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Regulating a Bully Alter

Having alters, can be more challenging than the worst spouse or room mate.  They have their own opinions, and once awareness is attained, they also know they have very little accountability for their actions.  For me, the worst part is not being able to leave the room when I need to.  You can never quiet them, or leave etc situation when fighting.  You are imprisoned in solitary confinement with a group of people.  Yes, it is just like that.

In particular, I have an alter, Larry, who is an arrogant, egotistical bully.  Yes, he is smart, and has kept the body in food and shelter during times when we did not know what we were going to do.  He is a great guy to have in a time of crisis; not during peacetime.  Our body is currently NOT in a complete crisis every fifteen minutes.  We are at a point where we are secure and safe.  Larry had a significant role in getting us here, however he is now bored and feels un-needed.  This is the core issue here.  He is the exact opposite of me: Arrogant, obnoxious, immoral, and downright mean.  He cares only for his objective, and does not care about the means to his end.  He is a true conqueror in every respect.  He is also a verified genius.  Being able to manipulate most anyone, he is used to getting his way almost always.  Being a teenager makes him an even bigger mess.  When Larry fails to get his way, he throws tantrums, and is the bringer of pain and chaos.  He is a master bully, mostly to me.  This is our problem.

When a bully will not leave you alone, you can fight him, or ignore them.  We cannot do either of those things.  He is incessantly degrading, insulting and doing whatever he can to get me, to bow to his will.  We have become much stronger in the system, and nowI manage the system.  Yes, Kevin is finally in charge of Kevin’s body, mostly.  However, as Larry was the primary show runner for many years, he wishes to retain his title.  The damage path he has left behind him over the years would make any narcissist proud.  He has destroyed lives in the name of his sense of duty and justice, or as he puts it, “Squaring up the books”.  I am not that kind of person, nor do we have to be.

So, now the stage is set, the lines are drawn and the fight is on!  I am not a fighter, I am a hippie.  I am the scared and timid boy that was never allowed to retaliate, or even have an opinion of his own.  If I was ever to show any semblance of self awareness or free will, that was quickly quashed with agony, shame and fear.  We were never the kind of kid that wanted to hurt anything.  We did not even want to shoot birds, or anything.  We did not hunt, or even like to fish.  Why would we want to hurt people?  We learned to run and hide, as we did many times.  Larry, is just like our father, a complete bastard that cares not for anyone outside of himself.

Gaining awareness of our parts, was such a difficult task, it only took about forty years.  We have been learning how to communicate with each other, as well as how to get along as a group, a system.  We are now more effective as human beings, as we are generally all moving together like a flock of birds, rather than a scared bunch of cats.  This is the real key to living multiple.  The ability to manage the systemic a way that we can all get what we need, while keeping the body moving in one direction, mostly.  When the body has thirteen different drivers, it can never rest, and to the outside world we appear a complete mess.  Yes, that is how it feels.  Like a city bus that changes routes at will.

Larry and I, have had many good times.  He has been my savior and my nemesis.   We have been able to accomplish quite a bit in our lifetime, mostly due to his intelligence and drive.  However we are in no danger anymore of becoming homeless or hungry.  We have been both before, and this is one of our biggest fears.  If you have ben either you understand.  Today we are running our system, and we are working to shape the system to project what we see ourselves to be.  We are a collective singularity, shattered to an irreparable state, but now able to place the pieces in an order that more closely resembles our original self.  Larry is not keen on losing his power and control.  He is about himself, I am about us all.

Our significant other, or “SO”, is someone who is as unconventional as she i beautiful.  This is the first relationship the have has where we are aware, and somewhat functional.  We have to accept our limitations, both inside and outside the system.  Acceptance of our reality helps us to live better in yours.  Our SO, we will call Toom here; Is of Southeast Asian descent, and very traditional.  She has accepted our multiplicity with reluctance, as most should.  She is NOT the SO, that Larry had chosen, married and carried around the world on his roller coaster ride of a life.  Constantly moving, and burning to the ground everything behind us.  This is his way of surviving.  Take what you can while you can, and as soon as things start to fall apart, burn it to the ground and start over again somewhere else.  This was effective for about thirty years, and now were just so damn tired.

Now that we have come to a turning point, a huge milestone inner existence, he has become the bully to me.  Constantly trying to manipulate me into crisis, so that he can retake the body.  So he can satisfy his need for control and power.  He has no real need for true affection, as he does not trust anyone or anything.  He gets all the juice he needs form the games he plays with people.  Most do not even realize what he is doing, till things are too far to back out.  He laughs a them, calls them idiots and roasts marshmallows in the fire.  He is a true destroyer.  His dream job was one where he could just travel and fire people.  He would enjoy the act itself.  Thats Larry.

So how do we take someone as powerful and clever as Larry, and get him to where he at least, cannot hurt people as much?  We really had no clue.  We have been struggling with this for months now.  The unescapable insults to not only me, but anyone I care for, the volume knob you cannot find to turn him down; this will drive you to thoughts of suicide and helplessness.  How could we even bare to have these thoughts about someone who has saved our system so many times?  He has been our master of ceremonies for so long, presiding over the freak show that was our life.  He took us to so many happy places, but then drove us away from them.  This was the movie we were in, on repeat forever it seemed.  In Alcoholics Anonymous, they say doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result is the definition of Insanity.  I will tell you now, we were there. There had to be a way to control the madness.

So what ddi w come to realize?  Our SO, made the comment to us one day that we had to play our part in the relationship with her.  “Be the man”.  Wow, coming from a Thai lady, this was confusing. Thai women are very large and in charge we thought.  Yes, to a certain degree.  Strength is not only in the hands wielding it, to have physical strength, one must have the belief there is something stronger supporting their humanity.  We must be the straight in the bow, even if her hands are the ones pulling the string.  This hit home to me in many ways.  I have never seen myself as strong, or even deserving of anyone that was exceptional.  Thus, i surrounded myself with second hand disappointments.  Larry was able to keep control, as there was no strength from me, not in my hands, but in believing we were good enough, and strong enough to deserve a life of our own.  This was the key.

many philosophers believe that, we are as we see ourselves to be.  This is a little bit confusing for us, as we are all pieces of a singular being.  As we each have our own sense of identity, bringing that together as a whole, is a bit complicated.  We had to come together as individuals and decide how we wanted to be.  As I am the host, the choice, in order to be authentic, has to come from me.  Learning who we believe we are, and then communicating that to the rest of they system.  This has been successful, mostly.  Larry refuses to let go of his role, and is throwing that tantrum he does.  Now, I realize he is simply filling his role, fighting.  He fought for me when I could not.  This does not give him license to drive forever.  The system has now decided and agreed that I am the host, and thus we are moving forward as a group in the direction I have set forth.  Larry was given the choice to sign on, or not.

In true Larry fashion, he has given me ultimatums, threats, and insults at every turn.  Calling me everything from weak to a coward.  This i realize is simply because I am stronger now, the system is following me.  We are becoming as I see us to be.  I am not discarding any part of the system, not even Larry, however he is losing his power, because much like real life, the system is following strength.  I am gaining control, because I believe that I am good enough to have it.  I am awakening to the fact that maybe all these years, I WAS the strong one.  Maybe I was just beaten down from years of systemic abuse, guilting and shaming.  maybe Kevin is a good guy, the guy he sees and always thought himself to be.  Maybe we are deserving of more than we have ever had.  Yes, all true.  There is no such thing as any utopia.  Our system will never be perfect, as in without conflict.  However we are learning that we can be around the rest of the world, hold our heads up, and feel good about who we are.  That is not arrogance, that is self realization.

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Duty or Happiness?

We are a great fan of existentialism and the freedoms that accompany living authentic. However this is a double edged sword, as responsibility for our choices is never without pain. Pain as it seems is the knife that forms the clay of humanity. We are very much defined through our own suffering, which in many cases is self imposed.

In our latest crisis of self, we are trying hard to achieve something that quite honestly has eluded us for some time, happiness. We are in a relationship, that has been through the wringer more than once. We for many reasons feel a great deal of loyalty and obligation to someone just because they have ridden out the storm of our illness. This isa fact that cannot be denied. We were in the fight of our lives, with ourselves; all thirteen of us.

For nearly a decade, our partner was present, even if only physically for much of it. We are not denying the tumultuous reality that was living with all of us, unknowingly even to me. We were a system, without organization and communication. We lived everyday in a constant battle from within, reaching outside and beyond. Feeling as if every conscious moment we were living in a horror movie, where we were the star player, but the writers were unknown to us. The deep seeded beliefs we had of our own sense of identity, and character we re constantly challenged and shattered. We became loathsome, because we know not who we were; free falling through existence slowing down only when we bounced off another lost soul on the way down.

Now we are three years, into the right therapy. We are about four years post awareness. We started to communicate with each other and the lights all started to come on. Even before we knew what we were, we began to understand. We KNEW we were more than just a group of little voices in our head that always was there. We were “US”. This was pivotal. Even then, we did not wan to accept the truth; Not about what we were, but how we became this way. This was the hardest part about our diagnosis, the gut wrenching truth about our childhood.

Another year passed, as we fumbled with unqualified professionals, unsurmountable self doubt, and denial. The struggle within becoming more unmanageable. The facad that is DID, the curtain of conscious darkness was falling and what lie in wait was nothing anyone can prepare for. The truth about us. Our partner, was packing the car, taking the kids, and running like hell from the nightmare she was in. We broke. I more than anything fear abandonment. This is a cold hard fact. We saw in front us, a rerun of a movie we had seen many times. The fruits of our labors, crumbling before our eyes. We did not understand why, we just knew how it all ends. Alone.

We had another one of our weekly, generic therapy appointments. In this visit, Larry, broke out and cornered her. Accused her of knowing about us and being too afraid to confront the truth. Looking back we feel so bad from her. She had no idea what had just happened to her. Larry scared her to death, not with his words, but from the total change that had occurred in front of her eyes. She immediately referred us to an unconventional, hard core, trauma professional. This was our saving grace, Becky. Becky would become our best friend, ally, and confidant. She knew, and understood what we were and how we got there. It took almost two years for her to convince us that we were “us”, and not just malingering.

As our hours accumulated, now three a week, with Becky, many things happened. We came to realize that our morals really had not changed. That we were not Multiple, we were shattered. We were something beautiful, created out of something ugly. We were the proof of humanity from the actions of an abomination. We were truly special, and completely as we were supposed to be. We were survivors, and that too is pretty awesome.

Our partner, who as we mentioned was a damaged soul herself, clung tightly. We felt from a sense of obligation, or maybe a need for physical stability, we were not sure. We never expected anyone to truly love us. We had known forever that all of our relationships would end with bridges burning behind us, in both directions. We were the torch and everyone was happy to pour the gasoline, just to never see us again. Tammy, our partner, and the system had been strained for years, living separate lives in the same house. occasionally crossing paths to make sure the other was still alive and somewhat in tune with reality. She was not the culprit in this, we were. During the time we were trying to sort ourselves out, we isolated hard core. We entered self imposed confinement in our home, rarely coming out. This was safety for us while we were sorting out the details. There are a lot of details too!

Who we finally felt like entering the world again, we ran as far as we could run. We went exactly to the other side of the world, to Southeast Asia. We went without expectations, or even reservations. We were searching for something we had never known, ourself. We were trying to see who we were , to see ourself that way. Trying to live openly about all of us, without shame or fear of judgement. After all, we were perfectly created to survive, nothing to be ashamed of. We found more than we wanted to find. We found not only ourself, we found another who without any warning, with whom we had a connection with. This could be about more than just chance, love, or anything like that. We believe that this was due to the work we had done in organizing our system. We had learned to communicate, learning each other, our desires and needs. We were learning how to respect the host of the body, that is me. Learning to respect myself and demand respect from the alters. I am the host, and need to act like it. I need to live my life for me, not hiding behind the alters as if a scared child.

Lets fast forward a bit now to today. We have entered into a long term relationship with another woman, with whom our connection is still ever present and growing stronger. Our fights are colorful and intense, but the makeup is just as intense, and we always make up. The values we have are in line with each other, and we are a good fit. Our partner from before is still in our life, in the same house. We all live together, Tammy, Jun, and my daughter Aaliyah from Tammy. Since we have all been together we have had good times and bad. I live as Kevin almost full time. I now manage the system for the most part. This causes issues fro Tammy and Larry, who have been in this relationship since they met. That is right, Tammy and Larry, not Tammy and Kevin. Hence the drama.

We are now almost six months into all of us cohabitation. I am and have been solely with Jun, not sharing a bed with Tammy. Tammy has still clung on to Larry. This causes confusion for me, as I wanted her to stay for the sake of our daughter, and be in her life. I ask for and expect nothing romantically from her. However we had enow come to see that Tammy resents the relationship we have with Jun. She wants that for herself, even though there was never anything that resembled that in the years before.She feels cheated, because the water under the bridge is a roaring flood. The resentments are there on both sides. However I have still wanted to make everyone happy, and take care of her. This has caused issues all around that we have wanted to ignore, but cannot anymore. Much like that throbbing boil on your ass, this has come to a head. For the first time we are having to make a choice about what makes us happy, and what we feel like we are duty bound to do. We are in a crisis of epic proportion.

Do we let go of tammy, the one who stuck with us, for whatever reason, through all the bad times. Do we let her go, knowing the emotional shit storm we are going to bring to bear on her world. Where is the humanity in that? When if ever do we get to do for us? When does Kevin get to choose happiness for himself? Does he? In all of this, we have two amazing ladies, both of which love us, differently, and some have more baggage than the other. We need to know what to chose, happiness or duty. There is always a chance that our happiness can fail, and Tammy would always be there. Is that fails to anyone though? IS an existence in which you are left wanting really a choice, for anyone? Both Kevin and Tammy may have something, but is something even acceptable once you have felt true happiness?

