nsashaell | Entries tagged with school

Dear Psychologists,

Some of you know us already, though you don’t know you know us. You know our singletsona. Some of you are our mentors, colleagues, friends. Some of you are even plural like us. Others are our enemies, abusers, toxic people who have caused us and/or our community harm. So it seems strange to address you all at once. But our field has a lot of issues, as you all know. And I’d like to address you all as people rather than some abstract concept of “the field”. Because at the end of the day, all institutions are made of people.

If you are in that corner of the field with all the renegades who are here to decolonize and depathologize and deconstruct, this is less a letter to you. But still, please listen.

Every day, people like us are dying. They are dying from lack of adequate mental health care, lack of access to care, harmful care. They are dying from what psychologists are doing. They are dying from both intentional harm and unintentional harm from people like you.

This may sound dramatic, and I don’t have the statistics to back it up. But it is the truth. I know this because our community knows this. We know what happens to our friends, friends of friends, our relatives. The reason I don’t have statistics is that you are in such deep denial about our existence that we do not have adequate literature to describe our community’s experiences.

It is possible to die from invisibility. When so many of you don’t believe that we exist- that we are lying or faking or watched Split too many times or whatever else you like to tell yourselves- there are real, deadly, consequences. We are passed from clinician to clinician, with “sorry, I don’t do that,” or “that can’t actually be happening,” or whatever other excuses you have. We are abused in hospitals. We lose our jobs, our children, our relationships. We are feared.

We are entering a field where we are dismissed or pathologized. And it is not easy. You don’t make it easy to exist in your space, much less change anything. We are weary from hiding in plain sight all these years, fearing that we will be gatekept out of our career because of the stereotypes you hold about people like us. Being around the negativity is exhausting. Once, in a classroom, DID was brought up in a presentation. A blank silence speckled with nervous laughter ensued. We left the room.

Once, in another class, a professor went on at length about “psychotic personality structure” and bizarre notions about how people with DID can’t think, can’t imagine, can’t function around other people. We were taken aback. None of it made any sense- a singlet conceptualization of something unintelligible to them, overcomplicated and inaccurate, insulting. We began to strategically skip class.

At a clinical site, we were told that people like us are “too severe” to be seen and must be referred out. Knowing that people like us are “too hard” for our site to see is a bad feeling. Are we actually “too” anything? Too broken? Too troubled to work here?

Because for us, these assumptions are damaging. They bring up past fears. We used to be as afraid of ourselves as you are of people like us, because that was all we knew. The pride we have scraped out of that crater full of shame is delicate. It is easily bruised. We think so often, “can we do this?” despite feedback that we are good at what we do. But if you knew about us, what kind of bias would that feedback begin to have?

At another clinical site, anyone could be seen except for people with dissociative disorders. We asked why this is. We were told they are a liability. Are we a liability? People with DID got kicked out of youth groups, out of treatment at that place, just for having the diagnosis. We have a burning question: if you knew, would we have been kicked out as well? Would we have earned the plaque on our wall announcing our completed placement? If you knew, would we be allowed in the building?

These are questions that no one should have to ask around you. “Am I allowed to exist here?” is not a question your trainees should wonder. We should not have to lie on paperwork diagnosing our clients to protect them from your discriminatory policies.

You need to completely reorient yourselves when it comes to plurality. Hiding from 90s lawsuits by avoiding working with us out of fear- this would not be acceptable with any other client population. People who cannot work with marginalized identities are currently being urged to take responsibility for their education. It is becoming required for us to deal with any discomfort we may have around people who are different from us and to open ourselves to learning. Please do this for our plural community.

Psychology is undergoing a revolution, where we listen to our clients’ experiences and we value their points of view more than ever before. It is time to look beyond the strange, tangled singlet ideas that exist in current DID treatment paradigms, which resemble conversion therapy more than anything else and have the potential for great harm to plurals. It is time, instead, to find out from plural people what actually works for and helps them. Community wisdom is not delusion. We have been surviving and thriving for all of human history. We do not need to become singlets to live our lives, and we should not be forced into your ideas of normalcy when it is frankly unnecessary.

