Messages

D-
I can't escape what's all over the news and the internet. Going offline leaves me genuinely, 100% alone for 10-12 hours a day. Unfortunately, staying online means I am still mostly alone and left to process things on my own. And in trying to navigate finding a middle ground where I'm not inundated with retraumatizing materials but also not 100% alone, I've had some new questions pop up.

I know that you were sexually abusing me. I know that your D did too. I know that the neighbors were.

I know that you, bare minimum, allowed me to be trafficked. I know that both you and M had to work hard to keep it under wraps. Your image was (is) everything. This is where most of my questions are.

What happened to my g-d father? It feels weird to call him that now, but I've always wondered why he disappeared and all contact was ceased. I don't remember how old I was, but I know I was 7 or younger. He was your best friend. I think I still have the shelf he made for me that you never hung. But he was such a big part of our lives before he disappeared. You refused to talk about it, about him in general.

I know you had a lot of hobby friend groups while I was growing up. I know there were lots of people with secrets and that those secrets were regarded more as "jokes" when certain company (usually M) wasn't present. I remember your CIA friend. I remember your "secret society" friends. I remember your secret phones and never ending cash. I remember how you'd switch up between having all these hobby friends and having "no friends". I want to know what really happened. I want to know why you had those friends. Why did I always know about your CIA friend? Why did you have so many "secret society" friends? Why was I "part of it" until suddenly I wasn't? Were the cop friends yours? Or M's? Were they the neighbors friends?

You were the one pushing me into sports. I did dance for what, two, three years? I did t-ball. I did gymnastics. Was money really the reason I was pulled? We never seemed to be hurting for money, but we were always "too poor" for anything you didn't deem immediately necessary or a good investment. Or when you'd give us apology gifts.

This all ties back in to the abuse I experienced in religious spaces and school as well. Because the common theme amongst all of them is you pushing me into these spaces, vocally praising and building them up, only to turn around and vocally hate and distrust them.

I want to know why. I want to know why my brain can't separate these things now that I can know them all at the same time. And I want to know why it all stopped. What happened? How did I get out?

I've been trying my whole life to understand your constant 180s, contradictions, and hypocrisy. To understand how you could go so smoothly between extreme invasions of privacy and a refusal to acknowledge my existence. To understand why nothing I do or don't do matters, why you can only see me through a lens I can't access. I have so many questions for you, if you could just be honest with me. If you could just stop being so reactive and defensive.

I don't want any of you in my life anymore. But if things were different, if I could talk to you, really, actually talk to you openly and honestly, maybe it'd be different. I know it sounds crazy. Even if that was the only change, even if being able to talk to you that way confirmed everything, even if it meant knowing worse things than I know now. Being able to talk to you that way is a luxury I've never had. It was always the rest of the family against me unless I was the one keeping us together. My honesty regarded as lies and exaggerations, my feelings regarded as threats or impositions. Is it really too much for me to ask for the truth?

Don't you see this is killing me? Not knowing, not being able to ask. I can't remember a time where my trust in you wasn't rooted in a fear of something worse than you. Do you even know how many times you've admitted the physical abuse to me? That you still swear never happened?

When I'm forced to process my flashbacks, my childhood, I can't separate you or M from what happened. Because what happened to me was done by your hand, ignored by your eyes, covered by your words and lies. I know I'm not lying. My body remembers more than my brain and I refuse to shut it out again. It always comes back to you two. You "didn't know" so you punished me for nothing? You "weren't aware" so you called me a liar for bringing it up? You "never did anything" but only respect my physical boundaries in the presence of my husband? You'll "do anything" for me, so long as it suits your story.

I just wish you were capable of seeing me. Really, truly seeing me. Maybe then you'd answer all these questions.

the benefits of not feeling sick that I could distinctly feel, outweighed the foods that I could no longer eat.

If it was just one allergy/intolerance we would feel the same. We did good for a bit at avoiding our allergies and felt a little better, we could notice the difference. It essentially means eating the same five-ten things on repeat indefinitely for us, and that is not sustainable while trying to recover from the ED mindset that food isn't safe and the mindset that food isn't "for" us. Cutting out our allergens blew up our progress in that area once we started actually feeling hungry.

