Hello. This ask is long and complicated and probably hard to understand; please feel free to put it off until later, when you’re not half-asleep. I’m in absolutely no state to be talking to people so forgive me if anything here’s accidentally offensive or something. I don’t mean to be. I…just started existing again. You’re a…traumegenic system? Or…traumatized? You have experience with shifts brought on by extreme stress, I guess is my question? How did that start? Because I…we? have two specific problems. 1) When we are upset, especially if we feel guilty over something, we struggle to move past it. Even if we don’t actively beat ourself up, we sit in bad, “slow” motions. It drains our energy. 2) If this persists too long, without resolving or getting worse, we…cease, is the best way I can describe it. At best, we struggle to move the body. We struggle to find the energy to move or look around and we don’t even think about speaking. It’s…a process. Slow movement, slow speech, turns to silence and stillness. That kinda thing. That “ceasing” often comes with a desire to cease existence. To not perceive the world or be perceived. To…hide. We learned tonight that we can turn off lights if we need to do things (there’s a light directly above the stove, so we could see to cook dinner), and that combined with ambient or distant music that induces a dissociated feeling helps recover. A little. We’ve only tried it once, so take it with a grain of salt. I guess my question is…does this make sense? Do you understand? Is it familiar? I don’t think I’m…Host. I’m pretty sure I know who I am, but all of our “internal imaging” (names, faces, etc) is all just…gone. A black void. Nothing. So I can’t check my identity against that one. I just want to help them. So badly. They so, so desperately do not want to be known. Even without this strange personality-swapping, they don’t want to be known as a whole person. Signed, 💙✉️
Hey, friend. We don’t consider ourselves traumagenic for the most part (we do have a traumagenic subsystem), but yes, we experience issues related to plurality due to our trauma.
None of us are licensed medical or psychology professionals but in our experience, it sounds like what you’re dealing with is some heavy dissociation episodes, in the form of depersonalization. We’re definitely familiar with it.
Our advice is for you to look into people’s described experiences with dissociation and depersonalization, and see if you feel like they match what you’re experiencing.
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