I hope that the new year is treating everyone well so far. Things are going fairly well on our end. We’re dealing with a lot of “mundane” things but it’s not so bad. We’ve been painting the new addition, so that our room mate/tenant/friend can finally get the last of her furniture out of the shed. We just have one more wall to paint and the touch-ups to do so that should be good. That will really help her to be able to get more settled and we’ll also be able to finish rearranging the house, and get some more things in to and out of the shed.

In other things we’re making preparations to do yard work and to finish painting the outside of the house, make positive steps for health in the New Year, and also the fact that our therapist visits should have reset so we should hopefully be able to make some more appointments and get things going with the work we were doing again. Tied in with that we’re seriously considering and have been for some time a way to get things sorted out for a few insiders. Talk has been coming up about a partial integration and that’s…that’s a big thing, and a scary thing. I’m not sure entirely how to go about it or if it will actually happen, but the fact that those words were actually spoken while talking some things out with our husband are Big, Huge even, and so I’m going to be doing some looking and some research and we can see what we’ll actually do with regards to that.

For a long time one of our number has been feeling useless and awkward and terrible and various other things. We’ve tried and tried to sort things out to have her talk with us and with hubbie about why she feels he doesn’t like her and all the rest of it; and there are also several times when others are out that it gets awkward for hubbie because the person who is out doesn’t feel the same way about him the rest of us do. We’re not sure if it’ll be a complete thing, or who will be involved in it; but if we can do some work and find a way, which in our case would in a sense be evolving the alter, finding a life which combined the various traits and threads and evolving them to that point and that life time… maybe it’ll be a good thing to get with our therapist first… because we don’t need to screw things up and destabilize the system further.

Has anyone out there who might be reading this done any partial integration work? We’re curious to hear others perspectives on this given we’ve gotten past the whole “OMG IT”S KILLING SOMEONE!!!!” because it’s not, we understand that; especially with the way we view our head space and the relationship to past and other lives, it’s not killing anyone, but… argh? There are still scary aspects of the situation.

I realized I haven’t talked much about the Otherkin aspect of things lately, and thought I would reflect on that.

I’ve always felt I was weird, and I know now that some of the weirdness growing up was from being Multiple, but while I was trying to sort out what exactly was going on for me it lead me to several different places, and most of them were non-Christian.

I’m fortunate really that I wasn’t raised in a cultish environment, most of my abuse came out more subtly with my grandmother, or more violently with students at my school. My church was actually a very accepting place, and while you might think that would lead me to be more Christian and remain so, it actually meant that I could explore comfortably and find the path that was best for me without being discouraged by the people at our church.

They actually set up a Third Sunday group where those of whose who were teenagers and starting to find our voice could talk with some of the church leaders and each other and explore the Bible and the doubts that we might be having, in the hopes that we would feel welcome within the community that mostly catered to elderly people who, for the most part, would shun us rather than help.

Anyway, this meant that when I was coming to discover that there were things like reincarnation I had a place where I could talk about that without being shunned. One of the pastors and a few of the leaders actually pointed out to me that Christ refers to John the Baptist as the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah so if I wanted to explore the theory of reincarnation I could and they would be interested to hear my findings also.

However, the more I read about more earth-based religions the more they appealed to me, and when we emigrated I found more and more basis in the pagan religions than the strange and unusual and more dogmatic ways American churches run.

My explorations were not solely on a reincarnation nature. I’ve been interested in a variety of supernatural and metaphysical things. I would conduct experiments growing up to find ways of proving if certain things existed. I would look for proof of fairies, ghosts, telekinesis, and at one point even wrote a paper on different methodologies of testing these abilities. I made myself Zener Cards and tested them with friends, and many different things.

I found out about Past Life regression and began looking into that, and discovered, before I went to college, I did indeed have at least one past life as a shaman in Peru around the time the Spanish first discovered the Incan civilization. So, I went to college armed with this discovery and more than a little shaky in my knowledge of myself, because rather than help me with the voices, the discovery of Myeda had sent everything in my head into a bit of an uproar. My room mate promptly decided that I was bipolar, and I met several other people within the first few months of my college who seemed to have the same sort of beliefs that I did, except they found solace in characters from anime and famous people and not just “regular past lives”. It was intriguing to me but in many ways it fit with things that were going on. They talked about these people living with them in their head, and that’s the way the voices had always been for me. They would live in my head and some times they would take over for me.

