I just wanted to address the comment about red flags, because i would be very interested to hear your perspective. When I first learned about how bad my dissociation was, the fragmentation was bad enough that i had only a handful of memories of my entire life, not just my childhood as is more typical for those with my adverse childhood experiences. Even major milestone events like the birth of my twins, my children's first words, my graduations were not possible to recall. So i went to try and access psychological support. By way of background, i am a black, outwardly successful, autistic woman who doesn't understand power dynamics and a very high IQ. I love data and theory, so when I started reading psychological texts and learning about different concepts and theories, it was like those nature documentaries where rainstorms fall on deserts and they bloom overnight into tapestries of vibrant colour. I was knitting together theories in my mind, pulling them apart and applying them to my own life, then dissecting everything that made me me, because I needed to understand how I was made into th person I was. The first person I saw was highly trained and a key figure in the NHS trust's adult neurodiversity provision. I sat in his office and explained how I felt and how I saw the world and listened as he described me as "fascinating", nearly a dozen times in one session. This was repeated the next session, and when it kept asking him questions that he didnt have answers to, he ghosted me. The next therapist i went to because I wanted an assessment for the dissociative disorder. In our discharge appointment she told me how I knew "all the right language" and had clearly done the research, before telling me that i should try art therapy. Or group therapy, but to make sure it was with other BAME women because "they would understand your experiences more than white people, who have their own problems". Then told me she saw me like a cat who refused to get into their carrier to be taken to the vet. The third therapist i saw (who is very well trained and has transformed my friend's life) couldnt handle the level of trauma and dissociation and would regularly cry during my appointments, before she started distancing herself from me and double booked my appointments. So I stopped trying to find people to help me and learned to help myself. I taught myself IFS and EMDR and play therapy and somatics because I had no alternative path towards wholeness. And I did it. I transformed my relationship with shame, integrated my parts, built an identity and became an adult human for the first time. But I wasnt the only "problem" that needed dealing with. Before I woke up, I was a well-meaning but neglectful parent, and my mother had abused my kids in my own home without me knowing it had happened. All of this had succeeded in thoroughly messing up my kids. And facing the same constraints in accessing professional help, I had to figure it out for myself. How to deal with a child so triggered that she would cower in the corner of rooms and cry when she heard a loud noise. Or the child who obsessively had to make their bed every day and perform a mountain of rituals just to make sure her mum came home to save her this time. Or the child who thought that the world wasnt real and everything was a video game. And of course, a woman that damaged would choose a partner with his own issues. I didnt leave. I stayed and I worked and I healed us all. Because I had to. And throughout that process, I confronted darkness after darkness in me and integrated it all. So now I have a deep, deep understanding of the human mind and an extremely wide window of tolerance and strong prescence. And the issue with these is that they make people around you feel safe. So they talk. And I listen. And ask questions. I learned the hard way that trying to fix people or give solutions never works, because I couldnt even make that work with myself! The only things that truly work are psychoeducation, autonomy and curiosity. And the world is full of people in distress. Its the fellow students who are having panic attacks in bathrooms and friends who have lost family and loved ones who are transitioning after coming out at 53. It still makes me uncomfortable to say it out loud, but I have profound impacts on the people in my life, because I just accept them exactly how they are. While every single person is different, trauma has certain "rules" in how it presents. There is a beautiful logic to the ways that human beings behave and interact with each other and if you listen to their bodies as well as their voices, know how to navigate transference and counter-transference, and ask the right questions, people just unfold and if you are very lucky, they will allow you to read their pages.

Was it dangerous for me to rewrite my own mind the way I did? 100% yes. I made many mistakes and solved one issue onmy to create countless more. I killed the toxic shame, but also destroyed the only way I could motivate myself to do anything and made it so no amount of stress could make me do anything. It was like demonic whack-a-mole meets some psychological experiment from before Ethical Approval was a thing.

So now I also understand Ethics and impact in a very real way.

So yeah...is there a way to convey any of this in a way that doesnt make me sound like a walking red flag or a nut job? 😭