My Dissonance

Its amazing just how much I’ve grown and how much my functioning has improved within the past 2 1/2 years.  Its incredible.  For instance on Monday I cleaned my apartment, did laundry, worked on some online projects, did some reading, etc.  This is just normal things people do but then I think back to the period of time I spent not having any energy to do these little things.  Doing a load of laundry was a huge ordeal and it would take me the next day just to hang it up and fold it.  I remember just straightening up my room took everything.  I’d goes days without showering and now I even have a nighttime routine of brushing my teeth, washing my face, and applying toner and moisturizer after washing the make up off.  I take my contacts out where as before I could spend days with them in because I couldn’t function well enough to remember to take my night meds every night, much less take my contacts out.

Its just absolutely incredible how low I sunk.  How did I get there and why?  I guess thats what baffles me the most.  I feel like if I could figure that out I could definitely keep it from ever, ever happening again.  It all happened so fast — the mental breakdown and its aftermath.  Things just kept getting worse.  So now when I look back I still sort of stare back in complete bewilderment.  I know absolutely what it took to get back to where I am now in my level of functioning.  But how did I get that low?  I guess it was a combination of things.  The major being opening up to my therapist about my childhood and such.  But…still, for all of it to come crashing down within weeks?  It still sort of scares me still.  I don’t know?

Hope & Love Sent,

~ Ani

Apparently my therapist went to a seminar last week and wants to start a new type of therapy with me called IRRT.

This is what little I could find about it on the internet:

Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse
Memories with Imagery Rescripting
and Reprocessing Therapy (IRRT)

Memories are often encoded as images
and sensations inaccessible via language
alone. Learn how to use a powerful
imagery-based/experiential treatment
to help clients address unresolved
memories. Dr. Smucker demonstrates
a method combining imaginal reliving,
mastery imagery, and self-nurturing
imagery with cognitive processing to
promote healing.

Mervin R. Smucker, PhD

Everything I’ve found online is directed toward professionals looking to learn this new technique and not toward patients/clients describing what one can expect during this treatment.

My therapist said that we would need 2 hours together. I already see her an hour per week so our first 2 hour session is scheduled for the 9th of October from 11AM - 1PM. I’m thinking I may need to skip group that day to process the session more fully. She told me that its based on visualizing less stressing traumas and working my way to perhaps the worst of them slowly. She’ll talk me through the visualizing and such and its two hours long to make sure that she can get me stable before the end of the two hours.

She said that it will be more complicated because of the DID and that we have to make sure that I don’t have any sever dissociative episodes where I end up blacked out for a whole day or anything of that nature. I agreed to work with her. Anything is worth trying. I’ll be her first, or one of her first clients to work on this technique with since her class or whatever she took this past Thursday. So we’ll sort of be working together which I’m more than willing to do. I’m her first case of DID and probably her last seeing that its rare and what not — not easily detected due to the lack of education in the field of psychiatry and psychology.

But anyway…has anyone ever heard of or had any experience with this technique? I haven’t heard of it until today so now I’m curious. I know that EMDR has been good for some and horrendous for others. So I’m a bit apprehensive and still excited at the same time I suppose.

But my attitude is that anything is worth trying once. The mind is the last frontier in terms of the medical research, so trying anything new seems reasonable to me. Researchers know so little and 100 years ago they were digging holes into peoples skulls for christ’s sake. Furthermore, the field of Dissociation doesn’t go back much further on a serious level than 20 - 15 years ago as far as honest scientific research is concerned.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Hope Sent,

~ Ani

About a month ago my little sis and 2 baby nieces moved in with the mom. Everyone warned her not to cause the Mom is a lunatic in a very bad sort of way. Moms always been a drunk, addict, flying of the handle, and going off the deep end every day of her life. She’ll never change and the family has come to accept this. We’ve accepted shes mad, selfish, …. well anyway.