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Fear of Expressing Needs

Perhaps the most difficult thing for us, and we believe many others like us; is the ability to express our desires.  A most basic human need and function.  Without expressing our desires, we rarely are able to satisfy our existentiality.  One of the fundamentals of being human, is our individuality.  Our desires are not just whims, to be catered to only when others perceive it nesacarry, they are very critical needs that every person has. For us, expressing these desires is utterly terrifying.  This is a precursor to many psychosocial and societal issues.

Why is the seemingly easy and instinctive action, of expressing what we need so frightening?  We were taught that our needs, no matter what they were, came secondary to everyone else. Our wants, needs, were so secondary, that to express them was considered selfish and even rude.  This behavior, like many others in trauma survivors, is programmed in from the earliest of ages.  Abusers begin this programming even before personality is completely formed, in order to imprint this belief in the victim.  Forever changing the belief system of a child.  This is the very foundation of many of our problems today in Western society.  

For us, being taught our needs were “bad”, went hand in hand with being taught that we were to bear responsibility of our family’s problems.  This meant, no matter what issues were between our parents, their jobs, each other, even the neighbors, and other family members was all the fault of our desires and behaviors arising from them.  This may sound unreasonable; blaming a five-year-old child for the complex issues of adult relationships.  The fact is, when you take all of your personal baggage, and unload it on your child, the child will carry it.  The child, has an inherent need to be accepted, wanted and loved by their caregivers. The child has no way to gauge the austerity in which they dwell.  For the child, there is only the desire to please.  When the caregivers discard the basic needs for positive physical and emotional sustenance, the child does not realize this.  They only feel a longing for something they do not know.  An emptiness develops, and quickly turns into something darker and much more detrimental than death: hopelessness.  

As we began to grow, through the broken timeline we occupy, our feelings of hopelessness turned to self-loathing.  How are we supposed to feel otherwise?  For the abused child, we lose hope for the happiness we see in many of our peers.  We learn to be grateful for less pain and fear.  For the abused child, pain and suffering become the normal, and self-hate becomes the standard.  We see others living lives we do not understand.  We are taught that our life is picture perfect and not to desire anything else.  Our wants, on all levels, become sources of more pain and suffering.  We are only to desire what is good for our caregivers. We are taught to ignore, and even loathe our own desires, for they are selfish.  

In our adolescent and adult years, our role remained the same. However, we now had truly become the scapegoat.  You cannot beat a dog for years and expect it to stay housebroken.  The dog will find a way to become what you have made it to be. The same applies to children; treat them like bad kids, they will resemble one.  Are there really bad kids?  

Progressing through the years where we are supposed to learn intimacy in relationships, our only reference was that of the caregivers we had. Still believing, because we were the problem, that the model we had been raised in was an ideal one.  Every relationship we had was inappropriate on many levels.  From the school teachers, peers, neighbors, and even law enforcement, we were the problem. We had successfully transmuted every ounce of negativity presented to us.  We again were victimized, this time by society.  The light at the end of the tunnel for which we always desired just a glimpse, was never to be found.  We were taken further away in to the darkness.  We had to transform our own self-image.  The part of that believed we were “good” and decent.   We had to accept the role we were meant to play.  We had to quit desiring more.  We were “bad”.

As an adult, we have needs and desires that transcend consciousness. These again are the same desires and needs we had as that small child, longing for love, acceptance and safety. These as it seems, would always be present, even if tucked away in our private place.  This is the foundation for all that is bad in our world.  We have experienced the wants and needs for many things:  Food, shelter, love, and too many others too.  This is a normal part of existence and survival, to WANT.  Why then is the simple and basic action of communicating these needs so frightening to us?  Our needs were never second to those of our caregivers; our needs were sins.  Our needs were only as they deemed them to be. The punishments for expressing our wants were severe and enduring.  Our desires were used against us as weapons.  Things we cherished and loved were destroyed, before our very eyes, and we were made to believe this was our own design.  Our wants were the reason for the agony not only in our lives but in the lives of others. Guilt is used to compound the effect of misery, reinforcing the lesson being taught.  To complete the lesson full circle, shame and humiliation are utilized to insure maximum suffering.  We were taught that there is no learning without suffering.  Fear and suffering are not only acceptable, but desired.  

Today, we find ourselves again, in a myriad of circumstances, all with very unique, and the same time, common threads.  Our interpersonal relationships are still based initially on the desire to love and be accepted.  We love, to be accepted and safe. We feel that our only purpose on life is to serve others.  If we serve selflessly, we will then be accepted and “loved”.  Thus, our relationships are never successful.  For any human to feel satisfied, his or her needs to be expressed. We cannot always meet our desires, and yes, desires and needs many times are the same.  The need to safely express our desires far outweighs the need to always have them fulfilled.  We gain have to learn that our lives are not those of our parents.  Our parents fulfilled all of their needs by using an emotional waste-bin.  For the adult child, we merely deposit our mental garbage back into ourselves.  The failure to express our needs turns again into self-loathing, and resentment.  We fail to understand, as we always have, how others are able to get what they need and desire without the punishment, guilt and humiliation that we have always associated with it. 

As this process continues well into middle age, many turn to substances, both prescription and otherwise, to fill the void, even if temporarily.  We are not living in a conscious self-pity; we are merely trying to tread water in an emotional typhoon.  We are seeking an understanding we ourselves do not believe in.  Many of us seek understanding in faith, friends, or even pain.  Most of us only find more disappointment in the first two.  We jump in fast into relationships, with all we can muster in the hopes of finding safety. We latch on to second hand disappointments, believing we are unworthy of first hand successes.  We endure, as misery is better than being alone.  Misery is accepted as an improvement over fear, nevertheless our fears still permeate.

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Get your popcorn and favorite substance, and hang on…….. D.I.D. Romance….

Six Daughters, Two Wives, fourteen personalities, in one body, and only one house.  Yes, you read correctly.  This post is going to address our very complicated, and very real situation we are currently living.  This is the reality of romance and marriage in DID.  This is the living hell/heaven/whatever, that we created, and many times wonder why, how and wait minute, again!

So, if you have been reading previously, you are aware that we are a system occupying one very unique space.  We have been coming to grips with the fact that we are MULTIPLE.  This is not easy, even when you live with it.  We still battle this after decades of evidence to the contrary.  Imagine you are a raging queen, wear drag, and think that you do not.  Yes, it is that obscure.

So, we have a wife, Tammy, we are legally married too for over ten years.  She is a Texan, through and through.  Tammy and us share a child together, Aaliyah.  We all love Aaliyah a great deal, and protect her ardently.  We also have a Thai wife, Jun.  This is a recent development to the system.  By the way, Jun and Tammy have different husbands, yet share a single body.  Herein lies the fundamental problem with romance in DID relationships.  These relationships do not account for the almost certain, unpredictability of the human jealousy gene.  Even thong Kevin and Larry, can differentiate their feelings between Jun and Tammy, respectively, Jun and Tammy have a harder time with this.

Going back in time a bit, we had very different reasons for being in a relationship with both of them.  Both Kevin and Larry are completely different people, in almost every respect.  However, these facts were not completely apparent to any of the ladies involved, much less us.  In case you are new or late to our program, people who are multiple, are the last to know.   Such is usually the case with news the human psyche would rather not assimilate, rather file away.    Now, we are in two very serious relationships, with two very different women, from two different cultures, countries, and even languages.  No, this isn’t complicated;  Let us just add children, and family into it, since we are so good!  LOL!  yes, we are that obtuse sometimes.

Let me start off by saying this:  we do not recommend this to anyone, do not try this at home, there are no professionals at this and should never be attempted by anyone wishing to hang onto what sanity they have left!!!!  There are some definite rewards, but thats for later, getting here is a journey worth examination.  As with  most things, there is a beginning and…..

They say that assumption is the mother of all fuckups.  If this be true, then resentment is the evil lovechild that stems from it.  A more powerful force is unknown to us.  Resentment is the product of surrendering your freedom.  Your inherent power, that can only be given away by yourself.  Most resentment, at least in our story, arises from placing unrealistic expectations on something we cannot control, like everyone, and getting unhappy about the results.  We CHOOSE, to place these things on people.  Then we do not want to accept the responsibility for our feelings and choices later on, playing the blame game.  That is bullshit.  We can only have limited expectations of our own behaviors,  expecting things from others is not only unrealistic, but un-authentic.  Expectations from others are ways of trying to control using guilt or a sense of obligation.  When that which we expect from others, is to subsidize our own bankrupt humanity, we are not human beings, we become emotional predators.

As trauma survivors, we have no idea what healthy looks like.  We have a fucked up sense of not only healthy, but right, wrong, and immoral. These are values, which like the balance of our learned life skills, taught by the world surrounding us as children.  We all understand that life is nothing more than random chaos even without the addition of trauma.  Trauma only compounds the chaos exponentially.  Never allowing the fragile young mind to absorb the positive things that come from living.

 

Back to the present.  We are navigating our way through many things currently; Developing our identity not only as a group, but learning who we are as individuals,  cultivating a sense of self worth, understanding what our place in the world is, and how we should react to it.  These re all things that have lead us where we are now.  The actions that are required to achieve self awareness and confidence, are not only foreign to the trauma survivor, they are horrifying.  Self realization, healthy boundaries, and healthy emotional regulation are all double edged instruments.  Desire to success in this journey can be overwhelmed, slopped and even destroyed  from the overbearing fear of happiness, self confidence and joy.  There is hope if we can press further into the abyss, battling our fears and self loathing, which is our comfort zone, to find ourselves and the relative peace that comes along.

 

We have now found that we are actually, both as a collective and as individuals, pretty good people.  We ARE good.  Realization of self worth is the goal, and we can see light piercing the darkness here.  Signaling to us a path of self redemption, saving us from the eternal abandonment we have felt for so long.  The feelings of insignificance still here, however more manageable. We are able to see contributions to a better life not just for others, but for us.  We have always been taught to want for self was rude and therefore bad.  To want for self, is not only NOT bad, it is the only thing that can save humanity from itself, and us from ourselves.

How does this fit back into two wives?  Simple, as the host of our system the body is technically MINE.  However, I have chosen for years to surrender this role to another, Larry.  He with help from the rest of the system, have managed our body for decades, as I was afraid to fail, as I was a shit person and did not deserve to live.  This was not something we made up, we were taught.  As we began to understand more about us, the  gift of multiplicity that we spawned, we could grow without fear.   We are not crazy, weird or bad.  We are quite simply the sum of an equation we never wrote, or agreed to be part of.  We are what we had to be.  This has allowed me the confidence to learn we are strong, I am strong!  I had to be to survive.  The sum of my parts is an amazing man, with much to give.  We are amazing.  You may think this arrogant!  NO, we have as a society made others feel self confidence is arrogant and rude, only because we are jealous of others that have it.  Our parents never wanted a child prodigy. They were jealous of us from an early age.  We were to be the cure for their self loathing.  Our needs were never aligned with theirs .  We became exactly what we were made to be.

Today, we can start to see we are lovable, desirable, attractive and very, very, clever.  Quite the catch, and that is just me!  The other thirteen of us are also quite unique and special.  Imagine the cornucopia of knowledge and skills when we all connect and come together as one.  Very formidable.

When we first travelled to China Mai, we were anything but prepared.  We had been searching for years, a way to escape the United Sates again. We still to this day cannot explain why America has housed nothing but heartache and misery for us.  We have never felt safe in America.

We were running again, away from anything that was even remotely familiar to us, knowing exactly nothing.  When we arrived here we found tranquility in the utter immersion of progressive ideas.  You can feel consciousness all around you.  The belief that all things deserve to live and be in harmony with each other.  This is something we instantly fell in ease with.  Yes, feel IN ease with.  We felt at home, first time.  We decided to live not open, but not to hide our alters.  We could be as we needed to be.

We need to say a big THANK YOU to a dear friend, although be it a bitchy one, too CiCi.  Without her we may have made a huge mistake, butt hanks to her and Larry fighting, which is what he does best, we walked to the Blue Grass Bar and Grill down the block and met Jun.  This was at first the most awkward and random thing that had ever happened to us.  When we have nothing to fear, perceived or otherwise, we found out most of our fears were self perpetuated.  Our fears today have been perpetuated by, that is correct, OURSELVES!  This is not to say that there is not sound basis for these fears, however to carry them, well after the threat has passed is where the disorder lies.  We become hardwired to survive, to endure the worst in things.  We enter training from teh first time we feel the fear of never knowing when it will stop, and made to believe it never will.

Back to the present, where we are safe, free, and accountable for our actions.  We meet Jun, we feel safe, and liked.  We know what your thinking now, and you should be!  So, let us qualify that statement.  We have come to realize and understand, to feel safe and liked, you must first know what a healthy definition of these things re, and also to instill them in your own existence independent of any others.  Failure in this action, leads us into that dark place, the black hole that is the emotional vacuum.  We all know them, they pull you in, and project all of their insecurities, and self loathing onto, and thus, into you.  The only protection we have are isolation, and self love.  They are not exclusive at times.

We did not feel loved because Jun, loved us.  We  did not think she loved us, lol.  Thats another story!  Those who know us have an inside line here and will laugh at this!  I digress.  We simply did not question why she would have interest in us!  Follow this line.  Instead of the confidence killing questions of “why”, someone would be interested, we accepted this on face value.  This allows for positive thoughts, and emotions to peek through the darkness.  Something we had never experienced before.  Tis is where our power comes through, and from.  From within ourselves.  The power of self love, and accepting it on face is intoxicating.  For those who have never done before, the feeling is euphoric, like that first roll.

When you have a healthy relationship from the start, without expectations, anything is possible.  You find trust and belief are easy convey with others, when  not already in fear of what has not happened. “Fear is the mind killer”; this quote was delivered masterfully in a film that was originally to be made in place of Star Wars.  Dune, an excellent insight in to the human experience.  Fear feeds on existential soul like bees to nectar.  Feeding until all is consumed with fear, hate and resentment.  Resentment being the tool that fear uses to drive self loathing.  Honesty with yourself in the understanding your fears, and why you have them has helped us more than almost anything.  When you know what your fears are, and why you have them, solutions will begin to appear to your system.  Imagine all your light bulbs coming on at once.  The light is blinding.

