A Collective Mind

Picture by me. I call it “Shadow People”. It was made before I knew the whole of me and some parts of me only felt like shadows to me.

Yesterday it was DID awareness day. I worked, then was too tired to write anything, though I wanted to. I find spreading good information about dissociation to be very important!

I have a collective mind. Inside of me lives a village. Though you would probably not notice that if you met me. Especially not now after years of working with myself. We are quite seamless these days. A whole, yet still a collective. It has its advantages, and these days I seldom dissociate because I need too, but it is more of a conscious choice — and partly just a way of being consciously collectively organized.

I still find so many misconceptions about dissociation, and espcially DID.

Though I prefer to only call myself dissociative, or a collective or a multiple mind.

The fact is, I am just an ordinary person. Who happened to grow up in an abusive environment, with very little support or care. Who needed some good and protective coping skills, to stay sane and get through my childhood. Which is where dissociation comes into the picture. It is an excellent survival and coping mechanism.

My reactions and response to the trauma that I endured were very normal. There is nothing sick or disordered about it. There is nothing wrong with me. Never was.

I am working on putting together a training/course on dissociation, collective/multiple and/or dissociative minds, and a tool I use (and came up with), that I call the Wheel of Tolerance. Sort of a window of tolerance, for those who dissociate (and therefore can be in multiple states at the same time or in very rapid succession).

I wish people would be more curious, not only from some Hollywood sustained fascination for DID and its portrayed freakiness — but to see and understand the inventiveness and strength of children’s minds, who do and develop what is needed to survive childhood abuse as intact as possible. To understand the adult who lives with something that can be quite scary and debilitating before one has gathered some deeper understanding of the mechanisms of one’s own dissociation.

I share this out of my passion and mission to educate and inform. I will share when my training/course is up and running.

And if you have any specific questions or aspects you want to know more about in regard to dissociation and DID — throw them my way — and I will do my best to cover it in the training/course.

Thank you for reading!