Should I stay or should I go? Finding the best solution for you both.

   The first thing you have to decide as a partner of someone with DID is: Do you want to remain being a partner of someone with DID?

            It sounds simple, but it is an incredibly difficult decision to make. There will always be one friend who tells you that you have chosen wrong, you will always have doubts, but it is important to remember that this is a choice you get to make over and over again. They have to live with DID because of their life experience. You don’t. You get to re-choose every day to live with this person, with their struggles, to either help them heal or choose to walk away and heal yourself in the hopes that things will work out better for you both in the long run. The only problem is, that the longer you stay, the more damage you will cause when you go – so keep collateral in mind. If you think you can’t handle it, go earlier rather than later and if you can, try to make sure they have the support of friends and family.

            The main issue for me was therapy – if John was willing to go to therapy and work on things, I was there for him 100%. If he chose not to try the path of healing I was out. The first stage of deciding was as simple as that – although I would caution you not to make this an ultimatum. Also you want to make sure you are speaking to the conscious mind when discussing therapy [there will be a post dedicated to talking about therapy later] and I would encourage you to accompany your partner to the door of the therapy room the first few times to ingrain it as a habit and make sure they are being honest about going. Accompanying them is also a show of support – it can be scary for them those first few times! They don’t necessarily know who is in their heads, even if you do! You won’t be allowed in the room, most likely, which is for the best, but walk or drive them there and hang out in the area while they are with the therapist so you can be there for them when they get out. I know John prefers when I do this now, even though I haven’t been these days. His therapy time is my once-a-week quiet hour at home in the evening.

            The big question really is: what is the best for both of you? It will be a hard one to ask. The answer will probably be equally as hard, whether it is to stay or go. I cannot tell you what it is like to choose to go, as I chose to stay, but I can tell you what it has been like for me to stay and live with someone with DID in the hopes that it can give you some insight. I do not regret a single day and while John feels guilt for some of what he put me through, he also knows it was necessary for us and our future together. For us, it was worth it. We got married during this time, we had an amazing honeymoon in Cornwall filled with English castles and walks along seaside cliffs. We had lots of normal evenings with good food and did projects, played games, and exercised together – couples yoga has been a blessing for us! Now it is more likely for us to have an evening without him being triggered than it is for him to be triggered. Sometimes its almost like it never happened, though usually in those moments something does trigger him and I am brought crashing back down to earth, but those brief moments are amazing and we end up doing romantic, fun, adventurous things in addition to the happy, homey things. I do still have to walk on eggshells around him not to trigger him – it is hard, it takes energy, it requires me to hide some of myself from my husband and it requires him to know that I am doing that, but it isn’t going to last forever and we both know it.

As I write this I am sitting in my lovely English flat (I am not a native to the UK), the indoor plants are thriving, adding a vivid green to the grey sky very visible out the huge windows, dark grey carpet and cream walls. Two bookcases sit opposite me, littered with colour and intriguing titles relating to both John’s and my professions and interests. I am sitting on the couch looking at the one filled with all of my academic monographs and thinking about what happened with the last year of my life. The year of my Ph.D. that disappeared. The year I disappeared. 

Basically, the last year has entirely been spent taking care of John and learning a hell of a lot about myself. I did manage to get some teaching done, but very little on my thesis. I even quit a seasonal job that required me to spend time working on a monastery in Egypt reading and recording medieval graffiti, something I loved. My body has deteriorated somewhat from the strain – I look much older now than I did before this year, though things like the baggy eyes from months of sleepless nights are starting to fade and occasionally I am starting to look and feel healthy again.