 

So here we are almost a year later, Jun, Tammy, Aaliyah and us are all living under a single roof, in a single dwelling, and with more people than bodies in the house.  Let us now throw in a small complication, Tammy and Larry have an independent relationship, and have for years. Yes, Tammy has been romantically involved with LARRY, for some time.  This has added dramatically to the already stagnate abandonment we felt in our “marriage”.  When we first all became aware of each other, I wanted to feel a closeness with someone, and was after all, married to Tammy.  This fact, even though never felt like us, was a legal fact.  This was not an unfamiliar place for us to be, so we flow with it.  Larry  had married Tammy, for me, so I could rescue Tammy’s daughters from life.  If you need to take notes feel free, we do.  555!

We would beg Tammy, to case relations with Larry, and Pat, and even Jeff.  She even made the comment one time, she was getting more strange than anyone she knew.  This was true, from everyone but me.  This was all the same body now, just different alters.  Tammy’s seemingly relevant defense was simply, we were all one body.  You would think this was not only relevant, but pretty valid, right!?  Maybe to most people, not to us!  Especially me!  We became even more resentful and disconnected from our “marriage”, falling further into isolation and a deep seeded rage, we never know we had till years later.   Then, we focus on therapy, self love, and existentialism.

Looking from a singular point of view, we can objectively understand, why her feelings would run this way.  However, we are not singular, or objective.  Honesty is double edged remember!  We are this collective of opinions, emotions, and beliefs.  We all also have our own fears.  When you compound the massive emotions fo the Host, also the heart, with the fears of the system you get more interest than a Macys’ store credit card.  The snowball effect is an emotional epidemic of irrational responses.  Hence the erratic behavior that many observe when a DID system gets out of sync.  This happens more often than singles like to believe.  We learn to hide, isolate, or otherwise accept the comments about eccentricity, crazy or other disdainful labels.  We learn to own them , assimilate them, and use them to power the system another day, hour or minute.  We do not have to accept the judgements of others.  Actually there is nothing that indicates we have to acceptor the choices fo anyone other than ourselves.  The only judgement that matters, is our own.  We are the final authority in our lives. This concept is something that most are pushed away from early in life, so others with weaker ideas can control them.  We perpetuate slavery by encouraging our children to blindly accept beliefs and moral codes, and teaching them to follow, rather than to be free.

Now, on a daily basis, I am reminded that I, created this dynamic we live in currently.  The girls make a choice to stay in our family here, but the design is my own.  Be design, we mean thing solid, more a living thing that changes to grow and best take care of the members in it.  We are a collective, living in a collective.  We are full of individuals, damaged and worn, as well as seedlings and youngsters reaching for their place in the sun.  We all have one.  We are all here in this rock, under the sun, as we choose to be.

When we had a dear friend, whom we will just call C, at this time, tell us one night, we are a really good and cool guy!  Not just one of us, but all of us!  At the time of this conversation, our mind was open and connected.  We were communicating in ways we never dreamed of before, sharing wisdom, knowledge and experiences without speech.  We could just “know”.  We realized at that moment in time, he was telling the truth.  Since we had no fears in the front end, we were able to believe what he said without question.  When we come to believe a thing, accepting into your own perceptions becomes easy, allowing your psyche to project your own version of that perceived belief to be.  We became as we allow ourselves to believe.   We accept this to be the origination of the “self fulfilling prophecy” theory.  However, our issue with this?  This theory fails to address the root cause, fear.  Fears, resentments, and surrender of our existential freedom, making us believe we are all bad, sinners and deserve whatever the world lays upon us.  Is it a wonder that every generation of our children becomes more hollow and vacant than the ones before?  We are passing on these self perpetuated, belief systems, These artificial forms of control, that do nothing more than teach us self hatred and prejudice from birth!  We indoctrinate our children, and teach them they are evil from conception!!!

When we came to realize that we were not EVIl from birth.  That the things we had done to survive, were no more evil than the things that anyone else does too survive.  This can be from working a job to robbing a bank.  How can we judge wha that person does, if we do not live in their perceptions.  If you are not causing misery, and hurting another human, then why should you be wrong?  Is there a right and wooing?  Is there a Happy and Sad?  Where did these labels even come from?  Hmmmm….

When you take away the hard wired programming of society today, we can then begin to do serious self inventory.  Both the good and bad.  This is the time for self judgement and if needed, adjustment.  I say if needed, because only one selves can just the same.  What most will find is someone they never knew.  We know now the meaning of  finding oneself, or selves as the case may be.  To find oneself, you need to explore that which most of us know we have, but fear to go.  We must realize that freedom is something we carry, and can surrender, but can never be taken.  We must see that happiness is something that is different fro everyone.  We must respect others happiness if we are to have our own.  Breaking free from the mold of insecurity will be the scariest, and most empowering thing any individual will ever do.

I live every day, with insecurities that I hoped to foster in every member of our household, whether from not being compoleltel;y honest with Tammy about my relationship with Jun, whether it is the feelings of possible abandonment I fostered in Jun, bringing her into a ready made family, or the questions raised by Aaliyah, whom at seven years long, is quite the perceptive little one.  These questions we are sure will grow in complexity and number as time passes.  most critically, how do I care for the insecurities that are in Larry, due to the fact I have asked him and Tammy to stop their romantic relationship?  Why, because I can, this is MY body .  Many in the plural community will say, yes, you should share the body with the alters!!   I get that.  Many will say, we should not share the body, we get that too!  Here is when you can tell therapy is working… IN the English words of my favorite Thai, ” I Don’t Care!”  Yes, I am good enough to make my own decisions.  I may share this body, but I am the landlord, and we have some hose rules now.

So as we all learn to live together, and this weeks we added teh Thai family to the mix, we find that we think we have things figured out, and we do not.  We Think we have thought of everything, we did not.  We do however see the good in a all of us here, and want to help one another.  We are also learning that everyone here is an individual that has fears, needs, loves, and hates.  While they should all be respected and heard, sometimes someone has to make the hard decision, and that is called trust.

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An Existential Approach to The Integration Question

As we continue this journey through space and time, we realize more, there is no conclusion to our existence.  Even though death is a certainty, reaching the climax of our humanity is certainly unattainable.   The struggle to give meaning to the nothingness that we occupy only brings angst and despair. We are as Sartre proclaimed, condemned to our own freedom.

As we live as multiple, and after fourty seven years, completely aware; our perspective is prismatic by comparison. The insights we now have, part and parcel due to the communication in the system, are only a result of something quite controversial in the world of DID. We have done exactly the opposite of convention. We have knowingly grown, cohesively independent.

Many times as we are, subject to the inexperienced intellect explaining to us how we’re supposed to feel and think. They define for us something they themselves, have never experienced. For many systems, this is not only frustrating, the experience is dehumanizing. Humanity being what is needed most from the complex trauma victim.

Embracing not only our rational, but our existential being; we have gained a sense of identity as a whole. Something we have never experienced in the past. The question in our mind, always piercing into the present. Our inability to move forward. All now seeking to fade as we finally move forward. Not only essentially but existentially. Now moving forward seems less fearful. Less begrudging than before. We no longer have the angst, the dread, we experienced for so long. We were becoming free; as a group-independent.

Embracing our fragmentation has been difficult at best. Mostly, we have spent an endless bad movie, as the main character. Briefly feeling in control, only to find we were farther in the abyss than we could see. Endless searches for answers to our struggles ends in endless questions, and misdirections.

As the physicians pick, as we called it for years. The endless incorrect assumptions, misdiagnosis and psychotropic chemicals did nothing to lessen our suffering. We WANTED to be SOMETHING!! There had to be an answer!!! We never felt we were as everyone made us out to be! The frustration of it all compounded our confusion, causing dread and despair. On a toddler, adolescent and adult. Years of programming. We were the problem. We had to be.

As we came to the point where, EVEN I(we)s, whatever. This gets complicated now. We were starting to have suspicions of our own, thinking we were single. Too funny, looking back. N our journals we find the evidence. Our medical records. School records. We never had a school we didn’t know the school shrink. Red flag???!!

When finally, after over four decades we came to an impass. We needed to face the realities we had before “known”, however never thought. If you understand this. You just do. The tipping point in your mind existence wheee you learn. You, this I are We. You are a singular collective. This is usually quite dramatic and emotional. This I am. It the correct one of us to discuss that. I CAN say for certain: this changes everything for all of us. This is our first milestone. The second being, co-consciousness.

The struggle for a long time, was acceptance system wide. Even now, there are times where some of us question the rational validity of our diagnosis. We have quite the debate, as we always have. See, Reading this you wonder why we wonder. If you are multiple. This seems quite normal. Quite simply, we have normal reactions to very abnormal circumstances. Our normal is not everyone’s. Our existence is actually quite normal for our experiences. Our is existence is only different as we are confined in an essential shell. Our essence cannot define our existence.

We have now embraced our multiplicity as a whole. We are a WHOLE, made up of many fragments. We are as individual as any group of people. We are an individual, group of friends learning day by day to live together. Try having 12 wives. That would be easy by comparison. We are all working now towards common goals. We are all growing Exi-Stentially.

Each alter, as an independent being, has the right and ability to grow. We experience growth through our experiences and the objective observed responses. We then try to work together to determine the best actions to choose. Yes, WE CHOOSE. As we choose to live separate; we come together from a need of existential survival as a single unit. This is DID. Survival. Existential empowerment has been key for us to understand our being. How we, became we. We understand now, only we can give our life purpose. Only we can define who we are. We have the freedom to live each life as we believe.

The weight, that most if not all my DID friends describe, is terrible. A culmination of years of ridicule, abuse, uncertainty, worthlessness, and outright fear, has lead us to the road we are on. The weight we feel is the baggage we have compartmentalized, and stored. We trudge forward bearing the burden laid upon us. We become disillusioned with society, family and even ourselves till only death seems humane. The only thing we can truly control, when all else has been ripped away. When tomorrow seems too far off to see. Yes. We have been.

The freedom this comes from the outright acceptance, is liberating. The ability to be authentic, to commit to our course of action without regret, utopian. As we have been allowed to grow as individuals, our anxieties have faded. Our self confidence, each and all of us, has increased many fold. We are learning to experience old things, with new eyes. We are LEARNING, all over again.

As we grow as a system, we must consciously make a case to each other. We must remain vigilant in our desire to lead our lives in the best way for all of us. Existentially, the best choice for the individual will result in the best outcome for the group. This is not an exercise in governing dynamics. We are not defining a positive outcome through the accomplishment of an essential goal. We are seeking the best existential, good faith choices for all. For this results in the most humanistic result for the group.

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Gaining Identity through Exi-Sential Balance

We have focused greatly on our opinion of the Existential ideology, and how that applies to the consciousness of our humanity, but also allows us to power our own freedom through true choice in actions.  Admittedly, we believe that an Existential attitude towards our day to day lives is preferred; this cannot however be the only foundations for successful living.

We believe that too many philosophies, theologies, and other theories for understanding the inherent emptiness that mankind endures, fails o compensate fo rate reality, that we live in a rational world.  Existence and Essence must peacefully co-exist, to allow our complete beings to grow.  To stifle one side or the other, this to cripple both.

Thus the term, Exi-Sential, is born.  An abomination to the English language, that is very limited on its face, Existential-Sential is to have a harmony between both realms of consciousness; The Existential, and the Essential.  For true harmony in the rational plane, mankind must first find balance and harmony in himself.  This is journey that leads us to transcending all of the freedom and power stored in our subconsciousness, to the hear an d now.  Bringing the questions of purpose and reason finally to rest.  Allowing us to answer questions from our children with an honesty never before known.

Identity

Identity for many, is something they have never known.  We are taught to believe as our caregivers teach us.  We as children, even pre-birth humans in their mothers womb, are absorbing the stimuli they can sense in the world around them.  As external life moves forward,  the child only has the feelings, and sensory responses of his mother to carry with him to the terrifying reality we call life.  For a brief moment, try to fell yourself as a child, for whim most of his entire nine month life, he has been in a state of trauma.  Exposed to abuses or stresses.  This child now is a year old, or 22 months in existential age, has been in a traumatized state for a minimum of nearly half his life!

Try for a second now to take the same life, and expose it to positive and nurturing stimuli. WITHOUT the negatives.  How different would you be?  This is completely true for all of mankind.  We need to start raising OUR children with our GRANDCHILDREN in mind.  The ideas and experiences that pregnant mothers and infants have been thrust into,  can be totally horrifying at best.  We believe as we are pushed further into a monetized society, that as long as the child survives, the mother must soldier on.  We have removed the existential nurturing from both the mother and child, at a time when it is  required absolutely.

The formation of identity, begins to paintFor many people, identitfor an empty canvas, even before conception.  Even as the fears and anxieties of the mother are experienced in her own existence, these are stored in the most rational of places, our DNA.  The concurrence of such an existential puzzle piece, to be domiciled in the most scientific and rational of places.  Is this not just absurdity a the most basic levels!  Is the fact we carry with us the angst of our predecessors, our lifesavers, proof that we are all merely pieces in puzzle for which there is no solution?  Chaos os the definition of random, as are the lives we attempt in futility to bring order to in unbalanced ways.

Many people accept the identity thrust upon them without a moments hesitation.  Falling prey to the perceived safety of the herd. Our identity as humans is not complete without the nurturing and constant feeding of the existential being. As we learn to live in Good Faith, we balance the two filling the void, reducing the angst, and growing forward in time and space. Truly able to reach the vast potential we are capable of.

