Struggling with a History of Denial - Wesley

Hello everyone inside the Astra System and to those who are reading from outside our system. This is going to be a tough thing for me to write because it acknowledges the amount of pain I have put many of the headmates through as well as the gaslighting of myself and them. This blog post will be more of a rant piece/history of how I have experienced denial of my/our system. My partner recently asked if journaling can help in a way for processing my emotions and I wasn’t sure because I’ve never tried. But with the help I am getting professionally and personally I thought it would be worth a shot to try to write things down.

So, well, how do I even start without trauma dumping all my crap onto the internet. Let’s start with Pepper, I’ve been friends/headmates with Pepper for as long as I can remember. Constantly having someone to be with me and play with me was nice. It was easy to be “accepting” of plurality when I was young because I could just say “My imaginary friend” and people seemed to understand… but as I grew up more I realized they didn’t really understand what I meant by that. More and more voices besides Pepper’s would be heard from inside “my” mind but I wrote them off as false, lying, subconscious monologues. It was hard to do so because many times I knew they wanted something that was very different from what I wanted. Anything from dinner choices, to movie choices, to how I should be spending my time.

Many years later, after coming to my parents about my depression and other mental health related topics (outside of being plural), I finally got a psychiatrist. I started to talk to my parents and the professional about the voices; and how some scared me and some comforted me. My parents, I feel, didn’t fully believe me but the psych wanted to get me a brain scan and trigger the different voices… younger me did not like this thought. First for fear of being a science experiment (as all the dystopian novels I was reading were telling me would happen) and second because… what if nothing showed up, what if I was faking?

This was the first hard realization and sense of denial I had about the system. It was awful.

So from then on I would ignore the voices, push them away, yell at them internally that they weren’t real- it’s painful to write but it was what I did. I was scared, scared of being wrong and called a liar- when I knew it was the truth. The voices became sadder and a little more distant, which only fueled the doubt I had in myself. I had never heard of plurality or DID or OSDD before, I just thought I was losing my mind. And didn’t want to get in trouble.

Through later school years I came out to my, at the time, serious partner about the voices and how sometimes they took over and I wouldn’t remember what would happen when I wasn’t the voice talking (which was the only way I thought I could explain fronting without the language). My partner accepted me and these voices (which I then called personas). I have old drawings of myself and these different parts of the system which I didn’t understand fully. I knew something was going on but I didn’t have the language or the trust to figure it out.

They were able to front and talk and breathe and experience more freely what I had been restraining the “personas” when we were at home alone, or late at night, or at least internally fighting during the day. There were 4 of us back then. It was much simpler but things still felt hard and painful. I got a new psych and after the comments the last one made I didn’t trust any other professional with my experience of “the voices” aka my plurality. But that is another blog post all together.

Later on my partner left me when I went to higher education because I was healing, I was “unable to be fixed” anymore… It broke me. I hid the voices again, saying that I was pulling my partner into a false sense of pride because I was lying about the voices. I knew I wasn’t lying in my head, but saying I was made the heart ache a little easier to bear.

After months of “silence,” aka pushing out and down the system members and denial, I had a breakdown that resulted in rapid switching and the “voices” to be very demanding of me. My roommate at the time was concerned and I came clean about “the personas” and they accepted me, all of us with a hug. I started opening up more and letting the different parts of “myself” surface and do what they wanted to. That is until that roommate relationship ended in disaster and I again blamed “the voices” and shoved them deep deep down.

I had about a year of painful “silence”: migraines, body aches and other symptoms that worsened my mental health. I blamed the weather, medication, sleep, not eating enough, eating too much, overworking for my classes, everything… everything I could blame just to keep up the ruse within my mind that these voices were all an elaborate lie I made for myself to trick others into pitying me.

Until another breakdown (a bad one), where a persecutor would front, threaten violence to the body and my belongings and I would have to fight to stay in control. I don’t blame them for what they did, how I treated them was horrible. I fought for a long time with many of these “voices” who now are my best friends and headmates. It was scary, it was hard, people were starting to notice. I felt so lost. After my close friends witnessed an “episode” they gently confronted me and asked what was going on… I was honest. I told them everything and they believed me. I thought I had tricked someone… again. But they talked to me, and asked that I explore what I/We were experiencing and soon after I did research and found out more about plurality and DID and OSDD.

Things start to make sense.

But that didn’t make my constant fight with denial any less real, more and more headmates started coming out of the works and I became overwhelmed and tried shutting them down many times but with how I had already opened the door to healing and letting my headmates into my life and I couldn’t shut them out again. Even with this acceptance it didn’t mean my times with denial were over.

I still get these urges and desires to push them away, saying “I'm faking it for attention/pity/for the sake of lying” but my friends inside and outside the system reassured me - no you/we are not faking it. This gets complicated with my being the main fronter and my memories always being from the “main character perspective” but I am trying to work on supporting all of us, as a unit and as individuals. This need to deny gets especially strong whenever a new headmate comes to be in the headspace, or I unlock a memory that I didn’t have and wonder if it’s a real memory or not, or when I have small periods of time where I am so distant to the system that I can’t hear them so… “are they even real”? And every time someone yells to the front so I can hear “YES!”

I feel somewhat healed sharing my history of denial. I know I didn’t talk much about current day but we, as Astra, are still processing and working through these things and still need some space for current topics (not even getting started on the fear of being fake-claimed). But, I hope some people can relate to this and see they aren’t alone in their experiences of denial. Maybe I’ll write more on current day stuff later but right now, I think this is good.

With kindness,

Wesley