or Blue Cross Blue Shield and their brand of madness!

I found out today that I can’t have any more therapy sessions until next year. Well, in theory I could but I can’t afford $500 per month for therapy when we’re barely making ends meet as it is.

Why is this the case? Because Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida has it said on most of their plans (according to the girl I talked to on the phone) that 20 visits per year is all that should be necessary for someone seeing a therapist. I guess they don’t take anything into account more severe than dealing with a death in the family, or being disgruntled with your job, otherwise you’re just up the creek.

They tell me that I can appeal the two visits I already had over my twenty before my therapists office saw fit to let me know (apparently there was a staff change to blame for this miscommunication) well tell that to my wallet that now owes $250 and only has $16 to last me until next week.

I can’t switch plans. I can have my therapist write to them and explain that because I’m a Multiple I NEED more than one visit per month, just like because I’m allergic I can’t have ambien but need lunesta, however they view the pill situation medically necessary and will make an exception, but the fact that the therapy is helping me to function in normal society and be able to return as a productive member of the workforce in the future is not something they consider valuable or necessary.

I guess I just better cling to the hope that I can actually qualify for disability and then may be able to get the rest of the appointments covered under Medicaid otherwise I’m screwed until January, and after then will only be able to go once per month.

There’s a chance that the office will be able to set up a sliding scale of payments, but other than that I’m out of luck, and even with that I may be down to one visit per month, because we’re pretty broke.

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.

Ami was finally able to sort out a nifty way to use the picture that we commissioned from DuskFire Art so we now have it here and on our livejournal, although slightly different on each, but the same theme.

Things are looking good, even if we do say so ourselves.

I’m hoping to write more here from now on, but I make no promises, it’s so easy for blogs to get forgotten and fall by the way side. We’re hoping now that we only have three it might be a bit easier (although that’s not strictly true if you count the livejournal and the insanejournal).

Tomorrow is therapy day. We haven’t had therapy in two weeks because our therapist was on vacation. Last time we had therapy she said she would perhaps like to talk to Debbi who seems to be connected with the Littles or that she would like to talk to those who voluntarily left when we found out that we were pregnant because she wonders if they’re the reason that I have such issues with anger. But I don’t know. I think perhaps I will let Kiddy out so that she can dress in a way that she’s comfortable and maybe that will help for her to talk to the therapist…but I can’t be sure. She’s the only one that I think might remotely feel up to talking to the therapist…

Then also we’ve had some issues this past week because a close friend lost a relative to suicide, and things have been very glitchy, so maybe that will come up. Some times I wish the sessions lasted longer than an hour.

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?”

…and as thus was kinda interesting. We were telling E about the discussion going on about Debbi and the roll call that we’ve been doing, and she found it interesting that we would take it upon ourselves to do one, and in amongst that was complimenting me on the fact that I’m being more firm with the munchkin but also said that I continue to surprise her because I take things in stride and have such “good humor” and “can joke” about my mental situation. She said some of the things that I describe would have others in freak-outs, and I told her that I’ve had my share of freak-outs to be sure.

College held a lot of freak outs and since college did too, but my last major freak out other than when I found out I was pregnant and tried to clamp everything down was the Yule after the munchkin was born.

We were driving to the airport to pick up relatives and SO and I were talking and he was saying about the discussion he’d had with me the previous night where it didn’t seem like me or Max or anyone he recognized and I didn’t remember it all. This was also around the time of the ceiling armadillo, and he was going “Why are you freaking out about this?” and I’m going, “Because I don’t remember it happening!” and he’s going, “but you and Max switch out all the time,” and I’m going, “Yes, but I remember that, and if I don’t remember Max fills me in. I have no idea who that was and Max has no idea who that was, it’s a HUGE BLANK SPACE THAT’S LIKE COLLEGE ALL OVER AGAIN.”

E was saying that the amount of control and awareness I have with my system is something she’s never encountered before. She says that next session she would either like to see if Debbi is willing to talk to her because Debbi is connected to the littles or if anyone who voluntarily abdicated when the pregnancy was discovered would like to talk to her that would be good, because they obviously have ties into the anger-issue and the fear of hurting the munchkin issues. She says she’s also interested to work out if there’s something major in childhood that caused the separations or if it’s more tied into the “channeling” and the regression work that I’ve done. She said normally people with systems as large as mine have had multiple traumas in childhood, but since I only seem to have had a couple she wonders if I was pretty static at 2-4 growing up but then the things I did in college played on the fracture that was already there instead.

