Heads up readers

Tags

Alters, Blog, Blogging, diary, Did, Dissociative identity disorder, Followers, Healing, journal, Mental health, Mental illness, personal, PTSD, readers, Therapy

I now have a new blog. Well I’ve had it for years, but just in case any of you are still reading this one, I never post in it now.
so my blog now is over at
http://therapybits.com/

So you can feel free to come on over and follow along!
Hope to see you all there!
carol anne
xoxo

Deleting this blog, come on over to my new home

Tags

Blogging, Depression, Did, Dissociation, Doctor, Mental health, Psychiatrist, psychotherapy, PTSD, Recovery, Therapy, Trauma

hi everyone
I will be deleting this blog really soon. I now blog over at
http://therapybits.com/

Please come join me over there!

Just a Heads up

We are no longer going to write on this blog. We’ve moved to a new location. We made a new, private blog, so that all parts insiders would be able to express themselves more freely, and openly. Anyone who is or has been a long time follower of this here blog, please email me carol anne, if you didnt get an invite, but would like one. Please let me know in the email, your username for wordpress, and who you are just so I know whose reading.
Our email is
manyofus1980

So…please get in touch if you still want to hear about our ups and downs and our life, and hopefully I wont lose anyone in the move.
Thanks
Carol anne

New blog for the alters! See inside for details of how to sign up!

Some of our insiders want to make a blog where they can talk about their struggles in therapy, in life, day to day, their pasts, their ups and their downs. However they don’t feel comfortable talking on the public blog about this stuff. I know a few have over the months, but more want to join in, but they want a private place to blog. However, they’d like some readers, friends, to read what they have to say and give them perspective and stuff on their writing. I’m just about to set up their blog, and I was wondering, if anyone who reads this blog, wants to follow our other insiders? If you do want to follow their journey, then please email me at

Manyofus1980@gmail.com

And let me know your wordpress email address or username so that I will be able to add you to the user list. I’m not going to advertise the link to the blog publically as I really want to know whose viewing, so if people email me I can monitor the emails coming in.

I hope that doesn’t sound too confusing for people.

So in the email…just let me know who you are, and either the email address tied to your wordpress account, or your wordpress username..thats it. I’ll be able to add you then.

Thanks so much guys,

Carol anne

Comparisons between our psychiatrists

Tags

Abuse survivor, Child abuse, Comparing psychiatrists, Complex PTSD, Dissociation, Dissociative identity disorder, Doctor, Mental illness, Psychiatrist, PTSD, Therapist, Therapy, Trauma

We have had a few psychiatrists over the years. Because we are in the public health system, things change a lot. When your going private, usually you see the same person for years. This hasn’t been the way it is for us.

We started with Dr M. She was quite a nice person. A little set in her ways, but we liked her. Then again, we were young, and very unwell, we’d have literally done anything that anyone told us, just to feel better and become well again. We first saw her for a year. She put us on meds. She made us go to therapy. Unfortunately back then we had a severe eating issue, we didn’t eat or wouldnt eat hardly at all. We were severely underweight. The therapist she made us go to was attached to the mental health services, and so wasn’t very good. We didn’t like that she would constantly weigh us, and focused on nothing but our ED. She never asked why it was we didn’t want to eat, or why it was that we were so suicidal, or we didn’t want to live. After a year of seeing Dr M, she deamed us well enough not to see her any more. Within the year though we almost got hospitalised to the psych ward once, we narrowly escaped that because our mom didn’t want us to go in there and she would not agree and because we were only 17, she had the final say. After stopping going to Dr M, we were out of therapy for a while too. Eventually we got back into therapy when our memories started to hit us full force. The memories of the SRA and MC and other abuses were plaguing us and causing us to have terrible flashbacks. So we entered into therapy again, this time with a wonderful therapist, who ended up devastating Shirley, and causing a system collapse. But we do still think she was amazing, she did so much with us in the 9 months that we saw her. She was instrumental in us getting a diagnosis of did. But inevitably it ended, and not very wel I might add. She said she lost her objectivity around our case. She did however get us back in to see dr m, and be assessed for a did diagnosis. Dr M didn’t know much about did, but she assessed us and diagnosed us with the disorder mostly based on our therapists account, as we weren’t really able to give her a lot of info, but we’d been seeing our therapist twice weekly and she’d met some parts insiders and had more of a full picture of how things were for us at that time. We then found out that Dr M was retiring. Dr D took over. It was a major change for us because he was a male psychiatrist. We didn’t think we’d be able to connect with him or trust him. But we actually did manage to get very familiar with him, and we saw him for five years. He was a pretty good doctor as psychiatrists go. He was the first doctor to hospitalise us, he also tried us on lots of medications, and we did lots of outpatient groups while under his care, we also had brain scans, and other tests, just to make sure we actually did have did and not something else. He tried to get us admitted to a unit in the UK specifically for did, but they refused to take us because of our blindness. They said our blindness would complicate things and they wouldn’t be able to accommodate us. After Dr D went to a new catchment area in 2007, dr C took over. She was only ok. We had a lot of ups and downs with her when we were under her care. One time Ro who is one of our darker insiders, threatened to kill her, of course that caused a load of problems, after those threats she refused to see us alone any more and would always bring a nurse with her when she saw us after that. Despite the ups and downs though, we did like her and got along with her. In 2010 when we had our formal diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder from the specialists who came over from the UK, she was there for part of the assessment. She believed in did. She spoke to insiders in our system…she saw us and understood us. But in 2013 she moved to Australia. That is when Dr Barry took over our care. And I can honestly say she is the best psychiatrist we’ve ever had. She just gets it. She is a great listener, and knows exactly the right things to say. She is friendly, and she is real. The fact that she is real is really important to us. She’s not afraid to let her emotions show either. She is just an all round good psychiatrist and I feel very lucky to have her. We all do. We’ve had a lot of therapists and psychiatrists I know. But I can honestly say that each of them brought something new to our treatment, each of them played a part in who we are today.