The techniques these people used helped me, somewhat, get a handle on the voice situation. However, one of these people I met became a very controlling influence in my life, which for three years, was definitely not a good situation to be in. Still, I have to credit “Zoe” with helping me in a round-about and very destructive way, because recovering from all that mess really gave each of my alters a solid foundation in the past and future lives that I’d uncovered thanks to the work and manipulations of Zoe.

It was during that recovery that I discovered otherkin. A friend that I’d met online while trying to get out from under Zoe happened across Otherkin.net and the questionnaire they had, she had filled it out and come out as potentially otherkin and I did the same and also got that result. It was because of the dreams and memories of being non-human; even when I was still in England I’d felt like an alien masquerading, and I had stories full of memories from Yana and she was not human. Since then I’d discovered wolfish lives, and werewolf lives, as well as several other human lives, and many of my alters have cleaved to those lives as the basis of their personalities. I’m not sure if that’s the way it works with every multiple, and it probably isn’t, but I’m grateful for the otherkin aspect of things because working on that has helped me to maintain balance, and who knows what would have become of me without that balance.

One of my big fears about going back to work is that I’ll somehow be completely obvious and everyone will know and therefore consider me a freak and hate me.

I know it’s paranoid.

I tended to feel that way even when I wasn’t fully aware myself that I was a multiple. I was afraid that I would flip into Max and drop an inappropriate cuss-word somewhere given he has a mouth like a stereotypical trucker and doesn’t have that good of a thought to verbalization filter as the rest of us. However he’s also got a lot more skill and less fear and embarrassment and social anxiety when it comes to dealing with people…so quandry.

I really need to get passed this fear because I should know by now that if there’s one thing I’m good at it’s playing singleton, especially as I even had myself convinced for several years. Still I’m nervous. I don’t fully feel employable. It’s hard to psych ourselves up because it’s really, really easy for us to pick ourselves down and convince ourselves that we’re worthless, we’re quite the expert at THAT. So, the fact that we keep getting turned down for jobs and in some cases don’t even get interviews further serves to undermine the fact that we are actually very smart, very adaptable and would be great at almost any job you can think of.

With each successive rejection there’s a little voice going, we must have slipped up somewhere, we must have said something that made the HR people see that we’re insane, why is they can see it but disability is certain that we’re not crazy and should be able to find a job. Never mind that the economy is in the tank and it’s very possible that several of the companies were told to just not bother hiring anyone after all, or they were just posting the job because they had to when really they were going to promote someone internally…there are any number of reasons.

As an acquaintance pointed out multiplicity is about survival, it’s very easy for multiples in general to be “in the closet” as opposed to out and flaunting, and in my opinion, a vast majority of those who publicly flaunt their switching in YouTube videos may well just be acting for whatever reason. There are times I wonder about doing that sort of thing…the forced switching on camera, then I remember that I don’t want the whole world to see me, if I did that sort of thing it would be for my own edification. I don’t see it, you see, a lot of the time I’m extremely flabbergasted when someone realizes that I’m different because I think we’re hiding things SO well, and as it is, most people can’t tell, it takes a huge amount of observation and deep understanding of me as a whole for people to be able to see differences. It’s just that most everyone I know, even before we outed, had actually known us for long enough. I don’t have many close friends, and the ones I have I’ve kept for a great deal of time, so therefore they all really started to know me long enough to realize I was weird about the same time…

…and there I go rambling off the point again.

Okay, so my point was that any employers or co-workers I have probably won’t be able to tell; I’m good at being Polite and Public, in fact one of us thrives on that sort of thing, and she’s the one who actually went to school, got the degrees and all the rest of it. She thrives on the work environment and has been abjectly withering since we’ve not been working…so it should be fine.

For some reason though no matter how many times we repeat that we don’t quite believe it.

…or I hate medications at times.

Our house is full of “plague”, bronchitis, post-nasal drip, ear infections, and because of that we’ve been prescribed a multi-spectrum antibiotic. It’s not been so bad the past few days but the first day that we took it wow…

It reminded me a bit of when I was prescribed Cymbalta. The first day I took the Cymbalta I had a hideous reaction where I was so foggy I had to just lie on my friends couch for about a half an hour until finally one of us was able to muster up enough control to waver over to their bathroom and throw up, and while I wasn’t that bad on this for the first time I had that overwhelming foggy feeling and just complete quiet in my head.

