Hello, this is Unpretending’s Substack and you currently have some of us here in our System, Unpretending Spontaneous.
This post is called Nuggets of Gold from 2023
2023, is the first year in many that I wasn't glad to see disappear into the abyss of history. If I'm honest, it was the first year that I, the entirety of me, of us, felt proud to step head held high into the new year. I feel as if I have autonomy as being a human being rather than living up to what I thought I have had to be. I believe in 2023, I have done more healing in this personage than I have in the entire 48 years this body has been alive. It’s uncanny that as quickly as I learn, there is so much more I discover.
I’ve written in previous posts that I’ve tried many ways to heal from my past and nothing has ever stuck, that is until I acknowledged those within and have given them the acceptance they have needed, given them the acknowledgement they have been craving. Our therapist has said that it is us who will heal us, honestly I didn’t believe her, I didn’t want to believe I could heal my attachment wounds, that we could heal our attachment wounds. I wanted what those inside me still craved, someone to love and nurture us like our first carers should have, I have always thought someone else needed to meet the need of those small children, because how could I, a fractured ‘part’ meet my own needs when it was our job in life, the expectation, to meet only the needs and wants of others.
Why now? Why in our 40’s are we finally at a place, where when we do the work, change is beginning to happen, in areas we could never change before. Some would say female body hormones – bring it on menopause (I love it, men oh pause! Ha). Others would say ‘Mid-life-crisis’ or ‘discovering-life,’ depending on whether you think in a half-empty or a half-full glass kind of way. There are those inside us who are sure it is because we have someone who sees us, loves us, who cares about who we actually are, and has given us a place of safety, of attunment, while at the same time, staying to work though the ugly when we fumble and fall into a heap of lies, pretending, and fear.
Interestingly, it is through our relationship with MultiMes, who has stood with us in the hard of the last couple of years. Within the patterns developed in childhood, they’ve called us out on our actions, challenging us to discover the ‘why’ behind these patterns of behaviours and asking us, is that who we want to be? As those in close relationships tend to do, MutilMes has also stretched, allowing themselves to be vulnerable, and welcoming us to walk with them through their growth and healing. Maybe that’s the key to healing, growing together. DID and DID walking and healing together. But their story is for them to share when they are ready.
I think I’ll write several posts what we as a System have learned in 2023, it’s not for those who already know everything, but for those who are doing the daily struggle of just trying to understand, “why on earth do I think and behave the way I do?” I’m not an expert, I don’t know theories or even the names of experts, all I have is a unique perspective of someone living with at least 20 others in this body.
Trauma response – living a lie.
To find safety as a small child, in a place where it was not okay to ‘be’ but to have perform to meet the expectations of others, I/we developed a persona of ‘doing the right thing’ for the person in front of us at the time. However due to the very many different people such as parents, friends, teachers, etc, there were thousands ‘right things’ to do and be. This caused fear within us, that we’d be caught doing the wrong thing for the wrong person in front of us and be punished, abandoned, ridiculed, or rejected.
Even without knowing it, pretending developed deep-set habits, which in fact caused us more trouble with each passing year. Because we were so afraid, we dreaded everything, every day we tried and tried to be good, do the right thing, be acceptable. Yet the trying, not to mention the dysfunctional home life, left our attachment disordered, our nervous system heightened, and we struggled to learn, even the simple art of social communication. Therefore, because we didn’t have the opportunity to develop our own self-worth, we carried the fear and the pretending and the lies about who we were right into adulthood. It was there we made decisions we were not proud of, lived a life we thought we were supposed to live yet failed at that life miserably because honestly, no one can succeed in a life where they are not being their authentic selves.
Is that the way we want to live?
Of course not, we didn’t even realise that was how we were living. I know, strange, how can a person live so long yet not even know they live a life of pretending and lies?
Self-Worth
As we have been accepting one another on the inside, learning reasons why people in our System have done things or what memories or traumas they hold, we as a collective have been trying to figure out our self-worth.
MultiMes asked us recently, “What is worth based on?”
Instantly some insiders alerted, frightened, “Worth is based on: am I good enough?”
Then, What makes me good enough? They didn’t know what makes us good enough, but they sure knew what made us not good enough; “If I see you feel insecure in our relationship, I mustn’t be good enough”.
Wow! Hearing that was like a jab in the heart. Is that how we live?
They went on, “If I see a negative reaction in a relationship, I must be doing something wrong.”
My cognitive mind says “What folly!” But in our body, every cell within in it kind of says, “Yes, that’s true”.
The young hurt ones, some experts might say the emotional parts, others might say our unconscious – it’s filled with fear. We become afraid, we are not good enough, we have done the wrong thing, you have found us out that we are not real selves, you won’t want us, so we say and behave in a way you will approve of us. “It’s not our fault!” “We are too scared to be us!” So many excuses.
When there is a negative reaction from another person, our body says, “we are bad”, then protection rises up and begins to defend us, to try and convince the person to still want us, “I only said this…, I only did that…, because of such and such,” or “you said…, you did…, so we said…, we did…,” We go on and on, heightened, dysregulated, reacting, lying, to protect us in case we’ve hurt you. We have to make you see we are not bad, no matter what the cost. That is a life of reactional trauma response.
There is no autonomy in that. See, it shows we are relating to the other only in response to how we think the person sees us, worthy or lack of. If you are happy, we must be good – worthy, if you are sad, we must be bad - unworthy.
