This one always pissed me off. That was never an issue the issue quite simply is had the result of each decision have an impact that not many people would even begin to experience. The risk is greater at times and it is physical. Those that observe and see things as what they might experience and those that parrot it have no clue.
I have come to understand this as for us in the times of less sun and light our body works differently. The decisions are harder as the consequences are greater.
Healing is very very hard and one gets very tired and can not handle more abuse as well. We learned not to heal so as to be better prepared to be traumatized. That is very much still with us. If we have stuff coming up in the real world where we want to be at our best we put off healing.
It is very hard as we never know how long we will need to recover. Sometimes it used to be months where we were out of it. Very hard to plan healing.
Stopping healing is horrible. It means starting up again and if you are a multiple one might not be able to be out for a number of reasons.
It is helpful to us to know we learned not to heal as it meant we would be hurt more by the next trauma or rather if we were in the middle of healing and more trauma happened than it would be worse.
I go with healing from extreme trauma means you have different sleep needs and the world is in the way on this. Over all I do not take the advice of dr s with regards to mental health as they have twice the suicide rate as the general population.
We are having issues sleeping. Pretty much we just stay up and ruminate. The rumination is about a job we are doing but it could be anything. We think it might go away if we could exercise and do art. No time right now as we are doing “stuff” that has to get done and could not due to not enough light and sun energy.
So we have a job we are now behind on. Big time. The client is being great. We are close to exhaustion and can not stay up to get the work done. It is hard work mentally.
So when I used to have a test in college I would often study with flash cards. I would sleep 20 min get up and study 20 min all night. Take the test ace it and forget everything. I kinda thought this was normal.
We were thinking of finishing the job this way. 20 min up 20 min sleep or some variation. Well that was known to be very much not OK. So we went to sleep. The reason it was not OK is that there was no end time. With the test there was a time of the test and then it was over. With the job we had no real end time. Now that are going to be be done today we are using the segmented sleep. We sleep do a bit on the job then sleep.
We can not use this method of sleep when we do not have enough light and sun energy. We never knew that and the last time of not enough sun energy and light we lost this method of getting through. It is not a way to live it is way to get through some things. We have tried it and crashed.
Any way I pass it on in case someone can relate and to work it out in my head.
This is kinda a follow up.
We now have enough sun and light. That is not the main focus although a couple of days of clouds could change that.
We have been processing the murder of my brother who I met and who was killed after my twin sister. We had lived in cages and did until we were three and then we lived in a closet in a apartment that no one lived in.
It was very very hard work. We had worked on it and each time it got interrupted and we had to find our way back.
It has been all of our life that we have had to deal with a lack of sun and light. Other than three years in FL. When I went to FL I had to borrow money to live and when I left three years later I had a credit line of 15,000 mill I think I can not really remember. More than I knew how to borrow and make money that is for sure. I came back to NE. I sold my business in two weeks and left and it would have been quicker if my wife did not want to give notice at her job.
We used those three years of sun and did great for 12 years and then we just happened to be inside a lot and crashed.
We are still facing the lack of sun and light this winter and have not at all recovered from last winter which was horrific other than we made some money. Enough so we may be able to get away this winter on our own terms and not to a a place that is cheap but not really a nice place to be.
So we were correct and have been gong in the right direction. Although it would have been nice to miss the time of dark here we might never have been able to process the loss of my brother. We are not done yet that is for sure. Some still feel they will see him again although as far as we know everyone would answer they would not and knows he is dead.
It is reasonable to question if this work is necessary or should we just live in the now. We did that often. We loved my brother and our soul needs to grieve our loss. It is not a logic thing at all. We question this often when doing the work. The loss in the now is extreme. Our future is going to be effected. When we get to a certain point in our grieving we know our soul needed to heal. It is a faith thing I guess. It is real.
Journey on,
Michael
We have done different things over the years. Some of them strange in a way. Being multiple is strange as it is different. We at one time worked on just going on fugues as a way to be and heal. More than once we created a temporary alter do deal with things. Those things worked.