Some of our allergies (like soy) are in absolutely everything and it's not always disclosed, especially in things like chicken/turkey meat. For example, as long as we're careful we can eat chicken, but sometimes we end up with chicken that was soy-fed and then had some form of soy used in it's packaging. The only way around that is a bunch of research and we've been working on it, it's just not a super quick or easy process. Because of PFAS we can't eat or touch raw veggies or fruits. We can't even really eat cooked fruits. We've also stumbled on new allergies while looking for replacement foods and it's cut out even more. It's getting hard to eat because one product being out of stock means we just have less food until it's back. Usually it's a base ingredient or something important to our ability to feed ourself while alone. Our other conditions limit how much we can do in general, our energy is limited and we always have to "choose" what's most important to take care of.

We're just at a point where we need someone to help us tackle this from all the same angles that we have to, and finding someone both willing and capable of that isn't easy. At the very least, we need to find doctors/providers that are willing to work together with each other to help us. We're working on it. It's just taking longer than we can really handle on our own.

We're trying. Really, really trying. We're doing our best to care for our physical health and basic needs. We're doing our best to keep a recovery mindset and not be discouraged by things. Every new/old symptom that pops up we just keep moving. Try to cope, or at least try not to dissociate endlessly. But there are never any real breaks. No one knows how to help us.

We're stuck in a loop where taking care of anything results in a flare up of some kind. Doing good with our basic needs? Pain flare. Got our pain to a tolerable level? Anxiety flare. Try to focus on the big issues? All the little issues become a thousand times louder. Find something to eat that we actually want? Eat it so much we stop enjoying it. Doing okay with not thinking too much about foods we want but can't eat? Bombarded by ads for them. Finally starting to understand what hunger feels like? Anything with nutritional value that we can eat makes us not want to eat. Managed to clean organize the house to a reasonable place? It only lasts as long as our body can keep up with doing it daily.

We stopped seeing our dietician and one of our therapists in early december because every session became "I know you're trying. I know it sucks. But you have to be patient. You have to keep trying. Maybe if you buy a million gadgets and overpriced 'allergy-friendly' foods you'll pavlov yourself into doing better. Maybe if you eat this thing you hate enough you'll start to like it. Maybe if you stop worrying about money you'll eat better. I know you're worried about not being able to afford the safe stuff, but have you tried buying it anyway? Maybe, maybe, maybe. You should track your meals, or your macros, or take pictures of what you eat. I know those things are triggering but have you considered doing them? Maybe if you move even when your back/leg gives out you'll get used to it."

We've been in this cycle for so long. No one stops to consider how it feels for us to not only be in it but to be asking for help with it. No one seems to consider the fact that simply being allergic to something doesn't stop us from still enjoying it, and no one seems to consider how much harder trying to recover from disordered eating is while being allergic to over half the food we enjoy. How much harder recovery is when our allergens cut out food groups and entire cuisines. Our main therapist does to an extent, but we don't talk about it much with her because she doesn't treat disordered eating.

We're trying a new dietician. We booked another session with our other therapist. We start pain management soon. We're doing everything we can to keep going and to keep getting better. We just don't know what to do or say at this point. Everyone goes down the same list of ideas/solutions for us. Everyone gets stumped by the way our issues interact with each other. No one seems to have anything new to say or suggest. "I'm trying" is always met with "try harder" but we can't. Whether it's allergies or pain everything that we love is being slowly stripped away. We've been watching it happen for the last 16 years. We've been stuck in this loop for so long. We're still trying. It's just getting harder.

asdis, my heart goes out to you.

 

I had a "cheat" meal the other day probably because I was tired of the limited eating... The next day, I felt absolutely awful, like I was hung over all day,

We feel you on this one. We made some bad food choices over the past week because it was just easier to and we've been feeling sick since. We hope you're feeling better by now.

We forgot to mention on our post above, but we applied for xolair with our allergist last week and we're hopeful that we can get on it. It'll be kinda difficult to manage the appointments every two weeks but we think it'll be worth it if it helps even a little bit.

The ED therapist has been pretty good, for the most part she's just helped us not slip back into intentionally restricting. She's been working with all of us that have fronted during session too. We're starting to touch on some of the deeper issues related to our ED with her and it seems promising. She's been pretty good about moving at our pace. Both her and our regular therapist recommended a nutritionist to help find food replacements and help navigate the medical side.