Perception

Many existentialist fellows, believe that the differences between perception, reality and consciousness are insignificant. The existential, or freed mind, can quite freely meld these stated of being. As we know, a persons perception is and can be that persons reality. If our consciousness perceives something as real, our mind will believe, therefore reality is perception. Regardless of the rationality of a situation, the creativity of the human mind is by far much more powerful.

Mankind has always struggled with the blurring of perception and hallucinations. Are hallucinations more than reflections of our unconscious being communicating with the conscious self? Are the phenomenon of the parapsychological field nothing more than unexpressed personality and angst captured and stored by the body and mind?

More times than not we have purposefully created compounds to “expand our consciousness”. Mankind in the struggle to explore then unknown corners of our hidden consciousness has waged wars and even sacrificed all to gain what they already possessed. Educated by our loved ones and society to stray further from individual identity to group autonomy.

Exi-Stensial Balance

When we learn to delineate between our Humanity, and our rationality, we can then begin to operate inside both realms bringing them together in balance. As we are able to exercise our freedom and grow as individuals, we can then use the purpose we sense to make choices and apply those choices as actions in the rational realm.

The discovery of harmony in a brought about through several journeys, outside of pure good faith. This is where we believe existentialism fails the common man. Even when man is shown existence and essence he will still run to the essential abandoning the existential for lack of a transitional theory bridging the two.

Most of mankind, through centuries of control, is born into an existential prison, much like “The Matrix”. However our prison is ultimately self imposed. We so easily succumb to enslavement rather than face the fears of the unknown.

In severe cases of trauma, children can expand their consciousness unknowingly to survive the trauma. The existential mind in an effort to survive and be free can segment, compartmentalize and even manage multiple personalities. This is all done with such efficiency, in most cases the host is oblivious to the obvious. How can we then fault the every day man for taking the path for which he knows the destination.

Application of Power

As we are now entering our journey to balance. We focus instead on individual choices, and living in good faith. How does this help us with or relationships? Work? Pay the mortgage? All valid questions. As short as time is in our society today, why would we sacrifice anything that has no immediately visible value? Who needs hippie psycho babble when the electric bill is due? Yes.

We have been raised to believe that selfishness is bad and generosity is good. We have been taught to give of ourself. To sacrifice in the name of the greater good. All true. However, before we can give of ourselves we need to have something to offer. We cannot give what we do not have. When mankind pushes forward and gives more than currently exists, the mind answers the call. The body will go further into debt to the mind.

The mind body relationship is critical. They represent the two realms of our lives. Our humanity and our reality. Exi-Sential balance again is critical. Many theories around the world plosives growth in modern psychotherapy is the lack of existential nurturing. Therapy is completely selfish. As we push further into rationality refusing our humanity the angst, hence anxiety, will continue to compound.

As we all make our journeys through time and space, we are all presented an endless array of situations of which to make choices. As we learn to make choices based on two basic principals, we are responsible and our decisions are completely our choices, we begin to truly live. We cannot become solely idealistic. We must, as much as it pains us succumb to living in the reality of time we now occupy. However, to neglect the humanity of existence is just as detrimental as starving the human body of nutrition.

True identity and a sense of fulfillment can only be achieved through the balance and Exi-Sential balance. As we learn to become one with ourselves, we will all learn to become more than the body we’re trapped in. We can transcend time and space, we can harness a power only few have. We can come become a whole, in a world consumed with pieces.

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Achieving Existential Power

Existentialism, which like may philosophies, has been viewed as obscure, and in many cases almost meaningless to the common man.  May philosophies have been all but dismissed as impractical studies, reserved for intellectual elites, and scholars.  These studies are reserved for those who do not need to push through, in the seemingly cruel hamster wheel we call life.  This could not be further from the truth.

Even as existentialism has been perverted into another convoluted and distorted intellectual idea, the foundations remain.  Existentialism is for the common man.Never before has there been such predication in a way of living, that speaks centrally to the core struggles that the majority of us make on a daily basis.  Never before has there been insights that were so profound, yet applied to the most basic principles of life itself.  We find ourselves again staring into the abyss of angst, searching for meaning, reaching for hope.

The tools we need to achieve purpose, have always been with us.  We are sentient beings, on a cataclysmic journey, one moment at a time. We are undefined, un-purposed and completely lost in ourselves.  The angst we all feel, or anxiety in modern terminology, comes from the inherent knowledge deep down that we are all completely free, mortal and completely meaningless.  We have the freedom to define our essence in every turn. We hold the keys to purpose and meaning, yet we continually look for the keyhole rather than building the lock.

Mankind, has now progressed leaps and bounds in rationality.  We have progressed far in technologies that seemingly bring leaps forward in our struggles to defeat our own design, our mortality. science has for all of its advances in medicine, communications, in nearly every aspect of our daily lives.  However, we have fallen further away from the humanity, the existence that makes us human. We have lost the balance that is required by all living things in any ecosystem.  We are ushering out humanity for a false sense of immortality.  In truth, we are no further along in our journey to fight what is unbeatable, than we were many centuries ago.  At the core of our existence, we know this.  We live in denial of these things every moment of every day that we do nothing to rebel against it.

We are not meat to rebel against the intellectual structure we run to almost mindlessly.  This is the true surrender of our freedom.  Freedom is never won in battles, you cannot give freedom to another person.  Freedom cannot be won, or taken away from anyone.  Freedom is an individual’s personal choice.  We are all born free, and we are taught from a young age to yield our freedom to the mass templates we are thrust into.  Thus, the focus and priority given to fields of study, that are considered practical, and rational; labeling the humanities as impractical and irrelevant to the common people.  This could not be further from the truth.  The truth cleverly hidden by our own fears of freedom and exploited by the boxed in, rational believers of the times. Existentialism, as we see it, is the only true answer for the common man, to reach his un-pre-destined greatness. To experience empowerment through freedom, to feelalive in actions, to choose their here and now.

II

Authenticity.

Jean Paul Sartre, one of the most influential minds of our known history, stated that for one to be truly free, we must live in good faith, or live Authentically. This can mean many things, the most apparent, honesty.  However, this is not truly what is meant.  Authenticity Is living to what YOU believe is YOU! All we have to do to live authentic, is to be free, and thus authenticity and freedom, are indelibly linked, almost cosmically as it were.  The ability to know you can make your own choices.  This applies to ALL situations, every moment in time.  If you are living in good faith, freedom abounds. Only we as individuals can be free; it is then by this definition that we can never be free in groups. Freedom can never be given, earned, won, or stolen.

A core principal in existentialism, and one we believe has been lost due to the overbearing systems placed on us by the masses, is brutal honesty.  As we have seen throughout time, man himself, is an honest being. This can bring about many discussions and debates all in itself, however, the primary fault of intellectualism is deceit.  The rational side of our lives, or the essence, fears mortality above all. Death, we cannot understand what we have never experienced.  Man has since the age of the first breath, fought with his own mortality; sacrificing his existence, freedom, and even families in the pursuit of immortality.

As a group, mankind has defined itself through conquest, suffering, exertion of power, and the appearance of infallibility.  At the heart of all oppression are the core traits of bad faith, the one thing that can insure the ruin of us all.  Fear, secrecy, and most of all deceit.  We as a species feel the need to deny the truth about our mortality in many ways. When we as individuals, allow others to determine what truth is, we have surrendered not only our freedom, but our individuality.  When we subscribe to living in the mass consummative and monetized systems, we relinquish ourselves.  We also relinquish, at least we are taught to believe, any responsibility we have for the actions of the system.  This fear of responsibility, accountability, is the motivation for surrendering the one thing we all publically vie for, freedom.  The further we fall in to the seemingly warm and safe, authoritarian existence, we find that angst we were so vehemently trying to escape has now enveloped our entire being, existence and essence.

III

Let us now, take what we have discovered and apply to our modern, contemporary lives.  Most of the beings we see today, circling around in endless patterns of preprogrammed existence, never following their authentic instincts, carry with them the anxieties we all seem to be exposed to. Moving in ever infinite circles, just as our predecessors.  We wake, breathe, feed, breed, and die, just as those who came before us.  We give artificial meaning to things in our lives to attempt at relating some value to it.  We chase corporate consumerism and monetization to somehow quantify our existence. Like the man drinking water from the sea, his thirst never quenched, yet growing stronger by the moment, until he relents to the only thing which is certain; Death.

Charlie Chaplain, made the comment in one of his speeches:” man feels too little and thinks too much”. This is applicable today, nearly one hundred years later. This constant proves the unescapable angst mankind carries due to awareness and cognizance. Existentialism, is not a philosophy for the obscure, ivory tower intellectuals that should like to sit around all day discussing concepts and ideas that have little, to no meaning to the masses.  Much like theological doctrine, philosophy was created for the aristocrats. Existentialism, is not so arrogant that it attempts to define human beings, and tell them what their purpose is, rather to set free the human spirit and allow mankind to make himself whole through freedom and self-exploration without deception and dystopic pre-conceptions.

The most challenging step in any process, is the first.  Here, we must first take action to become or at least, to attempt to live in good faith. As Authenticity, or the act of living in good faith, is purely individual and a unique journey, only the individual can ascertain exactly what the journey will be.  The act of “being”, is critical in the existential path.  For only can the individual define their essence. This is the only true Authenticity in life.

The journey to determine what one is, must first start with what one can be.  As we are thrust into existence, naked and unknowing, into an existence that is somehow pre-conceived?  Pre-planned?  Is this really the case?  NO. The paradox here is profound.   We are born as individuals, into a group. The paradox of the very fact is cataclysmic in nature.  We are seemingly created as a single, self-contained being, yet we are thrown into essence from the start as part of a collective.  This is not on purpose, as nothing is.  The absurdity of this would never stand to reason in the rational mind; hence “das Angst”.

We are taught, from the first time we can feel, not with our conscience minds, but with something much more powerful, our existential sprit.  The very beginning, when our spark of existence comes to be, we begin to paint the canvas of our own essence.  As adults, already having many moments of programming, experiences, and knowledge, we come to a point where we seem to find hollowness in our existence.   We look for answers to why we are here.  We develop angst.  This develops earlier and earlier as we now continue to transmit our angst inter-generationally, up through time. We are now creating magnified copies of ourselves, rather than crafting the future, we simply and knowingly promote our insecurities, embrace our fears, and teach them to our offspring.

As humans, we are laden with all of the fears, lies, ignorance’s, and even the prejudices of those who are our caregivers as young humans.  Even if we are without caregivers, our existence will ALWAYS, struggle to survive.  Like an empty sponge, will soak up whatever stimuli is offered to it.  We WILL in lack of positive or authentic interactions, accept anything.  Many times, in history, we have seen people flock to tyrants, when other leadership is exhausted or otherwise unavailable.  With an insurmountable push towards despotism, the ultimate goal of corporate consumerism.  We KNOWINGLY, sacrifice our freedom in the name of acceptance, and security in the masses. We sacrifice our own individualism as well as that of our charges.

When trying to determine what is authentic to oneself, we almost always get caught up in others.  This is NOT an accident.  Our rational mind has been taught that self-love, self-care, almost any activity or belief that centers around individualism and self-reliance is deemed as negative.  We think to care for ourselves first is rude and somehow counterproductive.  We believe that honesty in the face of reality is summarily and more shockingly, readily excused for deceit regarded to be “socially acceptable”.  The reason we are so wrapped up in everything else OTHER than the here and now, the reality that is right on top of us, becomes apparent; we are driven away from self, and driven to us. We are programmed from conception that we NEED the group.  There is little doubt why we cannot think in self, without being called selfishin a negative connotation.

Becoming self, is the first critical milestone in reaching authenticity.  To simply discuss what it means, is to glance at the abyss. Staring down over the side of a high place, is exhilarating, fearful and mostly an act of pure inquisitiveness. The feelings we experience are no different than the ones we feel as we lean over near certain death.  This is the feeling of true freedom.  The individual controls their own life in this single moment.  This in fact is the lure of suicide.  The desire to control what Is otherwise out of control.

Only the individual can determine what is to them, living in good faith.  The humanistic segment of our nature, given no other external processes have corrupted it, will most always after the desire to survive, will not choose to harm another.  This is true of most creatures.  Raw humanity will NOT seek to destroy itself in the individual setting.  There has never been a war waged by one man without validation from other men.    This is the nature of survival.

IV

Reactions

Ask yourself, do I, all alone in the dark, and without the validation or criticism of anyone else, feel as I am good to myself?  Am I whom I want to be as an individual?  This is good faith.

As an Individual, we can have limitless power.   We can see things others only view as obscure or meaningless.  In these things, we will find that we can define our essence by applying our freedom to everyday tasks and ideas.  We can control the Angst, defer the demons, and to the perception of many, become powerful.  This is the trickery of existence; your power was already within you.  Only the individual can release the power of freedom. All mankind is inherently powerful.

At the core of gaining your existential power, is the reality of what the individual can and cannot accomplish. What are we truly capable of? To determine this, we must first realize how things happen.  Many believe in the simplistic narrative of cause and effect. However simple and accurate this may seem, there is much more.  As the canvas of our existential self develops with exposure to external stimuli, even early into our days, we are sent askew of truth, and authenticity. Even this it seems to indicate the absurdity of everything.  For if an omniscient intelligence, truly created us, and has a preconception for us all; would the this far superior entity have foreseen the obvious design flaws of humanity?  The anxieties induced from mankind’s lack of anything more than instinctive survival, are the cornerstone of all evil.

V

Time

Time, is such a critical factor in all things existential.  In fact, in our opinion time is actually an artificial concept used to give quantitative meaning to existence. This idea that the distance from birth to death, must be somehow measured, and assigned value, is absurd in itself. The idea that life, is anything more valuable than the individual that indeed holds that life. The individual’s right to their OWN existence.  Freedom to choose the one absolute that we are certain, that at some moment we will all return to nothing just as whence we came.  Measuring this space in time, only serves the insecurities of lesser beings; beings that flock to the masses to escape their own mortality as long as they can deceive themselves.

