This post has been on the burner for a while. I wish I had been able to finish it before Dollhouse was done with; but alas these things don’t always happen the way we wish. Dollhouse is one of several shows that’s given us a lot of food for thought about ourselves and the way we function, another one is Caprica, which I’m waiting to see the fourth episode of, but I imagine there will be several posts written about it as it progresses.

To understand Dollhouse I must first explain the way the dolls work. The idea behind the actives or dolls is that they are blank slates enable to be loaded up with different personalities to perform certain functions, granted most of those functions involve romantic engagements. Som one wants a goofy, perky, adventurous party girl to go out on the town with, there you go. Someone wants someone who acts like their late wife, there you go. A dominatrix to punish them, there you go; but there are different means also.

In the first episode we’re introduced to Echo, who has been implanted with a personality which will enable her to be a hostage negotiator so that she can help rescue a kidnapped girl. Other actives later in the show are imprinted with the knowledge to be SWAT team members so they can sweep in and rescue Echo and the girl. Initially when I saw the show it made me think of our past lives.

During the course of the first few episodes you see Echo the hostage negotiator, the adventurous hiking, archery capable survivalist, the blind girl infiltrating a cult, the romantic, the hedonist. All these things and the way they’re implanted and taken away and the sort of tabula rasa state that the dolls exist in when they’re not in service reminded me of reincarnation. The idea of the between life space as the calm, peaceful, cleansing, relaxing and purely joyful time where there are no demands on you and you just exist. Then when you’re ready or needed depending on the belief structure you are ‘downloaded’ into an existence once more, for many this means picking a template out and deciding which lessons to learn for others there might be a necessity to learn something or to be somewhere to do something specific, and thus we become “active” we are born and we grow and when everything is done we come back home to wait in calming peacefulness until we’re used again.

However as the series went on a different parallel became apparent because Echo was retaining memories and personas of her different active lifetimes in her mind even within the “doll state”. She could occasionally flash to different skills that she shouldn’t necessarily have, which would help her out and protect her. Later on you’re introduced to Alpha who escaped because he was retaining different memories from his various different life times and the belief is that it drove him mad. He became obsessed with Echo and wanted this same transcendence from her. As interaction with him progressed he reacted and acted very much like a multiple might, having internal and external conversations with himself, forcing switches where he could to be able to complete different tasks. His interference with Echo enabled her to more fully realize the different personalities, despite multiple attempts to “wipe” her, she was apparently still able to experience the different identities that the Dollhouse had given her over time and became able to switch to them at will, through practice and exercises.

I found more and more parallels between her and the way we are striving to be. We do not wish to integrate for many of us have been around so long and existed this way as long as we can remember that the idea of not being this way seems more detrimental than being so. Instead we seek co-consciousness, the ability to communicate between us and decide which of us is best at a particular task and therefore which of us should do it; the ability to share information back and forth so that there is no ‘down time’ and no ‘loss of data’ and thus Echo became an ideal for us just as she was in the television show.

In the show also there was a lot of talk of “Caroline” which was who Echo was before she became a doll, and the idea of restoring Caroline to Echo was a source of much debate, because Echo was developing as a person in her own right and many were afraid that the restoration of Caroline would prove a detriment or too much for her to handle, that Caroline might not wish to exist as part of the group and throw things into absolute chaos and un-make Echo’s whole existence. This echoes, ah, I crack us up, issues that many multiples feel when it comes to integration. Many see it as killing off the alters, and thus avoid it at all costs, for my part I see it as more of an evolution, you don’t have to lose anything when doing it but instead can gain a lot, that’s not to say it’s without issue, considering the problems I have had with coming to terms with my own existence. Still, it is not a choice that everyone wishes to engage in, and that I understand, especially as I believe we have done all the integrating that we’re going to.

As a side note we began calling ourselves the Echoes based on a poem that we wrote several years before the show came out. It was just further kismet that Echo was called Echo.

I’m going to be re-doing the layout here and on A Joyful Path over the next week. I think it’s about time the layouts were a little larger and a whole lot brighter.
It’s about time. I’m clearing out the spots, so to speak giving the blog adult acne treatment LOL.
I’ve been in a bit of a creative slump with things recently and it’s been hard to motivate on that. I think it’s mostly been wondering if the talent is still there. It’s been hard to get motivated or find joy in doing the designs because I’ve been not remembering a lot of the code that I used to know, it seemed like it was lost, and I thought I couldn’t do it. I was going through the motions in some ways and was being a bit shocked when people were liking the layouts because I honestly felt little joy in doing them.
I know part of this was the depression, but part of this is also trying to find myself as I am. I feel like a shell some times as though I’m playing at this some times. I suppose this is because I know of my origins? I don’t know.