Which is very disconcerting.

I may not have constant chatter in my head but there’s usually at least one or two of us having a discussion about this or that and what we’re going to do later and reminding someone that we haven’t called so-n-so about this or started to prepare X for supper, or blah-blah, so to have nothing…it’s like suddenly going deaf. Add to that it also means that there’s no one really in control, so we wound up sitting on the couch curled up with our SO for about two hours, trying to listen to what was going on around us and inside and mostly not retaining anything.

I think I’d almost rather have just misplaced the two hours, because knowing that they happened and having the memory of time, and of the people being there but everything just being…hash and noise and nonsense…not so fun; but I also don’t want bronchitis or pneumonia so we deal with it.

I (Abby) is going to preface this by reminding any readers I may have that a lot of us, in here, have ties to soul past lives. It seems to be a tool we’ve used to graft our personalities around. It may not be the appropriate psychiatric methodology for someone with multiple personalities, but that has been our overwhelming belief for quite some time. Before we were Officially Diagnosed we felt that our different aspects/facets/personalities were representative of the way we were in other lives, and that just some had stronger personalities than others and would take over our body.

I felt I should explain that because it might clear up some things which Jared talks about in this piece, which according to what he wrote on the top of the page was actually written some time on the 30 of November.

It should also be noted that Jared hasn’t actually ever had a session with Elsie. The only ones of us who have are myself, Kiddy, Debbi-Rose and Sarah.

Warning that the below has some graphic imagery.

*****

I see myself talking to her, Elsie, in this vision we’re discussing me, where I come from, there’s the idea of answering generically talking about philosophy but that’s not what she meant. I want to hazard she’s trying to ascertain if I’m a construct aware of my status as a fragment or if she wants more of a belief, if this was Q&A like a job interview; Jared was born in VA sort of bullshit.
I dislike the idea of talking to therapists I know/have memories of child psych PTSD social worker/family services we regret to inform you that your family is dead schtick and in the sight I also find myself hypothesizing in that fraction of a second the reaction she would have if I reaction she would have f I remarked that my father killed my mother, ripped out her innards would that be taken as analogus to the fact that [body's mother] as destroyed by the men in her life or would it be taken as I have construct memories or as it’s intended–that in my life time that is what happened.
I feel too esoteric right now…all this analysis. Is my origin the past or future? Is it…all fabrication. Am I just some story?
I was not here before the baby but yet I remember along with being raised in Scotland with Stu, Clair and Cor my times in school, writing away in the backs of school exercise books, poems and tales. The wealth of Yana’s information but yet it’s all mashed.
I see myself talking about the fact that Abby and I formed out of the chaos of 2006, the times when there was attempts to solidify the time of numbness and freak outs and that whole internal conference about needing parts to function but wanting to be safe. The idea of looking through the life times and finding appropriate ones those who could not be a danger to family and Abby & I pased.
I think outward childhood was Ami, Max and Kiddy, that’s my understanding so I wonder then given aside from dishes I seem to be poetry and stories…whose that was but that’s difficult to think about. I can’t boil myself down to archetype, it’s making a ball into a circle.

– J.

It seems some times as though time jumps. I know that’s not really what happens, but that’s the way it feels, it’s Thursday, it’s Tuesday, it’s Sunday. I dislike that feeling. It’s not been so bad since college. I’m so surprised some times that I got through college. I see my GPA when I’m filling out job applications and I can’t work out how I managed to graduate with a 3.0 when I don’t remember half of what went on.

My time has been a lot more balanced since college, but the year or so after is still very jumbled. The past year is also somewhat jumbled but I’m finding that we’re getting cooperation back, which is good. Jay was out last night and remembered when he was looking for something that we’d been trying to find our son’s jacket that morning before we went “Christmas” shopping and found it behind the couch. It’s little things like this that make me realize that even without the bi-weekly appointments with my therapist we’re still working towards cooperation as a system which is good, and makes me less scared about finding a job, although the job hunt has been put on hold until after the holidays–but that’s more practicality than trepidation. Everywhere has already hired seasonal help by now, and probably won’t have job openings until mid-January, start of February (I hope).

