Tag: Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

Suddenly feeling unsafe

Today changed so fast from feeling relatively safe and stable to feeling totally unsafe, being consumed by an unbearable unnamed feeling surging within.

It was so unexpected

I had gone to the goodbye gathering of a very dear person I’ve worked for and with on various projects sharing lived experience of mental health conditions. I had expected to feel sadness. I wasn’t prepared that as soon as we arrived I felt discomfort, disconnection, unreality, fear, trepidation, certainty I had done something wrong that I couldn’t understand or repair, a sense of an anti-climax, a desperate rupturing loss, incomprehension, a sense the people there weren’t at all as they usually are, physical pain, cold, desperate thirst, the wish to run. None of it made sense.

I fought the urges and feelings for an hour and a half…

…then had to go. The feelings became terrible…

Even my body itself, my skin, my hair, my core, all felt unbearable and, of course, inescapable.

I don’t know why this happened and that itself is frightening. I’m worried how it may have impacted my behaviour to others and that it wasn’t okay or good enough. I wasn’t okay or enough.

I don’t know what the answer is or when these feelings will stop. Still, for once, I was able to say to my husband,

“I have these terrible feelings.”

For once I articulated that, instead of letting it build silently until I became apparently colder and colder outside, whilst the terrible things wound tighter in me, until explosion point, when I’d hurt myself or get angry with people or situations. Together we tried to articulate some of the feelings. Together we tried to find some ways to redirect, to ground myself, to self-soothe, and to create (cutting out Christmas pictures for cards).

Gradually, the threads of the feelings, which I could somehow experience separately but only name as loss at first, separated a little and I could name more as I have here.

It’s a very little step and most people would think this all self-centred ruminating. However, it’s an important small step for me. Just speaking the fact that I had terrible feelings was a little change which helped me veer away from a destructive path.

Where have I been?

TRIGGER WARNING for mention of self-harm in one paragraph. The paragraph is flagged at the start and end so please skip past it if you need or want to.

It seems I do nothing but apologise for why I haven’t followed through on my planned and promised blog revamp and new posting schedule. I need to change this. Life is not going to change any time soon so I need to develop a way to still achieve my objectives within the current circumstances. After all this is some little work I can do to hopefully help readers, as well as being a way to help keep myself well. However, I don’t know how to do this. I feel as if I’m desperately and barely keeping on running, controlled by the barrage of difficulties, re-presented trauma, fear, anxiety, my sense of uselessness, unpredictable distressing events for people I love and for me; I don’t know where the next blow will come from and I know I’m closer and closer to loss of any control, emotional explosion, fragmenting psychologically, total physical exhaustion – but I must carry on because I have a duty and responsibility to those I love, to God, to those who care about me. Stopping isn’t allowed. Breaking isn’t an option. When is it okay to say I can’t do it anymore? I know my resilience to daily life is so very low, because of this barrage of trauma my husband and I seem to be trapped in.

I never want to say “why me?” and I know it must seem as if I’m whining like that. It’s not what I feel or mean. I went into this with my eyes open. I so much WANT to support my loved ones. I so much WANT to learn to love more, more selflessly, through what God is permitting us to suffer right now. I so much want NOT to be powerless, like a scared child in every situation. I want to choose good, loving, positive actions.

How?

I reached crisis point the week before last. My angry identity and my little child identity both got out at the same time in a violent emotional explosion and a long period of dissociation. ***Trigger warning for mention of self-harm actions ~~~I drank alcohol, took an overdose of prescription tablets, scratched and cut myself and threw and smashed things in the house. When I started to mentally freeze afterwards and then came through that “shut down”, I was terrified at the physical evidence of gruesome, violent emotion. I was terrified I had hurt my husband physically though he assured me I did not and did not try to. ~~~ End of trigger warning***

I am horrified and ashamed at what I said and did and what is inside me in these two out of control identities that burst out when I’m under stress. I have been utterly exhausted since. Chunks of my memory around that time have disappeared. It’s clearer and clearer I’m not coping with basic life.