Wow! How on earth have we managed to have successful relationships of any kind when people on our inside believe this about themselves? Many of the choices we have made in our life up until recently have been through the encouragement or the coercion of someone else, rather than on what we believed about ourselves…, No. That’s not even true, rather than what we thought we believed about ourselves. We hadn’t given ourselves the permission to have our own thoughts and feelings, because we believed us to be wrong, unworthy to be enough.
Then we had to ask ourselves more questions:
How do we become motivated, not by our past, but by our hopes for the future?
How do I make choices based on the autonomy of ourselves as a System rather than through the influences of others?
How do I live without fear of making a mistake?
How do I live speaking truth, the truth of who I am and how I live?
We wrote some statements of the truth we are learning about from those questions and wanted to leave this article there. But then we realised inner processing needed to be done, inner work needed to happen. And we took the time to do the work needed as you will see in the headings stated below. As simple as the headings sound, the learning and acknowledging we didn’t even know these truths have caused some within us to have varying reactions, a sigh of relief, a prickle of tears coming to the surface after long held grief, a cry of why we didn’t know? Even shame and guilt for still not getting it as they think they should.
It is okay to be upset by the behaviour of another person.
I was crying, I was upset that a neighbour was upset with me. She was upset not by something I did but by something the neighbourhood kids had done. Now we were being attuned too and were given permission to cry. Through the crying we heard them say, “It is okay that you a feeling upset and hurt”.
Wait? What? I am allowed to feel this. People inside me heard that for the first time, heard it for the truth that it is, we laughed at the incredibility of never knowing the truth, then continued to cry, sobbing deeply as years of not allowing ourselves to feel hurt overflowed from our soul. This situation only happened in 2023.
Do you see what I mean by, the why now questions, how is it that we never knew? All we have to do now is, when we feel upset by something is say to ourselves, “We are allowed to feel, we are allowed to feel upset.” Somehow by reacknowledging to those wounded warriors within, we continue to teach them what is okay. It is us who will heal us.
It is okay for another person to be upset.
This is one we’ve been trying to learn over a few years, but it is again in reminding the insiders, telling ourselves that someone being upset might not be anything to do with us. A response from another person or a feeling within another person comes up from what that person carries within them, how they think, how they perceive. Even if they are upset with us for something we have done doesn’t mean we are bad, or rejected, or unworthy. It means we have another opportunity to learn something. What’s going on? What was it that cause that person to feel hurt? And we can take the time, not to defend our worth or lack of it, but to listen and acknowledge that person’s feelings, because they too are allowed to be upset.
It is okay to make a mistake.
Making mistakes are a part of learning, as a teacher and parent it is what I tell children all the time, however for some reason we didn’t think we were in the same boat. Making a mistake doesn’t mean rejection either, learning to admit the mistake and ask for help, and giving us the permission to redo is so much better than lying to cover the truth.
We went to a place to meet someone that wasn’t an appropriate place to meet, then we lied after we realised our mistake to cover it up. Now we know that it is okay if we a mistake to tell the truth. The truth, even if it causes rupture, is a thousand times better than to lie about it.
Something we teach kids, something we must know, yet those inside who still believe we will be rejected want to rise up in defence and protection. Even as we write this, some within us are feeling turmoil, because they still are not sure that is true, they are still not sure that it is okay for them to make mistakes. That’s a hard moment in a System, kind of like in a group of colleagues or even in a jury, so we are walking with those ones inside us patiently.
It is okay to be wrong.
This is a hard one for us, one that we need to talk to our System about daily. Admitting we are wrong is not the hard, it’s the recognising we won’t be punished or rejected if we are wrong.
It is okay to tell the truth even if it means the other person may have a negative response.
I spoke about this above, and it comes down to knowing our worth. There is no need to lie, we have nothing to hide, we can act with integrity. We can hold our head up high, be our truth, speak our truth and this is who we are. Why do we need to hide ourselves anymore? We don’t.
It is okay to have autonomy as a System when making choices.
Our choices are enough, although again it sort of comes back to making a mistake. The majority of this life, we have lived as a System without knowing we were a System, without the communication we have within us these days. Still, the mistakes we have made through choices over the years have also led us to where we are right now. It’s never too late, while we are alive and moving.
The difference is that now we have many of us working together, more of our brain seems to be being used, areas that only worked for some are opening for others. What we know now, with hindsight plus inner communication gives us still more knowledge and skills to act with autonomy.
With these reactions more healing begins, as we care for the individual reactions of those inside us, acceptance, forgiveness and holding them gently until they know they are okay as they are. Holding them until they feel loved.
And that’s where we go on, day by day. Acceptance of ourselves, remembering we are worthy. We are worthy to speak our truth, we are worthy to make mistakes, we are worthy of so many things. And because we are worthy, we can walk forward with our head held high.
This has been long, longer than I thought. This is now, right this moment, Unpretending, but there’s been a lot of us here and it’s taken a bit to record this.
We hope you got something out of it.
We hope can like, comment, share and subscribe, especially if you want to hear more of what we have to say. Hope you have a wonderful day. See ya.
Notes: Unpretending Spontaneous is the name used by a Multiple System from Australia, the technical term is currently called DID - Dissociative Identity Disorder. This blogcast is our journey as we attempt to function well in society as a multiple while healing from our traumatic past.
Thanks Mate!
Y'all doing some good work right there! Such good reflections in learning who and how you are.