This is also a note to remind us to share the entry that Jay wrote in the off-line journal given there were some eloquent analogies about the way a lot of us feel about things.

We were having a talk with a few friends the other day about the way things are, and one of them was reeling because our husband had showed them “Fight Club” and he was saying what a mindf*** it was to find out that one of the characters is just in the other ones head. Max turned to him and said, “You think that was a mind f*** imagine finding out that YOU might not be real.”

He had to crack up laughing at that and asked how do we deal with that? Max, being Max, said, “Well, anyone says that I don’t believe them is what! I’m prettying f***ing real, thank you very much!” I cut in (being Abby) to explain that was one of the reasons that we were sticking with our current therapist even if we couldn’t actually see her right now until the bill was paid off, because she had NEVER once said that any of us weren’t real, or that we were just fractures and things like that. We’re okay with the term “alter” and so on, but she also has never said that we’re just these little pieces, she treats each of us with respect, and listens and acknowledges everyone’s various styles and quirks and words, given there are several of us she’s only met through the writings in the journal.

We were also very gratified that neither she, nor the main psychiatrist at the office we’ve deal with have ever called what goes on with us a Disorder. They usually call it simply Multiplicity or refer to us, collectively as a multiple. I think that’s very important to garner cooperation, and is perhaps based on how we’ve reacted to ourselves. I think it’s a bit of a trip for our therapist that we were “selves-aware” when we went in.

I had this eloquent thought while I was driving today and I’m hoping that I can translate it to text as eloquently as it came to me.

We’ve been having some incidents with some acquaintances in our social circle that have really burned bridges with us recently because of some things which have been going on. Perhaps back in July or August when things first started happening there would have been reconciliation but as a friend discovered yesterday when he tried to broach some peace-keeping the bridges are thoroughly burned, and to reconnect is probably going to be nigh on impossible.

I had the thought that myself, with all my alters, can be compared to islands in a stream, and when you make friends with a person without DID you’re building a bridge from your side of the stream to one island, but for someone to make friends with a DID person while they think they’re building a bridge to one island really they’re building a bridge to three or ten, and the work they think they’re putting into the bridge is getting spread out between those ten bridges so it takes ten times as long, especially as you’re building bridges over some pretty cantankerous waters.

Now some of these islands are pretty, they’re full of vegetation and people chasing butterflies, and others are barren and stark and still others are fortified, with jagged rocks and towers with gun turrets in them, and it takes a long time, a long time to convince all those different kinds of islands that you’re worth while enough and a good enough person to be trusted with passage to those islands. You might get to set foot on a few of them, you’ll see the vegetation, and play in the forests, but you’re probably not going to get past the gun turrets to see what else might be on there, and you might think that you’re close but really you’re knocking on the doors and running around the edge, swimming in the shallows.

When you screw up and the bridges are burned you’re ticking off ten island nations and you’re not likely to get the opportunity to rebuild any of those bridges at any time, because there have been so many people in the past who have swum there way to those islands and pillaged and maimed and we’re done with that. There are too many precious things that we have to protect, and we’re starting to realize that it’s not only our family that deserves this protection but we do too. All of our little islands, even the ones that are barren landscapes filled with strange alien fauna they’re all worth protecting, and all need their own gun turrets.

I often read horror stories about people who haven’t told their family out of fear. They say “you can never UNtell” and things like that, and live in a half-cast existence where they have to hide their multiplicity from everyone around them. I couldn’t live that. I was reading some things on The Ability to Trust and a few other articles on Emily First Girl about relationships with spouses and significant others I thought I would share my own experience.

To be clear I’m not decrying anyone’s decision to tell or not tell. I just wanted to put out there why we told our spouse. I’m still not sure how I will tell my son when he’s old enough to understand; but I imagine because we’re very open in our household and among our close friends, room mate and with my mother about these things that we will also tell and I’m sure there are other multiples out there who have told their families and hopefully have shared their experiences.

To talk about why I told I have to start with when I first started to find out that I wasn’t…normal…which is when I was in college.

When I was with my “psycho” ex our entire relationship was about the various fragments we both had. To this day I honestly don’t know if she was also a multiple, at the time I didn’t know I was. In our relationship we spent a good deal of time channeling our personas from past lives, and while this did help my fragments to find a stronger personality base to live through it, it also meant that our relationship wasn’t very grounded in the real world, and I was afraid for a long time to talk about my experiences and the fact that even though the relationship ended I felt that I was still fluxing from past life aspect to past life aspect.

