Ever find that in therapy even though you desperately want to work and “get better” you find that you are standing still?  I am making a very concentrated effort to work in therapy.  It’s not easy- you would think it would be!  I have a great therapist and no time like the present right?  I am finding it’s not as easy as saying, I’m ready.  I’m finding there are invisible brick walls at every turn.

One of the topics has been strong emotions.  This has really thrown me as I am finding I am not connected to many things.  Sure I am connected to present life but not much of anything else.  However, I am finding things can really trigger and set me off, or well, someone.  I am finding myself doing a LOT of apologizing lately which I hate.  It is so embarrassing to “see myself” throwing a temper tantrum.  Though as I am recognizing things and seeing what the triggers are, they are becoming less again which is a very good thing.

In talking about strong emotions, of all people OD came out!  She is 10 years old and well, overdoses.  History would show she has only “met” one other person on the outside and that was a psychiatrist in the great state of North Dakota.  This doctor tried to work with her and what spun from that encounter was she helps us with medication (in a helpful way) and other medical issues.  She can research medical stuff and understand it and advise us (and sometimes other people as they have found we are resourceful so there are times I get emails or phone calls asking medical questions and it is OD that steps up with the answers or researches the answers).  So she has been able to take part of her job and use it for good.  This is awesome.  However, in the mix of strong emotions, I felt her being triggered to her “regular” job.  Which is why the topic was brought up to our therapist.  In talking to him, OD came out.  Her key question was, “I have a job and if I am given the order, what other options are there?”  He said that is something to work on and it will take time, but it is where we will work.  The ones giving the order need help.

Which is where Rosey comes in.  She was named Rosey in more recent years, before she had no name.  There is a song by DC Talk called, “What Have We Become” where the verse says,

“Mom and Dad are fightin’
As Rosie lies there crying
For once again she’s overheard
Regrets of their mistake
With Christmas bells a-ringing
Little Rosie’d leave them grieving The gift she’d give her family
Would be the pills she’d take”

This song hit so close and well, it described her so well, we gave her the name Rosey.  So anyway, what OD said is Rosey is a key player in all this.  A few of the pieces are she prayed for death.  She doesn’t attempt to die, she just wants to.  OD was one of the ones created to die.  The therapist has proposed to her that she speak to him before she completes any “orders/jobs”.  She is fairly reasonable, but is feeling pulled and in the middle.

As I walk down the path towards Rosey the path loses all light.  The path is rocky and dark.  The deeper into the woods the darker it gets.  As I creep slowly I come upon what seems to be a cave.  It’s damp and dark.  She lays curled up in the corner.  She is not alone here, but is isolated.  As she senses movement and someone drawing near she squirms as far as she can away.  She does not engage, rather she seems trapped.  It’s hard to say if she’s trapped awake or trapped in nightmares.   We are unsure how to reach her, how to let her know it is ok to be with us.  At the same time, it is concerning what she may be holding to feel this way so deeply.

There was a possible confirmation from the mother that our dad may not be our father.  It’s something that we have struggled with for years and it has come back around again.  The mother made the comment a couple weeks ago that my paternal grandmother wouldn’t share the family health history that the women (including herself and her daughter – my aunt) have and she wished for my sister’s sake she would have because it could have helped her.  She got the “deer in the headlight look” and changed topics.  She never even tried to correct it.  She never said, “Oh yea and it could have helped you for all those years too.”  While we were talking about the issues my sister had (before the comment I wrote was said) I mentioned about having the same diagnosis as my sister and she completely discounted it as being relevant and then mentioned there was someone on her side of the family with similar problems.  Might be the closest I get to a confirmation.  Not that I want it to be true, but it would certainly make sense in why I am the hated one of the family and the ways we were treated.

Well, I keep starting entries and not having time to finish and publish, I’ll end here and hope to make it back soon- so much has been going on!

they found out you were being abused?

That is the question that is on my mind right now.  Things have really exploded lately and I have to be careful how I share it because it is a very delicate and difficult subject.

I will note that my little one had her tonsils/adenoids removed and recovered very well

John 5:1-15 (New International Version, ©2010)

This is such an interesting passage!  We start out by finding out the man has been disabled for 38 years.  He has traveled a great journey to get to the “pool of healing” yet still finds the obstacle of being alone and not having someone to help him get into the pool so that he may be healed.  So he lies there on his mat in despair.  He has pretty much given up.  He is laying right there!  He has made it to the pool, but he cannot get IN to the pool.