I’ve not been able to make any sense from this post or bring it to a conclusion. It’s taken me days to get this far. I’m posting this just to write something, try to move on. It’s 1.15am and I’m in so much pain I can’t sleep. My brain is unable to shut down. Never felt such a mess.

Ginny xx

A question for bloggers, and the outline of my blog

A question for bloggers, and the outline of my blog

A special thank you to those of you who have commented on what posting schedule you’d like to see and those who have shown their support. Today I’m writing to update you on the new outline and posting schedule I’ve decided on; also to ask a question to other bloggers.

From your responses so far to my recent posts, it seems that topics you would particularly like me to write on are eating disorders and life with / after trauma and abuse. I will make these topics main categories on this blog. The main categories will be: PTSD (including life with and after abuse and other trauma); eating disorders and body image; borderline personality disorder and dissociative disorders; mental health and finances; mental health and work; living with physical health disabilities as well as mental health conditions; question time (writing in response to questions you and others have asked me – this will of course encompass a wide range of aspects of mental health conditions and cross over with other categories on this blog); in the future I want to add a “help” section where I will outline coping strategies that help me, mainly regarding PTSD for instance things you can do that may help during a flashback.

The posting schedule I’m going to start off with is one weekly journal-style post and one weekly post on one of the above topics. I may be able to increase this but I think this is a reasonable aim to begin with. As mentioned before I will post outside this schedule at times. I think I need to choose what days of the week I will make my two regular posts. I’m thinking Wednesdays and Saturdays but I may change this – I’ll let you know when I next write.

You will have noticed the change of name to Dignity Beyond Trauma and at the end of the week I will write a post explaining the new name.

I have upgraded my site plan so will be giving this site a new and hopefully more accessible look over the next few days.

Finally, I have a question for other bloggers. Do you use another form of social media as well as your blog, for example Instagram or Twitter? If so what benefits do you feel this brings to you and to your readers? What should one consider before linking your blog to another kind of social media? It’s something I’ve been considering doing; I am not going to attempt it right now as I need to focus on sorting this blog but I am interested in the future. I’d be very grateful to know how it worked out for you. Thank you in advance.

Ginny xxx

What would you like to read in my revamped blog?

Some big changes are coming here at intothisbreakinglight, including a new name. See my previous post, Changes Ahead .

What would you like me to incorporate in my revamped blog? I want to help, as well as sharing my journey, so I’d love to know what you’d be interested to read.

Here are some elements I’m considering including:

– A specific section collating suggestions and resources for living with PTSD and complex trauma; what has and hasn’t helped me. I need to find out how to create this. Sifting through chronological posts is just not accessible for readers in my opinion, especially if the reader is exhausted or distressed.

– Similar specific sections regarding Borderline Personality Disorder and eating disorders / body image.

– A regular “question time” where I write a post in response to a reader’s question. Maybe once per month at first.

– A weekly journal-style entry to share what has been happening in my life and plans for the near future.

– A regular posting schedule. I don’t know yet what frequency I’ll choose. I will also post outside this schedule but I think it would be good to have a regular schedule I always stick to (even if I start with just one weekly journal and one other weekly post).

– I meet with medical students and researchers to share my experience of living with mental and physical health conditions. Loads of interesting questions get asked in these sessions. I think I may start writing some posts expanding on these questions (of course, not breaking any confidentiality).

These are just some of my plans. What do you think? Are they any good? What else would you like to see?

Ginny xxx

Changes ahead

Changes ahead

I’m going to make some big changes to this blog over the next week.

It has been many weeks since I’ve posted regularly. My husband has been coming through major surgery for cancer. Another family member has been through severe trauma. We have been struggling through a heavy load of financial issues since last autumn. My PTSD symptoms are worse. I’m not coping with day to day basics as I want and expect myself to. I could go on.

However a big reason I want to make changes in this blog is that my posts have been too sporadic and too distressed and distressing. I don’t want this site to be just me venting and screaming about how hurt I am. That doesn’t help anyone.