I rebounded into a relationship with a guy I had dated in high school, because Max thought he was a wonderful and randomly kissed him at a stop light while we were driving somewhere. Unfortunately for us he preferred some of my other aspects to Max, which made things very awkward, especially because we were completely scared about talking to him about our fluxing because I didn’t want the potential for our relationship to turn out like my “psycho” ex’s; but it meant there was a lot of gaps in our relationship which I felt was unfair because while he understood that I had “crazy” days. I was also very skittish and hesitant about talking about a lot of things. So, there were gaps of distrust, and in the end my wounded and scared self ran away from the relationship when he asked me to move in with him, and I hid at my parents house. Those were not the only issues with our relationship but it was a big part of it, the longer I didn’t talk about it the harder it became.

Several years later I discovered that I really did have feelings for the man who would become my spouse. I didn’t want to have the lingering mess that I’d had with my rebound guy, but I also knew that this man was different than both the rebound guy and the psycho ex. He actually had drive and ambition, he had a grounding in faith and also a respect for other peoples beliefs, and to me it was a disservice to both of us if I didn’t explain to him about my faith and things that went on with my head. At that time I still thought that my fluxing and changing was purely due to the past life personas I had who were very strong. So, before we’d been in the relationship three months I took him with me to a get together some friends of similar beliefs and I had so he could see us talk about our past lives and alternate lives, and reading tarot together, and doing regressions and he was fine with that.

Over the next few years we talked at length about anything and everything. I feel very happy that we have a relationship that’s actually grounded in communication, despite what my step-father would say about it, we really do. My step-father would try to lie to one or both of us about other things going on figuring that he would get away with it because he would tell whoever he was talking to that they shouldn’t tell the other of us, but my husband and I would discuss things and then he would come back and say, “You guys don’t talk at ALL do you?” and it was more of a, “No, we DO talk you’re just a lying manipulative jerk.”

Anyway…back to my point. I came to realize especially when I became pregnant in 2005 that I was still very fluxy that it really wasn’t just channeling that there was something else going on. I was terrified that my fluxiness would have a detrimental affect on my unborn son, so I tried to clamp things down and function using just one of my personas. That didn’t work at all. I went from being able to function to being a walking shell. So, I decided I should have a new tactic. I talked at length about these things with my husband, and he agreed that it was better for me to be functional and flip periodically than not functional, and pointed out to me that logically it would be better for our son to have a mother who was functional and whose voice and mannerisms changed every once in a while than for his mother to be a shell of a person.

After our son was born there were some very rough times. It was a very traumatic time for our family, not just because of adjusting to a newborn but because my husband’s job switched him from nights to days, and because my husband’s mother was very sick. There was a lot of stress. Add to that a few months later that we moved from one apartment to another, and that my mother and step-father started divorce proceedings because he was cheating on her, and everything went extremely loopy. I was put on a new medication by my GP and that messed up the system equilibrium further. I started having missing time again, and my husband and I had a long discussion about why that was bad for me, and looked into getting me into therapy. That proved problematic because of insurance issues and time issues, we were trying to move again and my mother was living with us for a time, and then tried to go back with my step-father, who was abusive towards me, and I freaked out, more than a little.

I started realizing that there was a good chance I was actually a multiple. I would look at my notes to myself and how the handwriting changed, and I definitely knew that Max was strong enough that he could count as a separate personality. I had a conversation with one of the mods of an otherkin list, about my missing time and things and she shared some of her stories, she’s very open at being multiple, and some of her stories were so very similar to my own that I started to make peace with the fact that I was likely multiple. Hubbie and I had some more talks about things, there were certain things that I couldn’t do but that Max could, and I asked him if he would be averse to Max taking over certain things, and he said absolutely not he and Max got along very well.

So, this is why he knows, because to a point he already knew. He was along with us on our journey of selves discovery, and has been one of our greatest supporters. When I finally did get into therapy in February and was diagnosed in March it wasn’t so much of a revelation as a confirmation, and I told him as soon as I got home from the appointment that I had been diagnosed, and over the next few days we had several more discussions about things and elected to tell our close friends who are often over gaming with us and things, especially as half of them suspected anyway.

