Yeah…here we go. Apologies for the pic-heavy post.

One of the reason’s why Sims 2 is dangerous. Pics of the alters and how they look/see themselves, a couple of them are supplied by Max, like Yana, and the Little Girl. There was also one made of Terri, but it didn’t get capped for some reason.

He called the neighborhood “Head Space”.
Interestingly it’s set up thus. Max in one house. Jay in one house. Abby with Ami and Little Girl. Ami is a teen and Little Girl a child. Max and Jay both adults. Then Terri, Debbi and Yana all in one house, all adults. Although Terri lives in the basement of it with a bed and work out equipment, and the others live upstairs.

ABBY

AMI-CHAN

CRAZY GIRL

DEBBI

JARED

MAX

YANA

I haven’t written for a while…but that’s because we’ve been busy in “the real world” rather than just neglecting the blog out of…apathy, I suppose is the word that’s being looked for there.

This past week we’ve been sorting things out for my husband’s surgery, planning for my naturalization ceremony and our son’s second birthday. Tomorrow is the first of the now weekly therapy appointments. Going to weekly is a bit daunting, mostly because it means switching between two different offices and we’re afraid of getting lost, not knowing where we’re supposed to go, being late, all kinds of things. Traveling to new places for the first time has always been daunting for us, more so if we’re by ourselves in the car, and more so again if our son is with us, because it’s not like he can help with directions. My husband says, “That’s what MapQuest is for,” but it’s not always right.

I’m sure we’ll get through this. We want to. It’s hard to schedule appointments every week, and have them be on days my husband has off, but we’ll do this because we want to be back to balance. We want to go through the hypnosis and see if we can find out what’s triggering the imbalance. We have ideas, but we don’t know for sure. We know that the hypnosis can help because it has before. We’re still not sure if there’ll be integration.

Last session we talked about the possibility of Max and the core integrating and perhaps nothing else. Previously Ami brought up that she should be integrated because she’s useless but we’ve managed to convince her that was illogical thinking. We figure it will all depend on what comes up…what is best for everyone over all. Integration feels a bit…cold and callous in some respects, even though our counselor said it’s not as though either aspect disappears when it happens, it’s hard to see how that’s possible. She has said if we don’t want to go that way we don’t have to, it could be helpful but there are still ways to sort things out without us doing so.

At least tomorrow’s appointment is at the same office it’s always at, and those of us who drive have all driven there at least once, even if so far it has just been our main whose talked to the therapist.

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about Herschel Walker and his new book. I haven’t had a chance to find a copy of it yet, but we’re hoping to catch a movie this weekend and there’s a bookstore near there.
There’s a copy of the Nightline interview about Walker’s book at that site which I found really worthwhile. He definitely seems to have been able to function well despite being a multiple. In other articles round the web there’s mention of him being Valedictorian of his class and having written poetry and stories prior to embarking on his football career. Herschel Walker collection page shows links to various other articles on this topic and others about him.

There’s talk on the multiplicity communities I read and post to every once in a while hoping that it’s not a publicity stunt, but from what I saw in the interview, especially the portion where they talk to his wife it does seem that this is a real situation, and that he had a period of crisis after his football career ended which is what brought things to a head. One thing I found a bit funny in the interview is that the narrator mentioned Walker had been in therapy for eight years but wasn’t on medication. There aren’t any medications that can help or fix Multiple Personality. If you overall or some of your alters have other things going on like depression, for example, then you might be put on an anti-depressant BUT there’s no MPD pill. Yeesh.

I’m interested to track down his book.

I hear a lot in Multiple/DID communities about how therapy sucks and shouldn’t be an option. People and systems in those communities tell horror stories of shock treatment, forced hospitalizations and other such things. These stories terrified us, particularly Ami, who felt that our glitches and problems were her fault…she was petrified that if we went to a therapist that our son would be taken away or we would be forced into hospital or both. Shock therapy she did at least acknowledge was probably too archaic to be used, but still the fears were there.

There was a glimmer of hope though. Aside from our husband’s insistence that we were being overly paranoid, and that we would manage the financial cost somehow. There were a few stories from multiples in the communities that therapists were helpful to them. That while they had found some horrible therapists who didn’t listen to their wishes for treatment they had eventually found a good therapist who was working well with them and they were making progress.

Then I called my Mum’s therapist who was “highly recommended” and found out that he would not take my husband’s insurance and that he didn’t think there was anyone in the area who did.

So, I went to my GP. He put me on Cymbalta which was Not Good. Horrible reaction to said medication. Around our house it’s called “Cymbalta of Death” now. So, I went back to my GP and I told him that I would prefer to try therapy rather than another round of medication. I spoke to him of some things which have happened in our past, and he concurred and said that his staff would find a therapist who did take our insurance, and so TWO DAYS later I had an appointment with Dr. T.

Dr. T. did give us medication but only anti-depressants, and we spoke to him for a while explaining things which had happened recently and things that we remember having happened at other times, and showed him some of the handwritten journal that we talk back and forth with each other in. He set us up with one of his counselor/social workers and we’ve been working with her since February now, and it’s been very nice. She’s very conscientious, has  been deemed trustworthy enough to read the journal and has copious notes about who likes what, who is called what and even how to properly pronounce their names. We’re liking her a lot.

We’re also glad that we didn’t have to break more than one in, and bounce around from therapist to therapist until we find one that was suitable.

Especially are we glad because we found out that our mother talked to her therapist about us and he told her that because we weren’t repeatedly physically and sexually abused all throughout our life that we probably had Dissassociation rather than Multiplicity, because every patient he’s ever encountered with Multiple Personalities was.

Gee, thanks.

Are we ever glad that we didn’t go to you?

This is not to say that I don’t acknowledge that there’s trauma based multiplicity of that nature, don’t misquote me here. We know the way that we are, and it’s been a huge relief to be able to work with a therapeutic team who acknowledges us and is genuinely interested in making sure that all of us are getting something out of therapy and no one is being neglected or not acknowledge or listened to.

To hear that about the first therapist was a huge slap, and then a huge relief that circumstances meant that we didn’t even have one session with him. That would have been so counter-productive! So, now I see why there are so many stories that circulate about horrible experiences that systems have with therapists.

To me just because one person fractures because of years of abuse doesn’t mean that another won’t because of something less. This doesn’t minimize whatever either system went through. Some women can deliver babies without epidurals and some can’t, they both give birth. Some people faint from shots, some don’t. Everyone has different thresholds of pain for both physical and mental trauma.

The point now is to get things back to a balanced state, to understand how and why our brain decided that this was the best coping mechanism so that we can all work together properly.

It is, it really is. I started out just making a Sim of the way things are currently, myself, my SO, sending us through college, hooking us up, but then I got in on this idea of trying to use the Sims to let each of us make one to show how we look to us, so we could get a better idea…this is proving dangerous.

Really dangerous.

Especially as you can only have a certain amount of people in a house.

Although I’m intrigued by the fact that you can apparently have Sims turn into werewolves, vampires and zombies now. Not to mention aliens and plantsims.

Still. Dangerous. Sims was addictive enough before.