We are now accepting that we switch and not worrying about it. We need to switch sometimes to work for money etc. This is new as we switched from those who were doing the work of healing only as necessary and it was always to do with the world. We did not understand about the short days and lack of sun. Those switches were physical and we did no have a clue. Well we had a clue when we discovered we need a lot of sun light to heal. The dark was another story. It is all tied into our being in captivity.
When we switch now it is different. All of seem to know somewhat what is happening and why. Before that was not the case. Some were living pretty much a separate life with a different understanding of how the world worked and what should be done. Much of that was when we do not have enough sun and light we are dealing with a different body and brain.
So the just switching is new. In a way we have been doing it to heal for a long time and what is new is switching to do stuff being ok for now.
For me and us we are not done with something until we have been sad about it. This includes good things. When I am done a work of art I need to grieve that piece is done.
What we have learned this last winter and this spring if you want to call it a spring is that we can not be sad unless there is enough sun and light. Even in Ecuador where the sun is always out I was at the base of a cliff so we only had 10 hours of sunlight and it took a month before I could be sad maybe longer.
We have been fighting very hard to get sun and light. The spring has not been kind in this regard. We just have enough energy to be sad.
And yes we have a lot of sad that needs to be done. So in the winter we really do not want to do anything as we can not be sad so nothing is complete and it messes up the summer.
We do not think this is just us. We do think the intensity of it and such is from our experiences.
One of the many things in the way of healing is there is no known way to heal. It is often seen as impossible and the best one can do is cope.
We are always working on more than one thing at once. The trauma was more than one thing at once. In a way we have always been working on everything.
Guessing it was 4 years ago and I went out on my porch. It was spring and the sun was out. I was sick to my stomach. It occurred to me that maybe the sun should not make a person sick. This was a corner a path of healing for us. There are many paths and many corners.
That year if the sun was out so was I. I am not a lay in the sun and get a tan person. I would get up in the morning and get sun as wading in the water before my swim. It was a 1/4 mile walk to where I was swimming and most of the time I was alone. There was trash on the path and I spent that summer cleaning it all up one day at a time.
Sometimes on the way back I would meet people and they would thank me. I started with I do not do it for you no reason to thank me. Just being honest. I then started carrying two bags and would offer a bag to them so they could pick up trash. No one took a bag and that was the end of our communication. We healed a lot and thought we had the sun thing figured out. We spent the winter here and got as much sun as possible and healed. We then decided that there was not enough sun in NH in the winter or us to have a life we wanted and went to Ecuador for the month of march. Our goal was to eat, swim, sleep and then decide if we wanted to eat, swim or sleep next. We thought the time in the sun would change things and it did.
The next summer we got sun and figured we would be fine the next winter. We were not. We then decided to be away for a whole winter and went to Ecuador for the whole year. It was a mixed bag with us getting sick, the heat and humidity and getting caught in a electric arc from a refrigeration. It was really bad and we broke our finger.
It was a rough summer and we never really recovered even to the point we usually do. We were to messed up to get it together to get out of here for the winter and the winter was miserable. We did heal and we learned a lot. We proceed a lot and came to discover our body works much different when there is not enough sun and the days are short. The reason is all the time we spent in horrible conditions and much of it in boxes and cages in the dark.
We process a lot and worked very hard. We used the term the dark to describe how our body was when there was not enough sun or light. It really starts in October and is the worst in February. It is involuntary and is physical and not emotional.
It was a good December and we were able to get sun. It was good march and we were able to get sun. April and May sucked and June is not looking much better.
We learned to use up our sun energy faster to heal. We learned to get sun in a different way. We learned we were very hurt by the times we spent alone in the dark often hungry and sometimes starving. usually cold.
There was much to process. I used to sneak out of one of the cages as for punishment my brother and I who lived in the cage beside me were staked out in the sun. He did not survive and it was a close thing for me. I could go on and on and have so I do not have to.