The nutritionist we found is nice enough, we've only had three sessions though. We had one with her today and she had that look of "I might be in over my head" for about half of the appointment. We made sure to find one that had experience and focused on working with patients with food allergies and eating disorders. We wrote a pretty detailed (but not novel length) description of our issues surrounding food and where the non-allergy complications arose from. Her initial response and the first two sessions were fine. We didn't necessarily learn anything new or anything, but she at least never let on that anything was off/she wasn't comfortable. We found a few substitutes to look for but they're pricey and will be luxuries if we can get them. Today we had to explain the "whys" of a lot of things to her and had to give a little bit more detail about our childhood. We were up front in our intro message to her about pervasive ED tendencies, trauma being a major contributing factor, and that we were medically neglected until we moved out/moved cities. We were also up front about our physical health being quite bad. But still, we just barely scratched the surface of what we had to explain, and she just seemed super uncomfortable and like she had no idea what to do. It would be different if she was fully focused on numbers and blood work and stuff, but there hasn't really been much medical talk outside of going over my allergy test results. And she was asking us questions, we were just answering. She was shocked that it takes us so long (usually a month or so if we're lucky, 3-5+ if not) to get in with specialists even with referrals. She didn't seem to understand the emotional/mental difficulty of never knowing whether or not a new doctor will believe us. It just kinda left us feeling like she didn't think about the possibility that multiple compounding factors would mean more difficulty even if we're as intent as we are to heal and get better.

We're not giving up on working with her yet. We want to try asking her for bloodwork orders to check for deficiencies and stuff and see how that route goes first. We're just feeling some kinda way about another doctor having the "   " reaction when having to truly look at the complexities.

We just wish we had a family we could talk to.

Our physical health is scary. Our mental health has always been scary. We're alone when our fiance works. We don't have friends to ask over; we have one friend that we typically see once a week. We don't have fiance's family's houses that we can go to, they all have pets we're allergic to. We can't ask them over either because they have kids. We don't have the capacity for conversation. Between pain and nightmares we are at our limit.

We wish we could go back in time and find a way to record all the important moments and details. We wouldn't miss you as much then. We don't really miss you, though, we miss the dissociated shell that you kept us trapped in. We miss when we thought our horrid mental state was normal. We miss when we thought our body hurting all the time was normal. We miss thinking that all food hurting us was normal. We miss the pain from before we knew much of anything about it. We miss the effect that you used to have on us, where we'd get so scared of you that our brain would lock us into "happy" mode. We miss not being able to know what's wrong. But that very effect is the reason our memory is so fragmented now.

We don't know where we're going with this. We're scared for when you start asking about holiday plans. We're scared that our pain and fear will prevent us from seeing our dogs again before they die. We're scared that you're going to stop helping us financially when the economy gets worse.

We wish that any one part of our life was normal. That there was one aspect of life that wasn't so much work. Our relationship with our fiance isn't work but keeping our lives running is. Our mental health is always work. We never get a break from it. Just this past week we've had an increase in nightmare severity and in the frequency of our daytime nightmares. But you can't tell from the outside. Our physical health is always work. Whether it's trying to budget energy to do necessary tasks or just trying to calculate how to move without causing more pain, it's work. Eating is work. Easy food means at least a couple of bad days afterwards. Food that doesn't hurt takes extra time, extra effort, extra money. Trying to keep up with hobbies and interests is work. There is nothing that doesn't cause us pain. Maintaining relationships is work. We only really have one friend and we only have them because they're willing to work around our pain and allergies.

We wish we had a family we could talk to. We wish we had a family we could ask for help with making appointments. We wish we could talk to you about our symptoms. We wish we could rely on you for any amount of emotional support. We wish we could reach out to extended family. We wish we didn't have to be alone.

M-

I know you've told me a bit about my birth, but you've never really shared important details with me. I know I was a preemie. You've changed the story back and forth though, so I don't know by how much. It's between a month and a month and a half early. I know I put you in the hospital for a week or two before I was born but I still don't know why exactly. I know that I almost killed us both. I know that when I was born, I came out so fast that they couldn't even perform an emergency c-section. I know that my umbilical cord was wrapped three times around my neck. I don't know what position I was born in. I know that I was born extremely jaundiced and sick. I know that I couldn't breastfeed, and I couldn't have regular formula either. I think you said soy formula was the one I tolerated best. I don't remember how long you said we stayed after I was born. I think I remember you saying that you had to come visit me in the hospital, but I truly don't know. I remember you telling me that the only reason we stayed in the state you raised me in was because you were too pregnant to move back to your home state. I remember some varying stories about how planned/wanted I was, but the most common story you told me was that you really wanted a baby (me), but did not have plans for a baby when I was conceived. I don't remember how far along you told me you were before you figured out that you were pregnant. I know you've always drank, and D smoked until I was 7 or 8. I know D worked in construction and plumbing. I know you worked in the office for the same company. I know neither of you have ever really had your health in order. I know we lived in a townhouse in a not-great area before my birth and until I was 6-7 months old. I know the town we moved to, and the job you eventually moved to, had a lot of water and soil contamination. Your job site was declared, federally, contaminated and responsible for the contamination of water and soil by heavy metals and toxic substances in a large surrounding area for the small town it happened in. It is still contaminated. Those affected without town water did not receive town water until the end of 2020. I know even our town water was only "marginally safe" until my teen years, as we were often not allowed to use water fountains at school or drink tap water at all.

