Last night my Internet crapped out so I'm way behind on these answers. I did start typing in notepad and it came out to be this big long tl;dr textbook case. I'm going to post it here since it answers a lot of questions, but since it's so long I'll put in some bold headings here and there to make it easier to find answers to a lot of the questions I know I'm going to get asked. Also, I'm going to do a post of a lot of pictures next, then I'll get to answering more questions. Jesus Christ, 6 pages wtf you people are freaks.
So here goes:
My Internet connection has died and I'm not sleepy yet so I've decided to type more and I'll post this tomorrow or something.
About the Seizures, Work, Amnesia
Because of her anxiety situation I've often had to carry her out of restaurants, stores, Wal-Mart, from the car to the couch/bed, etc. I'm 5'9" 155-165 lbs. and she's 4'11" 105-115 lbs, so it's not particularly difficult to throw her around like a bag of dog food or something, but it's a pain when she starts having a seizure and shaking while I'm carrying her, or trying to deal with people in restaurants, etc. It also embarasses the crap out of her.
Additionally she lost her job (worked in the call center for Lowe's Hardware) and her driver's license over her seizures. With the job went her insurance, and her short-term disability was denied because they said she could work there with her condition (yet they sent her home and told her not to come back if her condition continued).
Dealing with her amnesia is particularly interesting because of the timeline. She always forgets back to the same period of time, and up until that point I hadn't told her I loved her. So explaining everything that's happened and the whole "OMG where am I at" thing is fun since I get to end it with something like "Hey btw what's that on your finger" and so on. During her amnesia spells (as always) she can hear the other personalities sometimes talking ala voices in her head, and this often scares the crap out of her. Additionally, they can remember the events that she has forgotten, and none of her doctors/therapist have any clue why. It's almost like it only affects the "normal" one, but I haven't tried to confirm this.
One of the triggers for her seizures for a long time was hearing a certain kind of turn signal (the ones that sound sort of like click, click, click). Eventually we figured out that this reminded her of being molested, since one time when something happened, her and that uncle were waiting to turn or something with the turn signal on and he reached over and did whatever. When she first realized it she had sort of a flashback where she described it as sort of being in a dream, like re-experiencing it. After that, the sound of that kind of turn signal didn't bother her anymore.
Some Rebecca Moments
For a while before she completely chilled out and started dealing with her emotions better, Rebecca caused a lot of problems. (Thankfully Matilda chilled out much faster, or at least it seems that way up until now.) Michelle couldn't be left alone for very long at all because Rebecca would come out and try to hurt herself. One of her favorite ways to do this was to cut her arm with a knife or scratch/claw her arm with her fingernails/whatever she could find. This happened a lot until Rebecca chilled out and started controlling her impulses, but two times in particular stick out as being particularly memorable.
Once she was in a Wal-Mart dressing room trying on a pair of jeans, and after about 10 minutes I looked under the door and saw that she wasn't moving anymore and she was laying down. I told the old lady who worked that desk that she was my girlfriend and she passed out sometimes and had seizures and asked her to let me in. She was reluctant to unlock it since I guess she hadn't seen me sitting there waiting on her the entire time or something, which aggravated me but it's a little old lady so whatever. She opens it and Michelle's sitting on the bench thing inside passed out laying against the wall. I wake her up and check her arms and as I expected she had clawed the crap out of the inside of one of her arms and was bleeding a little. I hid this from the old lady, the manager guy who showed up, and his cronies who were crowded around to see what was going on. The manager guy was trying to tell me something like security was coming and I had to stay there or something like that (I have no idea why) but after making sure she didn't have the jeans on she was trying on (thank god because that would have really sucked) I helped her to the car. On the way home, Rebecca and I had our first long conversation ever that didn't involve her trying to hurt herself. After that, the times Rebecca has done anything of that nature have been few and far between.