As we are applying our existentialist-like theories in contemporary life, we must however function in the rigidity that is time as we know it today.  To say that time does not come with many conveniences, that otherwise are impossible, is completely untrue.  Time allows us to deflect many things, quantify our essence and thus assigning value. Time allows us to give essential value, to our existence.  This is key if we are truly, to harness our power.

VI

Power from Balance

Learning to live in balance with the essential as well as the existential, is another key component to nurturing your inner power.  The strength required trudge onward into that next moment in time EXISTS in our freedom. The ability to not only choose the NOW, but to push into the future, writing the present.   Each moment in time thrusting us closer to towards our only assured destiny. This is the luxury time affords mankind.  Only conscious mankind experiences time, as we are the only intelligent life, naive enough to believe the deception.

The fears and anxieties we experience, as we try to define our essence while neglecting our existence; or transversely, ignoring our rationality to feed only the existential, proves equally detrimental.  Authenticity leads to individuality, which leads to balance in the two realms of being. As we find balance in good faith, angst recedes, power from freedom thrives.  The existential spirit becomes rejuvenated and alive once more.   In this moment, true power manifests.

Power originating from individual authenticity, is the greatest source of energy in the universe.  For if man Is to survive his own extinction, he has these tools in his possession from conception.  The power to survive and thrive can ONLY be as an individual. Mankind’s angst and fears stemming from the emptiness thrust upon him drives us to seek power in masses.  This deception only serves to deny the inner peace, that comes from empowerment of self.

How do we come to recognize our power as we discover?  How do we insure that on the journey to strength, we stay focused on the course without haste or distraction?  Only through constant existential inventory of ourselves, are we able to always stay focused.  The focus of the individual can never be subsequent to any other desire.  Only through learning to live as an individual in the here and now, making choices about our actions through humanistic exploration, can we make decisions, we as humans can accept responsibility for; Thus increasing our power.  The more we accept responsibility for the individual choices we make, the further we exercise our freedoms and thus gaining in the only true power.

VII

Essential vs Existential Instincts

We feel since existentialism, in itself is not a true philosophy as defined by the scholars, and intellects dating as far back as Plato, then conventional theories are moot.  Only by pushing the limits of perceived ideas, can we truly than begin to express our power through freedom.  As with any great idea, you must nurture the dark, with the light.

When we come into existence, we are nothing.  We are thrown, quite literally, into the realm of being.  We are at this point, honest and free.  We survive through our instincts.  These instincts, which serve nothing more than to preserve being.   In this we find proof of the existential spirit. For if man were to simply be as we assume other creatures to be, oblivious to his fate, then would we require the existential realm?  Would we then have the angst, and the push toward an enslavement we can neither touch, taste, or in most cases, comprehend?  This need to define oneself is rooted in the fact we are without definition.

As we are delivered into existence, we are simple, complex life forms.  The need to sustain our physical, hence, essential needs are paramount. In our infancy, we are given the rational thought to survive.  To feed, breathe, breed, and die.  All of these things are born to us without the asking or realization of need.  The human form, will not discriminate as to how these instinctive needs are met, rather focus on the meeting of these needs.  This is the practicality of the essential instincts.

As humans, we are however cursed with the knowledge we “are”.  We are also bound by the knowledge that we will once again, no matter the efforts and trials, return to nothing.  In this awareness the greatest injustice, was put upon all human kind, hope.  The hope that we can change our mortality, that we exist to do more than doe.  That we have meaning and purpose, that we can somehow become significant.  These things are all false of course.  From the earliest stages of development, we feed our children, and thus BOTH, of the realms of existence, with all of the detritus of an existence filled with angst and evil.  We try to define our own essence through reproduction, which will happen by design regardless of the efforts of mankind to control it.  We attempt to define our essence rather than accepting ourselves as individuals, through child rearing.  This is where the tragedy of angst, and lack of balance can truly be seen in clarity, as our lack of balance, lack of true power, and fear of accountability is most visible as we project all of our deficits onto a blank canvas.

As sentient, aware, and intelligent beings, humans are granted the existence of man. Mankind, has through the ages shown a predilection to denying the existential realm of being, in efforts to relish in the essential.  As awareness matures, and mankind is programmed, we begin to fear our own creativity.  Sartre, believed that genius, could only manifest authentically through creativity, hence art.  Thus, making the statement that true genius is only manifested trough art.  What makes artistic expression so unique and powerful, that only in this way can we experience our true gifts?  Why is it then if all mankind possesses this inner power and freedom, we are so many of us enslaved to consumerism and other tools of mass control?  We choose Enslavement over responsibility.

IX

Harnessing Existential Power

We have discussed aspects of existentiality.  Let us now examine how we as individuals can re-capture the power we possess without discarding for the false perception, of safety in numbers.

First and foremost, we must strive to live in good faith.  We must take every opportunity to further the development of self through individual choices, and beliefs.  We must choose to be individual.  Humans are not pack animals, we do not need the group to survive!  Moreover, we need our individualism to live!

Once the conscious decision has been made to seek authenticity over dystopia, we can develop our sense of essence, or purpose.  Imagine for a moment, you were completely without the pressures of the world, free to be whatever YOU decide what you were to be? Is this not true power and freedom? The ability to choose for oneself?  Rejecting all, except self, is the only way to be powerful enough, to effect the lives of others.  One cannot be truly free and powerful if he chooses to reject freedom.

The truth of existentialism; we are all alone.  We are all inherently free, and we are all nothing until our existence can learn to define our essence.  Man is destined only to have no destiny.  We gain true power from self-empowerment, and the exercise of individualism.  Only then can we progress enough to allow for healthy relationships with other life.

We must take back the freedom we have surrendered.  Whether this be known or hidden, the power is rooted from doing what the individual believes is right and good.

X

Closing

As we observe the world and the human condition, the damage of self-imposed slavery is undeniable.  Glaring in the face of every man woman and child today. The children reflect the angst of their caregivers, as they are the receptacles of all we need to dispose of.  The weakest of any group, the children take on the role of emotional waste bins.  So, inadvertently, we grow little people with all the damage of adults; No wonder the children are suffering as they, then grow up and have only the examples we have shown them to teach their own, and so on.  This self-perpetuating, circle of misery and angst is evident in the existential dread most dwell.  We need to realize that happiness is only a greeting card idea, used to control desires of the masses.

Happiness in fact is existential freedom.  Power to be is with us all, the power to deceive self, is equally abundant. Refuse to let fear dominate your existence and harness the power for you and prodigy.

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To Be or Not Boundary!

To be honest, I know the title is crap, but I was at a loss and wanted to get past that point to get this down.

Boundaries, something everyone at one time or another finds themselves in conflict or having issues with.  This can ben the form of their own boundaries, or issues that arise out fo the boundaries others have or haven’t well established.  As a plural person, our sense of boundaries can be quite well defined at tines, and then again completely obscure to a frighteningly non-existent.  This is why the majority of professionals, after establishing safety, will begin to introduce people to “Healthy Boundaries”.  I use quotations here as we have no idea what this truly means ourselves.

For those of us that are among, what we believe to be the majority, you have some struggle with being able to balance having limits and boundaries, with being politically correct or “polite”, we get lost in our own conflict.   If you add traumatic events, or environments that are riddled with negativity, instability, abuse, and other assorted bad things; you get an assortment of disorders.  At the heart of many issue fo those with mental illness is boundaries.  This is so uncomfortable, and redundant to most people e that have ever been to therapy JUST ONE TIME, that we tend to tune to out.  You can’t preach to someone that doesn’t comprehend the vocabulary!  You cannot empower healing when your client cannot grasp even the remotest idea, of what you are so eloquently saying.

Now, to the really exciting bits of the story!  Yes I know, were using poor structure, were crazy, we can get away with it!  LOL!   Our theory is this: Boundaries are not barriers at all.  Boundaries should be re-classified as “Points of Empowerment”. These POI’s, as we will refer to them now, are exactly that!  These are opportunities in your own timeline to become empowered and take control of your life!  This is epic!  When you are trying to get through to a trauma victim, giving them tools to take charge of their life, empower them, give them a choice, you have now communicated.  You are through the walls, the distrust.   You got us.  Otherwise we just see more people telling us what to do.  How to wall ourselves out and isolate.  Now, with POI’s, we have the power to choose how we want to deal with the outside world!  We do not HAVE to accept anything!  We DO NOT have to hide or be ashamed!  We are ALL people and deserve to be not only what but who we truly are.  Why should the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness be restricted to people that have never been traumatized?  Why should victims be victimized over and over again?  Just like the cruel children we went to school with,  every day was a new hell for us.  We did not know why, we just lived it.  We were not safe at home.  We were not safe at school.  Where were we to be safe?  The places a Childs mind can go to feel safe,  will absolutely amaze you.

Back to our POI”s.  Once you give us the ability to choose, we are free.  As someone whom has suffered with mental illness for well about, forever!  I can honestly say that for all the people that say they don’t judge, they do.  Let us be honest here.  We know were crazy, most of us do.  We do not want to be mocked or harassed.  The shame of this drives most of us behind the “Boundary”, and into our homes, heads, and some succumb to suicide.  For some of us the hell is too great to shoulder for very long.  Once we can all see the freedom we will continue the journey outward and onward.

We were in a situation this morning that aroused all the flowing dribble you may be reading now.  We had someone that said they don’t judge, blah blah abhor, and they understood.  You get the idea,  I am sure that most of you have heard this before.  A friend a family member, your sisters boyfriends aunties mommas baby cousins friend had it!  Well we put the theory to the test today.  We had someone that was being quite an asshole to the core, who was out at the time.  We proceeded to change straight in front of him, over coffee.  To say he reacted was an understatement.  Willing to walk away from a major money deal.  Turned white as a ghost!  Again, we have known this guy for years and we still got this.  So, the moral to the story?  We stood our ground and told him if he wants to bail that was fine.  We were the best at what we do and. “If he didn’t like us his competition would gladly hire our firm.”    IT FELT AWESOME!!!  I haven’t felt this alive in years!!!!!  Im ready to get busy now!!  We stood up fo our selves in the face of sheer ignorance and fear!  We come out on top with everything desired and them some.  This was a significant victory in our journey back to the “real” world.

I hope that this experience will inspire others to seek empowerment through the simple choices we can all make.   The choices may be simple, but the ability to have the belief in yourself to stick to them is usually what gets us all in trouble.  We have insecurities and baggage, which when combined again with trauma, equals us, crazy person(s).  The inspiration we have gotten from this seemingly small event, is overflowing.  I want everyone to know, out there too, that: “The barricades built by the abusers are never secure”. The abusers get their power from eh secret.  The secret is what drives them.  The power they have over you and the secret they contain is the fuel for their continued abuse.  We take the power back when we put OUR needs FIRST AND CENTER.   Self Confidence is a NEED.  Power and control over our own body should be ABSOLUTE. The ability to become empowered is not a privilege, or a law, its a basic, fundamental right to every living creature on earth.  We deserve to be safe from day #1 !!

If you find yourself always trying to think of others first, as we were taught, STOP!  You MUST take time for YOU!  The more of you the more time!  That is the way we look at it!   When you truly love and care about your family and friends, you HAVE to care about you first.  THATS OK!   This is how healthy people stay healthy!  YES, other props eco this and they’re not rude!  There not bad people!  Just because we need or ask for something, doesn’t make us a burden!  Just because were not perfect, doesn’t make us something to be ashamed of!  Jut because we do not fit into the mold of the masses, just means were custom made.

We have been diagnosed this time for about a year with Dissociative Identity Disorder.  We have a significant other and many daughters.   We are slowly learning that just because we were victimized once, does not mean we are for life.  Coming to grips with any sever disorder is hell on any family, ours was no exception.  Neither were the previous families.  Your lack of  boundaries, and inability to maintain anything more than a short mite lead to today.  We now have a sense of empowerment in small degrees, divided by fourteen.  If you ever feel like your not safe, or like your being shamed, speak out.  They probably won’t listen the first time.  Maybe not even the second!  Keep shouting, surviving, and fighting till your safe.  YOU CAN DO IT!  Never let anyone judge you fro the things you have done to survive.  They aren’t in your shoes, nor would they ever truly want to be.  Be Safe, Run, Fight!  SURVIVE AND BE EMPOWERED AT EVERY BOUNDARY!!!!!

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From Our Perspective. Yes I am Crazy.

Every time I google DID, and thats a lot by the way, I always come up with the same verbiage and blah blah blah.  For the afflicted, this is very daunting.  We are isolationists, very mistrusting, if at all, and yet we are asked to believe that we have one of the rarest things on the planet, and that we have no idea that we do.  Most of us have suffered through life, barely hanging on to a thread of what we think is a life.  Trying desperately to make it a few months longer than last time before you had to move, or otherwise reboot your life.  Thats it.  For whatever the reason you get scared, and then the crazy starts to come out and whoosh, its all a blank.  New thing you know its an unpleasant or unfamiliar situation.  Funny thing, this unfamiliarity your now in, becomes the sought after safe zone.  The very thing that has helped to so completely shatter us into pieces is one fo the things we now crave for safety.

The very notion that we are crazy is not a foreign, or even a new one.  We have at least, in our experience, have had many encounters with mental health professionals, school shrinks, law enforcement mental health, hospitals, etc.  You get the picture.  You would think that after all that someone would come up with something…right??!!  Uhhh, NO!  The very fact we had every diagnosis under the sunned that medication never worked on anything, RED FLAG.  Just telling you now.

SO here we are in the end of yet another cycle that involves children, lawyers and a great deal of money that we can make but oh shit try managing that shit.  Thats what killed us, we could make loads, and manage a thimble full.  This we worked, when we worked, our asses off.  This too becomes an issue when you lose days and weeks of time.  You learn to adapt.  This must be how everyone lives.  Were just lazy, or stupid because we cannot remember the things people say were doing.  Sometimes when we dream, we see things that seem real, but we really don’t remember.  Like frames from a movie, just glimpses.  So we learned, to blend, adapt, and run at a moments notice.  To give up everything to keep the secret we didn’t know we were keeping.