Bethany moves in with her and within a week Moms driving her nuts. Trying to nickle and dime her — like trying to charge my sister $200 for staying there the first week when the woman’s house payment is only $400/month. Meanwhile she tells the rest of the family that Bethany isn’t offering her any help financially at all. The point of Bethany moving in was to help our Mom because she’s gotten to the point mentally where she can’t keep track of her bills and has been in danger of foreclosure on her house.

Bethany walks in earlier today and finds Mom going through her personal letters and pictures. This is nothing new. The Mom once went through our twin brothers wallet and threw away some personal letters he kept in his wallet because she didn’t like what they said. So Bethany starts yelling at Mom for going through her personal things instead of respecting her privacy. Mom loses grip and grabs Bethany by the hair and Bethany in turn slams Mom’s head into the bedroom wall until she lets go. Meanwhile the little ones are crying, watching the whole thing.

::sigh::

Its not surprising in the slightest. But just upsetting that the little ones (2 and almost 4) were there and saw it. Its just disgusting. I called my older sister Tiffany who lives in AZ. We discussed how the Mom really needs to be put in a mental hospital of some sort for treatment for her mental problems (obviously violent). But Bethany and my twin wouldn’t go for it. They don’t keep people locked up long enough to really get help anymore unless she was put in a state facility. Shes a danger to others and to herself and could probably be accessed as such. Who knows…maybe a group home would do her some good if anyone would have her there. She wouldn’t follow the rules.

But shes never gotten treatment or sought help in all the years since I’ve been born. She was hospitalized years ago but it was more for a drug problem with speed. I don’t know. Its just more of the same thing. Just thought I’d share it I guess. I don’t know.

Hope Sent,

~ Ani

Wow, you know I haven’t really had this type of night in a while — where its 2AM and I’m not even remotely tired because I’m up and triggered. So I thought that I’d type here a bit and maybe sort it out. Or maybe just get it out. I’m trying my drinking warm milk and journaling about the problem remedy. And if that doesn’t work I’ll try sleeping with the light on, breathing techniques, yada, yada. I don’t feel scared per say to the point to where I’m shaky and edgy. I just have this dread and this waiting of feeling like I’m going to open my eyes to him standing over me. So thats where the sleeping with the light on option comes in. I’ve been reading through my journal as a teenager, highlighting points to give me some insight into a book of my memoirs I’ve been working on. It helps jog the memory and such, and also helps to give me clues into where I was exactly back then.

I’ve found an occurrence in the book - a memory - of my uncle’s abuse that I feel comfortable with sharing with the public, friends and family included. Not that its comfortable, but I feel its not too disturbing — just honest. Its not horrific — just enough to help people reading to understand, if that makes sense? My family knows about my writing this book, and they know about what my uncle did to me as a child, so I can’t leave it out considering it has a lot to do with my development growing up. So, there’s a decision I’ve made that’s no longer looming over the project, of “Oh God, what am I going to say? Whats safe that I can I tell them? Is writing this whole thing a mistake?” So yeah…sorry. Rambling.

So, reading about all of it in my journal though still triggered me. Reading about my suffering through my teenage years regarding the constant PTSD symptoms just brought tears to my eyes. I was just a kid but I was so hurt? It felt weird to cry for this girl that I used to be. To read through her words and hurt for her in a way that she couldn’t hurt for herself at the time — hurting for her almost a decade later. She was so very tormented. And its mind boggling that she was ever really me … that poor, confused girl.

Her words were so desperate:

(Jan. 3, 2000 ~ 3:30AM) “Can sleep now that I’m playing TooL. Please sing me to sleep. Please…my dreams…take away all this that hurts me so much…it makes me hurt me. I know its gone far, far too far. Please help me…Please, please, please help it stop. Numb it anyway you can. Just make it let go…”

In that excerpt I’d gone about a week with 2 to 3 hours of sleep a night. I was only 17 years old. I just wanted to go to sleep without having a nightmare or another flashback at the time that I wrote this.  I just was calling out on page for some peace. I come back at 6:46AM to report that I’d only gotten an hours sleep.