The other memorable time (for me at least) Rebecca was behind this kind of stuff was once when against the instructions of me/common sense/Michelle's therapist/Michelle's doctors, Michelle's parents had left her home for a few hours while they went to church because she didn't want to go or something. When I found out I flew over there like a bat out of hell (they live about 40 minutes away) and when I was really close Little Michelle called me and said she woke up in the kitchen and her arm had been cut a few times with a knife and she didn't know what happened. I think this time is very memorable for me because of how it felt wondering if I was going to walk in on her having tried or succeeded in killing herself. I don't even know how to describe it. Just thinking about it now is making my stomach feel uneasy, but it was basically the feeling I have whenever I'm in the middle of vomitting greatly amplified. I've had similar scares a couple of times, and I get the same feeling, and it's easily the worst thing I've ever felt in my life.
About Cutting
About Michelle's cutting, she started cutting after she was molested. She describes it as the typical release as most people who cut do, and both Rebecca and Matilda have described it in the same way. Michelle's therapist suggested that this way of explaining it from people who do it or have done it was fairly common and the general theme is that it's the only way they know how to deal with whatever emotion they're feeling an excess of. For Michelle's personalities it's typically anger and guilt. I don't think "normal" Michelle has cut herself since I've known her, and she hadn't cut herself for something like 5 years before we first started dating. When she cuts (or claws with her fingernails, etc.) it's not [usually] very deep, and it's not really like she's trying to kill herself that way. When she [they] talk about suicidal feelings, it's almost always something that would be instant/relatively painless, like jumping in front of a truck on the highway or swallowing a bunch of pills.
Pre-Personality Stuff Anxiety Issues
Back before the seizures and later the personality issues appeared, Michelle had very severe panic attacks a LOT. Apparently she'd had them since she was really little, like 5 or 6 years old. She was on a low dosage of Paxil for them, and apparently that helped quite a bit, because when she was off of it I could tell. We spent many nights during these sitting in the bathroom floor while she hyperventilated/puked/cried/etc. Also, the seizure situation might have started much earlier than either of us originally thought. During her teens she would often lose control of her arms or legs and they would shake violently. I'm not exactly sure why nothing was ever done by her parents to see just wtf was going on with this, but they also elected to do nothing when their daughter told them she'd been molested, so I'm not sure if this should be surprising.
A bit about the timing of everything. Her seizures and later personality issues first started really being seen after we had been living together for about 4 months and had started to talk sometimes about the chances of eventually getting married. Michelle's regular therapist (and a different one during one of her hospital stays) suggested that she kept everything so hidden because of her screwed up home life, and once she got in a really stable situation she was finally able to let some of it come up and start trying to deal with it. I tried to keep this opinion from reaching her parents since I didn't want them to feel alienated, but in retrospect I'm not sure if this was the right decision. Them hearing this could have made things between Michelle and her parents better, but it could have made it worse too. To this day, I'm not sure if they've been told about these therapists' shared opinion on that.
Me vs Her Family
If you haven't noticed yet, her family and I have differences to put it mildly. Her father is a baptist preacher (Michelle and I both 'lol' at religion), and in a period of six months or less his opinion of me went from something like "degenerate pos" to (direct quote) "a gift from God." To round out the picture of the future father-in-law, he's had five (yes, five) heart attacks and a stroke, and he still smokes. My future mother-in-law is a very submissive typical preacher's wife I guess. She works as a CNA and he collects disability. My main beef with the MIL is that the same uncle who molested Michelle did similar to her at some point earlier in her life, and she still let Michelle be around him unsupervised. Between the two of them, they rarely, if ever, offered any sort of help with Michelle for at least 12-14 months after all of this started. I very much feel like they pushed it off as being sort of "my problem" so they didn't have to deal with it, if that makes sense.