I wanted to write this today to all of us that suffer with DID.  The DID does not cause us the suffering we seem to bear.  Our suffering is rooted in the treatment that we receive from the world around us.   The medications they use to make us more manageable, to the fear placed from a Hollywood film indicating were all killers.  WOW, what happened to human kindness?  We have never really believed in it, so realizing its all bullshit is more of a shock to the rest of you than us.  Welcome to reality.

We had the issue of really fighting this.  We couldn’t believe we had this.  Were we making this up for attention?  There was no way we could have had this and not known. We were simply being what they always said, a drama queen.  Having been accused as far back as we can remember of being “dramatic”, and lying about the things we did, it seemed logical we were still.  This is not something we wanted to admit, but the other choice seemed so damn unrealistic.  Couldn’t be.

Dissociative Identity Disorder, as it is now referred to; is a perfect storm of heinous shit and mental creativity combined with the right amount of smarts.  In other words, its not a maybe or could have.  If you have this you had some really bad shit happen to you.  You WERE raped, beaten, tortured, locked up, tormented, shamed, etc.  Not just once or twice.  This went on for a long ass time.  How could any moan allow himself to be these things?  He would have to be some kind of pussy…wouldn’t he?  I mean to then block all tis out???  This couldn’t be us.

We began to take all of the online self tests.  Every one we could find.  They all came out pretty much the same, like really high scores.  We figured we must be bending th results for the m to be that high.   We decided to answer completely and rudely honest.  Confessional honest.  So we did.  The results were higher.  So we began taking the tests, when we were in our different “moods”.  Ok so now the results while different for different markers, were all still coming back high.  We even had one test tell us, “YOU HAVE DID.  CONSULT A PSYCHIATRIST IMMEDIATELY”. Wow, ok, but still even then we didnt believe.  We had been seeing a therapist that now specializes in Trauma for several months.  She was the one that laid the news on us.  Weird thing, reading back in our journals, we had been writing as different people for over two years.

So, here we are diagnosed, quite definitively, and still arguing this in our own heads!.  Listen to that, we were arguing between ourselves that we didn’t have Multiple Personalities.  LOL. I know, looking back I need a lot fo help!  So now as nearly a year has passed, since we found out.  We are functioning maybe not better, but without as much fear.  We try to live free of our fears, some are better than others at it.   We have entered a self imposed state of isolation for the most part.  That is ok now, we know that.  We need to unravel.  We need to find or at least look for the truth.  The real truth, not the one we were told as children.  We need to learn what possessed someones parents who supposedly loved and doted on him to allow and participate in this destruction of a Childs life.  Our life.

So if you have read this far, you are either struggling with your own selves.  Maybe you are a spouse or loved one fo someone like us, or just a curious co-worker.  Thank you for trying to learn rather than just call us crazy.  We are crazy, we don’t need you to tell us that.  We don’t want people to make special fuss over us, or treat us special.  We just want to be whatever it is we were meant to be.  Most of us will never know what that is.  Most of us will pass in to nothing never knowing anything about who we are or what we are meant to be.  However we can learn to accept what we have become.  We have become survivors of most anything.  Nothing to be fearful of there right?  You haven’t paid attention, we are fearful of ourselves.  How can you not fear everything when you want hurt yourself to feel better.

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The Sanity of Madness

Good Day everyone!   We have been gone for a bit.  Things have been very rocky the last few weeks since Gene passed.  The alter reunion tour has been charging on whether they  needed to or not!  We hae been learning a lot about not only ourselves, but our current IRL family.  More importantly how the alters reactions to my feelings are causing issues in the family I love more than anything, and running them away!

This all started a while back when I got my feelings hurt over a trigger than really had little to do with Kerry Shae, My oldest girl, and best friend.  It really wasnt anything malicious that she did that caused  the reactions that happened, which BTW all three of the protectors came out and proceeded to raise nine kinds of hell.  THis isn’t the worst part,  we were in such crisis mode we were changing so much that I, Kevin, would give Kerry her car and stuff back after the alters had taken it, and this happened three times in a day, not to mention the fact they threw her out and used words I wont dare repeat.  All this to a 23-year-old girl whom I love more than life.  Now we have to pick up the pieces.  We also just found out there is a chance she could have Liver disease or Cancer!  She has the tests next week!  Shes out of the house, living in the hood on foot and broke, stubborn as hell!!  Just like me once.  I did the same shit!  Almost exactly!

yesterday WE all went to therapy with Becky, Trauma Therapist.  We learned a lot!  We learned that I have to try to feel what its like to have hurt feelings, feel stress and pain.  I never do, Kevin never does, he runs and hides and we take the punishment.  We also found out that our, the alters, react completely wrong to almost every emotionally charged situation we enter.  How could we possibly know how to interact and manage a family when the only example we know is our own…scary though huh..  Becky out it like this.  I am accidentally allowing the alters to relive the trauma, which in turn is causing my family to suffer and feel the same way we did, and we ran.  It was alight bulb going off.  We never touched or hurt our kids, but we bullied them, or tried to, into not leaving!!  I see now that was totally the wong approach.  The alters were only trying to keep kerry at home but the gift ro flight instinct was so bad they fought, then ran.  Lets face it, there is no such thing as a nice fight and they weren’t nice, they were scared for us.  In turn their actions caused more damage than good inadvertently.  We see this now.

What is the sanity in the Madness?  Simply out it’s this;  The ability to see things from another perspective and dimensional view due to the way our brain has miraculously kept us alive and well all these years!  We have actually utilized more of our brain than the neurotypical person.  PET scans have shown as well as functional MRI, that DID folks use more area in the brain by far than others!  What were not insane…What if were really gifted?  This is our perspective on this!  We have instead of suicide, or conceding defeat, we found a way to fight it all back and continue on!  To me, THATS AMAZING!  That is definitely the stronger mind in our opinion!

To us the struggle with the DID diagnosis has been profound and lengthy.  We always has issues that made no sense.  We always had serious memory issues, social problems, family crisis 24/7, substances, mental health, physical health, you name it!  Yet we were always considered a genius at times, and others below average or worse.  We were all over the page.  We went from taking High School math and Foreign language classes as well as College level courses in the third grade to failing almost every class we took every year.  Go figure???  The things we were accused of  were horrible, and we really had no idea they were true!  We were a shy  and timid boy most times, we got picked on a lot at times.  At other times we were the life of the party, in a band, man whore, etc, and even then we were the depressed kid who cut and hated life.  I never made sense. We were even diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s by a neurologist, DR Brown, in Odessa!  WTF?!?!?!?  All this time we had been told before, but I couldn’t remember.  We moved all the time.  We were always hiding who we were even though we didn’t know what that is.  Were still learning too!

Folks that see and feel things differently than the majority are often stereotyped, labeled and filed away.  THey want to pump us full of drugs not for us, but for them!  To make us act and feel the way they want us too!  The ability to feel is what makes u human!  We feel much more because there are so many of us!  We all feel differently, interpret differently and even react differently.  However we can all feel the same fears.  Thats the shit about it.  Even though we don’t all share the same memories, we do feel the fear another one does.  Kinda like Blade, he still had the thirst!

Were heading to The Center, in Washington DC.  THis is a trauma facility that specializes in DID.  Were going to try to learn some better skills to get us all working together a little better.  To let us try and see that not everyone is an enemy!  Before we thought it was just a matter of time till someone was going to hurt us.  Now we know, or are trying to believe, that’s not always the case.  that’s a tough one.

We have recently learned that every good memory we ever had been a lie.  Our Grandfather, UG Painter,  was the heart of the biggest and cruelest inter-generational incest story in Charleston, WV.  This was known.  He was a cruel and terrible man, as was our father, and uncle.  What we would like to ask the Cousins, Emil Hopkins, Sonny Hopkins, Karen Lynn Hopkins, and Anna Hopkins, is this:  Why the hell when we told you we needed help, when we cried to you about things, why didn’t you help us since you knew we were being abused the whole time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  WHY!!!????

Now we understand that the years of drama and abuse were simply all of us trying to make it through the crap.  Now that were starting to remember things,  we want to tell the story…all of it, each of us.  We all have our own……..Hang onto your ass.  There are going to be some pissed off people in the world coming soon!

Soon………big kevin.

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What to do with the Body???

Wow, ok so here we go…  This is a complete mess!  The fathers body sin cold storage, and I am the next of kin!! REALLY!! Are we the only ones that see the irony in this?  So his new girlfriend wanted to cremate him right away…I also found out that the body was NEVER examined by a physician.  The physician OKd the order by phone and today thought he had died in a hospital??!!  WTF?  Everyone keeps telling me that Pat, the new GF was taking care of him and she told me she was the one that was there when he died, and she wasn’t even the one who called it in!! The call came early in the morning, not in the evening like I was told, and the call didn’t come from the residence, it came from a home health agency!!!  So who’s story is accurate?

 

So what to do.. I now have for the first time a shard of control over him, not that I wanted this but I may enjoy for a bit!  Is that wrong?  I want to see his body.   I want to make sure its really him and really gone!  he is on ice at the moment.  He isn’t getting any older at least!.

I ned help from the few of you that read this.  Please tele what you would do…Would you let them burn him, even though you know its against his wishes and she’s just trying to be cheap,  or do the inquiry and to hell with what any of them want and just get the truth out!

 

What the hell do y’all think??????

the bad seed

Not knowing how to begin this piece, we wanted to speak of many things.  So much is in our consciousness at he moment, needing to erupt into the living world.  So many times we are fearful of the consequences of our thoughts, our desires, of the very feelings that are supposed to define who we are.  Not today, today we release unadulterated and hideous, the inside that has been hidden from the living world.  The things we always knew to be true, but wanted to keep in obscurity; forever living in the abyss.

When reaching into that place we all have, inside, where we hold the truth as we believe it to be about ourselves; we shy away.  We know that inside this cauldron of emotional scraps, we imprison the truths we all need to deny in order to survive this hell we all currently occupy.  You see, hell is nothing more that the life we currently lead here, in this time and place.  When we delve into the cauldron we can see why there are those, like us, that have been created to dwell here.  We are not victims, we are as we were meant to be.

We do not want to generalize at all here.  For the longest time, we wanted to believe that we were, or could be, like others.  Those who did not live every day, praying that tomorrow would be different than today.  When we lay our head down to sleep, we wished to wake tomorrow as another person, as if we were trapped in a waking nightmare, or pass into nothingness.   The prospect of enduring another conscious period trapped in the quagmire called life; This Shakesperean tragedy that keeps repeating, only to worsen with every passing moment is overwhelming.  When we realize our ultimate fear, the thing we repress and deny in order to survive, we run to the last choice we all have in our control.

In our system, the name we have given the collective of shards that occupy our physical form, the truth is clear to us, as it always has been.  We are the ultimate in horror and pain.  We are the emotional reaper.  We are the penultimate weapon against happiness and joy.  We are everything we have been taught to be.  The cause of your problems, the generator of misery and pain.  Yes, we always have known these things.  We are the death of joy, and the black hole for happiness.  We feed on the joy of others, much like a parasite that cannot generate eh required building clocks to sustain its own life.  We are an emotional vampire.

Existing in this life knowing what you are is impossible, so we throw all of this pain and wretchedness into our cauldron.  Where we send all things we have to deny in order to trudge through another conscious period of existence.  We lie, to ourselves.  The only way to sustain the most basic, what can be defined technically as life.  We know inside all these things to be true.  As much as it pains us, we can see the wake of tears, pain and sometimes good, we leave.  We desire nothing more than to be the mirror opposite of what we are and have become.  We persist to strive towards the light, the life we see others living, to no avail.  To this end we are damned.

They say to envy is a sin, whatever that is.  We do not envy things that most would say are worthy.  We are not noble, or seeking enlightenment, or even to save our souls from an eternity of torture, we are already there.  We envy things like, caring, love, gentleness for no reason, kindness, and the silence of the ocean.  We want to feel wanted, to experience desire without obligation, or even just a brief moment in time without fear.  We envy that the most, how someone can live without feeling fear in perpetuity.  As Paul Arteries most profoundly stated, “Fear is the mind killer.”

So, now that we are at a point in our existence, somewhere between emergence and return, we realize that there is no real significance to any of it.  Age is merely an artificial measurement.  Something we do,  trying to give relevance to our coming demise, the most natural thing in our lives, is death.  Death gives life meaning?  Is there any real meaning to the time we have until we all meet nothingness?  The truth may astonish you.  The only real power that any of us have in life, is death.  As we now realize that our death will be just as insignificant  as the death of any other life form.  Death os only relevant to those that are dying.  Once the body dies, those that are left continue to live.  Most want to believe that their life is important to others, as this makes them feel loved, significant, more than just another molecule if dust, in a somewhat endless universe.  However I , we, us, have realized that the most useful thing we can contribute to the society we cohabitant in, is our own demise.  The way we could make the most people happy, is not to try and better ourselves, or do good deeds.  No, people just want us to not exist anymore.  We are like herpes, nobody cares when your not there.  When you pop in, all they can think of is how to make you leave. We were not the guy picked last in kickball.  We were simply asked not to play.

Now here we are with a body that is well into post mid-life, battered and worn.  Scars, both physical and otherwise, to match the self-image we see ourselves to be.  We examine the timeline of our existence, analyzing the carnage that somehow, despite our deepest desires, we have been responsible for.  How is that something so insignificant, so small in the grand scale, could inflict so much horror and pain on the world.  many parts of us become angry at the others, as we do not understand.  We desire only to love, and do not even require love in return.  However we continue to suck the life out of everyone around us.  From our youngest memories to modern times, we are the bringer of sorrow and pain.  We are the beast.  If there were ever an evil, we feel we are the incarnate.