Yes, I want to be totally honest in what I post. Totally real. I don’t want to turn the blog into a falsely cheerful, superficially positive story. After all I’m talking about very present and painful trauma, illnesses and struggles. I am not going to pretend that I have all the answers or that I’m “over it” and nothing can touch me.

Yet I am more than the damage done to me and the hurt of every day. I want to try to find that. I want to write about that. I want to be thankful for all of me and all of every day. Also, I want to incorporate more focus on what helps me cope and even heal.

I want to have a regular posting schedule and more defined sections on this site so I can share what’s happening in my life week to week, but also share information about what helps me and may help readers, answer readers’ questions, post in response to reflection about what’s happened to me in the past, how I tried to cope and why. I want this blog to be helpful to readers, partly through reflecting what living with PTSD and borderline personality disorder is like, partly through sharing resources and information.

Big changes are coming up. Please watch this space! Thank you!

Ginny xxx

I want to make changes in this blog

I want to make changes in this blog

I want to make some changes to how I write this blog.

A lot of everyday life feels @&)!%*€ awful at the moment. My husband has cancer and is having major stomach surgery next month. He has 3 other operations due and that’s assuming there aren’t complications of the March surgery. It has been horrendous since November trying to sort out our state Benefits and just when it seemed it was sorted, I was told I had to have a reassessment of my disabilities for one of my Benefits and had to complete a 25 page form and send around another 20 pages of evidence in with it. I have a face to face assessment 9 days before my husband’s surgery. This brings with it the worry my Benefits will be stopped or reduced if they decide against me. My disabilities are all worse than when I was last assessed but you hear nothing but horror stories about Benefits assessments. Our money could get cut off whilst my husband is in ICU after the operation. We have other financial worries as well. We have had a whole series of let downs from people that should be helping us, including doctors and nurses and support workers. We’ve been brushed aside and labelled as worriers or nutcases because we have mental health problems – when in actuality my husband has multiple tumours in his body. When I have severely painful disc damage and degeneration in my spine. We have complex and deteriorating family relationships to work through and little support.

I could go on.

I want to scream. I don’t know if I’m crumbling or exploding but I feel I’m on the brink of going to pieces. I don’t know when I last slept through the night. The nasty angry dangerous version of me is getting out more and more as dissociation takes over. Right when I need to help my husband.

I need to make this blog different. I have become more and more sporadic in posting. When I’ve posted at all it has been sad and angry, as the result of an overflow of emotion or a need for an outlet of some kind. Having that “let out” is important but I don’t want it to be all this blog is. When I started writing I wanted to be able to express myself and also to be honest about what living through mental and physical health conditions is like. A lot of that is difficult, but there are good times and strengths too, and I want to reflect that. I want to reflect learning and gratitude too. I want to try to explore different aspects of my conditions and what helps. I want to post regularly, with more structure.

I need to make plans for how to change.

Ginny xxx

Panic in BPD and dissociative episodes – spilling over and used up at the same time

My mind won’t stop. Yet at the same time I can’t process anything. There is constant clamour; panic and fear rolling round my head, gathering speed and swirling til there is nothing else in my head. I cannot hear properly. What I do hear is senseless, clanging, distressing sound with no words or meaning.

Remember a feeling can never be bigger than you, my psychologist said. But this feeling is. It’s boiling and spinning and pouring and rushing, and once it had taken every space in my mind it rushed outwards and spun round my head, like a hurricane or a tornado, slower but heavy, making a colourless, invisible, but impenetrable barrier between my mind, my eyes, my heart and the outside world.

I’m full but drained. In my heart it’s like only the dregs of me are left.

The panic has sucked everything out of me, draining away like water down the plug hole. Nothing is left but exhaustion, emptiness, and emotion that has no route to be expressed, so it just feeds back somehow into an explosion of pain and anxiety. The barrier round me gets stronger. Panic locks it tighter in place.

I need to cry and scream and I need to be silent. Silent inside and silent outside. I need to stop, so very much, but my mind is unable to stop spinning because of the panic force driving it on.

I need to be held, I need to be safe, I need everything that I have no right to in the adult world, because the only part of me left after this tide of fear is done with me is a screaming toddler, overwhelmed by the world. A little child who needs to be carried and protected. Adult me is lost in the panic, feeling forces she doesn’t understand, and little me comes out all alone.