Going Deaf/Blind
As I mentioned earlier, because of her anxiety stuff she often goes deaf or blind (sometimes both at the same time). This actually started before the personalities thing did, but after the seizures. It doesn't change much except it adds a level of difficulty to everyday interactions that you take for granted. Before I'd met her, I'd had a friend who was deaf and a friend who was blind, so I guess I was sort of prepared in some sense so maybe I dealt with it a little better. We always have a pad of paper and a pen around for when she's deaf, and when she's blind she just holds my hand and I navigate her to a safe place. I'll re-iterate so I don't get asked this, she does the deaf/blind/both thing while she's "normal" and while she's the various personalities. I'll also re-iterate that the amnesia seems to only happen when she's "normal".
Why I Stick Around
A couple of people have asked why I have stuck around. This is the best way I know how to get my point across. After Michelle's seizures she often stays passed out for a while, and it's extremely difficult to wake her up. This lasts anywhere from a few moments to 45 minutes, occasionally longer. Sometimes I do funny things like make a video of moving her mouth open and closed like she's talking to me (while I impersonate her voice) asking me to put my balls on her forehead. Then, while continuing to record a video, I put my balls on her forehead. Afterward I show her the video, and she thinks it's funny. That's a pretty good reason why. She's just awesome.
More Details About Little Michelle, Including the Sex Stuff (Bunch of Pervs)
Now that I've rambled on about random crap having to do with all of this, I guess I'll focus on one personality at a time. I'll start with Little Michelle. She first started showing up after Michelle's seizures maybe a month and a half or so after the seizures first started. She would stick around for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours later. I wasn't as used to totally weird off the wall stuff happening then as I am now, so it initially freaked me out a little. I'd known about her being molested and that she was struggling with trying to bring those feelings up to deal with them, so I figured it had something to do with all of that, but I didn't know enough at the time to really think about the multiple personalities type stuff.
Little Michelle's speech is very difficult to understand if you're not around her a lot when she's like that. I understand her a lot better now than I did when she first appeared, but I'm not sure if that's because of practice or if because her speech has changed. I suspect a little bit of both. Little Michelle thought she was 7 years old initially (later this changed to 9 at some point, I think after Rebecca #2 came out but Matilda hadn't yet), and then I asked her how was I her boyfriend if she was 7 and I was 23 (at the time). This confused her at first, and after thinking about it for a few minutes she said something like "Well something weird sure is going on." She realized something was out of whack, which later made her realize she was either a part of Michelle or something Michelle's mind created (whether you want to go the MPD or DID route). Either way, she eventually realized she was related to Michelle, which was interesting to me since I sort of always assumed she knew, so I didn't know she didn't know until she told me she did know.
My relationship with Michelle in general has sometimes felt more like a father/daughter relationship than a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of relationship because of the level of care she's required with all of this. With Little Michelle, obviously enough, this theme is much more easily seen. I've had to do things like bribe her into taking a shower/bath (she hates doing this, I suspect it's because it involves her getting naked), convince her that ice cream is not an acceptable meal, get onto her for making a mess and not cleaning it up (typically food-related), take her to a play-ground so she can swing and go on the slide (I'll have pics of this once my Internet stops being stupid), and all sorts of other stuff.
Little Michelle is also the snitch of the group. If one of them is hiding something from me, Little Michelle will often come out and tell me. Sometimes she's reluctant to tell me, but bribing her with M&Ms or going to a playground usually works. The others have made comments about her telling on them from time to time. Rebecca has also shown admiration more than once for Little Michelle's ability to get what she wants even though they go about it in completely different ways. Little Michelle seems to look up to Rebecca for her ability to assert herself, where Little Michelle often feels too shy or too unimportant to do so in such a direct way.
The sexual relationship with Little Michelle is extremely interesting to me, both from her side and mine. She's very shy about seeing me naked like if I'm changing clothes or getting out of the shower or whatever, and she's the same way about me seeing her naked. However, she often gets a streak in her where she's trying to peek at me in the shower or flash me her boobs and things like that. Then too, sometimes we'll be laying down watching a movie or something and she just like jumps on me like okay she wants to have sex now, just in a matter of fact way.
