Problem Solving

I have been completely lost inside a hormonal fog of meh this past week. I had a total rage fit a few evenings ago. I don’t even know what was wrong. I just felt like I was going to burst wide open and explode everywhere.

Wife was planning to order in some food, but that felt too overwhelming. Then the idea of deciding what to cook felt too overwhelming. I considered just sitting down in the middle of the floor and sobbing, but I threw on some workout clothes and went to the gym instead.

I’m not proud of the person I was before I got off the treadmill.

One of the strange things about DID is that you don’t always switch completely. Actually, I don’t think that’s strange at all. I think that might be a more common experience of dissociation and DID than the textbook DSM definition which (in my opinion, which I will clarify is what every word of this blog is, lest I be accused of trying to speak for every single person with DID again) totally over-values the whole “switching with amnesia” bit. It’s a far more complex and nuanced experience than that.

Anyway. The point is – this rage fit was definitely a combo deal. I could feel parts of Parts slamming into each other, trying to make decisions and assert themselves or just find a way to fucking cope. It doesn’t generally go very well under these conditions. We don’t agree. Everyone has different ideas of what should happen. It’s a mess.

But one thing I knew for sure was that if I couldn’t find a way to discharge some of that anger, it would end badly. Probably in some form of self-harm. I also know that Julia loves to workout and that doing so helps dial down her rage a few notches. Furthermore, if I could post-pone dinner by an hour or so, I knew it would give River a chance to pull it together and make a decision about what to eat. If those two were calmer, I figured the younger parts would start to calm down as well.

I wasn’t entirely sure my plan would work, but it did. It took a good 30 minutes of cardio to bring things down to a reasonable level. And once settled, we agreed on a homemade protein shake for dinner to follow-up the workout.

I was very impressed with the way I handled that. Mostly because I didn’t use dissociation to cope but stayed present with all those shitty emotions and sensations and used my super smart brain to actually problem solve. And it all worked out fine.

Huh. Imagine that.