Recently, we’ve been able to read through the entirety of our records from the third-party agency that was mentioned in the behavior plan we’ve talked about in past posts, the one which the individual service provider came from. In the course of that reading, we discovered that everything relating to that plan began in 2008, not 2009, and ended in 2013, not 2011. We also discovered, among other things that we will be describing further along in this post, that though the behavior plan itself was stored with our special education records, both the school and this agency had input on it, and it was mostly those who worked for the agency, not the school staff, who were responsible for the behavioral interventions that we believe, at this point, to be one of the biggest causes of our being multiple. Rather than creating yet another post on how disgusting these things were and are, though, we have another idea. We are going to put into plain and simple words, devoid of the pathologizing language our nature was described in for five years of our life, what we want back from the grip of behavior modification, and how we’re going to get it.
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We want our ability to truly, fully, completely, naturally express our emotions back. More specifically, we want our ability to cry, scream, thrash, grunt, stomp our feet, growl, and do everything else that was trained out of us from 2008 to 2013 back. Those actions were the actions of our emotions, the language through which we communicated, but through behavior modification we were forced to lose touch with it and use words in its place. To reclaim it, we will first find a safe environment where our actions, and the feelings that will undoubtedly come up, will not be seen or heard by those who should not see or hear them, and then we will systematically reclaim each and every set of behaviors and experiences that were ignored and/or repressed due to the program that was, and is, responsible for so much of our anguish today.
Obviously, we can’t just flop on the floor anywhere kicking and screaming, or stomping our feet, or doing any of the other things we’re trying to reclaim, because the world in general won’t allow that, but that’s where our ability to dissociate will help us. We are multiple for a number of reasons, one of which is to keep things like this safe from people who want to destroy them. There are some good things we’ve gotten from the mental health system as a whole too, as well as from our own research, many of which at least some of us feel comfortable applying, but they aren’t our favorite things to do in this context. We’ve already begun watching for situations in our life now in which urges to engage in the behaviors we usually did right before we began to have a strong feeling have come up, and found them, but we haven’t been in a position where we could engage in those behaviors safely, in both the physical and emotional sense. In those moments, the things we’ve learned about IFS come into play, and I, Maria, do my best to stay with the insider or the part of me having those urges, and provide them with the listening presence they should have gotten at least five years ago. When we are in a safe position, though, we plan to let go, completely and utterly, and to surrender to the crying, screaming, thrashing meltdown, not tantrum, that those initial actions ultimately signaled. I believe that in doing this, the feelings that were never allowed to resolve through that unfiltered expression which was seen as nothing more than poor behavior needing treatment will ultimately be released, and that, in time, we will not need to have this experience anymore.
We will also be looking into communication options that do not involve verbalization of any kind. Anyone who has spoken to us for a period of time understands that, no matter who is at front, our words and thoughts don’t always align the first or even second time we try to get our point across, and this is because, when we have an idea in the course of a conversation, we don’t have time to play it back mentally in one of our many thinking voices, which would otherwise be our way of translating it to English. We think in concepts, not words, which is fine by us, but it means that we take longer to get things out and often use words that don’t really need to be there so that we can sound like everyone else and buy five or so seconds of time while we figure out what we actually want to say. An example of this would be a time when we said, “You’re jumping around to random topics,” when what we meant was, “We’ve lost the thread of the conversation, have no clue how what you just said connects to anything in it and need you to slow down so we can catch up.”
The two quotes are roughly connected, but not close enough to make any sense to the usual outside observer. “You’re randomly jumping from topic to topic” is a long way from “I’m lost and need to have you explain to me how all these things connect,” and therein lies the problem. If we haven’t put together a kind of script for what we want to say, or don’t have the inner resources to put something together as we go along, our verbal communication, as expected, goes out the figurative window. This is where some kind of alternative way to get our message across comes into play, which could be anything from writing, to using pictures or symbols, to using gestures, to everything else in-between. The very first thing to set off a meltdown, in our case, was trying to communicate something and not having that communication understood. The thing that has always made an oncoming meltdown worse, in our case, was having our communication treated like meaningless behaviors. Words are not the only form of conveying a message, and for us, particularly when it comes to the expression of feelings, such things do not come easily.
We could force ourselves to talk, but what good would that do in the end? We already have trouble getting our words out through our mouth as it is, and dissociating in such a way that we were able to believe this wasn’t the case is ultimately the worst thing we can keep doing. If we want our authenticity back, we need to find another way to communicate in situations where we can’t stomp our feet, growl, or do the things that come naturally to us, because verbalizing things clearly isn’t working quite the way it was intended to. In the behavior program, a big focus was put on us learning to talk about our feelings, but to this day simply saying “I’m angry” or “I’m sad” or “I’m frustrated” or “I’m happy” does nothing for any of us. As far as some of us are concerned, verbalizing feelings is not true expression, and reclaiming our extinguished behaviors, and finding other ways of communicating besides talking in situations where we aren’t safe enough to do those kinds of things, is the best thing we can do in the wake of what people in power tried to impose upon us. We need to scream, cry, thrash, stomp, etcetera when we’re upset, and we need to find other, equally nonverbal, ways of communicating when we’re not in a place where we can do those things safely… It’s as simple as that.
Our first goals, then, will be to find a soundproofed space in which we can reclaim what is ours, and a blind-friendly communication system that does not require us to talk. In doing these things, I believe that our quality of life will improve far beyond what the behavior program’s coordinators could have ever imagined.
Thank you all, sincerely, for reading.