It's worth noting again that she's 4'11", something like 105-120 lbs. up and down a bit through all this, and she looks much younger than she is. I've read that for people who have sexual abuse going into puberty, there's a higher chance on average of them having limited growth or whatever. I'm not sure if that's true and I can't confirm it, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's what happened to her. So first she looks much younger than she is. That's okay, I can handle that. Then she thinks she's 7 years old. A little freaked out at first, but she becomes sort of my little buddy and we hang out or whatever, so I can handle that after I get used to it.
I was cool up to the point where she grabs my junk and tries to initiate some sexytime. All I can say is at first I wasn't cool with it, and at some point after she realized she was an adult and started making all of these connections I was cool with it, as long as she initiated it. I just don't try to go after sexytime when she's like that because I don't want it to ever be a question of if I was taking advantage of her. I've never had any sort of arousal or anything like that over her looking/acting/thinking she was really young, though I have made Chris Hansen jokes about it with her, which probably wasn't the brightest idea I've ever had.
It's kind of a pain when she's normal or Rebecca, and we start to work towards sexytime, might even be mid-foreplay, then for some reason she ends up switching to Little Michelle. But it's also a pain when I'm mid-stroke and she has a seizure. I'm sure someone will ask this, so I'll go ahead and answer it: I can't tell if her vagina has any kinda of muscle movement or whatever during her seizures. I've always been too busy trying to get her to a safe position where I can keep her from falling or swallowing her tongue or whatever.
More Details About Rebecca, Father Thinking She's Possessed
Enter Rebecca. From when Little Michelle first started coming out, Michelle's normal speech started getting worse and worse, sounding more and more like Little Michelle's. Eventually it was to the point that I had almost forgotten what Michelle's normal speech sounded like, and this was very sad for both Michelle and I. Michelle had a really bad seizure, laid there for a few minutes, woke up, and was speaking perfectly clearly. Unfortunately, she was talking about how big of a piece of s*** 'she' was (referring to Michelle in the third person) and how "that stupid c**t doesn't deserve to live". She tried to claw herself and grab a pill bottle and some other stuff, and I just held her down trying to figure out wtf was going on. That night I asked Rebecca what she wanted to be called, and she told me she didn't care just don't call her Michelle. So I asked what about Rebecca, she said she liked that, and that's how she got her name.
The first night Rebecca came out was the first time I ever had to physically restrain Michelle. It was a total mindf*** with her going from Michelle to Little Michelle to Rebecca and back and forth for about four hours straight. I was scared s***less. At one point I looked down and realized I was physically trembling, which was strange because I didn't realize I was scared until that point because I was so detached off in my own little world trying to think about what was going on and asking questions and usually getting something like "F*** YOU B****" as an answer.
At one point before things finally calmed down, Rebecca came to the forefront and said, "You know she's just going to end up killing herself, don't you?" I'm pretty sure that particular moment really stuck with me because I've had nightmares about being told that on a somewhat regular basis since then.
Eventually we got to sleep. The next night we had a similar thing happen, and around 3 am I got my dad to drive us to the ER so I could hold Michelle and keep her from hurting herself. And so, Michelle and I started our 4-day wait in the emergency room before they could get her a bed in a behavioral unit to figure out what was going on. Her speech was still off as much as it had been before, but there was hope for that because of how perfect Rebecca's speech was. By the third or fourth day in the behavioral unit, 'normal' Michelle's speech was back to 100% normal. I'm not ashamed to say I cried a little when I first spoke to her on the phone after her speech had went back to normal.
While Michelle was in the hospital the first time, I got really depressed. I also watched all of the Sopranos inside of like 8-9 days. I seriously slept, watched the Sopranos, went to visiting hours, and occasionally ate. That was it for those 8-9 days.
