Mental Health

If you have not been following this blog for the last month of April, I have been participating in the A-Z Challenge in which participants write alphabetically on a topic of their choosing. Writing is only half the story – with some 218 participants, the idea is to read the blogs of old friends and newcomers alike and if you don’t manage to do that during April, then the Roadtrip that follows in May is the chance to see what everybody else has been up to…

DID we write

One of the questions that the organisers ask in their prompt for the Reflections post that follows reaching the letter Z, is whether you invited or encouraged anyone else to join the challenge and though I didn’t invite, I did encourage a friend who had seen my post on day one of the challenge and who decided to participate. Some years ago, before Covid, one of my grandsons had his first gig as a rapper at a venue in Sheffield. The venue also contained some studios where various alternative medicine practitioners were offering treatment. My partner had a massage from a lady called Amber but over the intervening years, Amber has become aware that she has a DID system and that she has multiple identities and she has chosen to write about Dissociative Identity Disorder on her blog DID we write. If you know anything about DID or if you choose to read this extaordinarily brave and complex description of what it is to have DID, then you will realise how dificult a subject it is to write about.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is a response to childhood trauma – usually physical or sexual abuse whereby the child takes themselves into some part of the mind where they are disociated from what is happening to their body. The more trauma occurs and the more dissociation takes place – the more practised the child becomes and the places they take themselves may become identities in their own right and which may remain hidden in the psyche or may emerge later in life in what is known as a “system” of co-existing personalities. This is what happened to Amber and she writes as two identities, Mia and Berlou, who have created these very cogent posts to which I will refer you – for they explain it far better than I possibly can.

What I will say, is that to have DID and to write about it is extremely dificult and one of the dificulties, is that beyond Mia and Berlou, there are some “littles” who find the passion and intensity of Mia and Belou’s writing very dificult to put up with and protested to the point where Mia and Berlou had to take a break, and so their challenge has so far reached only “I” but that does not mean they are finished writing. Like marathon runners at the back of the pack, they are determined to finish the course eventually, so do not go home thinking it is all over, but visit, cheer on with comments and most of all, take the chance to understand an extraordinary, but commoner than you may think, condition…

The A-Z Blogging Challenge – A for Amber
B for Berlou
C for Change.
D for Diagnosis
E for Existing
F for Fronting and Forgetting
G for Grief
H for Healing and Hiatuses
I: Who is the ‘I’ in DID? 

There will be more posts, both from Mia Berlou but also form myself as I do the Roadtrip, but I wanted to dedicate this first Review exclusively to an extraordiary Challenge…