#becoming yourself

[furiousgoldfish]

I finished reading "Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse" by Alison Miller, and it was filled with incredibly useful information for those who struggle with a dissociative identity disorder. It was also filled with descriptions of some of the most extreme and atrocious kinds of abuse, so to anyone wanting to read it, there's a trigger warning for cult abuse, rituals, childhood sexual abuse, satanic rituals, child trafficking, child murder, brainwashing, mind control, and every form of religion used against the mind of a child.

I was reading this book to figure out if I had gone thru any kind of abuse of the sort, and I didn't, one of my abusers was utilizing religion against me and had done enough of brainwashing to construct several brainwashed and controlled parts, who were still under the influence, but that was it. The book is extremely clear and it will not confuse you about what happened to you, it tells you the intention behind every type of abuse, and often, how to resolve the results. The books also notes that the word 'alter' is triggering to those who went thru ritual abuse and developed a dissociative identity disorder, for similarity with the word 'altar', which is used in rituals, so they prefer to use the terms 'insiders' and 'parts', which I found to enjoy as well.

One of the repeating points in the first half of the book was on insiders who pretend to be something else, for instance, insiders who pretend to be your abusers, pretend to be demons, pretend to be gods or powerful entities, who believe it's their job to hurt you, or to control you, who are made to bring out consequences if you attempt to act against your abusers. I had something like that in my head, but I had refused to believed it was an insider, because it looked just like a case of 'internalized abusive voice', and I had fought against it viciously and focused on shutting that voice down and keeping it scared, often via imagined torture if it was making me feel anxious. Reading about these other scary entities, who would, when asked, admit to just being an insider pretending, I became curious enough to engage with the abusive voice and ask it, 'are you just an alter pretending'? The voice laughed at me and admitted to being found out, and then promptly stopped pretending and showed themselves as a child part. It took me several weeks to admit to myself that this was real, because it was mortifying. I had fallen for the trick, and even tortured a child part for doing their assigned job – this part now believed their only function was to be tortured. I feel responsible for that. But there was no way for me to know. Insiders are good at keeping up a pretense.

You can sometimes recognize that an entity in your head that is scaring you, claiming to be able to control you or triggering you on purpose, or pretending to be evil, demonic, terrifying, animalistic, powerful, magical, godly, is actually a child part, just because they often act the version of that thing that a child would believe is real. If your entity is often repeating the same lines, only knows 1 way of behaviour and has predictive responses, believes to be your abuser or something similar to it, doesn't follow any real-life logic and seems to belong to another world that a child would think is accurate, then it's likely a child part, for some reason programmed or brainwashed to believe they're what they're pretending to be. I should note that when children think of these scary entities, they're often very creative, and put their whole heart in it, so it's going to be an entity that is engaging, feels powerful, doesn't back down easily. Parts who pretend to be evil or demonic will sometimes cling to what they think they are very dearly and will not allow themselves to think of themselves as humans or children, this is for their own emotional protection. All they had in their childhood was being tough. They cannot let that go.

Another incredibly useful information I got from the book was on how to process trauma if you are a multiple. I had never seen instructions on how to do this before, and I'm going to share them in another post that should be posted right after this one, and I'll put a link to it here.

[labelleizzy]

[lenadelaneyburlesque]

���Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”

Kurt Vonnegut

💗💗💗💗💗💗💗

[unwelcome-ozian]

Do you have a PDF link for “Healing the Unimaginable” by Alison Miller?

I do not. The PDF I have for her work is below.

BECOMING YOURSELF Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Alison Miller

Oz

[furien]

[captainjonnitkessler]

>Join a union

>Hear people constantly complaining that the current union leadership is super corrupt, it's all just the same ten guys making all the decisions in secret and nobody else in the union ever gets to know what's going on

>Go to the monthly union meetings that are completely open to all 1200 union members

>The only attendees are the same ten guys every month, giving detailed reports about everything that's going on

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[mumblesplash]

comics as an art form make me insane. they’re so difficult to do well. there’s so many different ways to make sequential art work and most of them are deeply unintuitive. onomatopoeia that feels completely ridiculous to put down often reads seamlessly. panels on a page become a fractally nested image composition challenge that’s only possible to lose because if you do a good job no one will notice. you have to direct the readers’ eyes on a specific path across the page but also account for the fact that they won’t follow it. comic time isn’t linear. if the order of events isn’t crystal clear the story becomes incomprehensible. sometimes you need to do this on purpose. all this for a medium almost universally considered less effective than animation and less respectable than plain text. even its own name doesn’t take it seriously

[bloodybellycomb]

One massive, legitimate way to improve as a writer or artist or in any creative endeavor really, is to become absolutely obsessed with something and to allow yourself to be weird about it. Genuinely mean this btw.