Are we a bad seed?  Is there such a thing?  Are we just a product of our environment?  The real question:  What does any of that matter?  Just as the death row inmate must live very day knowing his fate is already chosen, we do not have that luxury.  Our fate is nothing more than an accumulation of guilt and shame of the parasitic personality that we are.  We feel we are forced into a most destructive existence, a horror movie where we are the evil.  We move from scene to scene, movie to movie, unwillingly feeding on the joy of those around us.  Seeking only to nurture, we somehow find ourselves again causing pain and misery.  Wishing to end this existence is not an escape.  We cannot escape what we are.  We cannot run from that which forces us to feel fear every second of every day.  The part of us that still wants to believe we are good, pushes forward through time.  Struggling more as every day passes, the weight of our past growing exponentially.   We are torn between what we know we are and what we feel we can be.

Multiple Personalities and Polyamory. Finding Happiness Without Guilt, Shame or Judgement.

For those of you just tuning in, we are a system of thirteen alters, living inside a single body.   We are like a bunch of roommates, sharing a studio flat, in Tokyo.  The interpersonal exploits are as many as we are, multiplied exponentially.  This too goes for our love lives.   Welcome to the crazy world of being batshit crazy!

To begin, lets just lay it all out there, I am Kevin, your host as well as the owner fo said body.  Our body is forty eight years in existence.  We are also joined by the following:

  • Lawrence (Larry) O’Knight. Late Adolescence, and Spooky smart
  • Brian.  Fourteenish boy with very dark insides, suicidal, goth
  • Little Kevin, Six, Scared to death
  • TK, Third Grade Kevin, Nine years old, walking anxiety
  • Pat, Vietnam Vet, crazy as hell, loves to drink
  • Jeff, Twenty one, loves weed and logic theory
  • D, System Peacekeeper
  • AJ, 19, Focused and very aggressive
  • Sandy
  • KK, Sixteen and pretty happy mostly, but quiet
  • SGK, Twelve years old and very messed up, barely speaks
  • Kevin, Me.  I am the host and own the body.  I remember very little of anything

 

SO, now we have established the cast, we will have to set the stage.  Such a production this has become, and yet it has not.  We, the system, married Tammy, in 2010, for many reasons, most of which were codependent and unhealthy.  We tried to substitute others in our life to love, since we ourselves could not feel love.  We believed that if we loved another children, then they would love us the same.  This is not only wrong, but very very dangerous.  This was all pre-awareness.  We still were living under the guise of singularity and trying to pull it off; Miserably.  Tammy had three beautiful bay girls, raising themselves.  Kevin, me, as we always do had to save them.  We have to save anything that has not matured yet.  Children, animals and even the odd hooch, as long as they are kiddos.

We married Tammy in order to get her kids abroad with us.  We were being sent to the Middle East, and could not bear to leave them.  We were in love with saving her babies, she was in love with Larry.  Yes, Larry, our chief bullshit artist, provider and resident butthead.  We love him, yes, as much as it pains us from time to time.  Tammy and Larry went on for nearly a decade this way.  We continued to live in this crazy death and resurrection cycle, we hav even in for eternity.  Larry could always get our shit together, but we always crashed and burned.This seemingly self perpetuating cycle fo glory, fear and misery, intuit order, had always been our norm.  We never expected anything to last very long, as much as we desired longevity.  The cycle of pain was evident and by the time we passed our mid thirties, we were learning to just live with it.  We had no idea who we really were, what we were meant to do and worse, if we had any real value to anyone.

Our relationship with Tammy was more than others before.  Tammy had her own crappy experiences to draw from, and we were good providers, despite the roller coaster.  Larry could see shit to a pig farmer.  We had an Aramco executive say in an open meeting one time, “I bet you could sell sand to the Arabs”. Larry’s reply to him, looking dead in the  eyes,” I just did”. Yeah, he is that good.    Anyways, Larry and Tammy held on for nearly a decade, traversing the complex fractured world that we created around us.  Where I craved stability and peace, Larry functions best in chaos and mayhem.  Only now the body was seriously broken.  We became completely, physically disabled.  Wow.  game Changer here.

The ability for us to NOT be able to work, was catastrophic to the system.  Before we could always move around, bounce, and land upright.  We could resurrect ourselves from moist anything, as we had done many times.  This time, we were stuck in the mud.  Unable to walk, work, and earn, the pressure was building.  We now had a baby of our own, as well as three other girls to raise.  The system went into panic mode.  We nearly shut down, but then something happened:  We found awareness, and acceptance.  In an effort to salvage our relationship with Tammy and the girls, we came out of the darkness. and confronted ourselves.

For the next two years, we struggled as a group.  Both Tammy and the girls, and us, trying to figure out who we all were, where if anywhere, we fit in the family, and exactly what we were to each other.  This is complicated when there are thirteen sharing a body.  Everyone at first glance, had been dealing with “Kevin’.  However the variousness of our moods was always attributed to eccentricity, moodiness or just good old fashioned nuts.  We were no trying to direct our past, in order to have a foundation of who we were to become in the future.  The biggest fuck we had during all this, forgetting that we actually HAVE to live in the PRESENT!  We completely sacrificed the present, for a glimmer fo hope in the future.  This is absolutely the wrong way for anyone to live, much less a trauma survivor.  It was about this time we started to study Existentialism, and the promise it delivers on; Freedom and Empowerment, NOW!

So, your saying to yourself at this point, how does all this lead to Polyamory?  Thats actually quite a short hop.  Lets look at a few things here:  Me, Kevin, has spent the better part of a decade married to a woman, I hardly knew.  Larry, has been in charge of the body since 1990, and thus was very used to having control over most things.  Kevin, the host and owner of said body, was still very lonely, and miserable.  Even surrounded by family, alone and unloved.  I was trying so hard to learn WHO, and WHAT I was.  We had forgotten what that meant, what it felt like to be whole and wanted.  We wanted that again.  After years fo intense psychotherapy, we felt like the time to start the journey was upon us.  We spent almost two years housebound.  We were ready to go out.  Out we went….to Thailand

Yes, we as a system, went to Chiang May, Thailand.  This was a decision long in the making.  We planned on retiring herein 2019, and wanted to have a look around.  Pat was excited and thought he would meet some of his adult children he left behind from the Vietnam war, and Larry was on the lookout for businesses to buy.  I just want ed to eat, were vegan, and thats almost Taboo in West Texas.  We travelled solo, with no real expectations than good food, and drink.   Copious drink!  LOL!

After being in country for about three days, we meet Jun.  This was not fate or anything quite so dramatic.  Larry had gotten into a fight with a dapper ladyboy in another bar, and we went walking to this one.   Little did I know, Jun and I were both taken back from the chemistry that resulted.  Here we are now, a year later and still feeling the fire.

After several more trips, and relocating Tammy, and our common daughter Aaliyah, to Chiang May, they met Jun.  This was everything that you would think it was, and then some.  Although we had somewhat indicated to Tammy about Jun, she knew who she was and all, the reality setting in of having another wife was rough, for all of us.  Tammy felt betrayed, Jun felt Jealous and like a bad person, and I was carrying the guilt and shame of it all, even though I was completely happy.  The fireworks that followed for anything but happiness.  The emotional flood was overwhelming, and yet cleansing.  here was the problem, Larry was still completely attached to Tammy and Aaliyah.  Aaliyah, and I were attached to Jun, and Jun was attached to Me and Aaliyah.  So you see here the dilemma.

Now comes the really interesting and quite cool part;  The phoenix that emerged from the ashes fo all this chaos and fighting, was beautiful, powerful and just….WOW!  With the help stubbornness, and a lot of love, we were able to all  learn things about each other, and ourselves.  We found that all of us had been living lives before, that none of us wanted to lead.  We all found that we were all happier together.  We also found more forgiveness and love in our little circle, that we had ever before.  The sense of having a place, fitting in that place, and knowing your ok, is priceless.

We all ended up living together in a house in the city, where Kevin, me, and Jun have a fairytale relationship.  Tammy and Larry get to spend time together almost every day, Aaliyah has more love than she can handle, and Tammy and Jun are the closest sisters we have ever seen.  Loving each other for the common love of us.  How cool is that.  Everyone respecting each others feelings.  This is not utopia at all.  We are a group of friends who love each other.  Tammy is Kevins best friend, always was.  This is not a crazy hippie love fest/orgy thing.  This is a crazy hippie love fest friend thing.  We emotionally support each other, respect each other, and realize that there is so much more we can do when we cast aside the archaic guidelines, used by people to control that which they do not understand.  This is not one person being a “Stud” or two ladies being  less than moral.  This is three people who are only just learning that love is not something that should ever be pushed back, or feared.

Love is something that just is.  You have to work to keep it, cultivate it, and water it.  Understanding, acceptance and caring, are these hallmarks we all desire.  The need to possess something is neither positive, or empowering.  The group of us do not possess any of the others,  we do not control or make demands.  We try to make what we want clear, which is a struggle at times.  We try to realize that there is something bigger and better than each one of us, all of us.  Our family.  Working together we are all coming to a place where worry is gone, hope is abundant, and living in the present is what we do.  We all have freedom because we all live in today.  We have no expectations other than honesty and love.

Maybe for us, living Poly, is not a big transition.  We have been internally poly since age six.  We have had separate and independent relationships, even unknowingly, for years.  We have found that we all, inside and out, want the exact same things.  We just wan to have a place where we KNOW we will be safe today.  Where we will have someone to hold us at night, and to feel like all the love we give is returned the same way.  We live on a planet where the ratio of the sexes is highly skewed, and thus to expect one to one fidelity is not only unrealistic, but sentences many to a life of solitude and loneliness.  As a system of many, we always had much love, in many types to offer.  We never felt like sex was the ultimate goal of any relationship.  We felt the ultimate prize, was to be wanted as much as you wanted someone.  Not all the system feels this way, our views about relationships and sexuality are a s varied as our personalities.  The one thing we know for sure, happiness is the key to a long relationship.  You can get happy in your relationship as long as you feel you are getting as much out of it as you put in.  That is a hard trick, and sometimes having a team is not only a good thing, but almost a requirement in todays times.

Connectivity Achieved! With ourselves, and the world.

We have over the course of our existence, been searching for connection. Connection amongst our own selves, as well as connection with the world around us. We have tried running, traveling, hiding and even the ever popular, failed relationship. Never did we feel connected to anything, or anyone. Walking forever alone in a sea of living things.

The obstacles to our connectivity were for our own protection. Walls and barricades, made harder and stronger by time and trauma. Reinforced by repeat victimization. You see, when you are taught how to be the victim, predators can spot you like a bird of prey eyeing up his next meal. Out of a desire to connect, be accepted and desired, we eagerly fall into their grasp. Even with the protective layers built around our psyche, we cannot protect ourselves from our greatest enemy, Loneliness. The desire to interact with other living things will drive many of us to take in strays, not only the four legged kind, jump feet first at the first sign of attraction and desire; Hosing tightly as we know eventually this too shall pass. We will drive them away. We can never connect intimately. We can never get close. We are always alone even in the arms of one who claims to love us.

As our journey has spanned both hemispheres and four continents, as well as fourth years, we still seek that which we lost so many years ago. A time when we were connected to each other, without the fragmented reality we now exist in. Like an idea that tugs at the threads of your existential being, you desire it, you need connection.

Currently living in Southeast Asia, the most recent stop on our quest for the end of Tha rainbow, we have experienced for the first time connection. Connection so real and tangible, we could feel the very molecules in the air around us moving. We could sense each other not as fragments, but as a singularity. Cohesively thinking and sensing our environment without fear and trepidation. Fear you see, is the obstacle to freedom. We began our adventure in a noodle shop on the side of the road, in Nong Hoi Thailand. A journey that began as a casual hello and ended as something more human than we have ever experienced. The closest thing we can ever remember that brought us this close was being at the birth of our child. This was further down the rabbit hole still.

During our evening out for birthday, we took a trip. We adventured through time and space, to a point where time stopped. Where fears fell away and senses were expanded past consciousness. We entered the void we so desperately had been trying to find. We found ourselves, and quite ironically, we were not alone. We could at last FEEL the world around us. Unfragmented, and unadulterated by fear and trauma. This was as intoxicating as any drug we have ever done. This is too profound to properly capture in the written word as we so desperately are trying here. We could see the music, the sound waves passing through the air, the sensations of the lights moving over our body like cosmic fingers. We were one with our environment. However we could not name to you which one of us was present. We all share the same memories of that evening, however none of us, alters, were there.

As we transcended the conscious plane, and travelled further into what was moments ago, unreachable to us, we questioned our sanity. This action was of course not strange to us. We have, as well as most others that meet us, questioned our sanity and rationality. However this time we did so because we did not fear that which was upon us. We were completely immersed in this sensory porridge, yet not drowning or panicked. We were in touch with every aspect both seen and hidden, yet completely safe. Why were we not afraid? We seek to discover this very thing. What happened to the deer that has protected us for so long? Why, in this moment without our fears did we not freeze and run?

To be continued after our next journey…

Fearing What We Need The Most

Recently, while indulging in not so intellectual pursuits, our minds seem to wander and realize something so basic, yet so foreign to us.  As human beings, and mammals, or just about any living creature, we all have common traits and needs.  The need for sustenance, the need to procreate, the need to sleep, and other things.  These are things that bind all living creatures together, and to some degree, prove that we are all inter-related, and part of a single ecosystem.  Perhaps the most significant of these things, is intimacy.  I am not speaking of the intimacy that comes with procreation.  I am referring to the intimacy that can be felt between any two living creatures.  The need for closeness, that drives humans, to have pets, lovers, friends, and even enemies.  Yes, sometimes even an enemy can provide a level of intimacy.

This is a very basic NEED.  I emphasize the word need here, as this is factual.  This is why many believe that the worst form of cruel and inhumane punishment is the use of solitary confinement.  Living beings, sentient or not, require intimacy with another living creature.  They need to feel needed, and un-alone.  They need to feel wanted.  This has shown to be the case in many examples, most easily demonstrated, by infants.

