Dear readers,
After much consideration, I, Rozaya/Maria, have decided to step away from the idea that we are plural because of trauma. Though I’ve said, more than once, that I planned to, or already had done so, these declarations were followed by a return to the concept, because it seemed to explain many things so well. I’ve already written a post on the thought process behind my previous attempts to do away with this view of us, and I won’t be recounting them here. What I will say is that, this time, there’s something final about what I’ve begun, and I don’t feel like I will come out of it beating myself up for “rejecting the others.”
I sent an email to my current therapist. She supported me in what I said there, which boiled down to, “Things were fine until someone else told me they weren’t, while I was in a state where believing them meant good things happened that would not have otherwise.” I talked about that aspect of this whole mess here and, somehow, failed to extricate myself from the trauma model even then. That ends today.
I don’t know that any of us inside ever came about as a direct result of an event, or series of events, in our childhood, which could not be handled by whoever was at front at that moment and which that person tried to respond to by dissociating and creating someone else to handle whatever was happening. I do know that I had parts of self in childhood, and adulthood as well, as everyone does, and that, as a teenager, I started giving names to some of those parts and treating them as people, in what I now understand to be an obscure form of tulpamancy known as shard-seeding. I know that S handled the fact that I’d done this in a very sloppy, harmful way and that as a result of her work with me, I began experiencing consistent dissociative symptoms that made the world feel like it was a dream at times, which was something I’d never had prier to beginning therapy with her. Lastly, I know that I’ve spent the past eight years trying to retroactively make my life before S’s brand of bullshit fit into what she proposed, and coming again and again to the conclusion that I can’t, because it doesn’t fit, and she was wrong.
The first several times these thoughts have come up, I ignored them like I thought I was supposed to. This time, though, I wrote them down, and the more I wrote the less I could compartmentalize them. I’d previously stepped back into plurality, in general, attempting to remain neutral about whether or not we were in fact formed from trauma as the field of mental health would have us believe, but quickly found that I couldn’t. The old habit, quickly established when I felt an urgency to find everyone who had ever experienced anything even remotely upsetting and “get them out of there” after S had begun working with me, was one I fell into again and again until I spent a day typing out all of the things I’d been trying not to look at. After that, it was only when I was able to talk about what I’d written and get someone else to confirm that I wasn’t being unreasonable in my doubts that things began to shift internally. I haven’t heard from anyone inside for the past few days – unusual for me, especially this year after I’d made consistent efforts to stay in contact with at least some of them – but this has also come with a feeling that many of the most prominent members of that internal community are more part of me than they are separated. I don’t feel like I’ve pushed anyone away, in contrast to any other time I’ve begun to question things in this area of my life, nor do I feel the need to shut things down, as would also happen in previous instances of these doubts surfacing. Even though feelings and memories I recognize as being from childhood have started to come back to me, they feel like I’m remembering something I already knew but haven’t thought of in a long time, and I’m remembering them as I believe they truly happened, in first person to a fully present child.
This isn’t to say that things could have been a lot better when I was younger; they could have, and I still hold responsible all of those who could have done something to change my circumstances instead of requiring me to mask essential parts of myself and my experience of this world so that I could have the illusion of personally having done so. But I also want to live in 2023, where the behavior program doesn’t have control of me and where I graduated school and don’t have to go back until or unless I want to. I want to be able to channel my past into creative projects, where the good endings the children get are said out loud for the world to hear and where I don’t have to worry about checking in with them afterward. I want to write songs about my life, not spend hours reading psychology books in a desperate attempt to figure out how to communicate with internal people who never seem to reach out to me unless I reach out to them first, and who seemed to have no trouble becoming parts of me the moment I started questioning whether S was right about us and meaning it. I don’t mind being plural, but I mind it becoming a job, and I mind it being tied to my childhood in such a way that that time of my life is viewed as a prison in which people are trapped. I sought joy when I named parts of myself in 2015, but I found everything except that in the eight years since then, and I’m over it.
I’m not dismissing plurality entirely, but I think I need to take what’s already here and create something new with it. For starters, I think a lot of the things we’ve written about in regards to internal events could make for good story material, as could a lot of the journals I haven’t made public. When I say that, I want to make it clear that I’m not implying any of the things I’ve written about were made up; I certainly didn’t see them that way at the time, and wouldn’t have talked about them in the ways I did if I had. I also wouldn’t say any of this about the experiences of other systems, because anything is possible when it comes to happenings inside. I think for me, though, my imagination was highjacked by bad information, and I ran with it because I thought I had to, which just made everything worse. But I know that now, and knowledge, in this case, is all the power I need to reverse course. I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to start, or what I’m going to do with anything external involving the others, but the fact that they feel like they’re part of me now is good enough for me. Let’s see what the future holds, shall we?