Wanda's Ramblings

Reprocessing

I told my therapist at one point that I felt like I needed a month off just to remember stuff. Fortunately, I have been given that and more. It Is not a month off but instead a job and lifestyle that lets me have plenty of solitude. And boy have I been remembering.

Let me back up here a minute and explain. Anyone who has been following my blog, story, and book knows that I have DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder. You will also know that we are now fully integrated, and all of the personalities and their memories are accessible to me. Since those memories were not available to me for much of my life I am now in the process of assimilating them and reprocessing my values, beliefs, and ideals.

That is what I meant by needing time to remember. And that requires quality alone time in sufficient quantity to process a memory or group of memories. I use music, imagery, and reading over the narratives written by each personality to pull things to the surface. When I read one of the narratives for a few minutes that personality emerges more and pushes to the front. I then begin to get a feel for the attitudes, morals, and preferences of that personality and can kind of enter its world.

Once I am in that mode I can relive the moments of those memories. It can be confusing and unsettling at times because I am often seeing things through two lenses. One lens is the lens that the memory was formed with, i.e. the personality fronting, or present, at the time. The other lens of course is my current lens. And through this process, the current lens is constantly changing and updating.

One of the results of this process is that I need to go back and reprocess certain things all over again. One of the reasons is that as I process things my values and morals update and something I found offensive, or not, in a previous remembering is now viewed quite differently. A good example is my religious leanings and beliefs. Something that I at one time would have considered wrong or “sinful” today I view differently and mostly look at the intent vs the action.

Throughout much of my life, I felt like my actions were not in alignment with my beliefs, or as Alan used to put it my values were not in a current status. Today as a result of this process I believe I have become pretty open-minded. Therefore, when I look back at events and actions from my life much of what I condemned myself for I see today was not out of line with my current values. The other stuff I can forgive myself for pretty easily now that it is viewed in context. When I used to vaguely remember an event out of my past without the context provided by the personality fronting things would appear to be evil or out of proportion. A good example is when I assaulted my mother. Now that I have the whole picture of what she did to me for all those years my actions no longer feel out of proportion or evil. I am not saying that my actions were justified only that they are more understandable.

It is like standing on top of a forested mountain looking back down at my journey to the top. While I was on the path I could not see the rest of the path it was confusing, and I made a lot of decisions without having all the information needed to make a healthy decision. Also, as my personalities switched out I often would not even realize I was on a journey and just thought I was lost in a forest. This was most evident when my core personality would push through to the front and find us in some awkward or confusing situation that the alter had gotten us into. Today when reprocessing I have the whole picture and see events in the context of the whole journey.

As I go through this process of unwrapping compartmentalized memories I wonder how similar or dissimilar it is to how people with relatively normal recall process memories. One of the cool parts of the human experience is that we all have variations of the mind's eye and internal monologue. For the most part, whenever I remember something from my past there are two mind’s eyes and two internal monologues present. Over time the second set is slowly becoming weaker but is still there. This gives me the chance to look at things, I would think, very differently than most people. What I used to think of as a curse I now view as a superpower because there are two, or more, of us looking at the same thing from different contexts.

I would liken the process to trying to make a bed with multiple cats in the room so that every time I almost have it another cat jumps on the bed and tries to get under the sheets. What I do today is take the high road, look at the journey, and try not to focus on the destination. It can become tiring and tedious at times and like any task, my motivation waxes and wanes at times but the improvement in my mental health and contentment I have gained so far always keep me coming back. I try to remember that I am going down roads that few have journeyed and remember to enjoy the process along the way. I often stop and ask myself, “How the hell did we get here?”, and to be honest I have no real answer.

That is the main reason that I have researched and written about Dissociative Identity Disorder so much, to try to answer that question. So, I do not write about DID from a scholarly or authoritative viewpoint, I instead write about it from an experiential viewpoint. I feel like that has more benefit to many others on this same path than a bunch of scientific explanations because so far, those explanations have not helped me all that much. Once the diagnosis is made and accepted by the person with DID I feel the rest is relatively uncharted, so I write about my journey to help start to build a chart. If not for the many, then at least for me.

In the meantime, I will keep remembering, processing, and taking the high road!