I have questions about my birth, about your pregnancy with me, about my health as a baby and small child. I don't know how to ask you though. You lost my medical records, you lost my birth certificate, my social security card. You limited my access to medical care and often did not take care of my medical needs. You denied me autism testing after being told by at least two different school psychologists that I was likely autistic, a conclusion they came to after I was tested far more than most of the other kids in my grade. I don't know how to talk to you about these things because, when I was a kid, the answers changed constantly. When I was a teenager, you only told me polished up, cutesy "kid friendly" versions of your pregnancy, my birth, and my early life. I haven't asked about any of it since applying for college all those years ago. That's when I found out that you didn't have any medical records for me from before 15, almost 16. We couldn't get them either, because either you didn't know what practices to contact or, the ones you did contact did not have my records anymore. Most of them were lost in the transition between majority paper and majority electronic keeping of records. It's hard not to believe that it was on purpose. It's harder to ask, knowing what I know now, because you have also kept my bloodtype from me and your genealogy results from me. I have memories from under a year old, confirmed by you, and I did not know I was under a year until you told me. The abuse I endured in that household, in the family, in my environment in general, adds to my feeling of not being able to ask you anything. I don't trust you to tell me the truth. I don't even trust you to tell me that you just don't know or remember something, or to be truthful if you do tell me you don't know or remember.

I want to ask you how far along you were before you knew you were pregnant. I want to ask you how much/often you drank before you knew and if you continued drinking after you knew. I want to ask you for all the details of complications before I was born. I want to know how on top of prenatal appointments you were. I want to know what happened to put you in the hospital so early before I was born, let alone due. I want to ask you about my actual birth, how long it took, how quickly I had to be treated for jaundice. I want to ask you how long before I was breathing after I was born, or was I born breathing despite a very restricted airway? I want to ask whether I almost killed you before or during my birth, and what you meant by that. I want to ask you how long we both stayed in the hospital after my birth, and if we left together or if you had to leave me there for longer. I want to ask you about the formula and if you ever introduced foods to me to check for allergies. I want to ask you about all the details of my health between birth and 6 months old, and what you meant when you told me that I was cleared as a "normal baby" at that age. I want to ask whether or not you ever told any of my very few doctors in childhood that I was a preemie with a traumatic birth. I want to ask you what you remember about my eating and sleeping habits when I was a little kid. I want to ask you about how you ignored my asthma, eczema, pain, and allergies as a kid when both you and D contributed genetically and environmentally to me developing those things. I want to ask you about the town I grew up in and the different public health safety issues that it had. I want to ask you a million other questions about these things. But I don't know how. Because it's never been safe, the story's never been the same, and you've never been willing to tell me the whole truth.

The answers to these questions could mean nothing , but they could also give me insight to my health problems today. They could give me more context to share with my doctors. They have the possibility of giving me more credibility with doctors because I would finally have an actual, accurate health history with smaller date ranges and possibly better wording. But they could also mean nothing.

If I trusted you enough to ask, there's still the possibility that you just don't know or remember anything that I don't. That would crush me, not as much as the current situation does, but it would. If I worked up the courage to ask you and you just didn't know or remember or want to tell me, that would crush me more than the current situation does. I'm scared for my health. I keep hitting dead ends and waiting periods in limbo. I don't have the right words to make most doctors understand what I experience. I don't have a medical history to show them, I have to be very careful about disclosing my mental health history and status. I can't tell them that I'm autistic because you never got me officially tested, but no less than seven professionals in the field have urged me to get a full, proper evaluation because I show the signs and I clearly need support. I have been tested by these professionals with several different versions of autism screening tests and my results have been consistent across all of them. I can't get tested, though, because I don't have records or family or community members that could back me up on the signs/symptoms from childhood. I have little to no proof of anything important about my health from before this year. I can't tell my doctors (or you) that I have DID because it is already a struggle to be believed. I have to be careful about how I explain my lack of a medical history. On top of trying to accurately describe my symptoms and issues, I have to manage all of that as well. It's exhausting. All I want is to be able to ask my M about all of these complicated things but I can't. Because it's you.