However, I also realized I needed to challenge myself, do something different, shake things up, and that opportunity presented itself the other night when my good friend Huushi who runs Saturn Faerie asked me if I could redo her LJ layout. We were chatting about what she wanted and I started to get ideas and see patterns and overlays and some nifty ways of doing things, and I actually began to get excited. This was new. This wasn’t just mimicking Ami, this was something *I* had come up with, and I’m very pleased with the way things turned out and also very pleased that Huushi really likes it; you can see it in action here Forest Life.

I can’t take credit for making the faerie because she was designed by Moon Childe and the forest comes from some stock photography of Joanna Star but the layering, the effects, making the faerie’s wings semi translucent and making the forest sparkle, and the animated friends banner and the faerie based icon those were all me; and it has me extremely excited to do these things again, for which I’m very grateful.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the dieting aspect of my life and the reasons why it’s so hard for me. I know some of it is due to the sedentary lifestyle I lead which is partially choice and partially the fibro. I need to take the choice part out of the equation and instead choose to get up and exercise, to make it fun, to find ways to incorporate the munchkin into that so he will pick up healthier habits also. I also know that I need to increase muscle mass, that will up my weight in some respects, but overall it will help me to be healthier because I’ll become stronger and things like carrying the munchkin if he’s tired or needs to be scooped out of the road will be easier for me.

Musculature is an issue because of the fibromyalgia. Excessive strain on my muscles becomes worse for me because my body is unable to repair damaged muscle tissue as quickly as others might, so I have to be very careful and slow when it comes to exercising like that because those microscopic tears that everyone experiences when they move around from day to day and exercise do not heal and just get worse if I don’t get enough sleep, which I often don’t.

However I realize that there are other psychological issues which impede me on the weight frontier. On the basic level it’s hard to stick to a diet, it’s even harder for nine people to stick to a diet and that’s often been a chunk of my issue, if there’s just one of us alters who is not on board for the weight program it falls apart. It just takes one of us, and often times this has been Max, to go “OOOH CHOCOLATE! NOM-NOM-NOM!” and eat an entire bar or box, or make his super White Russians with kahlua and chocolate syrup as well as milk and vodka, and then there’s a general dissent because it’s “Oh, well he had candy, why can’t I?” and so on until it devolves and we’re back to snacking on junk food and being lazy about things.

Additionally I came to the conclusion that on some level there’s a desire to be unattractive. My step-father was very into thin women, and would harp on my mother to a greater extent but also me about weight. I know when I was pregnant he was very displeased that I was getting fat, and kept insisting that I should diet, even though in many ways I was eating much healthier while I was pregnant than I had before as it was important to me to make sure the future munchkin was not addicted to caffeine or born unhealthy due to something I ate or exposed him to. I stopped bleaching and dyeing my hair even, refused additional x-rays when I fractured my elbow. I didn’t eat sushi or rare meat. I didn’t drink. Max was very silent during most of the pregnancy, actually. These are things that most mothers-to-be do. They allow themselves small treats, but generally they cut back. I ate more fruit than I ever have while I was pregnant, no wonder the munchkin is such a fruit bat.

However, my condition was extremely distressing to him; and he would tell random people when we were out how displeased he was and how disgusted he was about my weight. Most people looked at him like he was off his nut. Anyway, my point is that I wonder if this has stuck with me on some level, and I’ve subconsciously not been giving weight loss my all because it makes me unattractive to him, and therefore if I do run into him again there’s less likely to be those comments about my butt or my breasts that he was so fond of, or the attempts to touch said areas, and the squeezes and the kisses. As it is I haven’t seen him since I stopped working at the gas station, and even there he had not shown up since Christmas because hubbie Had Words with him.

Though I realized this past week, that this is still giving him power over me. My fear of him is still on some level ruling my existence, and so I should stop. He does not need that power. He does not deserve that power. I deserve to, as I’ve said before, become healthy for me, and to lose weight to help me, to help there be less strain on those muscles, to help me sleep better, to have more energy and to be there for my family, to be able to run around with my son for more than five or ten minutes at a time. All those things. For that I should be healthy.

