Starting Counseling

When I started counseling, I really had no idea what to expect.  I figured we would go as a couple to a marriage counselor to help us figure out what happened to our communication between when we got engaged to when our kids started moving out.  I think back and chuckle at my own naive expectations.  We would talk to a marriage counselor and in a few weeks everything would be rainbows and roses.  Yup, I started with marriage counseling with no idea that I would be told that I was the problem.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  I have since learned that counselors will say things or have you do things that seem totally off the wall and unrelated to what you are doing.  But your reaction tells them a lot about how you function emotionally.  This is where things fall apart for me.  I didn't know I was a multiple personality when I started marriage counseling.  I gave no emotional indication that I was in serious trouble. 

Within the first month of going to counseling, KavinCoach suggested I also start group therapy for me.  I had told him about one of my reoccurring nightmares and he recognized the information as an indication that I was sexually abused.  From all indications by my behavior, he thought I was already healing from it.  He recommended group therapy to kind of help take some of the steps I needed while he focused on marriage counseling with my husband and I.  (I later learned that the particular group I was in had some major problems.  Being so damaged myself, I didn't recognize the symptoms of an unhealthy environment.  The group leaders were later changed.)  In retrospect, it turned out to be a good thing for ferreting out my fairly odd reaction to certain situations.  One of the things the group leaders tried to do was to demonstrate ways that we are challenged as we move through life.  They had kind of an obstacle course across the room and they were having us go through the obstacles blinded folded while someone else gave instructions.  First mistake was telling me I had to participate.  Second mistake was blind folding me.  Third mistake was at the time no one, including myself, realized how deaf I was.  Fourth, while I was trying to walk across the room one of the counselor stood in front of me contradicting the instructions given to me by my partner that was trying to help me by telling me where to step.  Blind folded and disoriented, I froze.  The leader that had being contradicting the instructions chided me for not moving.  I switched from compliant Marie to violent Maria in a heart beat.  I reached out and grabbed the counselor by the shoulders and shoved her out of the way.  (I was very proud of myself for not turning on her and tearing her apart.)  Marie took back over control and finished the task.  Task completed.  Rage once again totally controlled.  Leader of the group shocked by my violence.  Shoot, I thought I just did what needed to be done to get the tasked completed.  I moved her.  I didn't turn on her or do anything else.  At my next session, I erupted over the incident to KavinCoach.  I suspect he may have already heard the other counselors version of the incident since they work together and there were 2 days in between.  He was totally unsurprised when I told him about the fiasco.  At the end of me telling him about this horrible experience.  I got no sympathy.  He just simple said, "Why didn't you take the blindfold off and say you couldn't do it?"  I stared at him as if he were an alien from another planet.  I stammered, "That was a choice?....but they told me I had to do it."  I was so confused by his total lack of sympathy or any understanding of how totally what he suggested would not occur to me.  I felt unheard.  I felt totally at a loss as to why any of this crap was happening.  Then I shut down completely on the inside.  I finished out the session feeling like, "What had I gotten myself into?"  I thought all week.  How was I going to get through to KavinCoach that what he suggested simply never occurred to me.  The following week I started our session out with a revisit about the situation from group therapy.  I told him, "I would no more think of taking off the blindfold and not completing the task, then you would think of stripping naked right now and going for a 2 mile run down the street."  He paused for a moment.  He agreed that he wouldn't think of doing that. 

There were many times during those first months that I felt like counseling and living was an alien world.  I didn't get it.  My husband and KavinCoach would talk and I would listen and I felt puzzled most of the time.  My bewilderment kept increasing.  Since I didn't know about Marie and Maria, and they didn't come out during the counseling sessions with KavinCoach I felt like the world was spinning but somehow I got left behind.  The challenge became...could I explain in a way that KavinCoach understood... what was happening on the inside.  Later, I realized that after the group therapy KavinCoach knew more about me than I knew about myself and the real work began.  I feel deep sympathy for any multiple personality, someone who has DID, tries to explain to someone else what is happening on the inside.  Going alone I was in group therapy with me, Marie, Maria, Ruthy and later Sammy.  Eventually Marie and Maria started talking in therapy sessions too.  I sometimes could sense KavinCoaches frustration if part way through I would switch and he would be explaining the same thing all over again.  Some things I eventually stopped trying to communicate because no matter how I worded it, I just couldn't get some of the concepts across as how it happened when one of the others that were inside of me would simply take over.  Marriage counseling got lost in the shuffle of who was talking to the counselor.  KavinCoach related until I could stay as just one person there was no way to work on my marriage.  Now I am just one person and I am still working on my marriage.  After integration, I finally understood that multiple personalities was a survival tactic for extreme trauma.  Integration changed my entire way I function.  Now, I am learning how to live.