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.

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’ve been doing this over on my livejournal, and thought I would bring some of the Q&A over here, and if there’s anyone else who wants to ask me questions just ask away in the comments here.

Here’s what I said over there:

Okay, so I know this has to be weirding people out in many ways shapes and forms. I appreciate hearing from those of you who have questions, ask me any questions you want about this, no matter how stupid you think they are.

This is weird for me so it has to be weird for some of you on my F-List as well, and I know from things my Mum has asked me that there are tons of questions, and it takes her a bit to ask them some times.

So, take this as the opportunity ask your questions. I will answer, or one of us will answer. For example, some of my Mum’s questions.

1. So, um…which one of you is [my daughter]?
Answer: We all are. Most of the time I (Abby) am the one that’s “out” so I guess I’m “default” and so mostly likely to be who you’ve talked to and consider to be [your daughter], but we’re all her.

2. But…there are guys right…how does that work?
Answer: Um…awkwardly?
It’s weird to me too, because for a long time I thought even going with “past lives” that if you were a girl you were always a girl, and for some people that’s true, but in getting to know other multiples there’s often a predominance of the birth-gender but at least one or two of opposing genders, even with guys. There’s one guy on AO who has one female alter (that I’ve met), and the more I get to know the “girls” the more I find there are male alters among them too.
I guess it’s just because it was necessary. We fractured because it was the only way to survive what happened, and for some reason it was needed for their to be guys in here.

Well, not quite, I just couldn’t resist the title.
The last therapy appointment I had, Kiddy went to. I never put her in the list of “active alters” because she wasn’t. She has been out a grand total of once, as far as I can tell, since we found out that we were going to have a baby, and that was…three years ago August.

Strangely enough she seems to be a bit…integral to system functioning as a whole, despite what she thought. I (and this is Abby talking for clarification) wasn’t sure. When we found out we were pregnant it’s safe to say that there was a Mini-Crisis. I mean, aside from the fact that at the time we really didn’t fully know what was going on with us mentally. We just thought we had a real easy time channeling facets and other lives, and we kinda went, okay, if all of these are other lives than everyone who has a hard time with children, doesn’t like children, or is really, really angry it’s probably best if you go back behind your little doors now and don’t bother us again, and Kiddy went, well, hey I hate kids, I can’t deal with kids, and I have a hideous temper so yeah, I’m gone. Or as she put it in therapy, “Well, shit. Bye!”

But apparently she’s actually been around since I was about seven…eight…some thing else that we as a whole didn’t know.

So, this is now the third alter who has been to therapy or who has spoken in therapy, the second being Sarah (one of the Littles) and the first being me, who is mainly Front and therefore goes most of the time by default, because I AM DEFAULT. Woot!

Last night, Kiddy met our son for the first time. She’s seen him before, but he was sleeping and therefore “okay” but it seems like the meeting went pretty well. It happened last night because my husband was home and able to mediate, but things did go well. The only one who had a meltdown was the child, and that was really only a mini-meltdown, and Kiddy dealt with that okay. I think she was actually more scared than anything. She was less sure how to deal with his affection than she was his tantrum, but I think that might be because anger is something she can understand. He peed on his shirt, he was upset that the shirt was taken. He got a new shirt, he was happy. Hugs…that’s something else.

All in all these past few weeks have brought a lot of useful information and insight…and it seems like Kiddy is also becoming or re-becoming part of co-consciousness. She’s also answered a couple of emails in our support group, but this I would say is good, because it’s better to deal with the issues that cause her to have the anger, and let her process things herself than to just keep her buried under the rug (or locked in her “room) as the case may be.

As I was saying in a forum post earlier, short-term is okay…but long-term is better, and what happened when we were in crisis that was definitely a Short Term solution, and that term has run out now.

I think it happens some times to people whose brains work like mine that you have times where you get stuck “in between” and you can’t tell if you’re forward or someone else is. Let me tell you it’s very disconcerting, because you’re still aware of what’s going on fully and yet you know that you’re not saying things that you’re saying, and aren’t really sure where your thought processes are coming from.

It happened to me the other night and it was, it wasn’t very good.

My SO did try to help but I didn’t really have enough energy to have one come forward over the other, and he said when he came to bed an hour or so later he found that my hand-written journal was open and there were a couple of pages of writing in there. He thought perhaps one of the Littles had been writing again, but the hand-writing didn’t match and didn’t match any one elses that I can recall or see other examples of in the journal.

The content that they wrote…that was a bit odd too, things that happened when I was still living in England for the most part. Some things that I had forgotten about but can now remember hazily, including me buying pets “on the sly” and bringing them home and then not being sure how or why I bought them and having to try and get rid of them before my family found out.

