#we've also just generally been more dissociated and fragmented since seeing mom

[honeysuckle-venom]

Long DID post, lots of inner world stuff

Kind of want to talk about something that's been going on internally, but it requires a lot of background that I haven't bothered to give for several months. But whatever, I'll try to give an abridged version with enough information that things make sense.

Most of us have fused, but it's not...the same as never having had parts. And we haven't all fused. Last February I discovered a part, I don't know that I've ever talked about her on main and she doesn't have a name I'm willing to share here, but I'm going to call her C. She was around when we were a kid (in fact, I have good reason to believe she's the core/original part. I know not everyone has one of those but I think we do). She went dormant when we were 11, and woke up last spring. When she woke up, it was accompanied by a strong internal knowledge that she had been dead and buried in an internal grave the whole time, and that her coming out of dormancy was her crawling out of her grave and taking breath for the first time in 15 years. But although she's no longer presenting internally as dead like she did when she was dormant, she still stays internal and very rarely fronts. She kind of came along with an internal world, and we did some work in therapy to discover it more clearly, but it felt like discovering rather than creating for the most part. Before she woke up I didn't think the main system had an internal world, but we do now. She lives there, and although Cypher and I have fused, Cypher is kind of...pulling double duty? She's fused with me, but she also lives with C in a cottage in our internal world, acting as C's...bodyguard? Knight? Whatever, her protector. C needs a lot of protection. She's extremely vulnerable and extremely important to me/all of us. Most of why she doesn't front is because she's too fragile still, she's recovering, and she's easily wounded, and it's very very important that she not be wounded. When she's wounded things go very badly. Because of that she mostly stays internal, deep in a cottage in the woods. She very occasionally cofronts, and it's always a wonderful feeling when she does, but it never ever happens unless we're alone or in therapy, and even then it's rare. It takes a lot of effort to communicate with her/get her towards the front, and if anything makes us feel at all unsafe she immediate goes back away and it becomes almost impossible for me to feel her/get in touch with her. I spend a lot of time and effort making things feel soft and gentle and safe enough for her to come forward, because it feels so wonderful and whole and hopeful when I can feel her/cofront with her. But it's hard and when she's gone it's hard to bring myself to do the things that will bring her forward again. But that's an issue for a different post.

Anyway. I fucked up last week. I didn't take appropriate care of C, of making sure she was safe and protected and barricaded before going to see our mom. Of course she wasn't fronting or as far as I know even conscious when we saw mom, but we should have done some special internal visualizations and stuff to keep her extra safe, and we didn't. And now Cypher is furious at me for letting C get hurt. I'd been trying to figure out for days why I was decompensating to this extent and why I was so incredibly angry 24/7, and today in therapy we realized it's because of that. I can't apologize directly to C, or well, I can but the message won't get through the protective layers, and I live internally in a castle very far away from the cottage where she is. My inner world self isn't currently even allowed to know the route to the cottage, it's magically disguised. But I can get a messenger bird to carry a letter to the post office in the village right outside of the woods that Cypher checks every so often, apologizing and promising to do it differently next time. It's funny, because Cypher is both living in the cottage with C and still fused with me, so I can feel the acknowledgement as I'm writing this that the intention to apologize has been heard, but I still need to internally go through the process of visualizing writing the note and tying it to a bird and waiting for it to arrive. Internal worlds are fucking bizarre apparently. Or possibly Cypher split into two so that one version could stay separate to stay inside with C? Unclear. Anyway, I'm going to do that and hopefully it will help us all calm down some.