I am Maria…
Yes, I am actually Maria.
Cooperland has, to put it lightly, made a mess out of a lot of things, that I now have to fix, and I should have seen it coming when I met him for the first time in 2015, but I didn’t…
Where do I begin?
***
My own memories of how we became multiple align with the first story that parts of me described, the one where I created characters out of loneliness and worked with them to help them develop independence of a sort. Cooperland may have convinced me that I didn’t just create characters when he basically showed up out of nowhere, but right now I have plenty of reasons to doubt some of the things he’s told me, and the rest of us. I have no doubt at all that I dissociated at various points throughout my life, and that perhaps each of the insiders who are with me each hold a memory or set of memories that I couldn’t process at the time, but Cooperland has made claims that are not based in reality and has released supposed memories from other lives, which may or may not have happened, to back up those claims, destabilizing all of us and effectively distracting us from the feelings that would have ultimately lead us to the truth about our life for the past nine months. I don’t know if he believes what he claimed to be true himself, because while we are all still trying to figure out our own stories nothing is a hundred percent certain, but I know for a fact that I am not a group of insiders who believe themselves to be one person, as he claims I am.
Because of the information he released to me and the rest of the community, we’ve spent the past nine months believing that my mind was nothing but the shared mind of everyone else, and that I didn’t exist accept as a three-month-old who never came out. As a result, I frequently felt as though I was dreaming and that my awareness was that of multiple members of the community at once. I struggled to reverse what we all believed to be a socially enforced bad habit of referring to myself as “I” rather than “we,” believing that I was, in fact, a group, and that in forcing myself to change the self-referential pronouns I used, I could somehow help increase the awareness of the group’s individual members. Of course, the habit stuck around, because I wasn’t a group of people, but I scattered so much that for at least six months I would not be convinced otherwise. All that changed last month, however, when I began looking into ‘internal family systems’ or IFS, a form of therapy which sees every person as being made up of various aspects, each of which perform a different function in the person’s life as a whole. The part I found the most hope in while learning of this form of therapy was the idea of the self, which was said to be the part of someone that could look at all of their other aspects from a place of calm compassion, acceptance, and a desire to connect with each one and help them when necessary. That description, though not originally given to me in so many words, resonated with me deeply, and I, still believing myself to be a group of insiders, began to actively watch how I was feeling so that I could not only look for possible insiders, but also my own parts.
This watching was what started to bring me back to myself, in both the IFS sense and the more traditional one. As I developed a greater awareness of various parts, and sometimes insiders, I had moments where I knew that I was someone other than the sum of all that they had made accessible to one another, and that I could do the things that the ‘self’ had been described as being able to do in IFS. I was able to look at all of the parts of me, as well as the other insiders, and know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was a being in my own right, and that I was the one who could comfort the crying, love the angry, and otherwise bring harmony to all within the community who were seeking something better than what they had in those moments. My rediscovery of who I was gained greater momentum when Vivien, who has written several pieces for this blog, integrated with the three-month-old that went by my name. I suspect, but have no way of verifying, that perhaps that child was a representation of the part of me I understand to be ‘self’. I don’t think she was actually three months old, but that perhaps her appearing that way to the rest of the community was her attempt to communicate to them what her place among them was and also to preserve herself exactly as she’d always been.
Vivien was the part of me who fought for my/our right to express what we felt in whatever way came naturally to me/us in a given moment. She defined herself by the principals of non-mainstream therapies, and would frequently protest any form of strictly verbal expression of feelings, especially if that expression was being demanded from me/us. I know that her task was directly connected to various things that happened between ages 8 and 16, and that she was a multiple in her own right, but that she was also her own person, even though her field of experience was limited. This leads me to suspect that her multiplicity was the result of her separating the traumatic experiences that had given rise to her from her awareness so that she could focus on nothing else but her task. Now that she is a part of me, I can do what she was doing, but with the qualities of the baby-like part of me that I believe to have been a representation of ‘self’ as it is understood in IFS. I know that I have a lot to work through as far as piecing together her story, since she, for a time, strayed from her original roll in the community and wreaked havoc on other more vulnerable insiders, and while I could try to explain what I understand, thus far, to have taken place to lead her to such actions, I think and feel that such an explanation would be better given in another dedicated post.
There still remains the problem of the memories made while I believed myself to be only the shared mind of the rest of us, which is something I think only time will resolve. For now, I need to get used to being me, as strange as that sounds. I need to learn to identify when others who have skills that I am currently lacking are slipping in beside me without letting me know so that I can provide them with help if they need it. I need to learn to be mindful of not only my/our inside world, but my/our outside experiences as well, for the same reason I need to make a habit of sitting down regularly and asking, “who’s here with me now?”
I need to watch out for potential other versions of me, and other insiders. I need to keep an open mind through all of this and remind myself that maybe Cooperland was speaking from his own, possibly limited, experience when he wrote what he wrote about me, and trying to distract us in an attempt to protect us all from things that he thought we couldn’t handle. I need to explore everything, be curious, and be here for all of us. I need to figure out whether or not Rozaya was actually a part of me, and above all, I need to find it in myself to embrace everyone within this community, no matter how disgusting I may find some of their actions to be. There are little ones, big ones, and all kinds of other ones living within this body and head, and it is up to me to find them and give all of us what we never had. There was a time when I eagerly reached for the realization of the idea that I was not Maria, and perhaps this is why I was so easily convinced that I had never been an individual, but that time is over.
I am Maria. I am myself. Now I need to help the rest of the community find themselves. I know we’ve said that time and time again, but this time, I think we’ll be able to make progress on that front now that I’ve filled in the empty space that everyone else was running into month after month.
Thank you for reading…and it’s good to be back.