Definitions [Repost]

Again, usually posted by embies, but they aren't here just now.
BY

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Definitions by [someone who is *not* embies]:

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I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a
few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us
are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between...fear
and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember
back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing
it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and
article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I
could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources
and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as
I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my
life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal
piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about
dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling
like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the
exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. :)

spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used.

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When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the
dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for
survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be
understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were
constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And
when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a
normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here
is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue.

There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a
kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie
points you deserve. Ok, that's putting it very baldly and not entirely
fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are
less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their
own pain.
(we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don't hold it over
someone else's head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over
our own head that somehow maybe we didn't suffer as much...sigh, we
seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for
ourselves.)

It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat
ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn't currently a
scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt
and sorrow we live with. I don't think it is measurable. When does the
damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we
trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and
alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all
have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without
doubt, is that we were not loved well.

Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first
and last word doesn't even agree with itself entirely. And it is
always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are
better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that
there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of
no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the
perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when
we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often
threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I
was newly dx'd. As I read I found myself saying yes...yes... yes, I do
that, yes, that happens....no, that's not me and neither is that. When
I hit the parts that didn't fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person
somehow. That I couldn't even be my dx right! :)

Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so
widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books
and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps.
I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and
appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would
explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that
they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay
to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children.
And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos,
who couldn't hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences
before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking.
And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods
of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate
book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our
experience and behavior.

I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My
office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone's
family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys
(maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing
music.
These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an
amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very
carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians
movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very
serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother
was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up,
getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate
along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father
and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded,
with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very
calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an
easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily
handle having two children.
But son number two wasn't his brother. He was himself. And he had
always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and
required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from
flying right off the planet.

My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative
quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and
survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our
strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew
up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone,
were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and
out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the
markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic
determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part
of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or
blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or
short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened
in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that
will define and identify each of us exactly.
Thank goodness.

I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you
came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so
unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are
not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the
other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That
is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a
human. And humans are complex.
Madly wonderfully dizzyingly complex. And how you heal will be, if you
are lucky to have a therapist who cares and teaches and listens and
learns, your own path, your own life. You are human first. You are
dissociative second.

I don't mean to devalue the search for understanding your
dissociation. I don't mean to demean the doctors and researchers who
try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. And I am not trying to rob
you of your right to get caught up in the same pitfalls I have been
through. But I thought it might help to know that others have been
down this particular road as well, and that the knowledge of where
some of the bumps in the road are will keep you from getting as many
scraped knees and shorten some of the wrong turnings so that you can
focus on what is really important.

You.
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