Ann Garvey's List: 8-12-12 to 8-19-12

• I think phobias exist when ignorance persists.  Maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, but WE-we, who struggle with mental illness–have a role in setting new views for treating mental illness.  For me, it means letting people know who I am, and what I’m about through my blog and within my close circle of friends.  It also means getting outside my comfort zone of angst to share information about what it’s like to have DID with medical communities.
• After all, the point is to educate the public about the relationship between child abuse and many mental illnesses.  This is information too few people understand.

• I listened to my friend’s opinions non-judgmentally, and when it was my turn to speak, I was able to answer her rationally – while still maintaining my boundaries.  So, here were my responses:
• I had to remind myself that my friend has never met K., and she has never really been interested in my therapy before, so she is just misinformed.
• She has allowed me to formulate my own goals in therapy.  She supports my goals, has educated me on dissociation, and shared skills with me on how to live with dissociation.  Of most importance, K. has a sense of professionalism.  She has strict boundaries which eliminates confusion (example: she has a “no touching/no hugging” rule which at first I hated but now I understand is very important to my healing). 
• I know K. will comment that my System supported one another via internal communication to stay calm and rational. 

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• I found myself so relaxed. And since my son did not want to do activities too close to the falls, i found that there was no recurrences of those nervous pinpricks where i thought someone might be trying to say something.

• It was kinda funny I woke up and went to swing my legs over the bed. Well there is a wall there.
• I went to the other side last night. That in part is what the bridge I had to build was.
• She is a fisherman. She knows how fish cycle through out the day.
• Somehow what happened last night was tied into my yesterday morning.
• I know a little bit about what that was about.  
• I have never sought this bridge keeper job. I do not like it. Right now in this moment I know I have always had it and it has always been a part of my life. It scares me when I am not in that role. It does not bother me a bit when in it.

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• fter I realized that my intense triggering came from that letter, I sealed it in an envelope and gave it to my best friend to read.
• She is going to hand-deliver the letter to my therapist since she will see him before I will. That way, my therapist and I can hit the ground running talking through it when I see him.
• The most disturbing thing is that these are the only parts she felt were safe enough to talk with me about.

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• We can do this, right?
• We decided after a few minutes of bad mojo that we should take another look at the Dr. Marvin picture.  Yes, that’s about how we roll.  Just whatever it takes to calm our system down. 
• I wish I were perfect in this, but we’re not … just 9 times out of 10 we’re ok with being on our own a lot, and it is ESPECIALLY, because we have the writing and the reading options. 
• Dust and me are like … hey if you don’t bother me, then I’m not going to bother you.  If you ever find yourself wondering how I do it all … just think … oh yeah … the woman doesn’t dust!

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• I am going to try to do some of the things.  Number One is to list three new things you are grateful for each day, for 21 days.  Number Two is to journal every day about something positive that happened that day.  Three is exercise–I’m already working on that one.  The other two are meditation and random acts of kindness.
• I also wrote to T about ideas of things that would make me/parts feel comforted, and I realized as I was writing that all of them had to do with outside of session things.  I don’t think the things I came up with are actually the most important, but I think they showed that I am still wanting reassurance that she continues to exist and think/care about me between appointments.

• At times the anger becomes overwhelming — at the abusers, at the people who deny it happened, at the people who cover it up, at anyone who looks or acts like the ones who hurt you.
• Because of these things, I have DID/MPD, PTSD
• Those things are real. They happened.
• I have to keep telling myself these things, because it’s easy to spiral down into no-one-believes-me land, where no one is functional. I know no one outside of me truly believes me. But we inside believe me, and that’s all that matters.

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• Last night there was much emotional upheaval, and the body went through a lot as well.
• Today, I have just been trying to take care of myself as best as possible.

• Photo taken by Josefine, a swedish photography student currently based out of Los Angeles.
• The reason she decided to pursue photography full time is because she saw the impact pictures can have on people, both by looking at them, and making them.
• She wants her pictures to be a voice to those that have no voice of their own yet, and to bring out the beauty hidden in the midst of brokenness.

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• This link and video may cause triggers or make you cry or help you understand you’re not alone or something else I don’t know or haven’t thought of.

   

  http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/

• feels like we're going crazy. nothing is real or safe. #

• get rid of it even, I could do it, put locks on the doors of everyone and everything that isn’t allowed out anymore. Just in one fell swoop deny those parts any more interference with my life
• And before you tell me that no, I couldn’t; yes, I could. And I could do it well, I could force myself to have the most beautiful, normal, fulfilling life. I could, and if she could fall in love with me again, I wouldn’t need much else in life to be happy.
• I know. This is what bargaining looks like. It’s sad and it’s painful to look at, and it’s a lot moreso to experience. I’ve never hated co-consciousness more than right now, because everyone can feel what I’m going through and I can’t do anything about it. And I’m just waiting for the point when it becomes too much and I am pushed inside while someone else takes over for awhile — I keep hoping for it to happen, but I’m too stressed out and upset to initiate a switch, it’s like the worse I feel, the tighter my grip gets.