We know a bit more about Asdis now, but it's still not much. Some doctors visits these past couple months brought us back some "new" memories. We put new in quotations because we've technically had them this whole time, we can just see them more clearly now. These memories coming through more clearly affected the whole system, but the way it affected Asdis in particular is what gave us some new insight.

We were conducting a system meeting in the new way, which for us means Seraphina and two others hold the meeting, the rest of us join the meeting one at a time to make sure we can't be fully grouped up for a persecutor attack. During meetings with others, Neverknown noticed that Asdis was starting to "glitch out" whenever the memories were talked about or referenced. Due to the setup of our meetings it's rare that anyone only gets met with once. Then Seraphina and the others met with Asdis. Her "glitching" was her messily shifting between 8-ish and "vaguely young adult". Another new thing was that, despite her glitching, she was the most lucid in relation to reality (past and present) that she had been the whole time since she showed up. There was still some denial, but nothing close to what it had been before. We found out that she's afraid of those memories, afraid of our body (especially as we learn more), she's upset by our body and what led it to this state, she's upset that our body couldn't "keep hiding it", she's afraid that our physical state is going to greatly affect our outside/physical safety. Whether she's 8-ish or vaguely young adult, she has those fears and feelings. However, when she's 8-ish she is more lucid. She knows what she does to the system but she's afraid of it, she can't stop it even though she doesn't want to do those things, and she tells us she doesn't know why or where it comes from, but she wants to stop and she hates disappearing when she doesn't try to. When she's vaguely young adult, she knows what she says and does and stands by it. She has the memories and fears but can't quite connect to them properly. They fuel the way she treats the rest of us despite acknowledging that the current trigger is her own memories. There is very little information to get from her in that state and very little we can say to her.

We were also able to figure out that the seal doesn't just affect Asdis, but several of the rest of us as well. It affects us all a little different, but there are some clear connections between the seal and personality/memory changes for some of us on the inside. That meeting was a couple weeks ago now. We've still been majorly dissociated day to day, it's been that way since August. We've found several nonverbal alters that aren't Sorrow or the nonverbal littles we knew about already.

We found out a bit more about our past from Asdis yesterday that we don't have any context for (or rather, don't want to acknowledge the context for). A nonverbal alter and Asdis were writing something together. She's pretty much only been around when she's 8-ish for the last couple of days. Asdis wanted to share it with our partner. She's gotten a bit more comfortable with him and is occasionally willing to talk about heavy things with him, as long as she stays 8-ish. There was an internal struggle over it, the nonverbal alter was turning our voice off whenever Asdis was present once he got home. It took a couple hours before Asdis was able to even tell him that she wrote something. It hasn't been shared, though, because of what she said about why she wanted to share. We knew that they were writing about something heavy. She warned him, we warned him that sharing it may stir things up for us inside. Asdis and our partner were discussing when to share it and he suggested waiting until he's off work for a few days in a row. She agreed, tried to show him immediately, and then told us (him and us) that she wants to share soon because "they'll have to answer you, they're programmed to" and that she "doesn't want to disappear" before it's shared. She knows it will likely hurt, she knows it might backfire, and internally she's shared that she's certain she'll go back older and make it worse if we wait too long.

It's hard to put much of the recent revelation into words, because it makes it more real, and because we're afraid to be wrong. And it's hard to trust that we've come to the right conclusion or gone in the right direction. It feels like we have because saying we're wrong relieves some of the related fear, and we know that that usually means we've found something that the denial can't handle. We haven't told our therapist yet, we just this past week got her off our back about inpatient/meds. We're going to tell her. We just don't know when. It's nice to know more about Asdis, it's helpful to know more about our system as a whole. She hasn't been as much of a persecutor the last couple days. She has moments but she hasn't been getting stuck in them as much and the typical things that she would do to us have been happening to her as well. We don't really know who's driving those things anymore though. It's weird, knowing there's still a persecutor (or possibly multiple) that are still hanging around without the rest of us having access to them. We can't tell if Asdis's ages split because she's so sure she'll "disappear" and become older again. We know this is rambly and a little confusing. We don't know that we're really looking for anything except maybe just being heard/seen. 8-ish Asdis is the drive behind posting this, for an alter that wants nothing more than nonexistence she has become very intent on being heard/seen, as long as she doesn't feel like she'll get in trouble for it.

We've seen the ED therapist a few times and she's pretty nice. She seems like a good fit so far.