On the next page it reads:

“Every night I close my eyes, paranoid that when I open them I’ll be greeted with one of my past monsters standing above me. When I wake up and take my shower my mind always wonders back to [memories of abuse explained in further detail] … I can’t sleep for 1,000 different reasons and I can’t eat for 1,000 more. Its always something day after day after day. I know that no one has any idea of how much energy I put into hiding this from them.”

Its so strange to read that and look at how far I’ve come. It makes me stop and think and look back and question if I needed that experience - that suffering - to lead me into helping others with the same problems some day. To make it a passion because now, looking back, it didn’t have to be that way. I have so many more coping skills now and its so much easier for me to detach from the abreaction and remember “hey…these feelings and fears, they’re not real anymore”. To know that I need to put them back there where they belong because I’m not that child being abused anymore now than I was 7 years ago, at the time that I wrote these words into my journal. Back then that was ALL I had, the journaling. While its still a good coping technique, one of my main ones, I have dozens more today.

So, all of it, no matter how hard and no matter how much pain that girl was in back then, today I can give it purpose and meaning. And that is a comfort. It seems to me to make her suffering not all in complete vain. And I feel so blessed in that sense - to be able to find meaning in any of it.

Good Night to All.

Hope Sent,
~ Ani

Free The West Memphis Three
(**video opens in separate window**)

I still wear black at times and my taste in music hasn’t changed from my love for TooL, A Perfect Circle, etc. — music that could still be seen by the ignorant as representing “occultism”. In high school my teachers thought I was in “a cult” and certain members of my own family began at one time to fear the same thing. Its disturbing to think that this could have been one of my friends back then. Please help these guys!

Hope Sent,
~ Ani

Wow…just so you guys know, from this email I received (pasted below), I’m wondering about my home page? I thought this was spam until I realized this woman (Hilarie Goldstein) was referring to the photo on my front home page. The photo is of a model posing …does it bother any of you? Its NOT me in the photo and theres NO outright nudity. My intent was for artistic symbolism, to portray how I feel when I write here (exposed but still safely hidden from a distance). This email REALLY caught me off guard. Any comments or advice??

EMAIL
Hillarie Goldstein to anistar@withdissonance.net

Sep 6 (6 days ago)

New comment on your post #32 “Message Me”
Author : Hillarie Goldstein (IP: 66.153.101.84)
E-mail : hillarie@core.com
URL :

Comment:
You’re an exhibitionist. Why are you posing naked on the home page? You’re like these guys who work for child abuse org’s and end up molesting boys. You don’t know what side your bread is buttered on, do you? You don’t know where you end and the internalized perpetrator begins, do you? Why don’t you just go away. There is enough confusion in this world.

This is my second night in my new apartment … my first night staying here completely alone aside from with my cat Ariel, whose a permanent guest. I’m drinking chamomile tea and trying to get Mike off my mind…the worry, and the dread, and the wondering. Friday was our official ’six-year’ anniversary. But it didn’t feel as though we were celebrating anything at the time as a normal couple. Can we really put everything back together? Who is he? Will he ever figure that out? One minute he’s the man whom I’ve known for the past six years, who’s working hard to put his life back on track. Then he’s some stranger who looks at me as if to say, “You don’t know me and you’re better off not knowing”. I’m just so, so confused right now. I’m emotionally drained and physically exhausted.

On a good note though my new apartment is perfect. Everything has come together smoothly and I’m all moved in. I couldn’t ask for anything more in this area of my life. Financial comfort, freedom, and security I’ve never known for as long as Mike and I have lived together in the past. I pray that he finds his way through and that he can reach out and grab hold of all there is in this life for him if he could only see beyond his negativity, selfish reasoning, and self-destruction. I love him so much. Above all else I have to remember that I can’t be a part of that self-destruction.

Hope Sent,

~ Ani