Complexity: Dealing with a Number of Parts

I’ve been going over my journal since before Thanksgiving, trying to make sense of the journey I’ve been on. As I read over it, I see a number of possible parts that I might be blended with. This is complicated by the fact that I’m an empath, but don’t know it, so I think whatever I’m feeling is mine. It never occurs to me that I might be picking up from someone else. I suspect that when as a child, I tuned in to someone and told my mother, she told me that was nonsense.

I think that a number of parts are operating, including the “protector parts” that dissociate. This makes it very hard to see what’s going on.

In September I posted “Yet Another Young Part.” It was about my reaction to my dog getting a buzz cut and not looking like herself. I have wondered if this wasn’t the beginning of my difficulties. I see that I never actually tried to unblend and connect with the part. Reading the journal entry again, I see that it just as well gives a description of  feeling like a child being expected to do grown-up things.

Then is my description of the baby who’s angry at me for hurting her. From my journal for November 22. I talk about a memory of hurting myself, but there was an earlier event that happened in a therapy session in 1992.  I was doing a gestalt exercise of talking to a pillow which represented the baby. But I threw the pillow away shouting “It’s not OK to be a baby.”

The Traumatized Baby —I think that baby became the baby on a garbage can that I rescued sometime in January 2006.

It was December 5 when I realized that I had been triggered into a young part “who’s expected to do adult things, even though she hasn’t been taught or supported.” What came back was one time when I had been left alone to take care of younger siblings, I think it was in 1994 that Mama Greene told us about it.  I have no memory of it, I must have dissociated.

The “Colonial Dames Incident.” This was a time when Mother wounded me badly, and I wrote about it in my journal afterward. The next day I read what I had written, and couldn’t remember it. I asked my sister, and she said it did happen. Then I understood that I had been dissociating all the painful things Mother said to me, so they were always a surprise. But now that I remembered, I decided I would not give her a target. I would not tell her anything about my life. Mother’s response was “I’m so cheerful she can’t be in a bad mood.”

Mother was always saying “Don’t be so sensitive,” as though I had a choice. I tried, but it didn’t work. I finally did get some help along the way, as you will see in the blog post.

Reading this over today, I find it very confusing. I hope that it’s because I am still blended with parts who are confused, and that you will be able to make sense of it.

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