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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
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I went to therapy for the first time on Monday with someone new. We did all the introductory stuff, and the subject of email lists came up because I was telling her how I had been on a emaillist with people who had DID/MPD on it, and I got scared and left. She got really serious and asked how much time I was spending online. It made me feel like I was going to addiction counseling. She said she wanted me to make a list of things I could do to be more social and also to work on limiting my time online.
This has several different effects on me. I know I have socializing issues to work on. I also know that occasionally being online gets in the way of other things I should be doing. I don't think it is a good place to start therapy, at least not on that approach. I have talked a lot with my husband about the socializing thing, and both of us feel like this is really a bad time for me to work on this particular goal. For one thing, I am a married student who is about to graduate. I am taking 18 hours and will take another 12 in the summer. It is really bad timing to try to form new friendships now. Also, I have a major transportation barrier. One of the conclusions I have come to after a year when I actually did put out a lot of effort is that it is not a good thing to depend on the same people that you are trying to make friends with for transportation. It puts too much strain on them and I think it pushes them away because it just reinforces my image of dependency. Yes, I know that is a natural dependency for me to have, but in my experience dependency and neediness is one excuse people use for not getting close to people with disabilities. I've had to go overboard on a lot of things to be equal to other people. I spend twice as much studying to get the same thing out of it because for me studying is slow. This is just another area where I feel that I need to put forth extra effort. At this particular moment I am not bitter about that. Some of my inside parts are, though, and that leads me to my next point.
There are a lot of underlying issues for me that need to be talked about and resolved before I can be effective at socializing. I am starting to accept those issues as mine, but so far it is easier for the named inside parts of me to talk about it and me watch. Otherwise I do not talk about it. This is not intentional, but it seems to be the way it works. So what I think I need in therapy, and the reasons I went, is a place where those parts of me can talk and I get some help with what they are saying. Chelle, for instance, has a lot of anger and thinks of it in terms of someone who is 11 years old. I need to learn how to separate that anger or function in spite of it or something, but I also need to learn how to live with it because it just isn't going to go away. It's part of me.
I didn't know I had this much to say about the whole thing. I think the bottom line is that I need to start with the more basic issues. I know the risks and dangers of the Internet, and I know there are also exaggerated versions of those risks. I feel like I do a pretty good job of managing what I expose myself to online, and I am working on my time management. I am willing to limit time online because I need to study. I am not willing to limit it so that I can be more social. At this point I don't think I am ready to be more social yet, and that is a major thing for me to admit because it means I have to accept my life the way it is for a while and deal with my internal issues. I needed to do that a long time ago, and I didn't. I am not going to give up the Internet completely or even come near that. I have a lot of friends online who don't live nearby. This is how we send mail because it is cheap (free for me). It is accessible. It is fast. And for me it is a valuable resource and a nice place to chat when I want to. The fact that I participate on it doesn't make me addicted to it or mean that I need to change it necessarily. How I participate on it might mean those things, but that is up to me to think about and decide and I am ready to work on other issues in therapy and don't want this topic to keep those issues from being addressed.
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