Analogy

I've been trying to figure out my difficulty with journaling lately. It's not the same difficulty I usually had, a resistance to writing things down, although that's a part of it. But I go somewhere to write so I can have a "system meeting," and find myself doing all kinds of other things (picking up the free newspaper so I can read it all the way through, for instance).

Today, I realized that part of the problem is that I feel somewhat resentful of having to have a "meeting" with my different parts, having to consciously cooperate in running my life.

My current analogy is this: It's like you're living in a house, where you've lived all your life. You think you live alone, and then you start to realize that there are a bunch of other people who hang out there. Some of them, you invited in to help with something temporary. Others, you really have no idea why they are there. But there they are, and they won't go away.

You can go into your room, shut the door, and pretend you're alone, but you can still hear them moving around in the house.

You find their things sitting around. You see evidence that they have been there. You realize that they are moving things around, or making decisions about the house that you didn't really participate in. You realize that the house rules that you've just followed automatically were created by these other people.

And, even though you didn't choose to live with this whole crowd, there they are, and now you have to meet them officially, and cooperate with them, and come to compromise, and all of that work. Some of them you like pretty well. Some of them are rather annoying. And some of them are downright scary, because they will make decisions that will destroy the house, just because that's what they want at that moment.

The analogy I've seen a bit more often is that it's like a bus, where different people keep taking control, or there has to be cooperation about where it goes. And that's another thing: if you think you're in a private vehicle, but it keeps making stops for other people... DID is kind of like that.

Part of the problem is that it's just hard to make this adjustment. I've spent my whole life just kind of, I don't know, acting as though I was on my own. Some of the inside parts are happier that way, because it's easier to sneak around if people don't know you're there.

So, for instance, the teenagers can just slide in when I go to get something to eat and distract me so that I forget to eat, but also forget that I didn't actually eat. Or the little kids can make me walk into a toystore and buy them toys, without me really being fully aware of why I'm doing that.

And lots of the parts feel safer if no one knows they exist. They are terrified of being found out. Some of this is because I've gotten lots of positive feedback from my mother for my ability to not remember a lot of the abuse. And more, it's because I've seen the denial and anger that comes out when my sisters have talked about their memories of abuse when they were little. So my desire to be a good girl requires that I not be able to remember, that I be sufficiently separate from the parts that remember the "bad stuff" that I can behave as though it didn't happen to me.

So tangled in with the resentment of having to communicate with these parts that have been hanging around my "house" is the fear of what it means to communicate with them. How will I be able to forget their stories once they have told them to me? How will I be able to behave as though nothing happened when they keep on reminding me that things did happen?