If we did not believe in the potential of psychology to help people like us, we would not be subjecting ourselves to everything you put us through. We would not be learning from you and joining you in the future if we did not respect psychology as a discipline, or you as psychologists. Please, let’s make room for my people. And perhaps, for future plurals, there will be less hate, less death, less fear. Maybe, in future generations, it will be easier for aspiring plural psychologists to make it, and we can add our unique wisdom. Let’s make that happen, together.

Sincerely,
Your student(s)

Current Mood: cathartic

We were able to participate in the Plural Positivity World Conference this week by presenting a session about our graduate school experience, and got a lot of great support and positive feedback about our session. People found it especially useful to hear about our team system of organizing tasks during the semester. I think it might be helpful to people for us to really flesh this out in essay form. So, I’m going to go into detail about how we manage our fronting time.

Our current life is divided into 3 kinds of time periods: semesters, breaks (which for us are usually a month or more), and holidays (we celebrate solstices, equinoxes, and important personal dates). Each of these time period types have a different strategy for fronting assignment. For semesters we use a team system; for breaks, it’s called a day system; and for holidays, it’s a free-for-all type schedule. I want to stress that these scheduling strategies are mainly for times when we are able to be intentional about fronting, which is about 90% of the time. We definitely have some days when we are struggling emotionally with something or another, and people get stuck in front against their will. When this happens, we just have to roll with it.

First, I’ll discuss our semester strategy: the team system. During the semester, we have various tasks, such as taking classes, our clinical training, research tasks (for example, we will begin work on our dissertation this year), and driving to and from all those things. We also have responsibilities at home, such as cooking, cleaning, gardening, and pets. Additionally, we have self care tasks such as exercise, body care, our own therapy, and sleep, as well as spirituality-related tasks. Each of these categories becomes a team.

People sign up for teams on a volunteer basis, meaning that they are freely chosen. People sign up for a team knowing that they will be responsible for those team tasks until the current semester ends- they have the option to switch teams next semester. Sometimes, people will change teams in the middle, but we only let people do that if they are really hating their current task. We want people to commit so that there’s some consistency, and we balance that with wanting everyone to feel fulfilled with their various jobs.

Below is an example of a recent team signup sheet for this coming semester. I’m going to show you what it looks like in two stages. The first stage has the opinionated people who really really want specific jobs, or to keep the jobs they had last time. In the second stage, gaps will be filled in with less opinionated system members.

Stage 1

1. At the top, you’ll find everyone’s initials in the system. This is for our reference, to make sure we don’t forget to assign anyone to a team in Stage 2.

2. The class team has three subteams because we are registered for three classes this fall. Each class will end up with two people on it.

3. On some teams, including the research team, people have different assigned roles. In this case, I’m in charge of writing and Shawn is in charge of presenting.

4. Our clinical training team will be further subdivided (ex. notes, supervision, group and individual therapy) once we get a sense of the responsibilities at our new site. More may end up added to this team once the semester begins as it tends to be one of the more resource-consuming teams.

5. Our driving team tends to be between 3-4 people, but this semester our classes are online due to the pandemic, so one driver will be enough. In prior semesters, drivers were assigned routes and/or times of day (ex. morning commute to campus).

6. Our therapy team is in charge of managing internal trauma reactions, trauma healing work, and assigning different members to go to therapy. They are also in charge of determining whether the direction of therapy needs to change or we need to set a boundary, etc.

7. The sleep team is in charge of getting ready for bed and falling asleep. Some of us are better at sleeping than others, so we tend to have certain good sleepers on this team.

8. The spirit team is in charge of keeping us in touch with spirituality during the semester by organizing house events or simply making sure we go outside when things are hard.

