In the last days of our marriage, I opened a YouTube link sent via text from my ex-husband with the title “Dealing with Someone who Dissociates.” That someone in the video was me—more accurately, my 9-year-old part who exists as a key member of our dissociative system. Yes, we are a person with dissociative identities and we move through life as a collective of various selves who developed in response to earlier traumas.
As our marriage began to disintegrate over the course of the previous year, my younger parts, specifically Nine and her tendency to self-injure, began getting loud again. I/we (my internal system) reengaged our intensive therapy, which also featured the blow of Donald Trump, a stark reminder of our main abuser, being elected as President of the United States. Yet even under the care of the best therapist, an unhappy home where one does not feel safe to be themselves can be torture on the mental health of a dissociative system.
So after 11 years of not self-harming, we progressively found ourselves self-injuring a great deal. We were in a full self-injury relapse and these episodes were largely triggered by bitter arguments with our ex-husband, primarily when he criticized our independent identity, our bisexuality, and our profession. Yes, I am/we are a mental health therapist specializing in the treatment of trauma, addiction and dissociation. And not just any mental health therapist. By 2017 when he posted the video, we’d already written five books in the field of trauma and addiction recovery with another book in production. We were Dr. Jamie Marich, highly respected in our field, the director of an EMDR Therapy training program (one of the main therapies being used to treat trauma in the modern era),
personality
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My Mental Health
Donald Trump
