Trying desperately to make sense of a mix of emotions arising from a mix of memories and my thoughts relating to those memories. What a fucking mess. It's Christmas, almost, and that means lots of family time. Up from the ashes of my dissociated mind rises the black phoenix of what I experienced at the hands of mom. It is memory in all its forms - thought, emotion, sensory - but it is not integrated memory. I know what happened. I stand outside the memory and judge it objectively - not particularly traumatic but confusing as hell. I have feelings about the memory - strong and diametrically opposed. I judge my feelings from a distance as over-reactive and embellished. I tell my little child self that I am mistaken, that I have made more out of a simple thing than I should, that the physical sensations I apply to the events are evil and do not belong. I tell myself that any difficulty I'm experiencing in my adulthood related to these memories is because I've mis-interpreted the events, both as a child and as an adult. Another objective "me" replays the events, and determines they were indeed abnormal and painful. Quickly he is "shushed" and shame creeps over my soul and I reach for a hammer to hit myself. I simultaneously think my memories are false and real, as well as embellished and mis-interpreted. I question and question and question all the therapists who have placed such an important label on these memories, question why they think what happened is "traumatic." I wonder if in their zeal they hold up these memories as The Source and help me embellish them. And I embellish them to please my therapists. The Objective One refutes this thought, proclaims that the memories are Real. The shame spreads into my blood and is the air I breathe. I used to ask her to tuck me in. I cling to my shame and all that tells me it was my fault, and I cling to the ideal that I am innocent, was always innocent. How will I ever navigate this Christmas????
Book information: http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/
Sarah's Take - Dissociative Identity Disorder Unplugged: A true and raw telling of the thoughts, musings, meanderings of a woman with a Dissociative Disorder, Sarah's Take takes readers on a little ride through what most people can't really imagine.
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