9. We have a couple of teams in charge of our somewhat excessive number of pets.

10. The Body team is in charge of keeping us well-groomed, clean, as rested as possible, and exercised.

Once the initial signup is done, the remaining people choose from what’s left.

Stage 2

Note that now, the initials have been crossed out, indicating that everyone has a team. Gaps have been filled in. We have a heavier focus on home tasks this fall because of the pandemic, so more people are assigned to teams such as cooking and cleaning than would normally be. Lately, we have noticed a tendency to stay in and not get exercise, so we have allowed that team to be one of the largest, in the hopes that people will place more time emphasis on exercise and body care.

Every day once this schedule is in effect, we will check in first thing in the morning and establish who will front that day and in what order based on our responsibilities for that day. Only one member of a given team is necessary to do most tasks, so the team is responsible for deciding who is out for their tasks when.

We have found this system of job assignment to have a number of benefits for us. It gives us some variety in our jobs semester to semester. Even if you enjoy a job, for example, taking classes, you may need to take a break by joining a different team every so often, because it’s understandable not to want to do the same thing year after year. It also allows people to test out new tasks temporarily. For example, some of our teen members have tried being on a class team in order to experience something new and for their own personal development (with supervision by adults, of course). Because people can move freely between jobs when a new semester begins, they can try something out, decide if it’s a team they would like to do again in the future, or if they want to return to a more familiar team. In this way, people can discover new interests and even talents.

Additionally, having every task handled by a team means that any system members who are struggling with their mental health have other team members they can rely on if they are having a bad day. The teams serve as a support system within tasks so that no one is doing their job alone. And having one task to focus on means that it is easier to focus on your own responsibilities without getting overwhelmed by other systemmates’ stress. For example, if Shawn is presenting something at a conference, I don’t have to micromanage that or worry because that’s not my job. This keeps our group anxiety down when we stick to our own responsibilities and trust other teams to do their work.

That about does it for the team system during semesters. We have an entirely different fronting schedule during breaks. We call this the day system because we share whole days in groups of 1-3. The way it works is that we list people under categories of whole day, half day, 1/3 day or no day depending on how much time the person wants. Then we devise a schedule that can last between 10 days and month depending on how much time people have requested. After the entire rotation, we do this again, with people choosing new options for the following rotation. Usually we have a day or two between or within rotations that are free for anyone to come out.

When breaks come around, we’re usually all exhausted, and so a number of people may not want to front at all, or may only come out during one rotation, or may just want a few minutes on free days. It’s not uncommon for some people to stay inside for an entire break to recover before the semester starts again. Anyone who does want scheduled time will choose how many people they want to share their day with. Based on this, people are grouped and their initials are placed on our calendar so that we know who is supposed to be out that day.

We aren’t very strict during day system times. The priority is placed on the scheduled fronters for that day, but if they decide they’re all done halfway through the day, then others are allowed out. The point is to give people the ability to prioritize their projects and/or relaxation, without anyone else in the system pestering them to hurry up or do something else. Someone who is fronting on a given day also must do daily tasks, like body care, pet care, and cooking. This makes it a very different experience than the team system as people do a variety of types of tasks on their days. We find it to be a refreshing change from the strict semester schedule.

For holidays, we declare free days where anyone can come out. This includes trips (road trips, camping, flying somewhere), solstices and equinoxes, our birthday, scheduled time with external loved ones, etc. Usually we still make a list in the morning of the most enthusiastic people, and sometimes we celebrate extra days to accommodate everyone. For example, our birthday tends to entail multiple days of celebration.

Hopefully, this explains what we do in enough detail to be useful to others. It took us years to arrive at this way of dividing our time, and it will definitely be different for different plural groups- in fact, we know plurals for whom this system doesn’t work at all, who have better ways for themselves that wouldn’t work for us. In other words, this isn’t any kind of perfect method, but just ideas to consider. There are many ways that plurals organize time.