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• the body reinacts and pains over these last two of which no one knows what is happening other than the body sensations.
• no one wants to know what these last two are about.
• nyone out there given that information wanna know what happened back then? Fuck that! We fucking lived thru it, probably something that caused a split in people, a core split of which we don’t have the host to be the center at this time.
• it has caused an earthquake, more shit piled up, our 5 part host is now shattered and 40 pecent still unaccounted for

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• Does anyone know if Fred Van Lente suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder? Because it certainly feels like two distinctly different people wrote the beginning and end of the first issue of the new Valiant Entertainment’s reboot of Archer & Armstrong.
• So, basically four bucks for twelve decent pages to read. Even with the five page Ninjak preview in the back-up story slot, this issue hits your wallet like those old Image #0 issues. I can only recommend that you either start with Archer & Armstrong #2, or wait for the trade paperback. At least then, twelve pages of fiddling about won’t be 50% of the book.

• Can someone help me.. How did you figure out your alters, and there personalities and how to classify them? I understand you don't always have them all out at once, but the ones you know of.... My head so jumbled I can't seem to do it. And I need help
• DID doesn't always make sense to me but it makes more sense than not knowing what I have or just "depression". Your lovelies will also help you to understand and classify them more as well. They may let themselves be known.

• We have intentionally been running some experiments on ‘ourselves’, finding out . . . things.  What is what and who does what and what is for what kind of things. 
• Aoela was created last year by ‘our system’ for our system’s “behalf”.  In our DID lingo ‘behalf’ means for the benefit of the system, the whole.  We often don’t know what we are doing when we do that.  It’s like the orders come from some unseen direction, some unseen force or ‘being’ inside of us – a Major Player and one from which ‘we’ are being kept from being aware of.  It’s always been quite a mystery to me
• But anyway, she tried to ‘drive us away’ when ‘she’ was half-way created in us.  And in doing so we found some parts of some ‘others’ – where they come from we don’t know:

• It really makes a difference.

   

  (and so that’s where our maternal love went, we muse and we are thinking, wondering if we ‘built’ it somehow out of a composite being – and where that ‘being’ – or a large part of ‘her’ came from . . . as well as those two mysterious children.   Their tales . . . they were ancient and strange if you believe them; they didn’t come from ‘us’.

   

  and we learned something about ‘us’ – how to manipulate the system; using it quite deliberately to accomplish a goal: consciously ‘switching’ beings in order to achieve an emotional state that is more normal and quite human – loving babies.
• And – we ask out of curiosity from our DID friends:  Intentional ‘switching’ to achieve a positive effect and/or a positive emotion within you: have you ever experimented with intentional switching?  To achieve a specified goal?  Have you ever found yourself doing it unconsciously or deliberately, relinquishing control to another ‘someone’ who can a ‘job’ better than ‘you’, the host or whatnot?  Just curious . . . and curious about the overall effects of ‘using’ a system vs. the system using ‘you’.

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• I couldn't even begin to tell you which item on the new blog came first, second, or third. I am going to try thinking hard. I think we knew we needed some place to put the information from our Google searches that we been talking about for such a long time. It is like they are building up a hole in our pocket. There were a lot of efforts figuring exactly how that would happen, and there was some fine tuning that just went on and on until just a few minutes ago.
• The Plan B part was the part where our Google search references were going to go somewhere constructive and connected to our main site at Ann's Multiple World Personality. We didn't know how we were going to do it.  We just knew that we had to start working on it and that we would make editing changes of our system as we went. I wish I could have it figured out before we started, but it just doesn't work that easy some/most times.
• Each time we move forward with one particular gadget, then we had to see what it looked like, how it operated, and how we felt about it, and then to see if it stood up the test of time while adding more and more other and element choices. I’d like to think we are doing our “designer thing.”  J We will explain some of the smaller elements now.
• We wanted to let people know that we'd really appreciate a dialogue or conversation taking place with DID/MPD issues because SOMEBODY should be doing this to progress the situation. The underlying question is always, “Can we agree that multiplicity is real?”  And, then if so, “What can we do with that knowledge?” This was a major point to get to when I realized that what we were doing was putting together the great conversation that we have been talking about for such a long time.
• We find ourselves going over and over again the work in our OCD way of doing things to make sure that we've crossed all our T's and dotted all our I’s.

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•  And I spoke about fear and the fear that there is STUFF that I have been trying to keep out of my head and out of my therapy and mostly:  OUT OF MY THOUGHTS.  But trying to stay out of my thoughts means I am not really fully able to make my art, live my life or feel all of my own feelings.  I think that for a while now the more I've come to know more of my mind... the more I have wanted to shut down more some of my FEELINGS.

• ometimes I wonder who would I have been ...
   had I not had experienced some of what I have?
   
   have you ever wondered if there was....
    something or someone you could have been?
   
   would I have accomplished more?
   would I have accomplished less?
   
   I'll never know..but I will always wonder...
   hell I wonder day to day...
   sometimes minute by minute..who I am?
• ome multiples state they don't know the difference...
   between fantasy and reality....
   
   I get that .. because some days I don't know the difference....
   or I don't want to know the difference..