For the next couple of months, Rebecca and I had our rounds. She ended up going back in the hospital for a few days in the same behavioral unit for the same kind of stuff. Rebecca would come out all pissed off and try to claw or cut herself, and I'd do my hold her arms away from each other and talk to her thing. Eventually the Wal-Mart scene happened that I described above, and after that she didn't do much if any of that kind of thing again.
Okay so about Rebecca in general in the time period since she's backed down from the hurting herself/suicide attempt stuff. She's a lot of fun in general, but it's really interesting to see how differently she goes about trying to get what she wants than Michelle or Little Michelle typically do. If Little Michelle wants to go somewhere or something like that, then she'll usually try to butter me up with a hug or draw something for me or whatever, then beg and give me the puppy-dog eyes. If Rebecca wants to go somewhere, it's like "Hey get your s*** in the car we're going to ________." If I say no, or not right now, the next step is usually something like "Well what if when we get back I blank your blank then let you blank me in the blank and blank in my blank." It's just a much more direct approach that tries to be more in control of the situation.
Rebecca was also what prompted Michelle's father to first suggest that she was possessed. Michelle had a seizure in public with just her father once, and then afterwards on their way home was crying and asked to borrow his cell phone to call me and talk because it would make her feel better. When he declined, suggesting that she could talk to him instead, Rebecca came out and dropped a few F's and MFer's on him. Keep in mind that Michelle had never really stood up for herself hardly ever, let alone to her parents, and let alone in a profanity-laced tirade. So of course, it's the devil, and she's possessed. Yay Jesus.
Rebecca drove Michelle to finally be comfortable with being bisexual, since she'd always felt attracted to women, but with all of the fire and brimstone being fed to her growing up, she always felt guilty about it. Rebecca would have none of this, and would often make really dirty comments about what she would do to some of my chick friends, or yell things like "HEY LOOK AT THAT B****'S TITS" while we would be waiting at a stoplight.
At some point, Michelle told her mom that she was bisexual, and her mom said that she wouldn't tell Michelle's dad. So when Michelle's dad pops up one day and says that God told him that she was bisexual and he didn't approve of this and she would go to hell or whatever his spill was at the time, it didn't surprise me personally, but it was a bit hit to Michelle's confidence in her mom. Which is interesting considering I would have thought that to be completely shattered by then.
Since Michelle has been living with her parents, she goes to church with them since she doesn't want to be by herself, and there are girls there she grew up with and she gets extra social interaction. I'm not sure if it was Michelle or Rebecca, but after church on one Wednesday night, she convinced one of her chick friends from church that they should go to this strip club after church. And they did. And the chick friend bought Michelle a lap dance, and Michelle got boobs shoved in her face, and that started her obsession with strippers. That obsession lasted a month or two, and I think it got boring to her at some point so she stopped going.
More Details About Rebecca #2
During this time, Little Michelle had started to warn me that she thought there might be another personality. She told me she had tried talking to it to convince it that it could trust me and talk to me, because it didn't feel like it could trust anyone. I'm not sure if Rebecca knew about this ahead of time or not.
At some point we were laying down about to take a nap, and Michelle randomly starts to sit up and push my chest with both hands at the same time. Her eyes looked kind of glazed over, and it was really weird. She was trying to tell me something, but it just came out as a sort of random-sounding groan. My first reaction was that she was trying to choke me or something because it was like a 9.5 on my wtf-o-meter, but then she fell over passed out so I was left confused. The thought crossed my mind that after Little Michelle's warning, maybe it was a fourth personality trying to get my attention, but I quickly dismissed that idea as being a little too nuts.
As it turned out, that's exactly what it was. After a few tries, I got her to come out again maybe 2 minutes at a time, and this eventually became known as Rebecca #2. As happened many times (and will probably continue to do so until this is finally over), I saw something that completely changed my understanding of the limits of weird. Rebecca #2 would come to the forefront for just a couple of minutes, and it would be so exhausting for Michelle that she would sleep for a couple of hours afterwards. Then we'd repeat it.