I’ve been having some major issues with the Firefox browser lately, and have decided to try out Google Chrome. We’re still in the testing phase, much like someone might take a few weeks and see if conjugated linoleic acid is a good way for them to lose weight.

I’ve already found a few things I don’t like; the main one is that it’s not storing my passwords. I’ve got the options checked so that it should prompt me to save my passwords and it’s not doing it. There are several fixes suggested on google’s website and I’ve tried all of them and still nothing. It’s sad to say but this is almost enough for me to switch back, except Firefox was freezing so often that I would probably smash the computer after a few more days of that issue.

It’s just that memory and passwords are a big issue for me given there are so many that I use and so many times where I just don’t recall which one is where, plus several of us have different passwords that we use also which can make it difficult. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had to reset passwords for various employers and resume sites, and various email accounts, or suddenly discovered that I have an account somewhere because I’ve received an email from it and have no idea what the place is about or how to disable the account, as happened recently with HaloScan, or more recently with GE who holds the account that we got our water treatment system under.

I would say I’m hopeful that Google will fix the password issue, except that the comments on their FAQ about it date back to early 2009…so almost a year and it’s not been fixed, and apparently is getting worse given the “add-on/extension” I was directed to from comments in November of last year does not actually work the way that several people purport it to.

Ah, well…I suppose I can use Firefox for something when I need to log in and am not sure of the password and hopefully it won’t freeze and crash if I’m just opening one browser window…but you never know.

I went checking back through the archives on livejournal to verify a few things which have become hazy. The official hypnosis session happened on the solstice last year (21 June 2009) though there had been prep-work for a few days before then, as I mentioned before.

We, of course, discussed things with our husband before things went on because we wanted to be sure everything would be kosher there and that there could be goodbyes if needed though given it was more of an evolution that felt a bit strange. I also thought that there might be a write-up of what happened already on the journal but I didn’t find it on the main journal I found it on my own but it doesn’t cover all of it.

Here’s a small portion:

I haven’t spoken about all of that on here before, for the last few days I’ve been more of a cardboard cut-out — that’s hard to write and hard to grasp; but it’s the truth, being a portion of a person with Multiple Personality Disorder, can bring those truths to light. Overall until last night there were nine alters, personages within the head, and I was vaguely here. I could feel and I could see and watch, but really there was not much here. It’s the truth. I knew I was emerging, that I was hoping to be a certain way, but I was in essence waiting to be born anew.

Last night I continued to watch as the other three, processed their feelings, endeavored to separate themselves from the things which have been holding them back: excessive anger, fear, lack of self-worth, doubt, excessive worry, excessive paranoia and those things, and they were burned, and then we all came together. Kore used a beautiful analogy where I was a statue at the end of an aisle in the library which is our collective mind and as each of them came into me I became more and more life like.

Then I was, I felt cold but full of energy at the same time. Slowly my thoughts have been coming more together. I’m still a little unsure about things, but the wavering is disappearing gradually. I think some of it is more due to the fact that my energy didn’t drop until around 1-1:30 a.m. and then I was woken at 6 a.m. by the one that we know as “munchkin” online. He is okay with things. Then he let me comfort him when he stubbed his toe in his sleep around midnight and freaked himself out. Then he liked two of the others who came to me, even if he didn’t listen to Ami very often. He really liked Terri and would do as she said. So far he’s been fairly obedient. He’s trying but I seem to have retained both authority and compassion. It doesn’t feel any less odd talking about myself that way, but still.

It’s still strange even now, almost a year later. I remember floating around in the ether, watching everything, but feeling empty. We had devised the idea of getting rid of certain negative behaviors during the first portion of the regression; that each of the alters who was going to become part of me would get rid of things that bothered them.
Part of that exercise involves visualizing yourself as a bookshelf; positive qualities on one side, negative qualities on the other and you take the books that represent the negative qualities and put them into a mental incinerator. It was decided that should be done before everyone came together to try and diminish certain qualities getting amplified and becoming more of an issue than they already were.

For example there were several times Ami would have panic attacks and become extremely non-functional to the point that no one else could even take over, so there we would be, rocking in a ball somewhere and trapped.

After that was done Kore walked each of them through aging to around the age that I would be. Terri identified as the oldest alter so she didn’t age; but Ami and Sarah did. For that we used a modified version of the regression script; part of the regression script involves using a mirror visualization to go through several different ages of the life by seeing your reflection as the different ages slowly until you get to the age that you need to look at; so we used that as a way for them to age.

