miscellany

Several things going on. Lots of parts are very depressed because of a lot of different things (mostly boiling down to being lonely and not having good prospects of getting friends our own age, and also that there are some things in day-to-day life that can be really discouraging and frustrating to deal with. Oh, yeah, and all that "childhood trauma" stuff that we so often discount as a cause.)

And for a few days last week, a severely suicidal part was out; the main problem with that is, she's not sufficiently self-aware to recognize that she's a separate part... so she thinks she's one (or several) of the other parts. It's all very confusing. It would help if we could get her to start to recognize herself, and that she's separate from the rest of us, because then it would be easier for us to help her. Also, it would be easier to convince her that the rest of us are NOT as severely depressed as she is, and we'd rather not have her acting on her suicidal urges, thank you. Even if she does experience the rest of us as just being her, "faking being happy." It's a real downer, let me tell you.


On a somewhat related note, in the sense that I remain convinced that there is SOMETHING we can do to ease a lot of the pain and frustration we're experiencing, I've realized a couple of the reasons I find it so difficult to access the ideas in books like "Getting Through the Day" by Nancy Napier. One is that they are totally focused on dealing with trauma, and don't actually give good strategies for figuring out day-to-day life stuff. You know, like how to you work through a system meeting, if you can't figure out how to get everyone to come to the same spot and speak one at a time? Or how do you figure out a schedule that will actually meet everyone's needs? I swear, as soon as I come up with some good ways of doing this, I am going to put them up on a website, because I cannot be the only person who needs this.

Also, I desperately wish I could find some simple worksheets, with short fill-in-the-blanks kinds of questions, just for parts to practice communicating (I mean, things like, "My name is _________ and my favorite flavor of ice cream is ________." I can't be the only person who experiences immediate chaos if I push certain parts to talk about why they exist, but who also needs to figure out how to get to know them. And we're all better at responding to questions than at coming up with something useful by journaling to a blank page.)

But the other thing I've realized is that most of the books, at least all that I've read so far, are written as though there is a singular "you" who happens to have some parts. And I think that's why I have such a hard time translating how to work within my own system. There just isn't one part who is consistently present. Some parts may be out more than others, but none of us feels like, or is accepted by the others as, the "main one" or the "host" or even the "shell." It's kind of like people who live in a house together, presuming they moved into the house at the same time. No one really has seniority, and they all share the house equally (more or less... some people monopolize different parts of the house, just like some housemates take over the phone and no one else gets a chance to make a call. That doesn't make it their phone!) (And now I'm thinking of youth in this cell phone age wondering why people don't just use their own phones. I'm talking about land lines here, folks.)

So anyhow, even the stuff written for multiples doesn't seem to take into account that there isn't a singular "you" who is the one in therapy, and the one who can coordinate everything. And I haven't seen anything explaining how to figure out who is coordinating things, or in charge, or how to have a consensus based organization inside your own head.

Sorry this is so totally scattered. On top of my own brain being wonky today, I've been getting phone calls and text messages off and on while I'm writing this, so my attention keeps wandering away from the point.


Not quite sure who this is. I'm not the same part as the last one who used the "who?" label, but I figure the label is there, and "who?" is not a name.