So here comes Jesus and he asks a question that He asks quite a bit, maybe I should research this because I’m curious how many times does he ask the person, “Do you want to be healed?”  This means a couple things for me.  First, He is showing that he is respectful.  He asks the man if he wants to be healed.  I’m sure if the man said, no, I’m quite content with life as it is, Jesus would have kept on walking.  However, as most people who are disabled would say, “Sure, I want to be healed”.  However, this man adds a “but” to the answer.  How many “but” responses have I given?  I’m sure plenty!  Sure, I want to be healed, but…  Yea it just rolls right on out.  I still find I do it today.  My husband might offer a suggestion and I’ll say that sounds great, but…  Of course at that point he gets frustrated so I’ve learned that he is looking from a different perspective so maybe I shouldn’t say “but” too quickly because maybe there is something there.  So, this man tells Jesus, sure I want to be healed, but…  I love Jesus’s answer, he hears the yes, but ignores the but and simply tells him what to do.  Again, the amount of respect that Jesus shows is awesome!  He says “Get up!”  Jesus didn’t pick him up, Jesus didn’t touch him, Jesus respected all boundaries and gave the man a choice.  I wonder if it’s because he said “but”?  Either way, the choice was still his.  He could have not made any motion, but he did, he got up and he walked!

What’s even more interesting is what came next.  He did not know who this man was.  He did not know his name.  So he’s carrying his mat, and the people around criticize him!  He is HEALED from a disability he has had for 38 years and what do people say?  You are breaking the law!  Seriously?  But yet, isn’t that how it is?  You are knee deep in healing and some idiot who don’t get it criticizes you for a step you have taken in healing or says, it’s taking too long or whatever.  Instead of rejoicing with you or even lending a shoulder, people with sharp tongues criticize.

And of course what happens when we, especially who are healing, are criticized?  We question.  We feel bad.  We think we are breaking the rules, we are doing something wrong and we doubt.  This man had no idea who had healed him and had no idea how to answer these people.  Jesus must have had a feeling or maybe even saw him with his head low.  He comes back to him and reminds him that he has been HEALED and to go on.  Lift up that head!  And it was then that he realized that man was Jesus so basically runs back to those condemners and tells them- “Hey, it was Jesus – so there!”  I’m sure the Jewish leaders were infuriated, but it really sounds like the man felt liberated by this.  When he was condemned for carrying his mat, because Jesus DID SAY pick up your mat and walk, Jesus came back and gave him that assurance that everything really is ok.  I know when I feel supported and backed up I can stand up to my condemners too!  But when I’m alone and hurting, I struggle to stand up for myself.

How can we support others?  How can we say yes, I do want to be healed?  How can we pick up our mat and walk?  How can we stand up to our condemners as we take this harsh journey of healing and have them throwing stones?  It can be done- woohoo!  Yes, this was an awesome passage to see this morning!  I think I could write for hours  But I’ll spare you

This really doesn’t make sense to me, but then again how could it really be about the sex either?  I mean a small child’s body just isn’t made for that, hence the excessive scarring and damage I have.  Yesterday marked 25 years since he died.  I have been flooded with snippets of memories where I can completely visualize the snippet.  One of my insiders who his job is to put the “puzzle” back together was able to draw a map of the house the grandparents lived in just from the snippets.  It’s strange.  I know I have “seen” this information before, but each time I experience this it feels so weird.  I’m avoiding, but am hoping to make a bit of time to do the map one more time and a few other maps and write down the pieces as we go.  Like I said, it’s nothing new, but we find relooking at it gives us a new perspective each time.

The other thing about this “power” thing, is I realize power plays are a trigger for me.  It can be over the smallest thing, or things I logically think I should just ignore.  There is a blogger who says she had a horrible experience by a therapist/psychiatrist and in pointing this out is attacking those of us who are healing from abuse experiences that traumatized us as children and our coping mechanism became DID.  I believe in the First Amendment rights of free speech probably more than most.  However, I do believe there is a difference in speaking and demeaning others.  I don’t believe my right to free speech should stomp on anyone who believes differently than me and I try to keep it about me.  I mean I sure could write a TON of hateful messages about sexual predators and abusive parents.  However, that’s not what this is about.  This is about my healing journey and trying to understand what I can and move on, not about dragging other people down.  My point is this, I find myself drawn into these “power” struggles because while I listened to her story, she drug me through the mud and when I didn’t say in the end that she’s completely right, she began naming my blog and such on her site.  I find myself enraged that another human who has experienced abuse and abuse of power, would continue in doing this to another recovering from the same.

At the end of the day, I am now realizing I have this trigger and will do my best to not be drawn into these games of power.  I’m not in it for the power.  I’m not in it to convince others my experience is real.  So why blog?  I’m here because I do want my voice out there in the midst of all the others.  I am here to say just because I have DID doesn’t mean I can’t be a mother, I can’t live a productive life and to show the world that I am healing from all this.  There are so many out there who struggle alone.  I know because I was one of them for quite some time.  I had all these memories of abuse and things not making sense and felt so alone.  I felt alone and that my experience wouldn’t make sense to anyone because it seemed so strange.  However, thank you internet, I have found I am not alone and I’m not crazy.  I have seen the stories that give me hope and I see stories where I can now be that ray of hope in someone else’s life.  There is life after abuse.  It feels good to say that, because in that darkness, it was a phrase I lost hope in.

