Back Dated Journal Post #3
Saturday, October 1, 2011
I have been reading Getting Through The Day and last night I got to the part about Therapeutic Dissociation. Skipping things that were too strange for me to want to try at that exact moment I landed on ‘Your Inner Landscape: On Becoming an Explorer’. An exercise where I can just sit back, close my eyes, and explore the landscape of my subconscious didn’t seen too daunting. I at least understood the concept. So that’s what I started doing, allowing the landscape to just appear before me in stead of actually trying to focus on some predetermined place. In other words, seeing whatever it was my mind wanted to see instead of what I was telling it to see.
When I was successful at this, I moved on to the next exercise given, ‘Discovering Your Inner Garden’. It took me a little bit of searching through my inner landscape, but I did finally find it. A nice little gated hedge maze that opened up into various sized plots of land where different things were growing. It was in an interesting little mushroom patch (I guess that’s what you would call it) with a murky pool in the center where I encountered another of my alters just sort of lounging around and skipping stones in the pool. I’m not sure if it’s normal to encounter other alters in this sort of exercise but it was one I had only met a few times and hadn’t seen in a while so I was more interested in interaction then stopping the exercise and trying to figure out what was going on.
I will go ahead and say that the alter’s name is Alice, and that she is one of the few alters I am aware of who is not another human being like the rest of us. She is a jabberwock, the creature from the poem by Lewis Carroll.
I went ahead and started a conversation with Alice. What are you doing here? Where have you been? That sort of stuff… This was relatively new territory for me so I guess I wanted to be sure it was really her and I wasn’t just imagining the whole thing. Although I had read a comment online from another person with DID just that day, where he said he was trying to map his system so he “went inside” to their “house” to see who was living there. That fresh in my mind I was confident enough to go on, assuming this was in fact Alice and not something I was dreaming up.
Then Alice surprised me. She asked me why she hadn’t seen me there (in the garden) before? I explained to her that I was only just learning to do this stuff and she turned around and told me, no, I’ve done this lots of times before, although she had never actually seen me come into the garden itself. At first I couldn’t really recall doing this inner landscape stuff before, but then I remembered she was right. Not only that, but I was able to remember a vague timeframe. It was during the time in which I had believed myself to be a dragon.
I remember so little of what actually happened during that time that I had completely overlooked it. I don’t even remember how long it went on exactly, my belief that I was a dragon… Just a vague recollection that it was about a year and a half to two years. Two years of what I fear my have been a lot of mental and emotional abuse from my so-called girlfriend heaped on top of whatever else I can’t remember. Somewhere around two years where I did find myself going to my Inner Landscape quite a bit. That was why the exercise didn’t seem to odd to me.
Alice came with me as we explored the garden further but after a while all of these sensations I hadn’t experienced in so long were becoming more frightening then I had expected. We even found a part of the garden that frightened her, for some reason she would not explain to me… So we called it quits for the night.
The next part of the exercise is ‘Weeding the Garden’, but I don’t think I’ll move on to that quite yet. After what happened I want to email this to C and see what she says when we meet this Thursday.
I have been reading Getting Through The Day and last night I got to the part about Therapeutic Dissociation. Skipping things that were too strange for me to want to try at that exact moment I landed on ‘Your Inner Landscape: On Becoming an Explorer’. An exercise where I can just sit back, close my eyes, and explore the landscape of my subconscious didn’t seen too daunting. I at least understood the concept. So that’s what I started doing, allowing the landscape to just appear before me in stead of actually trying to focus on some predetermined place. In other words, seeing whatever it was my mind wanted to see instead of what I was telling it to see.
When I was successful at this, I moved on to the next exercise given, ‘Discovering Your Inner Garden’. It took me a little bit of searching through my inner landscape, but I did finally find it. A nice little gated hedge maze that opened up into various sized plots of land where different things were growing. It was in an interesting little mushroom patch (I guess that’s what you would call it) with a murky pool in the center where I encountered another of my alters just sort of lounging around and skipping stones in the pool. I’m not sure if it’s normal to encounter other alters in this sort of exercise but it was one I had only met a few times and hadn’t seen in a while so I was more interested in interaction then stopping the exercise and trying to figure out what was going on.
I will go ahead and say that the alter’s name is Alice, and that she is one of the few alters I am aware of who is not another human being like the rest of us. She is a jabberwock, the creature from the poem by Lewis Carroll.
I went ahead and started a conversation with Alice. What are you doing here? Where have you been? That sort of stuff… This was relatively new territory for me so I guess I wanted to be sure it was really her and I wasn’t just imagining the whole thing. Although I had read a comment online from another person with DID just that day, where he said he was trying to map his system so he “went inside” to their “house” to see who was living there. That fresh in my mind I was confident enough to go on, assuming this was in fact Alice and not something I was dreaming up.
Then Alice surprised me. She asked me why she hadn’t seen me there (in the garden) before? I explained to her that I was only just learning to do this stuff and she turned around and told me, no, I’ve done this lots of times before, although she had never actually seen me come into the garden itself. At first I couldn’t really recall doing this inner landscape stuff before, but then I remembered she was right. Not only that, but I was able to remember a vague timeframe. It was during the time in which I had believed myself to be a dragon.
I remember so little of what actually happened during that time that I had completely overlooked it. I don’t even remember how long it went on exactly, my belief that I was a dragon… Just a vague recollection that it was about a year and a half to two years. Two years of what I fear my have been a lot of mental and emotional abuse from my so-called girlfriend heaped on top of whatever else I can’t remember. Somewhere around two years where I did find myself going to my Inner Landscape quite a bit. That was why the exercise didn’t seem to odd to me.
Alice came with me as we explored the garden further but after a while all of these sensations I hadn’t experienced in so long were becoming more frightening then I had expected. We even found a part of the garden that frightened her, for some reason she would not explain to me… So we called it quits for the night.
The next part of the exercise is ‘Weeding the Garden’, but I don’t think I’ll move on to that quite yet. After what happened I want to email this to C and see what she says when we meet this Thursday.