-Calen

Current Mood: accomplished

After what happened in supervision this semester we’ve been trying to figure out what the takeaway is. How do you glean something useful from a traumatic interpersonal relationship? How can we learn something other than that entrenched, “well I guess we shouldn’t have trusted anyone in the first place”? We are all tired of living in that stuck place, where everything and everyone is against us and life is a constant war of defending ourselves to stay alive. Where people who are supposed to love you actually feel scorn and disrespect under the surface, and laugh at every mistake you make. The world where all of our differences must remain as hidden as possible or else we’ll be vulnerable to people assuming we’re stupid, crazy, freakish, just need to be normal, need to be fixed by someone else. Sometimes it feels like people just look at us and we become a target- that person to blame, shame, scapegoat in the group. That happened again in this relationship. Our fumbling around, trying to connect, resulted in that horribly familiar scapegoating and backstabbing behavior that has occurred too often in our life. We’re left wondering, do we reek of weakness? Is there a sign on our back that says “easy target for emotional abuse”? When we arrive, ready to apply ourselves and be open-minded, why does it often end in us being used for someone else’s purpose without our consent? When we’re going out on a limb of emotional vulnerability, why does that signal to others that we’re incompetent, ripe for blaming, or that we need fixing or for them to take control of our life?

These questions have been floating around in our head, constantly discussed and poured over. How does it all relate to how we try to present? To our attempts at fleeting moments of authenticity? What does it mean to be ourselves around other people? Is that even possible without eliciting this behavior from them? Because when we show our true emotions and concerns, these abusive behaviors from others seem to intensify. How should we be in the world? Trying to be what others wanted or expected never worked out for us: it precipitated our worst mistakes.

We’ve been searching for a mentor our entire life, someone who can give us advice and lead us in a way that takes into account all the layers of our identities and experiences, acknowledging and accepting all of us. Our parents were never that for us- they like to see only what they want to see and disavow the rest, and have always required our management. But in our search for mentorship, we feel constantly othered by advice we receive. Mental health advice needs serious editing to accommodate our “severe” but highly selves-aware presentation. Graduate school advice is mostly vague reassurances while refusing to explore the issues we face as a disabled trans student. Any realm of activism seems to hyperfocus on one aspect of identity while failing to account fully for the rest. Advice from our family is usually to take responsibility for everything we suffer to the exclusion of admitting sometimes situations are more complicated than “work hard and get over it”. As a result, we feel like we can’t rely on others to figure out our immediate concerns, which seem strange compared to the immediate concerns of peers. Instead of wondering how to afford fees associated with internship and standardized tests, we’re trying to figure out how to navigate transness when we don’t “look trans”. Instead of exploring our past and how that might impact our clients, we’re navigating post-traumatic stress in the context of caring for clients, dodging supervisors who might take issue with the whole wounded healer trope that we represent. We spend a lot of time strategizing about how to be seen without being truly seen. What does that even mean?

We’ve given so much thought and exploration into our mental health, our healing, our relationships, and yet it still seems like our problems tend to be extreme and strange. Our clients heal so much faster than we do. We get stuck all the time, and feel like there’s nowhere to turn for actual answers. We have a tendency to make our therapist cry with our catch-22s and complicated existential crises. We find ourselves in constant emotional storms that only make sense months later and derail our ability to be present in our own life. We worry that we’re “too crazy” to reach any of our goals. And yet we keep going for some reason. Maybe because the alternative is to stop.

At the heart of our distress is the feeling of alienation, of being “too different”. We have a sense that no one can understand us. This teenage type of thought is possible for most people to shake off, but in our case, it seems like our life keeps proving just how different and non-understandable we really are. A few close people do seem to understand us, but they rarely know what we should do, because the answer is usually that things with us are too complicated for a straightforward course of action.