Carol anne

Our experiences of bullying as a young teen

Tags

Abuse survivor, Alters, Bullying, Child abuse, Complex PTSD, Dissociation, Dissociative identity disorder, Mental health, Mental illness, PTSD, Trauma

I’ve been thinking a lot today. Mostly I have been thinking about our teen years. So much happened during that stage of our life. It was before we were ever diagnosed with did, because we were unofficially diagnosed with did in 2001. But it was during our teen years, that we discovered we had any mental illness, namely depression, and an eating disorder. And it was during our teen years that the abuse came out, came to light, but I am not going to write about that now. What I am planning to write about was the bullying we endured twice during our teen years. The first time we were bullied, was when we were still in the boarding school in Dublin. For those who maybe don’t know, this was a school for the blind. When we entered secondary school at age 13, was when the bullying started. It was intense. It was horrific and horrible. The girls who bullied us were very nasty and mean and would stop at nothing to cause us pain. Eventually we told one of our teachers, our class head teacher. She said she’d sort it out, and she did. The bullying stopped and we thought we’d gotten through it and it was over. Only a few years later, when we left the bording school and returned home to go to school at home, it started up again. Only this time we had a much harder time than before. We were in a school of over 500 pupils, all of whom could see, we couldn’t as we are blind. At first when we went there it was a novelty to the other girls. They’d never been in school with someone who was blind. Lots of them were eager to show us around, be our friends, take care of us. But of course this didn’t last. When the bullying started, it got really bad really quickly. They’d call us names. They’d make us cry. They’d do things to injure us…for example knocking us over when we were carrying our backpack, trip us going up the stairs, put superglue on our chair, you name it, they did it. It was when they tripped us while we were walking up the stairs that everything blew up. We broke our arm then and had to go to hospital. So then, the bullying all came to a head, it was found out by the teachers and principle. Of course this made the bullies very angry. They then started to do things outside of the school so they wouldn’t be noticed. So while the teachers thought it had stopped, it really hadn’t. It was escalating further and further. Eventually we couldn’t take any more. Eventually we tried to end our life. We were taking Prozac and we overdosed on it. Luckily for us, our mom found us. We were rushed to the hospital and it was only then that we met our first psychiatrist, Dr M. Dr M diagnosed us as having clinical depression and anorexia. She put us on antidepressants. She continued to see us as an outpatient for over a year until she deamed us well enough not to see her any more. We still had to stay on our meds though. I supposed if the bullying hadn’t happened, we might have never seen anyone and we may have never have gotten into the system as early on as we did. Sometimes though i wonder if becoming a service user of the services for mental health at such a young age was helpful. I’m not sure still if I think it was or not. Thats part of our story and I hope someone out there is able to relate to it in some sort of way. It was hard for me to write and think back and remember the awful experiences of bullying and of our teen years. But I am glad I decided to open up a little bit more than I have done in the past about what happened to us.

Carol anne

Cant sleep ug

Tags

Abuse survivor, Alters, Did, Dissociation, Dissociative identity disorder, Mental health, Mental illness, Sleep, Trauma

So…I’ve been sitting here for hours doing email. And reading blogs. I just cant sleep. Of course if I got up at a reasonable time of day, it wouldn’t be like that. But today was Sunday, and I slept in. Only sleeping in turned into a kinda all day thing. I did get up and watch some tv for a while and I fixed myself something to eat, but then I just felt like going back to sleep again. Now I’m paying for it because I’m wide awake. Its lucky I have email and blogs to keep me busy, otherwise I’d go stark crazy from just being bored.
Carol anne

I just had a hallucination

Tags

Abuse, Abuse survivor, Abusers, Alters, Did, Dissociation, Dissociative identity disorder, Hallucinations, Mental illness, Psychosis, Trauma

I just hallucinated. I hate that so much. I just saw one of my abusers. She berated me. She really got to me. I could hear her voice so intensely. It scared me. It really fucking scared me. Her voice was so vivid, the words loud and clear. I really hate this. It makes me feel less strong. When I hallucinate it makes me feel vulnerable. Seeing one of my abusers, their face, hearing their voice, makes it seem all so real again. Like I am back there. Like its happening all over again. I hate it.

Carol anne