It’s still Stranger doing the writing and being out. My EMDR therapist believes I won’t be able to stop being dominantly out until I resolve or come to peace with my relationship with my sister. That seems like an overwhelming task to me – a mountain just too high to climb; but there is no turning back so I’m trying to focus more of my time doing therapy. It’s so complex right now because she is sick and Dad is sick and our family friend who sometimes cares for Dad is also sick. There is so much current crisis that it is hard to focus on past trauma, yet past trauma gets in the way of helping with immediate crisis. I love my sister and have many cherished memories of times with her. I want to just focus on them. I fear losing them and losing future good relationship with her by pursuing healthy boundaries and accurate expectations now. My therapists are telling me I need to establish healthy expectations on my relationship with her so that I can put my energy on developing intimate relationships that can be reciprocated with other people in my life.
Right now I’m working on two collages in an effort to sort out what I can/want to hang on to and what I want to/need to let go of. Some things I”m flushing down a toilet and some things I’m nailing to the cross. Maybe I need to add a third one for things I want to/need to hand on to. Just thought of that – will have to ponder that a bit.
Anyway, that aside, the topic I thought I would focus on for the blog is what dissociation is like for us. The first time I dissociated was as an infant. In that case, I lifted out of my body and floated above my body watching what was being done to it. A red-headed boy (I’m guessing between 8-12 years of age) held onto my legs and beat my body against my parent’s bed. The next time I did the same thing – floated above and watched as two adults wrapped my infant body tightly in a sheet to pin my arms and legs down. I had been refusing to eat because I believed my parents had abandoned me (they hadn’t but I didn’t know that), so these people were pinning me down on the bed flat on my back and one held me down while the other tried to force food into me. Of course I was terrified and wanted to cry out but whenever I let my lips part to cry they shoved food into my mouth which promptly went into my lungs because I was inhaling in attempts to breath and cry.
Later, when my older brother came into my room during the night, I sank through the wall. There were cracks in the wall and I imagined they were animals I could hide behind. When I got to be a teenager I had rooms inside my mind I could escape to whenever I wanted to flee from whatever was happening on the outside. My internal world grew and developed as time went on and I was living in perpetual crisis. I had separate dwellings for different groupings of personalities.
Maybe I will write more on this topic later. I’m fatigued right now, just remembering and dealing with the pressures of today’s living situations.