Rebecca #2's speech was just barely over a whisper, and seemed very stressed and difficult. She described constantly feeling like she had a boulder on her chest and that she couldn't breathe. Her therapist suggested this feeling came from the overwhelming amount of emotion she was feeling and finally trying to let out after bottling it up for so long. (Matilda does this primarily with anger later on.)
Over a period of about 2 weeks or so, we established a name and started figuring out things about Rebecca #2. She felt extreme guilt about everything, especially her childhood situation. She also felt guilt about Rebecca's assertive attitude and demeanor, like she should feel guilty about that because she's not worth trying to get what she wants or something. She also felt guilty about being mad at her parents, so I suggested that she talk to her mom about the whole thing since she never had.
They had a little talk for like an hour, and apparently that helped something because almost immediately after that Rebecca #2 could come out for an hour or two at a time without completely exhausting Michelle like before. The situation with Rebecca #2 in general was completely different than Little Michelle or Rebecca because 90%+ of the time she was in the forefront we were trying to figure out what things she felt guilt over and how she could try to reconcile those things. After a whole lot of that type of thing, Rebecca #2 almost completely stopped showing up. Once in a while she'll pop up, but that's about it. I've not come to develop some deeper special relationship with Rebecca #2 like I have Little Michelle or Rebecca.
More Details About Matilda (omfg this is long)
After writing most of the rest of this, I've come back to say here that there's a lot more detail here with what happened when Matilda first came out than with the others. I'll be the first to say tl;dr, but I've already typed it all out rambling on in notepad for the past 3 hours or so, so I'll go ahead and post it.
Rebecca #2 had been pretty quiet for a while. I was driving down the highway one day spacing out a little as normal, and Michelle just sat listening to music in the passenger seat. We were doing roughly the speed limit in a 70 mph zone. Out of nowhere, Michelle grabbed the steering wheel and tried to pull us off the road. I pushed her off, she started clawing herself, I grabbed her arms the best I could with my free hand, and after a moment she passed out. When she woke up, she didn't remember any of it.
Not long before Rebecca #2 showed up the first time, Michelle had gotten to the point that most of the time she could bring up either Little Michelle or Rebecca at will. Often if they got bored, they left and another took their place at the forefront. Since I'd only ever seen this kind of behavior in Rebecca, I stopped at the next exit at a gas station, waited for Michelle to wake up, and asked her to try to bring Rebecca to the front. When she did, it was the first time I'd ever seen Rebecca scared.
Rebecca and Little Michelle remembered what had just happened, but Michelle didn't. She literally heard them telling me and each other what had happened, and that's how she found out. Rebecca said she didn't do it and she didn't know who did it. Little Michelle confirmed that it wasn't Rebecca and that Rebecca wasn't lying about it. So then I think about Rebecca #2, but that seemed really out of whack with how she normally behaved. So after a little while of sitting there with Michelle trying to bring up Rebecca #2, she finally comes up, tells me there's another personality but she doesn't know anything about it except it's pissed. Wonderful.
The next day I drove Michelle to her psychiatrist appointment, and some similar grabbing the steering wheel type stuff happened on the way there (it's like a 1 hour drive each way). Her psychiatrist asks to talk to me when Michelle tells her about this new stuff happening, and suggests it's time for another hospital visit if it comes up again. We drive home. As we are coming in the door, the new one comes to the forefront and starts seriously f***ing up the kitchen. Hitting, kicking, screaming, biting, clawing, headbutting, everything you can think of to me, herself, the floor, the wall, the doors, all that.
After a few minutes of holding her down and trying to get her to talk to me (which she refused), Little Michelle came to the forefront super scared and crying and freaking out, saying that Rebecca and Rebecca #2 were scared too and thought whatever this other one was is going to kill them. Then she passed out, and I carried her upstairs to our bedroom to try to figure out what was going on. At that point, I knew I was probably going to end up calling 911 because I couldn't drive her myself because of the grabbing the steering wheel stuff.