Having thought we had a solve with knowing about the sun it was very hard to stay with this dark concept. There is much that makes it hard.
We had two days of sun with little in our way and we slept most of today.
So we were correct. We needed to find a way to heal from all the solitary confinement etc and we have discovered a way. It is hard and takes a lot of time. The logistics are daunting. It is different than the grieving for those who were murdered. In a way we have to grieve for us.
One thing we learned that if there is not enough sun and light we can do a lot of work. We can not fully heal as we can not be sad. So now we have more sun we are starting to be sad. Not much fun.
It is still amazing how much sleep and rest this work takes. It is also amazing how fast we can use up our sun energy. We had two days where we had a better situation and one day of sleep. It took weeks to make the two days possible. In one day we are sun deprived.
I am up against it finding a way to heal, creating a situation so I can heal and doing the work and doing what needs to be done to be in this world.
I sometimes lose sight of this when doing the work to heal from what I was up against as a child. The reality is I have always been up against it in a way that is not known to most of the world. In fact it was not known to me.
That stands for to weird for words.
There is one of us that looks to the left and at a poster that is black and white in therapy. Our therapist seems to know more about this than we do. There is also one that looks to the right and looks at a small figurine of a sun god. They than sometimes look at our therapist and the one on the left will some times reach out and touch our therapists hand. We sometimes go blind when this happens and sometimes we close our eyes so we do not have to deal with that. It seems the one that looks to the right always goes blind.
We have been visualizing this in our head for weeks. We saw our therapist yesterday and when we looked to the right the sun god was gone. We told here there was a problem and then looked again. What had happened is we had gone blind. The sun god was behind the small clock which is a sun with a face. We asked told our therapist we would like the sun god moved so we could see it. We were shocked. That is not the sun god we see in our visualization. Not even close. We asked her if it was a different one and asked if she was sure.
So we right now can not find the one that looks to the left. That is new. We seem Ok with that.
This is about all the time we spent in solitary confinement or times with long periods in the dark and his is from birth. It also may be about the time when we were an infant and saw in black and white and due to the conditions we lived in and the harm done to us physically we would sometimes see in color and sometimes not. Our body was developing in very harsh conditions.
Sometimes when in cages and such we were not alone as there was another child or an infant in the cages etc. They were all murdered eventually. Including my twin sister. We just figured that out. This might be about the times we were in the dark and with someone. Pretty much if you have never been in a cage beside someone as a small child of of any age for that matter and they were later murdered you do not understand as you have no context.
We have a visualization that we do and it is all but spontaneous. We close our eyes and see a figure 8 on its side and there are two balls that travel on the figure 8 “track” they might bounce into each other very much like Newtons Cradle. This is kinda going back and forth form the right to the left that we visualize in therapy.
This is all what we call un-directed expressive therapy. Our therapist is part of it somehow but it does not come from her education although it might come from her experiences. She seems more comfortable with it than some of us.
Our favorite is when it is all our therapist fault. We do not believe that and we tell her that is what we are doing and she smiles. That only works sometimes. It is a way for us to take a break and not take responsibility for it.
So right now we are seeing this as this is all her and the others problem so we do not have to deal with it and we can do what needs to be done in this world. Part of which is do what needs to be done so we can get out of here when the sun is not out as much, is not as close to the earth and the days are short. That will not solve anything it is impossible for us to do the level of work needed when we are in those conditions. We can still do the work it is not efficient or complete.
In the last few years the windows that we can no the deep healing have not been long ones. We this winter came to a deeper understandings of how the lack of light etc effects us. pretty much when we have enough sun there is a switch until we do not and then there is another switch. We are organized in groups although there a a lot fewer groups and fewer of us than before.
So we are aware this is all weird. We are aware it is not really credible and we are aware we might just be insane. The way it works is with enough sun etc and the right situation we can go with this is insane and be Ok with it as it will work.
SELF-ISH TOO ---TRIGGERING-- 