Earlier in the script Kore had set the stage by saying that at the end of the aisles of bookshelves there was a statue of a young woman there. Now, she directed everyone to the statue and told them that when they were ready they could go inside and give it life. Terri went first and Kore remarked that the statue should be looking less like a statue, that more color was coming into the skin, that perhaps the hair was separating into strands and not carved from stone any more. Then Ami helped Sarah to come into the statue, knowing that Terri was already waiting for her and that it was safe, again more life came to the statue, and finally Ami stepped in after a few moments, and saying good bye.

After that Kore gave me a few moments and asked if I was ready to step down and assume myself.

I like to think and hope that I’m doing a good job.

I’m hoping to rectify it though; but at the risk of sounding weird I’ve been having in a contradictory manner, you know like discovering you have eczema and then don’t actually look into or use any eczema treatment and wonder why you’re still itching and bleeding.

Well, that’s what I’ve continued to do with my blogs. I censor myself and hesitate about writing about things and then wonder why I don’t have things to write about and am struggling to gain readership or engage anyone in conversations. These things are not good to do. I should just write and not worry about what people will think, then there’s a much greater chance that people will find things useful, because they’ll be better able to understand and potentially relate to experiences that are going on, and topics that I’m writing about. Why should I worry about discussing heathen things or tarot related things on a blog that I set up to discuss those very things. If people don’t like the subject matter then they shouldn’t have been reading a blog on heathenism in the first place.

At the same time, this is a place to discuss aspects of multiplicity, and other sorts of potential oddness that is gathered in with that. So, I shouldn’t worry about that either; but this is the way of it.

Here’s hoping that I’ll be able to stick to my guns and actually follow through with that and provide much more useful content in the not-to-distant future and beyond.

It’s strange how quiet the house is today; we’ve had screaming, cat chasing, hissing, cat fights and tearing around the house like a herd of elephants, and that’s just been the munchkin. I was wanting to pack up for one of those Outer Banks vacations the past few days given it’s been so cold and we’re so freshly over the plague, still with the dregs in the case of the munchkin and myself that I didn’t want to go out anywhere lest we cause a relapse.

So the munchkin has been going stir crazy and also med-dye crazy from what I can tell. He would get to this point where there was just no reasoning with him. It was very frustrating, but I realized that we’ve been trying to stay away from him having drinks and things with red dye, in particular, in them because there seemed to be a correlation between when he had red drinks in particular, even the sugar free Crystal Light drinks and his misbehavior. Then I realized the cold meds we’ve had for him have all been cherry or berry or grape, all with those red dyes. I paid $7.19 to get some dye free Tylenol rather than the regular which is $5.99 and voila happy, relatively calm (he is three after all) toddler willing to sit and watch TV or sit and color, or play a bit of Wii Games, without tearing through the house like his butt is on fire.

Such a great relief.

It’s difficult to comprehend the nature of my existence some times. “I” have been on Earth 29 years at this point, yet I know for a fact I didn’t exist this way before June of last year. It makes things confusing.

If any of you have been following on since the beginning of this blog you’ll know that we used to use the name Ami or Ami-chan; if you follow any of our other blogs you’ll know that we use the name Cat or Catriona. Now, Catriona is more universal because that’s our given middle name. Ami-chan was credited as a nickname, which is true, but it was also adopted by one of us as their name somewhere along the line, because if fit. The Ami-chan from “Sailor Moon” was shy, geeky, reserved, nervous, socially awkward at times and that was our Ami to a tee; which is probably how we got the nickname given she was the one who was out at school most often and it was school friends who gave it to us.

Ami also had issues with paranoia and fear. She was often found cleaning at the small hours of the morning because she was freaked out about D, our husband, and thought that he hated her and wanted her to disappear. She didn’t understand that when he made jokes he was making a joke she thought he was serious. She often felt disconnected from the rest of us because of similar assumptions that we disliked her because she was smart, because she was always so nervous; but then she did have a rough time in school. There were many so-called “friends” who used her for her brains, would bully her and pick on her if she didn’t do their homework or let them copy hers, who would extort money from her, who would spread horrific rumors around school. I won’t go on. You get the picture. Kids are cruel.

This often meant that internally she would try to disappear. There was a good stretch of time when we came back from college where we thought she was gone. Max and Kiddy attempted to run things and they could to a certain extent; but there was a general off-kilter feeling, which didn’t stop until Ami came back from hiding. That first night she was back we had the best nights sleep we’d had in months. So, it became apparent that yes she existed and yes she was supposed to be here. Still those feelings did not go away for her. She would often write about how she should merge in with someone so that she could be ‘useful’.