We like her. She’s very open-minded and very smart

There are so many times I wonder why my husband stayed with me, agreed to marry me even though we really didn’t know what was going on with our mental health, put up with the times we would be doing something and I would just suddenly stop speaking and curl up on the bed and not say anything for hours at a time, deal with me yelling at him, randomly calling him and telling him to get lost, and all the rest of it.

We never really had a hospitalization style break down, but still I think this The Significant Other’s Guide to Dissociative Identity Disorder could be useful to him, and to other significant others of survivors; because that is what we are. We survived. We did it in a weird way, but we did it.

There are times I still feel like I shouldn’t be hear, but then sometimes I’m not, LOL. We’re getting used in our house to the fact that there are things which aren’t remembered, and I no longer, or at least I’m getting better at not freaking out about it. I write notes about everything and everyone else is pretty well trained to write notes too, so that things will get remembered, and we’re training ourselves to write therapy appointments on the calendar as SOON as we get home so we don’t show up early or late for them again.

Hubbie helps when he can. He leaves me notes if I do something strange and out of the ordinary and he’ll make sure that certain alters who are prone to not taking meds take meds, because even though there’s eight (or nine, or twelve) of me we’re still a partnership and that’s what you do.

Or at least that’s what McHugh’s Article on Multiple Personality suggests.

This gentleman who is apparently or at least was at some point Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore claims in the article I linked above that people only experience multiple personalities because they feed on the input given them by their therapists and counselors. He likens the experience to that of hystereo-epilepsy which was a combination of hysteria and epilepsy that another psychiatrist identified, but apparently invented.

I’m so glad that I have a good support system and decent therapist in place before I read this article because it could have really done me some damage. I had read about and knew of multiple personalities before I went to therapy, that’s true, but I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that was what was going on. There was a lot of evidence which pointed to that but I didn’t want to walk into the psychiatrists office and tell him that’s what was wrong because I’m not trained in psychiatric evaluation, and I know well from reading WebMD that you can talk yourself into a lot of illnesses I was worried I had Multiple Sclerosis before I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia.

Anyway, my therapist and my psychiatrist did not make assumptions. They read my journal. They talked to me about my experiences, they evaluated every ounce of my being before pronouncing that they agreed I did indeed have multiple personalities.

Ironically, in regards to the article my therapist has only talked to one alter, me, the main one, she’s read some journal entries by the others, but she hasn’t talked to any of them. She’s also commented that I’m not typical, because I was not repeatedly sexually abused when I was a child. I had some traumatic events happen, and I was sexually attacked when I was in primary school…but most of the abuse I received was psychological.

A hyper-controlling family environment, a school where there was tons of pressure to succeed and compete. There were some events, a classmate attacked me sexually and either later or before, things are hazy, gave me a concussion. My biological father may have hit me when I was a small child (under a year old) because his narcissistic behavior couldn’t comprehend crying.

It’s taken me a long time to accept that rather than just being a channel these alters are a part of me, they’re different portions of my soul. They’re not going to go away if they’re ignored I’ve tried that. I’d much rather find out what their purpose is, why they’re here and if they want to blend back or just find a way to live in balance again, rather than trying to ignore them. I become completely unable to function as a normal person if I ignore them.

I’m so glad that we don’t have a therapist like McHugh.

It’s been a busy few days again because my husband had surgery on Thursday and then my son got stomach flu the day after that, so between one and the other I’ve been very tired and crabby and not getting much sleep, which means I’ve had a few times where I’ve had blank spaces again, or at least hazy impressions of things but nothing clear, like someone coming by around midnight one night asking to borrow something (which turned out to have happened). My friend apologized for coming by profusely the next day, so I’m guessing he got to deal with the short end of Terri’s tongue, she’s one of the few I don’t have a good handle on, but she really doesn’t deal well with the child so doesn’t come out if he’s awake, which is good on that score.

Tomorrow my mother is coming to my therapy appointment with me. My therapist figures that’ll be a good thing to do so that she can perhaps get a bit more background on my childhood, cover things that I don’t remember or might not have thought of, and then we can move on to hypnotherapy, after the next appointment which is going to be a joint session with myself and my husband and both our counselors.

Such a busy time, not to mention my husband has his doctor’s appointment to follow up on his surgery and at the end of the week I’m taking the cat to be microchipped, and there’s also the fact that my car had a flat tire and needs an oil change and a tune-up. Hubbie’s car will probably be in need of an oil change too. Life is so hectic.

I suppose it’s no wonder I’m exhausted and sore and have a hard time keeping things up beat, even with rotating alters around I’m still snippy most of the time. The terrible two tantrums don’t help at all.

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 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.