Just needed to be heard for a little while

DUKE

I'm still here! Been a bit busy with one thing & another.

Waves_and_Smiles

Hiya Duke! How are you and Harry?

oldestgnome

WaS thank you for the explanation about MPD. Can you help me understand a bit more? How do you supervise Lucee in that way?

Am I right in thinking that generally the good voices which include Lucee are what you hear inside your head and the MPD are other versions of you like the one with the different accent to you which can take over you and you are then inside of yourself and not interacting but the two are different from each other? Hope that makes sense.

Are there also bad voices you hear due to the schizophrenia which you transcribed for us a few days ago and then MPD which you best not exploring or interacting with as they protect you from the more difficult childhood experiences?

oldestgnome

Thanks for being brave enough to ask questions haybel

Hello Duke, how's things?

How is that second shelf looking?

Waves_and_Smiles

All totally correct, oldestgnome!

The MPD people are fully formed people, who I can see within my mind who live in a house within the woods. I can visit them and interact with them and they have been there for as long as I can remember. When they are moving towards taking over the body I can feel myself changing. We are all somewhere on the spectrum, you know when you're tired or stressed and don't feel like yourself and don't feel real? Well, that is just lower down the MPD scale than I am.

The best example of taking over is Lucee. I will suddenly feel dizzy and the ground will feel much nearer, everything will feel taller and I'll feel closer to the ground (she's little!). I may trip at this times because her walking isn't that good! I will feel lighter in my mood and suddenly want to play with something or cuddle a toy and want to twiddle with my hair or even skip! They all have separate feelings when they want to take over but Lucee is the most obvious as she is so young. Sometimes, I can see out from inside myself and watch my hands move and hear myself talk but I have no control over it (if they allow me to watch them).

There are two sets of voices with big differences. The MPD voices I hear inside my head. Not from the outside. The best way of describing this is imagine recalling a conversation you had with someone. In your memory you see the person and hear the conversation. The inner world is just like that except it isn't a memory and I don't control what I see and hear. It is a complete community of people interacting very much as we do in the real world. There are some that they won't let me meet particularly the people that were there during the missing 9 months. Once I get to know someone in the inner world I will pick up on their memories (like suddenly remembering something obvious that you had forgotten), they can also show me their memories if they choose to that play out like films in my mind. They then become my memories,too.

The bad voices I hear from outside of my mind as if someone is talking into my ear, not from within my mind. They have no physical appearance at all. The people in the inner world can hear the voices, too and sometimes they scare them. These are symptoms of my illness and not reflections of me at all.

Oh, and personal preference here, I hate that it is called a disorder. It isn't something that needs to be fixed for me. It was a coping strategy that I learnt to use when I had no other option and it doesn't harm me in any way. It saves me from remembering some of the worse things that happened to me and very likely stops me ending my life or going totally insane. Little me wanted to live when she created the inner world and I don't believe something was wrong with her, she didn't want to die and did all she could to prevent that happening. I call that a victory, not a problem.

whitewing

Is there a higher incidence of MPD amongst schizophrenics than the general population?

Waves_and_Smiles

The jury is out on that one, whitewing but the evidence points to yes. The two conditions get confused and often one is diagnosed when it is the other. For a long time some psychiatrists believed that there was no difference and that it is just different manifestations of the same illness. This has now been refuted thankfully. Someone with MPD without Schizophrenia will not hallucinate at all, everything is seen within the mind. They will not be excessively paranoid either and many people with it lead relatively ordinary lives with some symptoms of PTSD. But the biggest clue is no amount of medication will stop you hearing and seeing MPD people. It isn't a chemical disorder and you can't control it with pills at all.

Also, MPD has recently been reclassified as DID, Disassociative Identity Disorder. This was to show that there is a spectrum, people have different degrees of the same condition, for example some people may feel like someone else and want to be called a different name at times but not blank out as I did yesterday. There is a subtle difference, however as MPD implies you are right at the top of the spectrum with switching (when you swap the use of the body), suppressed memories and co-conciousness (when you can communicate with a lot of the others and they can with each other). So I am on the DID spectrum with MPD.

Pyxis

Good evening, WaS!

Firstly, may I say to haybel19, please don't be afraid to ask questions for fear that may be silly. Education always starts with a question! All the great brains asked questions that many people thought were stupid at the time - Galileo, da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, (and now haybel!) - seriously, though, asking is how we learn. If anyone says "what a silly question!", it is they who are silly, not the enquirer!

I once posted a question on the IT thread. One reply said, "it's such and such, OBVIOUSLY!"
"Well," I replied, "it wasn't obvious to me, which is why I asked in the first place!"
Other people who replied weren't quite so crass!

Anyway,for every question you ask, there will be other people who want to know that as well!

I'm sure that if WaS doesn't want to answer a particular question, she will say so, and why.

Now I've forgotten what I was going to ask you, WaS!.........:rotfl:....oh yes! .......if the good voices are all different facets of you, and therefore, ARE all you, why is it still so important for them to keep their 'distance' from say, your partner?
I kind of feel I understand why, but not entirely!

Waves_and_Smiles

Several reasons why, Pyxis! For a start they are all different ages with different likes and dislikes. Most like my partner as a friend but wouldn't want to date him. Also some like Lucee are only little and think boys are icky! There are also males in here who are straight sexually and who would run a mile at anything romantic with my partner, along with those who have been so disturbed by the abuse that they suffered that they couldn't imagine being with anyone.

It is also out of respect to my partner. Some of the people inside are quite different to me with their own personalities so it would be confusing for him to say, sit down and watch a tv programme with me (if I did that) and then be told 2 minutes later that it was boring. It was this aspect of me that he fell in love with so it is agreed that he has that, he has met 2 people from inside who he doesn't even particularly like so that would be very unfair on him.

Think how a major part of our personalities is formed by what we experience. Well, we (all of us in this body) have all experienced different things and have different memories so we are different people. My partner loves this aspect of me formed from my experiences, others can be very different because they have been through different things.

oldestgnome

Thank you for the clarification

I love that people ask questions, helps my understanding!

Pyxis is bang on!