Infants, especially when sick, in pain, or otherwise in distress, will almost always, respond to sensory touch.  How can this be?  How can an infant, unable to comprehend the complexities of human behaviors most associated with closeness, respond to and even repair their bodies, with the simple thing as gentle closeness?  This is not terribly difficult to grasp, once you have been deprived of it.  The understanding of things comes easiest to  those who thirst for it the most.  In the case of intimacy, physical touch, the trauma survivor craves this most of all, yet runs from any sign of it.

Why then do we desire that which terrifies us the most?  Simple, even though we instinctively seek out touch, warmth and closeness, we have never been able to understand why.  In most every case in the survivors lifespan, physical touch, or relative closeness to anyone, has resulted in pain, loss, and terror.  These things were not one off events.  In the case of complex trauma, these were the norm ,and thus became hardwired into our psyche.  Thus, even though we seek intimacy, as we get closer to it, our fears will take control, and keep us safe.  We run away, or even more common, we drive others from us.

The protections from Intimacy come at a great expense to the survivor.  We tend to overcompensate in the areas of social interactions, usually making a muck of things. Sometimes we get it right!  We feel overjoyed at the peak of success we have achieved, till we do not.  We come crashing down the mountain, only to lie in a heap of fear, doubt, and self loathing most often mistaken for self pity.  What others perceive as self pity, is actually the survivor reaffirming to himself the programming he was instilled with so many years.  He is a worthless, horrible, and good for nothing child that should have been drowned at birth.  Yes, people do say these things to their children.

What we end up with, becomes a frightened child, in a. an adult body.  Constantly reaching out for affection, attention and the affirmation he never received as a child.  These are all things a child needs to build the confidence required of an adult to be successful.  The survivor, even in cases without the fragmentation of Dissociative Identity Disorder, becomes embroiled in daily struggles to just breathe.  The fight to stay alive seems futile, almost trivial and torturous, compared to the tranquility of death.  Thus, many survivors choose to exercise this choice.  The choice for death can seem very appealing when your sense of self worth is lower than whale feces.  This is not depression, this is how we feel, believe and experience our day to day existence.  We KNOW and BELIEVE we are these things.  We have become exactly as we were constructed.

Fast forward now to adulthood, early middle age.  Maybe you have children, maybe you do not.  However, try to imagine yourself, without ever feeling another desire to touch you in a way, that is positive.  Yes, there are many adults, that by the time their bodies reach adulthood, they have still never progressed emotionally.  They are in effect stuck in time.  One cannot progress onto the next stage of development mentally, unless you have built a strong foundation in which to build. The desire to have closeness is still there, but the tools have never been developed.  Thus, train wrecks and chaos abound in the survivors life.  Trying to defeat the instincts of binding is almost impossible.  You cannot defeat the instinct to breathe, or eat, or procreate?  As we grow, we learn and adapt, using the tools and lessons we learn as children, or supposed to.

Imagine trying to build a house without tools or plans.  Try to fix a car without parts.  The same goes with living beings;  you cannot build an adult without the tools needed to allow them to grow, both physically and developmentally.  In the absence of nurture and positive ideals, the blank canvas, that is the Childs mind, will absorb whatever is presented to it.  In the case of abuse and trauma, all of the negative energy becomes a part of the Childs personality.  The self image that is created in these formative years becomes engraved for all time, forcing the child to endure the suffering for a lifetime.  Even when the Childs body grows, or for some other reason, can escape the prison of blame and victimization, the self hatred continues on for most in perpetuity.  For most this cannot be overcome without professional guidance.  Unfortunately, this is rarely found.

For a trauma survivor, much like an alcoholic, the starting place for recovery has to be the bottom.  It seems that only then, can we truly force ourselves in to the fears of trusting people, enough to allow them to help.  For all time, whether it be self fulfilling prophecy, or the evil that is inflicted upon us, we run the farthest and fastest from those who claim to care fr us.  We are you see, programmed into believing, “I love you”, means quite literally, “I will use you, hurt you and discard you when I am done with you”.  We hear the same words as others, but the translation is far different.  Even in circumstances where we try and connect with other humans, we are overcome with our programming, falling into doubt, fear and disbelief; not only in others, but mostly ourselves.  This is the reason we run.

The disbelief in ourselves is so deep and infectious, we struggle to have any confidence in almost every decision.  We cast doubt ourselves not only on those around us, but ourselves.  We do not believe that anyone could ever truly care for us’. The truth is, we have no idea how others are supposed to show care and affection.  Are we as people, doing our duty as a companion, only if we become the victim our partners or friends require?  Are we less of a person if we decide that we have needs and desires of our own, that are separate from others?  These are the struggles that we face every second of time we are here.  The futility is only compounded by the need to understand why we are so different from everyone.

Many times, from childhood onwards, we have been accused of being dramatic for attention, being selfish, conceded and uncaring.  The fact is this, we desire only that which our instincts lead us to want, affection that comes without strings, obligation or most of all, pain.  We do not realize ourselves the flat circle that is our own existence.  We know only that we desire something, yet we fear the result more than the lonliness.

The Safety of Unfamiliarity

We are currently at 40000 feet and traveling back to our current home. As we have over fifteen hours to our next destination, we have been reflecting. We have always been most at ease when we travel. No matter the reason for it. Work or play, immigration or just good old migration, we are most comfortable when we are completely unfamiliar to our locale. We are safest on the move. We choose flight, and the beautiful anonymity of travel. Being completely surrounded by strange people, places, foods, everything. The less we know about a place the more appealing it is. Not because we like the adventure, because we’re a stranger there. We become the anonymous anomaly.

Being plural, we have suffered most of the abuse, abandonment, torture and fear, at the pleasure of those who claimed to love us the most. For us the phrase “I love you “, carries a terrifying message hidden in the voices of those that speak it. We are the victim of convenience. We are the victim of choice. Many times we struggled to grasp how we could be so terrible as to be responsible for everything wrong in our family. These things must be true. They could not treat something they loved so much unless we were that terrible.

Learning to be comfortable on the move was a skill we developed early on. By the time we were six years old, we had attempted suicide once, ran away twice and moved twice. We had already attended two of thirteen schools. We would go on to live on three continents, and countless cities. As our brother would later say, “we lived as gypsies”. Truer words were never spoken. But why did we live this way? We never knew. Till later.

It has been said that moving, is more traumatic than the death of a close family member. So, let’s examine for a moment the reason we were moved about so much. The truth is uglier than anything Hollywood can fathom. We were running. Being transported as if a trafficked slave. Moved from one place to a far different place at the drop of a hat. Without notice. Constantly ripped from peers, schools and any resemblance of a childhood. The perpetual new kid, already with more baggage than any person should bear in a lifetime. Toting the burden of our abusers insecurities, and feelings of inadequacy.

By the time we had matured to the third grade, we became the obvious social oddity at times. With drastic behavior changes, note running away and self mutilation, we were the scapegoat openly now. Even having our first consensual sexual experience. This was followed with another suicide attempt in grade four. We moved again.

Today, we follow a similar pattern, as we have our entire life. Hiding in plain sight. Becoming what the situation requires and moving on. This is made more difficult with the addition of family. Family number three to be exact. Running becomes so engrained, we choose this over all. Even when, as we do today, choose to wander, we do this alone. Our family choosing to stay put. This was baffling to us at first. How could anyone stay in one place more than a year. People start to notice how we are after a while. They ask questions, and invariably notice a “quirk” about us. Silly them! They all just thought we were BiPolar! We had no idea either. We would become defensive, withdrawn, and self mutilating. Time to start planning our exit.

Lucky for us, some of us are are smart, desirable and even talented. Too bad we could not all work together. What a mess things become as we hide to run. Run to live. Live to run. We have been called cowards many times for this choice. We have borne the brunt of many people, “friends” and strangers alike. Made to believe we were weak for choosing life. You see, to us the only life was flight. To fight was not allowed, and to stay meant death, or worse. We would find a new job, and disappear into the night. Literally. So no one could see where we were going. We didn’t want to get into trouble. Even as a grown man.

The choice to fight or run, may seem like a choice to most. For us, we were in a corner; facing the worst fears a child can imagine. To fight meant the torture would persist. To simply ask why meant a good beating. The answer was clear, why ask. We were the source of all things bad. We had to run. To be safe, meant to be away from them. To be homeless in the open, in a strange place was better. We begged once to be put into juvenile hall.

People couldn’t grasp how a child from such a good family could turn so sour. Ungrateful, was a term we hear regularly. Every time we were caught, they would hand us back. We would endure more severe “punishments ” each time. You see, “fear is the most effective parenting tool”. A quote from our father. A belief he professed to anyone that would listen. His children would behave or wish they had. Our mother, troubled on her own without help, was a pawn in the game. Using us for her own sick games. Taking her anxieties out on the troubled child. The center of her troubles.

By the time we were in post adolescence, we had completely lost any sense of identity. Running as far as foreign countries. Finding solace and peace in homeless shelters. Safe if only for a night. Laying on the floor or the occasional bunk, wondering what tomorrow would bring. Would anyone ever miss us. Would anyone ever want us. We couldn’t think that far ahead. We had to think about what we were going to do for food next day, and where to sleep in the night. Our desires were basic, yet seemed so far away from the floor of a shelter in Soho.

Even now, as we feel much more in control, and in communication with ourselves, we struggle with being stationary. We struggle with being familiar. Will people see the chinks’ in our armor. Can they find a crack in the walls we have constructed so efficiently. Almost instinctively we start looking for a way to stay a stranger to the ones we’re around the most. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, anyone in the same county as us. We carry the same fears as the six year old child, sneaking out barefoot in the snow to run away, again. Safety it seems is really only a desire for us. To actually believe we are safe, we run. We have not stopped in 41 years. Even now, In this moment in time, we are flying somewhere else, and already planning another new lace to call home for a short time. We are gypsies hiding from a deadman, still very much alive to us.

The Dark Cloud Cometh

As we approach our travel day, away from Chaing May, the existential angst that has left us for most of our adventure returns.  The body has taken note, and we cannot deny the effects.  The fatigue, pain, and overall feelings of dread and dismay are completely upon us.  This is not a coincidence, this is the body keeping score.

We feel as if a storm cloud is approaching;  Ominous and powerful, rolling into our existence with unrelenting force.  our body is telling us what the rest of us already knows, we do not want to leave.  Chiang May, has ben a saving grace for us.  we have been able to be open and honest about everything in our lives.  We have stepped out of the closet and into the light without fear.  For the fist time, we can be free to be us, and we love it.  Now we return to the confines of our modest home, surrounded by the walls we have constructed so diligently, to keep us safe.  Walls that so much are invisible to the naked eye, protecting us form the stereotypes and judgements so many seek to pass on us.

As the time comes closer to travel, we grow depressed, both physically and mentally.  The ailments that plagued us so intently, mysteriously vanished in Chiang Mai.  The fears, primarily if people, that we seem to have quashed, and rid ourselves of are now seeping back into the existence we have so relished these last three weeks.  Even with the antics of the alters, we still were able to breathe here.  We were able to be “us”, instead of just being one of “them”. This is what we will most most about Chiang May, living in the light.

Friendships forged in the expat community, are always fast to be made, and just as easily can take extended leaves, without consequence.  We learn to accept on face value the human in front of us.  We learn to be accepted by those around us.  Learning to accept the opinions of others, especially when they’re of a positive nature, is quite difficult for us.  However with existensiality, of the Chiang Mai community, we can feel confident the accolades we receive are nothing more than truth.  Truth is now something we are growing to see, doesn’t have to be painful.  Truth can be quite pleasurable and freeing.  When immersed in an environment free from prejudice, hate and blanket insecurities, we can then begin to develop our own sense of identity; as we are no longer trying to “be” what we perceive what others desire us to be.

The cloud, blocks the light from reaching us, drowning us in angst, and pure existential crisis.  we KNOW, we are NOT living authentically, or in good faith, by abandoning such a place.  We also know, we have the ability to choose.  As we CHOOSE to return, we have to accept responsibility for this choice.  Even as our choices are in somewhat bad faith, we know that to have balance we must at times make such choices.  In order for us to reach our goal of living as we have in Thailand, we must sacrifice, to ultimately succeed.  We must throw ourselves further into the darkness in order to come back into the light.  We must weather the storm.  We must survive once again.

The blanket of anxiety that used to be our security, keeping us warm and safe, when we only had life and death to choose, now seems foreign to us.  We no longer want to stay hidden in the shadows, only peering out to see if the world was still turning.  Fearing everything and running from everything.   Chasing only a dream from one broken part to the next, in hopes of conscious tranquility.  The hope of one time being able to relax, breathe, and grow.  This for us the ultimate achievement.  Bringing all of us into the light, so that we may develop into something better, something useful, something desirable.  I accept the cloud that comes now only because, the cloud is now demonstrating to us just how happy we have been here.  Free, breathing and serene.

Being an individual, in a system of thirteen, can be a challenging and even frightening task.  We have always had each other to lean on, even if it meant exponentially complicating things!  We now know, that we can co-exist, in a. way that interfaces well with the world.  We can be desired, accepted and even respected.  We no longer need the darkness fo the closet to hide in.  We are reborn in the light of existential freedom, power and truth.  We are an individual, working as a group, to attain a common goal.  We are most certainly “WE”.

We will return to Chiang Mai, in several weeks.  We hope that the cloud, although familiar to us, will not continue to follow us till we return.  We also know that many of our own choices can effect how the cloud moves about us, transferring the negative energy stored inside.  As we return home to Texas. to our family, we know many negative things await us.  We know that the crisis will persevere, only till we change something in ourselves to either change it or die.  We choose life one r death today, at this moment.  We choose NOT to let others make our choices, as we are FREE, we are powerful, we are striving toward inner peace and balance.  Back in six weeks.  L

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