[visionsfrompastrealities]

Paprika (Japanese: パプリカ, Hepburn: Papurika) is a 2006 Japanese adult animated surrealistic science fantasy psychological thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Seishi Minakami.

The film follows a battle between a "dream terrorist" who causes nightmares by stealing a device that allows others to share their dreams, and a research psychologist who enters the dream world and changes into a dream detective named Paprika to investigate the cases.

Inspiration for the movie 'Inception' by Christopher Nolan

[becomingthatgirl111]

be aware of what you consume:

the energy of others: surround yourself with positive people and avoid those who drain you.

the videos you watch: select content that inspires, educates or entertains you in a healthy way.

what you read: look for reliable sources and material that enriches you intellectually.

who you follow: follow people who inspire and challenge you to grow.

what you scroll through on social media: avoid negative content and look for something that motivates you or makes you feel good.

the news: look for objective sources of information and avoid information overload.

highlights of others: compare less and celebrate more the achievements of others.

the advice you listen to: evaluate advice according to your criteria and needs.

source: @zamirasaba

[furiousgoldfish]

How to process trauma as a multiple (a person with dissociative identity disorder, OSDD or DID), taken from the book "Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse" by Alison Miller.

First part of processing trauma as a multiple is that you need all of the parts that are holding some memory of that event; you need the pain holders, the sensation holders, anyone who was present or saw what happened, anyone who holds even a tiny bit of memory or pain or sight or sound, needs to cooperate in order for the trauma to be processed correctly. Unprocessed trauma can be used to trigger you, to trigger your parts, in case of mind control even to control their actions, it can cause emotional flashbacks, make you feel like you're re-living it or are stuck in it, often some parts will be stuck in the moment and unable to get out. In order to process it, the trauma needs to be put back together from all of the parts, and then processed only cognitively – meaning, without any emotion or sensation involved, just seeing and realizing what had happened to you, and with what results for your life. Then, you can introduce emotion and sensation to it, and your brain can make correct connections to what kind of feeling and pain was caused by what event, and store that information properly. Once you have all of the event completely understood and all of the emotions linked to the events they were caused by, the memory should be complete and able to get stored in the long-term memory side of the brain, where it will finally start fading, like normal memories do. Once it's there, it's unable to cause any more emotional flashbacks, panic attacks, or trauma symptoms, it would become a regular memory.

Now, how to do this when you're a multiple and you have many different insiders holding parts of that trauma, a lot of them unwilling to uncover what their part of it is, some of them holding just some of the sensation and some of the pain and unaware of the rest? What needs to be done is explaining to each of them what you're planning to do, and persuading them to give their part of the memory or feeling that they're holding, because it's going to make the burden of it lighter, and they will not be judged or punished for it. For some people, this will mean working around with other parts, that are assigned to punish certain parts for showing emotion or revealing information – they also need to be persuaded to not punish or sabotage the process. The book claims you don't even need to know all of the alters, just ask who has any part of the memory and persuade them, with explanations and benefits to what you're doing, to participate.

Once you have them all in, you need to get a big box, or a treasure chest, or a big bucket, or it can be a storage box, and you tell them to put all of the emotions, sensations, pain, fear, panic, anxiety, grief, anger, sexual feelings, bonds, love, shock, terror, anything they might be holding from that event, to put that feeling into the box. I was surprised to find out I could do this, because I've never done anything like it, but I could easily feel relief when every single sensation got sealed in the box, it was almost unbelievable. Then, you all sit together in front of a projector, or a television, or in my case, I physically transported us all in front of the event, so that we could watch it all happen. This way, all parts get a complete memory of the event, and awareness of what actually transpired, instead of the small part they were holding onto. First time you watch the memory, you watch it without any feelings or bodily sensations, all of that is in the box, and if you start feeling something, you pause, and put that feeling into the box, to continue watching the event using only the cognitive side of your brain. That is the only way you can get a good idea of what happened, without getting completely overwhelmed with sensations and pain. For the memory I was processing, I even cut the sound out and put it in the box, because it was less painful to see it without hearing it.

After seeing it once, you introduce feelings, little by little, and you don't need to feel it all in full extent. It's enough to add a little bit of feeling only to help your brain to connect it to the event. Just to link whatever discomfort, pain, sensation, grief and shock is related to the event at hand, it doesn't need to be felt in full all over again. You watch the memory again and again, until you're able to connect every sensation and emotion to it's cause. If there's any part of the memory missing, any sensation or information or feeling that you can't recall, you ask what part has got it, and ask them to put it in, to find out just what is hiding in that trauma.

When you're sure as you can be that every memory is back in it's place, you talk to all the parts to hear their version of how it felt and what they're feeling and thinking about it. You see what information they've gained from it, and how it changes their view of their function, or their life experience. If some are in grief, shock or terror, you make sure to offer them comfort and bring them back from the despair of it, and show them that other, different things happen in the future, that protect you from anything like that happening again.

