April 2024
The two most dominant emotions that dictate my experience of the world are fear and shame. Upon processing this realization, I’ve come to the conclusion that while these two emotions may seem to be unrelated at first thought, they are actually quite intertwined in my internal landscape. Fear and shame are both uncomfortable emotions that signal a high degree of alarm—one needs to enact change to alleviate them. However, these two internal alarms are triggered by and about opposite circumstances.
DID fear narrative shame symptoms
4 minutes
March 2023
I was initially hesitant to write about anger, as it’s an emotion I am not used to feeling1. How could I write about something I know nothing about? But I now realize that the absence of anger in my life is significant in itself, and is indicative of how I operate. Anger is an emotion that I am simultaneously very sensitive to, yet not at all familar with—I am incredibly sensitive to the external display of anger in others, yet not at all familiar with how it feels internally.
anger DID narrative symptoms trauma
3 minutes
When I was 12, I stopped feeling anxiety. Prior to that, I was a child ravished by anxiety. Then, one day, it stopped1. And I have never experienced anxiety in the same way since. I now understand that anxiety is one of the experiences that I dissociated away—it’s a state that I did not enjoy experiencing, so I learned how to compartmentalize it and push it out of my awareness. This doesn’t mean I do not experience anxiety; rather, it means that when I do, I am so detached from it that I do not experience all aspects of it.
anxiety DID narrative symptoms
3 minutes