NOTE: Each alter’s name has a number after it the first time
it is on the page to show which group s/he belongs to.
See the right of this page for the group.
Well, Christmas is over (though some people still have Christmas lawn ornaments still up. Don’t they know?) our birthday celebrations are over, our cold has pretty much gone away, and it’s mid-January. Time to buckle down to work. Doesn’t that just make you cringe? Most of the jobs we have had, and there were many, weren’t all that inspiring. For a number of years we worked with temp agencies, sent out usually one week at a time to one place and another and another. We calculated that we must have worked in at least 75 different offices in Vancouver during those years. At times it was very stressful but other times, well, Othel (1) loved it. He loved being new in a place and observing the dynamics of work relationships. Othel leans toward psychology and philosophy and even a little anthropology. In other words, he loves watching people. But make no mistake, he doesn’t like to get involved.
Our last job was one of the best and was really inspiring. We worked with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) facilitating workshops on mental illness. Usually in teams of two, we did two-day workshops covering the basics of mental illness and a few of the major disorders. We learned so much then. We also told a bit of our own story in each workshop and that was always the highlight. Telling our story feels so important, something we have always needed. Very early on, in our first post to you, we talked about the need we humans have to process important events in our life. As a child being abused, there was no one to tell. Thus we could not process what happened to us. We could not understand what was happening to us and why. Not until we began therapy in 1990.
Telling our story is about processing ... and processing ... and processing. Trying to understand what happened. And maybe it’s more than that. When you have kept secrets from the world .. well at some point you just gotta tell someone. When you have had to hold onto terrible secrets for so many years you want to tell even more, desperately. In those workshops we never told our story the exact same way. We did not want it to be automatic. So each time, in preparing for the workshop, we dug deeper Inside us to find out how we felt at the time. Then we would find a way to communicate that to the participants in the workshop.
One time, we saw a woman crying as we told our story and we began to cry a little too. It felt as if it was sinking in deeper, that we were closer to our own pain. And we wanted people to see that pain, so that they might feel just a bit of it too. We have also been writing a book for a long time now, years. That is another way to tell our story. And now this blog. It seems like the need to tell doesn’t go away, or maybe it just hasn’t been fulfilled yet.
In December 1990, when we sat at a desk in the psych ward at UBC, we began writing a little bit of our story for the counsellor we were seeing at the time, John. He was the first to read the document, the first to hear our story. When he read what we had written he said he thought we might be multiple. He said he didn’t think we were crazy and he didn’t think we were making it all up. No one would go through all that we had without it being true. Oh I remember that day well. After our session we went to the bus stop. I (Shell (1, 2)) recall standing there on Main and Broadway in some state of shock and yet, at the same time, a sweet relief. The burden of our soul had been slightly lifted and someone believed me. Believed us. Believed we were an “us”. Wow.
That document described the first ones to emerge – alters from the group called The Others. What a beginning. The start of an incredible journey – sometimes extremely painful, sometimes amazingly profound, at times spiritual ecstasy. It was like those dreams of discovering new rooms in a place you had lived for so long and didn’t realize they were there. A place to expand in, to become more yourself, to be all of who you are.
John believed us and that was all that we needed. That was the beginning.
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One more word about work. We told you about falling apart in 1990, and that there were some factors that influenced our disintegration including five people we knew dying in 1989. There was one more factor that impacted on our life – being fired from a job. Well, they didn’t say “fired”. No they just asked us to resign. That was such a blow. We had never experienced something like that before. We had always prided ourself on our work ethics. We also aimed to do as good a job as possible. But here, it seemed, we had failed. Fortunately, we didn’t lose all of our marbles then. We knew it was down to a personality conflict with our boss, the head honcho of the organization. He did not like us. Fine. So be it.
The following week after we had left, we went and saw him. Sat in front of him and told him what we thought. That his employees were not happy campers. That there were problems in the organization. And that he had no idea what our job was like. He mumbled something about not being able to hold our hand. But we told him that was not what we had expected from him. In the long run, we felt good about saying all those things to him. We held our head up high. There was no way this guy was going to make us feel bad and feel incompetent. We knew we were not. Still, the event left a mark.
Now the work we do is all at home. We know we cannot do anymore “outside” jobs. As much as we loved the job at CMHA it eventually became too difficult and too stressful for us. Too many of us hated any time taken away from focusing on us and what we needed. And the year we quit, 2007, our psychiatrist closed her practice. We had been working together for 17 years and expected almost a lifetime relationship of some sort. She herself talked about this and yet in the end she said sorry but I can’t keep my promise.
Then one of our colleagues at CMHA committed suicide and we were devastated and crippled by it. We took to our bed and watched tv a lot. We became depressed. We felt like we were losing control over our life. Things taken away from us. What did we have left? What was the point of anything?
Still, we eventually found our way back to some kind of sanity. We survived and got through it all. And today we feel better than we ever have. We still feel vulnerable, and sometimes depressed, oftentimes afraid of life and of death. But we feel so much bigger than we used to. We feel more of who we are and we will continue to tell our story until we get tired of it.
Thanks for listening. And don’t forget if you want to read more about specific alters go to the right and click on one of the pages.
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