After you've managed to do this, you can put the entire memory into the box (or treasure chest, or bucket, or whatever you feel is most appropriate), with a little opening for the chance that some other part of it will come up and need to join the memory, and the box can be stored as a processed memory. This should help your brain to store it as a long-term memory and for it to stop causing trauma symptoms.

I unfortunately have not been able to complete processing a single memory this way yet, because I keep missing parts and pieces, and parts holding them will not come up or cooperate with me, but I am hopeful that figuring out more about my parts and system will eventually enable me to process trauma properly. The information on how to do it gave me options to do things I couldn't do before. For instance, I could approach my child insiders who are stuck in the past, and show them the events of me running away from the abusers, having another place I can live in, show them that different future is possible and that freedom is possible. For those who've been brainwashed, I've been able to show them the events where the person who brainwashed them later abandoned them, ceased their function, and later distanced themselves to the point where they no longer recognize my voice or my face. (This sadly, only put my child insider into deep grief because they depended on that abuser for having a purpose and they're now just upset full time.)

I'm sharing this for the chance that someone else needs this and can use this information. I've never seen it laid out like this before. The examples shown in the book told the story of people taking a few years to intensively work on processing trauma, and then overcoming the symptoms of ptsd, which I find incredible and hard to even believe, having the ptsd symptoms for over 10 years now.

If anyone needs this book and is currently unable to buy it, I'm willing to share the pdf privately.

[me-beef]

@strangeravatar made a great point

i was gonna focus on the spike-hotboxing-celestia aspect but i got distracted somewhere along the way and i think i forgot what joke i was trying to make

but dont you think its interesting how many guards of the exact same color/body type she's managed to accrue?? i do

ooohh you want to go look at our stickers so bad

[lunarwednesday]

Kindly Miquella... I see you've thrown away... Something you should not have... Under any circumstances.

[fanaticalthings]

Bruce coming home one day to find Robin Jason clinging onto a chandelier with Dick below him cheering him on.

Bruce: Jason what are you doing?

Jason: Dick said that you missed his antics after he moved out and so he’s teaching me how to be a better son

Dick: After this we’re going to drive the Batmobile into the bay :D

Jason: We’re going to what? I mean yeah! Right into the water.

Jason trying to whisper to Dick: Dick I can’t swim though

This just further fuels the chaotic dynamic of Dick and Jason during a time where Dick was still going through his teenage angst and was absolutely not a benevolent role model LMAO

I mentioned it in this post, but it's just so funny to me to imagine a Jason who grew up with an absolutely WILD Dick Grayson as an older brother, while the younger batkids grew up with a more mellowed out and mature (arguable but when measured against the other kids, he wins by a landslide) Dick Grayson.

Robin!Jason era:

Dick: You wanna go out and get high?

Jason: I can't, I have homework.

Dick, sputtering: HOMEWORK?

----

Dick, about to do an elaborate (and totally not dangerous) acrobatic move in the manor: Watch this, littlewing

Jason: You shouldn't do that, it'll make Bruce upset.

Dick, on the brink of angry tears: Why are you like this.

----

Jason, dejected: Listen, I know you don't approve of me because you think I'm not good enough as Robin, but-

Dick: Not good enough as Robin? I don't care about that, I just think you're a little bitch

----

Dick taking Jason out on a hangout for the first time: OK, looks like I got my work cut out for me. Take out a notepad and write everything down. I will NOT have my successor embarrass me like this. So what you wanna do to piss off Bruce-

---

[Years later, Jason returning to Gotham with the fury of a thousand suns and the chaos to match it]: I'm gonna make your life a living HELL, Bruce

Dick, older and relatively more chilled out: Okayyyyy, maybe let's just– calm down a lil, haha, no need for the theatrics

Jason, betrayed, observing a Dick Grayson who is teaching his new younger siblings to behave and be mature: Dick, what the FUCK

-----

Present!Dick, mentoring Tim: Make sure not to be too impulsive, don't wanna raise Bruce's blood pressure

Red Hood!Jason spying on them from afar: Who even ARE you??

-----

Jason: So you teach me ALL of that, only to turn into the ONE thing you despised so greatly all those years ago

Dick, sweating: Well-

Jason: I'm ASHAMED. How can you be worthy of being called my PREDECESSOR?

[maxiglow]

be addicted to real dopamine

be in the present and notice those little things you never saw before, but that have always been there

experience new exciting things that bring you joy

love people, listen to them and create meaningful connections

make art and don’t label it as “good” or “bad,” just let your soul be free

stop scrolling on social media and start turning pages of an interesting book

do mindfulness meditation and feel your body and mind calming down

move your body, no matter how as long as you’re enjoying

listen to music that matches the moment you’re in

eat nourishing food, feel your stomach full without discomfort

get a good night of sleep and feel yourself ready for another day