On the other hand, we saw an allergist on monday and while it's incredibly relieving that our asthma and food allergies are real, it's also become incredibly destabilizing. We have lost pretty much all of our safe foods. No more peanut butter, no more oreos, no more silly treats out unless we're absolutely sure they're safe. Fast food and restaurants are a no unless we either know for sure they're safe or decide to be okay with being sick after eating. Even for the foods that we didn't show as allergic to, we are so allergic to the pollen that they just aren't safe to risk. We even forgot to mention some foods that we react to because we have been able to avoid them for so long; now that we're looking for replacements we're kicking ourself over it because we can't find replacements! We truly think that we have lost peanut butter and it's alternatives as a whole because all the alternatives we've found either include other allergens or intolerances.

It truly feels like the universe or something has decided that we should either never enjoy food or just never eat. If the textures good and it tastes good it will hurt us. If it brings us joy, if we have fond memories of the food, if it's safe by eating disorder or autism standards, it will hurt us. There's something incredibly demoralizing about finally getting answers after 16 years only to find out that we've been right all along, that our disordered eating, our asthma, our skin problems, our inability to lose weight, our severe environmental allergies, our personality shift between 3rd and 5th grade.. could have all been avoided? Or at least, softened? Not only our FOO, but our peers, teachers, extended family, friends and their families, the rare doctor.. they were all so mean! Almost nobody believed us, even fewer tried to help. It's further proof of neglect against our FOO, if not abuse with the way they treated our allergies. Just kinda lost in all the what-ifs and memories.

We want to get to the point where our eating and relationship with food isn't disordered. We want to stop feeling sick all the time and we want to stop feeling worse every time we eat. We want to stop fearing food. We want to stop getting consumed by contamination fears. All we've ever wanted is for food to stop being such a big, scary, impossible to deal with thing without turning our brain off and dissociating from the body. It just doesn't seem like we'll ever get that. It's hard coming to terms with something when every time you've previously accepted it, someone else has convinced you that it could be different. It doesn't seem like it could ever be different. Even if we do allergy shots and xolair, we will always have foods to avoid, we'll always have to be hypervigilant about food, and food will never be easy. So we're trying to figure out how to accept it in a healthy way.

Thank you all for responding, we're sorry you guys understand as much as you do.    Sending support and compassion back to all of you

We're able to be a bit less emotional about it now. We've been grey-rocking them to some extent since about 13 years old, and were grey-rocking them fully while we were in college and when we initially moved cities. If we were still able to work we think we'd still be able to grey-rock them, it's just since our body gave out that we've been having to talk with them/disclose more to them. They still know very little about our mental health and we plan on keeping it that way. They've also made it clear that letting them visit us is a condition for remaining on insurance/financial help; they visited on Sunday. We've been in limbo between being the golden child and the scapegoat for forever now, it's just that they've realized it no longer helps their image to treat us poorly now that we're out in the world without them.

We've been working on getting the fight back so we can advocate for ourself better and it's slow going. We can advocate for ourself decently with one doctor and okay-ish with another two, but new doctors and ER doctors are still kind of a no-go. Maybe we need to have our therapist work with us more on not defaulting to the fawn state. Maybe once we're actually getting treated for the pain we'll be able to be more present as well. It's been very overwhelming and we often feel like we're asking too much when we see our doctors, but since they seem to remain concerned we've been doing our best to keep up with it all.

We got the MRIs done last Friday (yay) and found out that our PCP had to call and fight with insurance twice; the day before and the very morning of our appointment because insurance kept trying to say the tests weren't necessary. Because of insurance issues FOO got some of our mail relating to the MRIs and that meant an extra-in-depth conversation about it all. It's weird to navigate because they can come off as genuinely concerned for a bit and then switch up so randomly, it's honestly more hurtful than if they hadn't changed at all.

Trigger Warning: medical talk, mentions of past neglect
We debated what topic to post this under for awhile, so please let us know if there's a better spot.

Our health has deteriorated more. Our tests are coming back abnormal but "fine" according to some of our doctors, while others are very concerned about our current state and symptoms, and are trying to connect us to doctors that can help. Our insurance, that we have through our birth-giver(BG), has also been dragging it's feet and making getting imaging tests done very difficult. Our BG knows this. We recently had some extended family (aunt/uncle, two cousins + spouses) visit our parents and sister's house. For weeks, our parents kept asking/rephrasing/telling us that they would pick us up and take us to their house for the visit. We said no every time, and it took explaining our difficulties riding in the car and the several appointments we had that week for them to back off. Monday was the last of that set of appointments. The appointment did not go well.