My therapist told me an interesting analogy about my body the other day that I thought I would share. She said that the body is like a car, and while I’m sure people have heard that analogy before. She said that for multiples it was like the body is the company car and singletons a car that they own.

The singleton takes care of their car, they make sure it gets the oil changes, they fill it with gas, take it for tune-ups, take out the trash, but a multiple it’s like the company car, where everyone borrows it to get to a meeting, but they don’t take out the trash, or fill it up because they figure the next person will get to that, and they figure it doesn’t matter about the oil changes because the company will sort that out.

We were talking about my problems with sticking to exercise and diet. I have these ideas that I’ll get with an exercise program, but then I just flake out, or they never get done because of that one day that so-n-so is out and doesn’t so the next day when some one else is out they’re all, “Well, they didn’t do it, why should I?”

Over the Easter “break” we came out to our mother.

It was an interesting experience which verified that things do indeed work out better when you trust your intuition and don’t give into paranoia. This is something that certain alters really needed to learn, or perhaps clarify is the better word.

We explained to her that our therapist was interested to find things out about our childhood because of the way I’d been diagnosed and went on to explain to her that the actual diagnosis given was “Multiple Personalities”. She was a bit confused at first but didn’t freak out in any way shape or form. She said that she thought that everyone had multiple personalities in one way or another because there’s different faces that you present to different people. We told her that’s true but this goes deeper than that, this is shifts in things and loss of memory, at certain times, and things like that.

She said she’d never really seen anything like that, and we explained that often there’s only a few of us who come out around her. We told her about the schism in the first semester of college, and about what happened to us when we were younger. The abuse we received from our elementary school friend.

We told her we’d been pretty sure she wouldn’t freak out but we didn’t want her to blame herself that was our only fear. She said she only blames herself for the incidents with our step-father. She said that as our mother she wants to see us, “healthy, happy and whole,” and we explained that we look at the therapy as a means to get healthy, that we are a lot happier since we started and getting happier every day thanks to our family, and that we think whole depends on the definition, if she’s meaning whole as in “integrated” we’re not sure that we want to do that, given we’ve been at least a trio since we were very young, what we really want is just to be balanced again, to be able to function seamlessly, with proper communication and no glitches or fuzziness, and definitely no blank spaces.

She said that she understood. Then we started joking around again as normal as I explained about who was who and if there were any specific things that they can and can’t or do and don’t do, like Max being the bartender and Abby and Debbi being the cooks, the Max likes shoes, but Abby likes making jewelry, that Ami is the computer geek and so on.

Her main deep question for the whole thing, “Who got you the tattoos?”

We love our Mom.

So, therapy went well on Monday. Therapist and I went through my journal entries from 29 Jan to the date of therapy going over the different aspects who came up and she took notes on their personality traits and names and how to pronounce those names.

She said that a couple of them look to be pretty well adjusted and have a good handle on things, that she was grateful I showed her the journal because it meant we could start working on things properly within two months rather than a year and that it was such a valuable tool she was glad that we trusted her enough to share it with her.

She verified that I will certainly not be being locked up because I’m functional enough to sort a lot of this out by “myself” in certain respects and have knowledge of certain terminology. I told her I credited a lot of that to wonderful sites like the Crisses’ KinHost website.

We went over some of the things which have happened in the past few months because they were listed in the journal. She said that the adverse reaction to Cymbalta that I had could be because whichever alter was forward at the time I took it didn’t need the Cymbalta or that if there are times or have been times where certain medications have suddenly stopped working could be because the alter didn’t need it. She’s seen situations like that where one or two alters benefit from a psychiatric medication but that others in the system might not need it at all.

She said that a lot of the work with multiples other than just straight talking therapy can be done via hypnosis and she figured that we would be receptive to that because we have training in that area. I said that yes we would but we weren’t sure that we wanted to go the integration route if that’s what she was suggesting the hypnosis was used for. She said that integration is primarily aided by hypnosis but that wasn’t necessarily the only thing hypnosis could be used for and she certainly wasn’t going to push integration if that wasn’t what we wanted especially as we’ve been at least two pieces for twenty years.

I said that we have wondered about a partial integration of some alters who are less well adjusted to try and ease things for the whole system because there are some that we’ve essentially locked away because they are uncooperative and would have a negative influence on our son.

It’s going to be a little while before we can have another appointment because we have a lot of other things going on in our personal life, appointments, my SO has surgery and the like but the therapist said that despite the fact that standard treatment for multiples is usually twice a week for six months she thinks we’ll be okay because we’ve got a good handle on things and we’re not in a crisis situation. That we should keep up with the journal and see how things are going from there.

My SO pointed me to this article about exorcism and entity release being used as part of psychiatric treatments: Thought Exorcism was Dead? Think Again.