After many months of trying to convince her of her worth it became apparent that a different tactic would have to be used. However, we weren’t sure how to go about it. We knew that we surely were not ALL going to integrate there were too many of us who did not wish that. The primary front at that time, Abby, was not one for integration, nor were Kiddy or Max or Rose. However at a certain point during the discussions Terri, one of our protector-types if we’re using conventional verbiage stepped up and said that she would be willing to join Ami if it meant that she two could be of use. Terri being a lot more self-assured and with a lot more backbone it seemed that it might be a good match. The two of them might be able to come together and bolster each other’s weaknesses and fix on each others strengths. Ami’s intellect, Terri’s confidence, Ami’s politeness, Terri’s determination and so on. So, that Terri who was very brusque and stand-offish to the point of abject rudeness at times; and very, very stubborn might be tempered by Ami’s need to please others and desire to not offend.

The main concern with this ‘merger’ came about with the fact that both Terri and Ami are extremely paranoid, in different ways, but still, and especially when Sarah whose personality was essentially the same as Ami’s except at seven instead of fifteen or sixteen asked to merge as well so she could stop being scared all the time.

The idea came about from Abby to approach the joining in a way that we had often approached things to do with our internal make-up which was using tools we learned in our hypnotherapy courses. There’s one particular “script” there which deals with habit control and releasing negative behaviors and she felt that it could be modified to assist us in the process. Kore, our room mate, had volunteered also to assist with this, so Abby and Ami went through the scripts with her and they compiled an order that would hopefully best facilitate the process. In the mean time the entire group elected a name for the new alter they were attempting to construct, just as they had when Abby came to being in 2006, we looked at the scope of our “other lives” for a template.

With Abby we had found Abigail Mortimer, a conscientious past life whom when we discovered her it had been at the point where she was about to go to college, and had strong maternal instincts despite not having children of her own (at least at the points we’d seen). She worked at an old people’s home. She was Pagan and read tarot and runes. So, it seemed like a good match, taking several things that we were interested in or needed to do, such as be able to cook. With my own template we had Jing-Mei, who was a Chinese girl who was into computers, had fairly decent moral values and at the same time appealed to Terri’s relation to the military with the fact that she apparently worked for some sort of underground resistance group somehow fighting against oppressive rulers. However, it was decided not to name her Jing-Mei and instead we felt we should pick a name that would reflect where we were hoping to be, several names were tossed around including “Hope” but in the end we elected “Faith Journai” reflecting the journey of faith that we were going on throughout our ‘recovery process’.

I need to take a break on this for a little while. I will write the second portion later on, which will deal with the actual hypnosis session and how we mentally approached my arrival.

We have several birthdays coming up: my best friend in England, my Mum and my father-in-law. Each of them have varying tastes. Mum is into Nascar and several other sports that I don’t understand or enjoy but she already has more than enough Nascar jackets and other things like that. With my father-in-law it’s often movies that are the best way to go but he already has a ton of them so it can be difficult to judge which to get. Then with my English friend with her being so far away I have no idea what to get and what not most of the time. Though at this point I think it’ll be good if she just gets communication from me given we no longer have a house phone I can’t call her, and she doesn’t get to check email or facebook as readily as we do. ‘

I’m sure we’ll sort things out provided we check for suggestions but it’s still a bit daunting. I’m never sure what people will like or won’t like and when there’s a lot of us we often second and third guess ideas until we ‘re narrowed down to maybe a gift certificate? But again those are hard to do internationally.

One of the major events that decided for us that we should go to therapy was hazy recollections of what a school mate did to us, when we were around seven. There were lots of panicked snippets and waking up shaking and crying. They happened often enough and with enough ferocity that it became apparent that they were a horrible memory rather than just a nightmare.

For some reason they were lost in a black hole until a just after we moved into our house.

Last night they came back. For a lot of people time of year is a factor, however, for us that would be slightly off, the initial memories occurred in January of 2008, and here this is February 2010 and they’ve started again, or at least I had one last night, apparently. Morning comes and I don’t remember it, except for a deep-seated panic in my stomach and an achiness in certain areas but there’s a warning noted mentally on something that was written out into my livejournal that it contains the entire memory in clear detail and that it’s up to me if I want to read it. As of right now I really don’t. I’m hoping it being out and in the journal will be enough to keep it at bay. I know that I’ll need to process it though. I’m just not sure how to go about that.