This was the topic of my session yesterday.  Or well, the main theme I guess.  I talked to him about some of the information I was learning in the class I’m taking.  One of the videos they showed is written from the perspective of children in the foster care system.  They said how “Big People” were always making decisions, and when another big person steps in don’t expect them to just trust them because they have been hurt by so many big people along the way.  T asked if the video spoke to me.  I wanted to say no because I was never in foster care.  But yet, the video did speak to me, and it spoke to my husband.  As soon as the video was over we went to lunch and he said now I really get it.  You see, when we first met, I could meet him as a “friend” but when he wanted to call me and go out again, well that was a different story!  I kept asking him why he wanted to go out with me and I was a “broken toy” and not worth being with.

The video did speak to me.  Because the kids would get attached and then have that attachment taken away they would fight with themselves and swear to never get attached again.  So why am I like this?  I didn’t go through foster care, get taken away from my parents, get trotted from home to home.  So what did I go through?

There was no help.  I was stuck.  No one in the family was safe and no one would open their eyes enough to see my pain, they were too worried about their own lives.  My mom knew her father was abusive, yet she lead me right to him.  My dad was always drunk or asleep it seemed.  All the family seemed to be in on it too.  One thing I’d never thought of was my dad’s parents weren’t abusive, yet they knew how we lived.  Supposedly they didn’t know about the sexual abuse (cause dad didn’t know either) but they knew our living conditions (rain, snow and icicles inside the house), water from a spring that often ran dry for weeks at a time so no running water.   Not to mention no real household income for most of my life and no assistance was allowed, no food stamps, no free lunch at school.  I wonder why they never stepped in and said, “We’ll take the kids until you can get proper living conditions…”  But then I probably know the answer.  My mom’s parents were considered prominent and never would have let that happen.

As a kid though, no one really stayed in my life except the family.  It was so hard to ever ask for help and I always got too scared.  I couldn’t understand why no one saw my pain and why they wouldn’t help me.  I felt so alone, so abandoned and basically felt that I deserved it.  The problem with that is those little ones that felt that way, they are stuck in that.  They are hidden inside and they are extra sensitive to not being liked, or listened to, and feel that they are not deserving of life.  As an “adult” and as a mother I know different.  It enrages me that the family could do this and be “okay” with it.  But it also does bother me that no one ever asked.  No one ever advocated for us.

So this week’s class has brought something new to the table and I’m not sure how to handle it.  I’m sure I’m probably extra sensitive to things, but I think I’ve put pieces together in a way that makes so much sense, that it’s scary.  I don’t know if I’ve written much about my brother here or not.  He’s 10 years younger than me and sadly he’ll never be able to live independently.  I never fully understood all this.  When he was 6 months old he got his first pair of coke bottle glasses because his eyes were in really bad shape just physically and he has had several surgeries and still has very thick glasses.  She was determined SOMETHING was wrong and put him through several tests and “nothing” was ever found.  They simply labeled him MMR (Mildly Mentally Retarded- yes this was in the days this word was used rampantly).  When he started school he was labeled ADHD and just a problem child.  To my knowledge my mother never had him on medication.  They held him back in Kindergarten.  When he went to first grade the teacher “tolerated him” for a bit then said to the principal she couldn’t “handle” him and that they needed to put him in a self-contained classroom.  In other words,  a classroom that would take him an hour each way on the bus and sit in a classroom and learn nothing.  Even she (mother) admitted that.  She said she didn’t know what else to do.  Being who I was, a mommy to him, I worked with him and saw that he could do some work but mother didn’t want to hear it.  So I had in my mind she just wanted him dependent on her forever but honestly it never made sense.  Lately, well, in the past 5 years or so, they are now “thinking” not doctor diagnoses, but just “thinking” that he is autistic.  My uncle has some problems and I’m not sure if they ever found out what his “diagnoses” is but he is much higher functioning than my brother and they have very different problems.  However, I was made to believe that whatever my uncle had is what my brother had so when I was pregnant (not that I would not have managed and loved my child no matter what) I was terrified that my child was going to be born with this “mysterious illness” that no one knows what it is.  Neither of them were.  My sister is now pregnant with twins- I don’t know if she shares the fears I had or not.  However, I still worry that there is a defective gene that my kids may carry and maybe their children will have it- I know dumb, but supposedly this is “mysterious”.