I know that telling isn’t for everyone. It’s taken me a long time to be able to trust people, and there’s still people in my social circle that I don’t trust enough to tell. If I do go back to work I doubt I’ll tell my bosses because that’s just too awkward a thing to do, and opens things up unnecessarily in the professional environment. However for my husband to know was important to me, because I knew that he needed to understand why certain things go on, and also because I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. It’s one thing to remain between one or two alters at a job but it would be a disservice to my husband and also to our recovery process for him to not know what was going on with his wife, as far as I’m concerned. Plus it prevents there from being issues with certain alters and certain acts. One of the big things between a husband and wife is sex. He wouldn’t want to be having sex with one of the littles, or with Jared, who is a male alter who is straight…that would just be awkward for everyone. So, with him knowing about the switching he knows now that if certain people are “out” there are certain things that he’s not going to do to me. He and Jared get along, they’re just not going to do that.

So, that’s why we told. I know it’s not for everyone. If I hadn’t been aware that I switched before I got married, it might be a different story.

I’ve been having a hard time with things lately, and I realized a couple of days ago that I”m coming up for the ten year anniversary of when certain things happened to me.

For a long time I felt that around Halloween of 1998 I was possessed and didn’t overcome that possession until around January or February of 1999 with the help of my room mate, who later became my girlfriend, who is now “fondly” referred to as my psycho ex.

Now, I’m honestly not sure what to think about the possession. I’ve done a lot of spiritual work and so it wouldn’t be unheard of for it to have happened. However when I did work with entity attachment and release, rather than being taken to the time I thought I was taken to January of 2001 and found that my grandfather had attached to me to protect me from a spirit fragment of my “psycho ex”.

Perhaps I did get possessed, perhaps there was some kind of disassociation caused by something going on, where I had a stress-fracture and then it healed itself, after a fashion.

Hopefully when I’m able to go back with my therapist we’ll finally be able to get things sorted out. We were getting ready to look at these things when my insurance ran out…

I get some interesting comments about my mental situation since our friends have been told about my multiplicity. There’s one friend in particular who seems to think that hubbie is exceedingly lucky being married to ten people. We’ve explained to him that there are a couple of us who don’t consider ourselves married to him. Jared, for example, does not look on hubbie as “Honey” or anything of the sort, and generally hides in the back with the Littles if anything remotely romantic is going on.

Hubbie also points out that there’s one Little he’s sure is going to try and kill him, and thus he takes his life into his hands every morning. It’s not quite that bad from my point of view, Little is a bit unstable, but she doesn’t come out much.

Sure things are never boring, and hubbie says he wouldn’t change it for the world, because he loves me with all my quirks, even if he doesn’t think of Jared that way (and he’s not expected to) but there are many times that I find myself wondering if he wouldn’t be better off with a saner person, just because that’s the way my thoughts run from time to time, especially on days like yesterday where I’m feeling decidedly non-functional.

I remember the other day I was talking about a trip I took to France when I was about ten. We went up the Eiffel Tower, and for some reason on the walk down I was seized by a huge panic attack and couldn’t move for a bit. An American tourist actually volunteered to carry me down stairs, but my friend and I refused. I said, “I’m not sure who had the fear…by that point there were five of us, and my childhood is still kinda hazy and jumbled because of that.”

The friend who had been commenting on hubbie’s good fortune being married to me said, “Wait, hold on. You were…ten?” I said, “Yes.” “And there were FIVE of you already by then?”

My room mate said, “Well, her grandmother is such a GREAT person.”

I said, “Well, two of them came about from some thing which happened with my ‘best friend’ so I *think* only three can be put down to my grandmother…”

I get mad periodically and want to go hunt down my step-father and punish him for things, or plot my grandmother falling down a hole and never coming out, and that causes arguments, because the parts that have those feelings most strongly are tempered by others who will defend the abusers in my life and put all the blame on ourself rather than the perpetrators. It’s a complex situation, to be sure, but on days where I’m feeling less fragmented I try to find the humor in the situation. It’s like I was telling another friend even if I’m driving by myself and get lost I’m not really stuck alone I have people to keep me company ALL the time, just so long as we don’t start talking to each other out loud so I don’t get Baker Acted.