How really messed up I was.  I excelled at the hiding game.  Our children were the first ones to really notice a recurring theme that their mother was not the same in all situations.  One of them accused me of lying.  I was appalled. When I entered counseling and discovered the dance between personalities that specialized in coping with different situations, I began to understand why they had the perception I was lying.  I wasn’t, but I was very different and inconsistent and PTSD and multiple personality.  My counselor called multiple personality my little luxury.  It was how I coped with PTSD or what is now called Complex PTSD since it was years of abuse not just one event.  I functioned in fragmented pieces and very few noticed.  Another blogger called it High-Functioning PTSD.  This is a link to her story, http://www.ptsdjournal.com/posts/what-high-functioning-ptsd-looks-like/

People wonder how could all this be going on and nobody noticed?  They did but not enough to put all the pieces together.  Friends that commented how different I was sometimes.  Teacher that offered a mercy grade of a C if I promised to never take one of his classes again.  Teenage children that called me a liar.  But nobody saw the whole picture, especially not me.  I’ve lost more than one friend and a couple of jobs because I didn’t always stay high functioning.  Confusion reined when I tried to tell but I was told that I was lying, exaggerating, and over active imagination.  My World shattered in counseling and my therapist helped me learn how to put the puzzle pieces together.  He got me started but kept explaining that I was so messed up that it would be life long project and he had other plans for his life besides helping me put myself together again.  He did something awesome, he taught me tools.  Boundaries, grounding, recognizing abuse, negotiation, No is a full sentence, this list goes on and on the different skills he taught me to do.  I am thankful he spent 7 years working with me to learn to put my puzzle together.

My counselor assured me I was just like everybody else, I bring in my puzzle pieces and we figure out how to put them together.  He followed this with, “You just happen to be a 10,000 piece puzzle.”  Yup, that is 10 thousand pieces sitting on my counselor’s floor.

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