When John and I moved in together my life changed suddenly and drastically. I went from being a fairly high level academic who travelled all over the world for various conferences, research, archaeology work, and fun (I love rock climbing in different parts of Europe and the Middle East) to being almost a house wife – a stay-at-home care giver. I rarely left our small town to commute to the city and my university. I stopped talking to people because I didn’t have the energy, or knew that there was no way they could possibly understand my situation. I stayed close to John because he would become triggered when I left town, and I spent the first few months when he was in crisis mode using the days to catch up on sleep because he was up every night in an attempt to either bolt (its called dissociative fugue) or harm/kill himself. I would get him to work and spend all day with the phone volume on loud in our flat so that I could hear every text and try to soothe whichever alter was texting me horrifically painful things about either killing himself or leaving me while his arbitrator alter was making it look like he was doing everything normally at work. I would try to clean between text bouts, would try to nap, sometimes I’d even get a shower in. Almost every text was something horrifically painful to read. John’s trauma spoke to my own – we all have experienced some type of trauma, even if it isn’t DID related, and people with DID seem particularly skilled at pulling that out. In small amounts of exposure I’ve seen it be healing and beneficial. I have seen John get someone to start thinking seriously about therapy and actually go for the first time after talking about it for years. However, if you are constantly exposed, as I am, you simply have to deal with your shit as you become aware of it because it is going to be pulled out of you and scattered every-damn-where at full speed.

I suffer from abandonment issues from literally being abandoned by a parent when a sibling of mine became terminally ill. Things worked out, my brother didn’t die and is one of my closest friends. My mother and I are still…working things out. In any case, John’s constant text messages attempted to distance me because he felt I would leave somehow anyway and/or he was trying to repeat his trauma by forcing me to abandon/neglect him in the hopes that someone would save him/it would work out differently this time around. If you haven’t read previous posts – John’s mother became incredibly ill with rheumatoid arthritis when he was 2 and could no longer hold him and could barely touch him. The two had been inseparable before she fell ill. This is what caused his DID. How does a highly intelligent two year old understand his mother suddenly not wanting to touch him and suddenly looking and moving differently? He decided it must be his fault and so it began.

In any case, there is no way for me to communicate the soul-wrenching pain caused by those texts, yet at the same time I knew that he had to communicate this stuff, that he needed these fears to be heard. And even though it was hard, I also felt honoured that he was willing to share this much of himself with me. I read them all, I had panic attacks, I contemplated suicide, I tried to reach out to friends for support who only kind of understood and spent more time being irritated with me for trying to stay in the relationship than they were actually helpful or kept demanding to know how I was doing rather than hearing about John, as if I could have even contemplated how I was doing. I practically didn’t exist at this point as an entity with any purpose but to get John to a stable place. And I went to therapy as often as I could with the counselling service at my university. The friend who had walked me there in the first instance was kind, I knew I could reach out to him and so I did, and he gently listened while I unloaded just the tiniest percentage of the horrors that were unfolding – I had to be careful with him as John had not yet given me permission to explain fully what he was suffering from to anyone but the counsellor for the first few months. In the meantime, for those rare moments that John was not dissociated and trying to sabotage our relationship, we had an amazing life together. In the evenings he would write the plot and scripts to one of his shows (he is an author for a tv show as a hobby on the side) out loud and let me help occasionally, which sometimes turned into writing together, and we would just…be, just joke and plan for the future and cook and go for walks, exist as an almost normal couple. When I struggled, he would comfort me, even had an alter that existed for this very purpose. Life was safe and very very happy when he wasn’t dissociated or in an ego state, and, depending on the alter, sometimes it was safe and happy even if he was! There were some who were friendly and helpful and those parts of him shone through the darkness. There was even one who didn’t talk, but just made a heart shape with his hands, smiled lovingly, and liked cuddles.

Then it got incrementally better – John started working on alters, trying to understand them as boxes that contained trauma and to hear their stories. We had a few re-integrate before he ever got to therapy, probably thanks to the instruction and literature provided by the counselling service and John’s incredible mind and determination. He told his parents, something that helped me immensely, because it meant we could call them to come over and spend time with him when I had to be at my various jobs. It also meant I could talk to them about where different alters originated and they could help me piece together a narrative that I could use to help the alters along the path to healing and integration. Suddenly I had access to information that allowed me to ask the right questions. If the parents are not the cause of the trauma in an abuse-related way, they can be very helpful! Asking the right questions certainly sped up the process. 

Then he gave me permission to talk to my friends openly. If you can get your partner to agree to that, do it as soon as possible! I was frequently rewarded with new perspectives, understanding, and support. Although, I will warn you that there were the occasional people who would just tell me to leave the relationship, or seemed to be judging me despite acting otherwise. There will always be helpful and unhelpful people in life, some of us are just better equipped for different situations. If you do share this stuff with your friends, only do it with those you trust the most or who seem inclined towards empathy. You will probably learn who your real friends are.