***

Pain after pain, trauma after trauma, repetitions of past abuse, are all happening to people I love the most. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help. I feel so empty and I don’t know how to protect them. There is so much I need to give them and I can’t because the panic has emptied me already and that’s so selfish and stupid.

I’m exhausted and afraid of these exploding emotions that I don’t know how to control. I feel I’m barrelling on towards disaster. I feel failure. I feel the losses and longings and guilt and dread of terrified little me, alone after the abuse. Not knowing what to do or say when I see my loved ones suffer it too.

Xxx

A beautiful day

Today was amazing. I don’t know why but we were both full of hope for the future. It wasn’t that the many obstacles in our way at the moment had been moved. Yet we both felt lifted up by God’s grace. The magic and beauty seemed to be stirring in our hearts and giving an energy Ive never felt before. This evening I’m buzzing and high even though I’m exhausted physically and mentally. The voices are telling me this happiness and goodness isn’t for me and doesn’t happen to me; they are trying to fill me with the dread and guilt I always feel after any brief elation.

No. I choose Jesus. I choose my life by grace with Him and in the love of my fiance R. We are richly blessed. We are created for good.

Thank you Dear Jesus.

Ginny xxx

God whispers and the world is loud

I stumbled across this quotation today.

It’s apt for me. I need to rest and listen for God’s “still small voice of calm”. Amid anxiety, distress, confusion and an awful lot of dishonesty around me right now, His voice guides and assures and gives hope for now and the future; His voice is always there if I allow myself to hear Him. I know He is with me working out His plans. Where I am right now, He needs me to be and needs me to serve Him.

I don’t know who drew the beautiful illumination in the quotation or who wrote it, but I found it thanks to the Facebook page Contemplative Monk.

Ginny xxx

I told him what I see. He explained it away.

I told my dad today about my concerns over how he’s being treated by my step mum. I told him I’m worried for him. I told him about how she’s treating me and other people in the family. He denied it is happening. He denied any possibility that he may be being treated very badly and that he may not realise because he has had so many previous years of emotional abuse. He says there is no problem for him. He put my experience and my concerns for him down to the fact that I had harmful experiences when I was abused when I was younger and that means I perceive interactions now as a repeat of what was done to me back then when actually nothing is wrong / there is no similarity, and that my “world view” may not be a good one because of what was done to me then. Basically I am wrong, I am the problem, and there is nothing wrong at all in how my step mum behaves to him or me or others. He denied events that have happened, denied things that have been said, and bought totally into my step mum’s view of me as a failure, a let down, spoiled, the problem, unwelcome, at fault… he even upheld her emotional attacks on me as being fine and my feelings essentially as being because I have problems.

It was pretty much what I had expected would happen but he had a much deeper rooted explanation than I was ready for, for why things are not really as I have experienced them to be. At least he did not deny my experience. But he explained it away in such a manner that it secures my step mum’s casting of me as the difficulty and her as the perfect spouse and mother figure.

My concern was primarily for him and how he is being treated but she has cast me in such a role that no concern I raise, no event I try to discuss will have weight with him.

It is rather as my mother did, drawing my dad in to such an extent that he would not hear when I told him multiple times about her emotional, physical and sexual abuse. She could invasively abuse me pretty much in his presence, emotionally taunt and threaten me for hours on end partly in his presence. At the time he supported her, joined her in her emotional attacks on me, often continuing himself afterwards; somehow he ignored her physical actions to me… and then later when at long last he listened to me (when I was an adult, hospitalised) he claimed no memory of any of the events. He was that drawn into her world.

His blindness now both traps me again and leaves me alone. Traps me where I cannot reach him to warn him what is happening as he just won’t hear me. Leaves me alone because it feels universally declared that I’m mad, I’m wrong, I’m the problem; what I’m experiencing and seeing isn’t real. It feels like all the power has been handed back to my step mum. I feel as I did when I was a child; alone and my sense of reality torn to shreds.

Xxx