When we read books looking for advice, that sense of alienation becomes a barrier to getting anything out of our reading. As soon as a book on theory talks about how women are and how men are, we’re checking out of the hotel. The second an author jokes about “multiple personalities” as a dismissive ha-ha moment, we’re booking a plane ticket out of there. When a supervisor we respected told us that we need to “just suck it up” when people misgender us, we found ourselves questioning that entire relationship and seriously considering never talking to that person again. When a book about therapy mentions that people with “serious mental illnesses” should not become therapists, we will literally throw it across the room.

How do we find the useful takeaways from authors, professors, and supervisors who are dismissive of our experiences and antagonizing towards our identities? How do we learn in a world that repeated proves its hostility towards who we are inside? We feel raw from the constant re-opening of this alienation wound. Where we used to pull the good out and discard the rest, we now throw out the entire bathtub, because we’re tired of seeing the same insults, dismissals, and erasures. But that doesn’t help us learn anything, or improve, or grow as people. When it comes to our cultural environment, we mostly feel like yelling, “what the fuck am I supposed to do with any of this?!”

Just like the rest of our life, this entry is more question than it is answer. We are incredibly bad at tolerating uncertainty, but maybe that’s another area we need to improve, another life skill we need to master. One thing I can say about us is that we are always striving. There always seems to be a farther distance for us to travel, compared with everyone else, but somehow we manage to get there eventually. No matter how much adversity we face, we continue to show up, and that’s what will get us through our degree, not answering any of these questions. Which is a good thing, because I doubt we’ll find these answers easily, or anywhere we expect to find them.

-Izzie and Nenilor

Current Mood: frustrated

During semesters, our life has a way of devolving into chaos. We usually start out okay- we're efficient at getting our work done, most of us are highly motivated for our various jobs, we still have a reasonable amount of emotional and physical energy. Then things begin to shift. People start to stress out and become anxious about their deadlines. Then they start to have conflicts over time management, because there's never enough time. At some point, people stop communicating, because they feel overwhelmed and just want to focus on their individual tasks. It becomes hard to keep track of what's happening. The feeling of losing track becomes anxiety-provoking.

Meanwhile, emotionally-difficult things happen. Some class material is triggering, or a weird interaction happens with family, or something rough comes up in therapy. A client talks about something really intense, or our supervisor criticizes something we did. Meanwhile, we start to lose physical spoons. Walking to and from our car is exhausting by the time we get to the end of the week. Our chronic pain gets worse from the anxiety, which in turn makes the chronic pain even worse. We start dreaming bad dreams instead of sleeping.

We continue to slog through, and it varies when exactly we realize we need to regroup. Taking care of ourselves seems less important than going to our training or showing up for class even when our performance is down because we're so tired. We always wait as long as possible before realizing we need to take care of ourselves. We're always a complete mess by then. Sometimes we're all in a panic because our body is so activated and painful.

At some point we realize we need a day off. We cancel something, or take a full weekend day off from homework despite the deadlines. We write in our journal and take a long walk. We have a meeting. We go eat our favorite foods and let ourselves take a nap.

Suddenly we realize what just happened, and vow to pay more attention next time, take care of ourselves sooner. But that never happens. It's just a repeat of before. It's so easy to care more about our work than our own health and mental state.

We took a day off this week because we were in such a high state of panic we were finding it really hard to leave the house. We were struggling to work on assignments. We couldn't focus in class. We were making mistakes at our training site.

It's hard not to feel a lot of shame about needing that day off. We feel infinitely better. We've talked a lot of things over. We did some of our favorite things, including taking a nice long nap. Our physiology calmed down to the point where we can really think again. It was clearly what we needed. But it's so hard to feel okay needing anything, or prioritizing ourselves. It's hard to be okay with our tendency to get anxious, and to allow ourselves to directly address it instead of plunging ahead, pretending it's not happening. Maybe we'll remember the lesson we just learned about selves-care. Probably we won't.

But it's okay to need a day off, and that's something maybe we'll manage to internalize someday. Hopefully.

-Calen