So at this point I'm figuring out how I can make this phone call without leaving myself in a situation to get the crap kicked out of me by a pissed off personality of Michelle. At some point in all of this, the new one comes out, I get her to calm down and listen to me for a minute, and we start to have a conversation. I ask her what her name is, she says she doesn't know, I ask her what she wants to be called, she quickly comes up with Matilda (yeah I don't know either). We talk for a bit between her tries to bite me and all this other stuff, and we establish that she knows who I am ("Michelle's fiancee").
It's worth noting, to me at least, that Rebecca's word of choice is MF'er, and Matilda's word of choice is the female c-word that ends in a T. I think it's worth noting, though it could be coincidence, that Rebecca seems sort of like a white midget Samuel L. Jackson, but Matilda is more of the woman-hating type instead of just being a much more assertive person.
She passes out, wakes up as Little Michelle. Little Michelle HATES going to the hospital, but I convince her it's the thing to do. She decides she wants me to take a picture of her with her "cool" pink sunglasses on with my phone, and then she'll get Michelle to come to the forefront and make the 911 call. I don't know if the 911 dispatcher was confused or what, but I ended up with a sheriff's deputy, an ambulance, and about 12-15 firemen in my front yard like 10-15 minutes later. Not exaggerating in the least bit. I still have no idea why. They were just standing around watching me talk to the cop mostly.
Immediately after I get off of the phone, Matilda shows back up and has the bright idea to try to bite her tongue in half. I worked her jaw open with my hand while she was clawing the crap out of me and kept one finger bent between her teeth along the side of her jaw like you do to a baby who is teething to give them something to nom on. She bit me pretty hard, and I bled some from it, but I hid it from her later in case she didn't remember.
Side note: The deputy sheriff they sent out to the house to make sure everything was already was a guy who goes to the same church as Michelle's parents. He was like their preacher's son-in-law or something. I got lucky that he was somewhat familiar with Michelle's situation, so I probably got off with 20 questions instead of 200.
At the hospital, Michelle gets a room in a behavioral unit in a different nearby hospital inside of about 12 hours. During this stay, I got super depressed again, and watched The Wire like I did The Sopranos the first time she was in the hospital. Once Michelle got out this time, Matilda had already chilled out for the most part, and we had figured out by then that Matilda was dealing with suppressed anger similarly to how Rebecca #2 was dealing with suppressed guilt.
At this point I was a little scared that Matilda might kill me. I didn't think it was particularly likely, but it made me a little more aware of what was going on. After conversations with Matilda got more frequent and she started to open up to me more, the random acts of trying to hurt herself got less frequent, and eventually all but stopped. She reminded me a lot of Rebecca, except Matilda was much less deliberate and methodical. If Rebecca wanted something, she had a plan, and if throwing something was a part of that plan, then there was little hesistation to do it. On the other hand, Matilda didn't need a reason to want to throw a laptop across the room, she just wanted the release. She was so full of anger she couldn't stand it. A lot of working with Matilda has been finding constructive ways for her to deal with that.
More Recently
After a while Matilda cooled down and she became somewhat normal. Not long after, Michelle's seizures started being less and less frequent, and her changing personalities started becoming less and less frequent. She's clawed her arm once or twice in a few months, and that's it. Everything has improved leaps and bounds. I'm happy, but on the other hand it scares me, because I'm afraid to get my hopes up. As soon as I do, something else that's totally nuts will probably happen, etc.
I started out to write a few short paragraphs before I sent to bed, and I ended up typing for about three and a half hours and have wrote over 6000 words. I don't think I've ever talked about all of this to anyone like this before, so maybe that's why it happened. Anyway, my Internet connection is still down, but after I get around to posting this, I'll keep answering questions and try to direct people to the answer if I've answered their question in this novel of a post.
Two Plus Two
Linear Mode