Somewhere in the period where things became incrementally better, we completed the months-long process of signing John up for therapy and he was having regular emails with the therapist, even though he could not see her until her waiting list had run its course. This was about three or four months into crisis mode. I still rarely left our town, rarely left our flat, and very rarely managed to get the energy to clean, but at least I knew some tricks to get him out of dissociated states [there will be a post dedicated to this later]. I still rarely got to see or speak to friends, though some weekly skype or phone conversations were very helpful. I talked to his parents almost every day and his mother kept her phone/ipad by the bed in case I messaged in the night, frightened by what his alters were doing. The most contact I had with people was teaching, which isn’t exactly the same thing as a chat, but it helped, because it was time that John knew he couldn’t text me and magically usually didn’t, and it was also a time when I got to talk about something I am passionate about with people and could pretend that everything at home wasn’t happening. A tiny bit of escape that I also, thankfully, got paid for!

We spent almost every waking hour focused on his alters and what they were all about, how they were created and what traumas they contained.  A big question was always how they felt about me – it took a while (months) for them to start trusting me one at a time. I talked to the alters, asked them questions about what year they thought it was, what their name was, if they had one, where we lived, what they remembered, etc. I played games with some, cuddled others, coloured with some, and even slept with most of them. Because his trauma was not related to sexual abuse, sex has played a huge role in soothing alters, teaching them that they could trust me, thereby creating a bond between us, and helping them become re-integrated through realising their attachment to the shared body. This is obviously a tool therapists cannot use, but as a partner, if the trauma is not caused by a sexual act, one can use it to very good effect. Plus, its fun for both/all of you! If not a little disconcerting in terms of it feeling like you are kind of having sex with one person for a while and then suddenly you are having sex with another without moving. I will explain how this works to help people return to their conscious mind more in the post about getting people out of dissociative states. For now, just remember, unless you have had a talk with the conscious mind about consent, be very careful when going down this route – you could do more harm than good if there are supressed memories of sexual trauma or if the conscious mind does not consent.

In any case, my life changed from being career driven and well, I hate to say it now, but it feels like it was hollow, or shallow, to being all about family, all about getting John on stable ground. We bonded in a way that I suspect few people do with partners simply because DID not only causes trauma in partners, trauma is almost contagious – again I urge you to therapy! – but also because people with DID bring out trauma that is already within you but you had somehow pushed down or not dealt with properly. John pulled out my abandonment, looked at it, examined it, challenged it, punched it in the face (figuratively speaking), and as previously communicated in my first blog post, put my soul in a blender. He hurt me more deeply than anyone has ever hurt me, his alters tore from me any semblance of security or safety I may have had while his conscious mind, in addition to one alter that he created for the purpose of comforting me, would reassure me, making me feel safer than ever before. The world was flipped both inside out and upside down and I have come out of this year a new person. I care about different things, value different things, pay attention to things I never would have noticed before both about others and myself. But, this transformation was one of the most painful processes I have ever undertaken and, on a practical level, it was expensive! I took out loans for that year and had a finishing up grant to help me get through. I was supposed to finish my Ph.D. and didn’t, despite incremental progress. Instead I looked inside the world in my husband’s head and saw the unbelievable and then tried to get to know, soothe, and help him learn to soothe every single one of those alters. In the process of doing that I had to take a look into my own mind in a more honest and brutal way than ever before. I had to begin healing my own trauma in order to manage the situation as a care-giver while also being systematically and thoroughly broken. I had no choice. And I am left feeling raw and vulnerable, somehow both stronger and weaker than before this all came about. I entered an Alice in Wonderland type of world instead of finish my Ph.D. And now, here I sit, on a grey English day wondering – how the hell am I going to actually do the rest of my healing and my work? John is stable to the point where I can actually pay attention to myself without having any progress torn down again, and now I have to do it. I have to heal fully, I have to function like I have been helping him do this whole year. How am I going to get back into this very complicated Ph.D. thesis? What is my life’s work now, really? How do I re-establish a working routine? How do I learn to take care of myself not in a crisis situation, but in normal, everyday life?