Well, our BG texted us asking about it shortly after we left the hospital. We didn't respond until today, when we were able to have our therapist support us through the response. Our BG called us after we responded. We called her back once our session was over, and we had a long conversation about our physical decline and difficulties with getting adequate/consistent care. For context, until we were living with our husband in a city two hours away from our parents, they would deny, delay, and obstruct us from receiving medical care. So these conversations are new, difficult, and scary. When talking about some suspected diagnoses, our BG said "you know, I've been wondering if you had X condition for awhile now". When we asked what "awhile" meant, she said "since middle school". That was deeply infuriating. Near the end of the call, she also said "I'm sorry for giving you a broken body". That one hurt. It still hurts. It's been hours and we can't shake it off, ignore it, or bury it. She didn't sound sorry. Her voice was steady, tinged with pity and annoyance. She didn't, or rather wouldn't, acknowledge that her medical neglect is what put us in this situation.

Despite this, we must remain in contact for survival. As maddening as it is, the slips of "oh I saw signs of that X years ago" that we occasionally get from BG are our best chance at filling in some medical history/only chance at validation that our issues are largely ongoing from childhood. We've been doing everything internally that we can to make our peace with our situation with our family, talking with our therapist about it, the works. Reminding ourself that once we can't remain on their insurance, we can let them go because they won't have anything for us at that point. Hopefully by then, two years, we'll be able to work again. But until then, we are still struggling to deal with them. Even with making peace with it, limiting contact, only giving them necessary information; they still find ways to hurt us and make us feel small.

Our left leg works at 50%. Sometimes, it loses function entirely. We are in constant pain from multiple conditions. And yet, no matter how often we remind them or how well we explain things, our family, and BG especially, seem to be under the impression that we're just not trying hard enough. They don't see how bad it really is, and as much as we are honest about how bad it is, we refuse to perform rock bottom for them. After the "sorry", BG spent another 2-3 minutes reiterating "you have to advocate for yourself" and "be annoying about it". But she can't see that she abused that fight out of us. We tried, many times as a kid to be heard and taken seriously about our health. She was the one who dismissed us and gaslit us about our concerns. She was the one who pushed us to think everything wrong with our body was "normal" and that we were just "weak" and "lazy". They just don't get it, most likely never will, and are somehow both aware and oblivious to their hand in our current state. It's exhausting. And we feel so much more alone when they do things like this.

Thank you both for your responses  . We have an appointment with an ED therapist today and we're nervous but we know we can't skip it. Here's to hoping that she selected "dissociative disorders" as a specialty because she actually understands them, and not to just get more clients. We've tried ED therapy once before but the therapist told us she "wasn't equipped to help with our issues" because of the DID/the ED being tied to trauma.

We finished the emergency meds but our stomach hasn't returned to normal yet. We finally can eat whenever we're hungry again though. We're counting down the days until we see the allergist and trying to compile a comprehensive list of foods that we react to and how. It's supposed to be one of the best allergy centers in the area.

Trigger Warning: religious trauma/abuse, mentions of physical/sexual abuse (no details), mention of suicide, fragmented memories

It's getting too hard to ignore the role that religious trauma has played in our trauma as a whole. Specifically, how tied it is to our scattered memories of being trafficked.

This will probably be mostly word vomit. Apologies in advance. We would also like to apologize in advance in case  our story doesn't belong in this sub-board, we know it could have been much worse.

It's always struck us as odd that our family considers themselves christian despite only about a quarter of them engaging in religion. Also that the quarter or so of them that engage in religion are seen as "less safe" for doing so.

It first began bothering us between 8 and 10. At that point we had been through catholic preschool, a baptist headstart, a lutheran pre-k, had been shipped to church with an older neighbor child on a bus (that child's older sibling was involved in our abuse), had been put into the bible trailer/school church program, and had been put into a weekly children's bible study at a baptist church, all due to our parents wanting that for us. They would discourage us from talking to them about religion, we were punished very harshly for doing anything more than practicing assigned bible verses, and at some points for just doing that. We vividly remember how bad the punishment started for accidentally hearing our father pray, though we have no recollection of the punishment itself or what he was saying beforehand. We were maybe 6 or 7. Our sibling was never treated the same way regarding religion, and was involved in significantly less religious things until they chose to be involved. Our mother was also the only parent who would engage with the adults in religious places, although significantly less involved with religion.