I laughed as I was reading through some of the parts of the article because they’re very similar to things that I’ve experienced myself, and it just further serves as a reminder to me as to why my therapist might have been less shocked than I expected when I mentioned entity attachment being part of the treatment I’d gone through in the past.

Peter Johnson’s demonic possession was no less bizarre. Askinra’s presence only became apparent when Peter was hypnotised by Dr Sanderson. Under hypnosis, Askinra would temporarily gain control of Peter’s body and use his voice to communicate.

Askinra apparently attached itself to Peter during his former life as a child in 1950s Tibet. He was bayonetted to death at the age of twelve by a Chinese soldier. The soldier’s sheer bitter hatred for the boy sucked in a nearby spirit which became attached to Peter’s soul. When Peter was re-incarnated, Askinra was dragged back into our world too.

When I was in the hypnosis class. There was another person also who experienced entity attachment, whereas the spirit attached to me was from this life time, one of the ones that she released had attached to her in a previous life because she reminded him of his dead wife.

There are all sorts of reasons why entities can attach to a person, my ex fragmented a piece of herself too me because she couldn’t let go, my grandfather when he died attached to me to try and protect me from her not realizing that I was becoming symptomatic with some of the illnesses that he had experienced in his life.

After my ex went back to herself, he went to the light for a time, he still hangs around to check in on us, and watches over my child while he sleeps but won’t attach to me so forcibly because he knows what happens now. While I still have some fibromyalgia symptoms, other than when a flare was caused by an adverse reaction to a medicine I was prescribed, since I did the entity release work the highest issue I’ve had has probably been around a 4 or 5 with ordinarily being around a 1 or 2, compared to 6-7 most of the time previously. I was diagnosed with fibro in August of 2002 after having symptoms for over a year, but not going to treatment because my step-father had convinced me that if I started a job with a pre-existing health condition diagnosed I wouldn’t be able to get insurance. My grandfather had died in January of 2001.

I remember my hypnotherapy instructor explaining that sometimes the fragmenting is intentional and sometimes not. He said that often times there will be interesting reactions from the person who was fragmented once the attachment is released. Three days after my session my ex tried to get in touch via the internet when we hadn’t spoken in any way shape or form for several years. I thought that was interesting. Once I wrote back that I was married and starting a family contact ceased again.

I find it interesting also to see that therapists are incorporating spirit release into their sessions. I’m going to have to ask my counselor about this when I go next time.

When we first broached the idea of therapy among ourselves it was prompted by something our mother said. She has been going to therapy for her own more mundane reasons, and we elected to say that we were fine at this time that perhaps “in the future” we would consider it, which was a brush-off at that point.

We feared therapy, because we have a small child and we’re always afraid of losing him, primarily because in many other lives we have lost children to death, social services, separations, and various other things, like A.J. who gave her child up for adoption because she was only fourteen when she had her.

Anyway, after a few months from the conversation with our mother we started to think that perhaps it would be a good idea for us to go to therapy because we needed an outside perspective, someone who could see things that we’ve been unable to, and who could give us pointers on how to straighten things out. Still we were paranoid.

We decided to ask on several forums and communities about other plural/multiple systems and their experiences with therapy. Then we also found a community for plurals who had physical children (not just child alters) and see if they had any better perspectives on the situation and suggestions for ways to go about it.

One of the major remarks almost entirely across the otherkin/multiple community is that practically all therapists do not know how to deal with multiplicity and force systems to integrate against their will, which my logical sides find hard to believe, but the more nervous paranoid ones freaked out about. The other comments we got were along the lines of “No don’t tell your therapist, they’ll lock you up, they’ll take your child away from you!” and so on. There were a few who advocated telling right away to weed out the bad therapists from the good, so that we could move on to find one who shared our outlook of treatment for multiplicity.

But wow…if we’d listened we’d still be struggling along by ourselves living at half-kilter.

It seems to me that a lot of the most vocal otherkin and multiple systems have as much of a negative stereotype of therapy as they claim that therapists have of them. They complain that not all multiple systems are like those depicted in Sybil, but yet assume that therapists are going to mistreat them rather than help.

I may just have been incredibly lucky with the therapist and psychiatrist that I was referred too, but from what I’m hearing from others who’ve actually gone and seen from people who have dealt with therapists they’re not as stuck in the 50s and 60s as people seem to assume. The ones in my office are fine with the fact that I have esoteric professions and esoteric leanings, they want to work with me and my belief system to help me get my balance restored.

The only medication I’ve been given has been an anti-depressant I asked for, which is a low dose to help with issues that aren’t related to my plurality. They’ve never once mentioned Multiple Personality Disorder, only Multiples and Multiplicity, and haven’t freaked out about anything I’ve mentioned negatively, not even when I talked to them about entity attachment and possession.