So back to what I was saying, in class near the end, the trainer said she was going to give us a run down of fetal alcohol syndrome and meth in the systems of babies.  When she started talking about FAS I freaked.  Literally freaked.  I don’t know what the word or phrase she said but I instantly thought of my brother.  Now, I was 10 when he was born, well, almost 10.  But, I do know my parents drank a lot (including my mother though my dad was much more severe in this) and smoked pot (and I’m honestly only sure of those things).  So I flipped through the book and found the symptoms of FAS.  There are some things about my brother that just seem baffling.  The list threw me on the floor.  When I got home and all weekend I at various times will spend a few minutes looking up FAS and Autism and I have to say, FAS is a much closer description than Autism.  It also fits the puzzle better.  My family is top notch at keeping secrets.  They are so good at this it scares me.  I mean, how can I ever know the truth of things when they are constantly messing with reality?  I thought about some other connections to this and I started to look online and it makes sense AND if he was autistic it would have been diagnosed then, and it wasn’t.  I mean I read the symptoms and for the most part they are not them.  I know neither diagnosis is cut and dry.  However, this is another instance that most likely my mother knows EXACTLY what my brother’s status is and is keeping it secret from the rest of us.  I’m so tired of her games.  I don’t understand why she would bring further harm to my brother (keeping him from getting medical help that WOULD have helped) because she wanted to keep this secret.

This is really hard to accept.  It is so hard to accept anyway knowing that she handed me over to be abused on a silver platter.  But now to finally see the puzzle pieces fitting together and realize what is more likely the reason for the status of my brother’s health?  That’s just devastating.  I don’t know how to process this- I’m stuck and well, pissed.

What’s something you never believed until you experienced it?

I never believed I would turn 18.

I never believed I could be a parent and be a healthy one.

I never believed I’d escape abusive relationships.

Describe the worst teacher you ever had.

However, I have already done a post on the worst teacher I ever had my 5th grade teacher because he harassed me (he was convicted of having a meth lab in his home) and he was simply transferred school to school and finally to another county to get rid of him.

So, I’ll share my second worst teacher.  She was my 7th grade math teacher.  Now, keep in mind that I’m DID right.  That does change this story.  She saw me as a student who could not do math.  I did not do well on tests and homework I was kinda getting it off and on, however tests not so much.  Well, during the course of this, not sure all the circumstances around it but she accused me of cheating.  Something about my answer column changed in another handwriting or something.  I don’t know if it was a test or homework.  Either way, she yelled at “me” in front of the class.  I don’t know if she called my mother or if “I” told her, though I guess i must have told her because part of the reason my mother was so angry with the teacher is because she yelled at me and she felt the teacher should have come to her.  Now, my parents couldn’t do math so the help didn’t come from them any way.  My Dad took college math and had me help him with it and I’m horrible at math but well, apparently someone isn’t.

So she was even madder that my mother came to talk to her and apparently she continued to yell at me in class, so my mother came back and finally I think I stopped the cycle cause it did finally end.  It was one of the few times my mother came in and defended me.

Well, I guess someone wanted to really make the teacher mad, so since 7th grade was a special year in math (there was math field day but also something called Math Counts).  So though I was making C’s (average of bad test scores against good homework scores), I scored very high on the math field day and math counts tests!  And this teacher was the coach for both!  She was mad as a hornet.  But she had to accept me to the team because of the scores.

That was the only year, no wait, I think I might have made it one other year to Math Field Day, maybe, can’t remember.  but it was significant that year.  It’s funny cause anyone who knows me knows I’m horrible in math!  But now and then there is someone good at it because it even shocks my husband when I come up with a correct answer before him or to correct his answer.  It doesn’t happen often because I don’t know this insider well, but they are there…somewhere…

As far as my healing journey goes- this is proving to be insightful.  The information makes sense and I think I’m going to make some new understandings and connections from this experience.  We watched a video and the children talked about they will try to not get attached because all big people end up leaving anyway basically.  My husband (they sent us on a lunch break right after watching it) said now he realizes why I pushed him away so hard at first.  As I watched it I realized all the times in my life I have tried to stay disconnected and even now I find myself trying to disconnect and connecting is so overwhelming at times.

I can’t remember all the pieces, but I know SI and SU were brought up quite a bit as well.  There were some comments I hope come back to the surface because they were interesting.

We talked a lot about abuse and neglect and what the kids go through being bounced around and pulled in so many directions.

The topic of the additional blog will be Foster Care Adoption as my husband and I are beginning a long held onto dream of being able to adopt a couple of girls and add them to our family.  We are excited as technically the journey forward (becoming reality instead of thinking) a week ago and tomorrow we begin the process.  It is a several step process but I hope to be able to blog about it and keep track both for us as a family but also anyone else that would like to follow our journey with us.

If you would like a link to it, please contact me and I will provide it.