We also had consistently negative experiences in religious settings. Authority figures constantly bullying us, physical abuse, being punished for memorizing assigned verses, being used as the "sinners" example constantly despite constant fawning (to be seen as "good/obedient"), generally being held to an impossibly higher standard than our peers.. Then there's the black building. We only really have one memory of it, being taken there by bus for food(?), seeing all the food and being told wee wouldn't get it anymore, and then it stops. We can't remember the other children with us, but it was a small group. We can't remember if it was during preschool or kindergarten/first grade, but the building was about a 5 minute bus-ride from both our preschool and our k/1 elementary school.

We also can't remember more than the bus rides in regard to going to church with a neighbor. We know we went more than once, but our younger sibling was only ever allowed to join us once. Our sibling was allowed to go without us once or twice, after we were stopped from continuing, but it was a different bus and with a different neighbor child and their parent. We don't remember much about the bible trailers other than them being generally awful to us, just a lot of memories of the issues from the "authority figures" sentence. By the age of 6 we were convinced g-d "hated" us; maybe three months after our 6th birthday we began praying to g-d begging to be "buried" or "returned". We never prayed aloud, either. Even when completely alone. We continued to pray about similar things until 13 when we fully gave up.

By the time we were started in the children's bible study, we were extremely distressed by religion yet continued to attend, still fawning. The fawning plus the fear made others see us as both extremely devout and extremely "dirty". Again, we have very limited memories of this time outside of the common themes we experienced in religious spaces. We stayed at the same church for youth group once we got to middle school, and then got shuffled around between 5-6 other youth groups in the area until we finally were allowed to stop attending religious things at 16. We were kicked out of the first youth group after our first suicide attempt and our refusal to "let them mold us" afterwards. We were kicked from every youth group after that as well for various reasons, mostly relating to our mental health history or personal style. We were kicked from one for helping our friend through a panic attack.

We were always able to remember the things that happened during high school time, however, as we've gotten older and stayed away from religion we've been able to remember more. Especially once we left our parents house and were able to stay out of it. Some of the first things we remembered were what we talked about above, but we also started to remember "baptisms" that we never agreed to. There were at least three, two at the same church, and all were violent. One was done by other children/teens that were related to the pastor and owners and at the command of the pastor. We were also sexually harassed by those same peers, some others, and two of them got us a specific "job" in a church play so that they could SA us. There were instances of SA at school that were loosely related to the bible trailers. Around the same time, we had also started to ask our parents about the array of preschool/headstarts we attended, and like they had been doing since kindergarten, the story changed every time we asked. According to them, we either only went to catholic preschool and no other programs or we went to preschool and headstart but none of the other programs were church related. We also began to remember that adults had been involved in our SA, as up to that point we were only aware of cocsa and internet grooming. One of the adults was the older sibling (and his friends) of the neighbor we had gone to church with. Another was father of our other neighbor/childhood friend, who we had already been aware of being involved in/started the cocsa. Our father slipped up once and asked if our grandfather (who lived with us our whole life there) had ever SAed us. And admitted to catching some of the cocsa. And then last year, when we finally escaped our hometown and got a place of our own, memories started coming back that overwhelmingly point to our father and grandfather. There is no doubt that our father was involved, just no way to know how involved. Our mother and grandmother were aware to a degree as well. We don't think we can say anything more about the trafficking memories beyond that police were involved, but never to help.

Add all that in to medical and emotional neglect and constant gaslighting, the rapid switching between absent-parenting and helicopter-parenting, straight-up missing records, and knowledge from recently awakened/returned alters, and the picture is the closest to put-together that it's ever been. The bits of knowledge that we have from these "new" alters gives us some insight as to why our father was so angry at us for hearing him pray and why our family treated us the way they did around/about religion. Since 2017, our hometown has been arresting more and more predators. Multiple distributors have been caught and arrested. Teachers across multiple schools and levels have been fired, as well as certain teachers that moved from our county. The sheriff was raided. The bible trailer no longer exists.

And yet, we still don't really know what happened, what was actually connected, when the abuse shifted to mostly online.. We don't know how much we'll ever be able to handle knowing or get to know. It's hard to heal from something we can't fully understand. All of these pieces individually, we can hold. We don't go straight into denial. We can do some work on them, but it always hits a wall. But when they start fitting themselves together, even loosely, it becomes a struggle to not be consumed by denial. There are some that don't untangle anymore, even when the denial starts to pass. It's confusing. But we can't deny the role that the religious trauma and abuse played, and we can't ignore it anymore. It's lead to some terrifying questions, especially about the nature of our diagnosis, certain alters, and some of the ways our headspace works. The most we can do right now is acknowledge it, but we're hoping that it's enough for a little bit. Because we really don't know what to do with any of this.