The following article is about how I responded to a situation that was extremely difficult and ongoing. I’m not really sure how to content note what follows, but I talk in some detail about separating parts of myself from me and describe what many would call a neglectful environment. If these topics may trigger you, please be careful.
It was the summer of 2019 when I purposefully began taking myself apart piece by piece. I did this in response to an environment I’m certain would have emotionally destroyed me otherwise, an environment which has since changed but whose configuration, when I was in it, nevertheless caused damage. The process I used was already known by many names, had been discovered by many different people before me, and had been incorporated into many methods of healing, self-improvement and overall wellbeing. It was called disidentification, and its essence was the understanding that experiences were something other than oneself due to their temporary nature, and thus the best thing a person could do for themselves was to recognize said experiences as “not me and not mine.”
I understood the concept easily; as far back as 2017 I had remembered previous lifetimes in which it had been used, though not named, and had typed my best description of it into google. As it turned out, the word ‘disidentification’ already existed, and I had accurately connected it to the concept that it represented. I hated the whole thing, though, that is, until I found myself in the environment I’ve mentioned above, a perpetually unclean house that I, as a visually impaired person, had difficulty living in, and whose other occupants were exhausted to the point that anything, including my frequent protests of the messes, would lead to annoyed and sometimes yelled responses. As though that wasn’t bad enough, one of the people living with me decided that my internet use was somehow to blame for its slow speeds, even though where we were living had the effect of slowing everyone’s activity down. I was kicked off the house’s wireless network, which wouldn’t have been so bad if I had local friends I could connect with, but I didn’t, so the effect was nearly total isolation, save for those rare moments when I could get a cellular data connection to cooperate with me long enough to send a message or make a Skype call. All of this had the effect of sending me into a rage-filled depression, and as S began to focus her energy on pushing for integration, something inside of me snapped.
For the first time, I not only used the process of disidentification willingly, but embraced it eagerly. I took to Facebook, one of the only apps that consistently worked with my poor reception, and wrote, “I don’t feel the classic self energy like it’s described in internal family systems, just a calm blank detachment, until someone reacts to something and I feel it. I can see clearly that there are all kinds of insiders behind me, but I don’t see myself as them, just...me...blank.”
In a later post, I wrote, “In simple terms, I began to view my experiences as parts of me, rather than all of me. The same view has also been applied to all the rest of the things that have, in past, defined me as a person. They are part, but not all.”
The practical implication of this, of course, was that not only did I disown experience, but also skills and knowledge; though I could access them, I attributed that ability not to me, but to an inner organizer, and would go on to construct far more elaborate explanations that forced reality as I lived it to fit the narrative I was creating for myself – namely, that I didn’t exist, that countless other community members were living in my place, and that any perceptions that said otherwise were bad habits that my brain had been conditioned into by years of social programming. How I didn’t realize that I was falling right back into the state Cooperland had prompted by his false confession of having put illusions of unity around me and other community members, I have no clue, but the fact is that I fell into it, with the exact same consequences coming about as a result. If anything, now that the only real social contact I was having focused on plurality, they were even worse than they had been, with random people I had never heard of showing up to protest what I was doing to myself.
One of them even took to Facebook to write, “Why? Why do we have to be like this? Why do we have to be unformed and without structure or peace? I don’t like it when we don’t know who’s at front. I don’t like it when the I goes away. It makes us feel weird and I have every right to protest it and try to change it!”
When I moved out of the environment I was in, the person responsible for the post got her wish. I came back to myself the more I lived on my own, was able to clean up my own physical messes and could cry and otherwise get emotional without fear of being overheard. Within a month of moving into the apartment, I set the process of disidentification aside, and haven’t felt the need to pick it back up since. These days, when it crosses my mind, it’s a signal to me that I need to stop reading whatever I’ve found online, get up, and do something physically so as to not form a part of myself whose beliefs clash with everything I know about the world. Such understanding has allowed me to better grasp the ways in which my mind works, and to come to terms with the fact that plurality may never fully leave my life – not that I see that as a bad thing. I hope that it comes back, but not because I split parts of myself off. Such a birth would not be fair, either to them or to me. My hope is that I, with full awareness of what I’m doing, can first reconnect with those aspects of me who grew into their own beings, and then, if I am drawn to do so, co-create other origional headmates who will embody more than a single trait and do more than a single protection-oriented task.
This, though, is a while off yet. I promised stories, and stories is what I want to provide first. This, though, I felt was too important to put off.
Thank you for reading.