The Wrong Sort of Imperfect

Last year, I wrote a fantasy fanfic, Have Demon, Will Travel  in which the heroine accidentally acquires a supernatural being who combines the personalities of three men and a dog – one of the three men being her enemy.  A reader commented that this sounded like a persecutory alter, which is a known phenomenon in Dissociative Identity Disorder.

I don’t suffer from DID myself, but I did a bit of research and found an interesting blog post here discussing the idea that persecutory alters aren't actually malevolent.  They are just misguidedly trying to protect the person that they are part of, for example by trying to preserve the status quo (cancelling their host's therapy appointments, sabotaging their host's relationships) because they fear that change will be dangerous and may make things get worse.  As the writer of the blog explained, describing her own relationship with her alters, persecutory alters need love and education in how better to care for their host, rather than condemnation.

Even though I don’t have DID, I can see similarities in the way that my brain behaves.  When I start to find new ways to think, or realise I have learned to do something that I used to find difficult, my brain panics because it doesn’t want change.  For example, last week I was walking into Shepton Mallet (as I said in my last post, a day that involves a lot of walking can be triggering) to meet my friends for Dungeons & Dragons.  I had decided to try calling in on another friend, Essex Granny, who is staying in temporary accommodation on a farm while having some repair work done to her house.

I didn’t know which farm to search in, on an unmarked lane off the main road which I had never explored at night with only the torch on my phone for light.  It had been late afternoon when I set off, and had soon turned from a beautiful pink-lit sunset into a beautiful starry night.  I began to realise that I didn’t have time to go on searching, phoned Essex Granny to cancel, and decided to try to find my way back to the main road – and realised that, in the dark, I wasn’t sure which way I needed to go.

I didn’t panic.  I had both a map and a compass in my bag, as well as my phone.  So I got out the map to confirm that I needed to head west to be back on the main road, consulted the compass to check which way actually was west, and set off.  I briefly felt rather pleased with myself; finding my way in the dark might be a small accomplishment for someone aged nearly 42, but, only a few years ago, I would have struggled with it.

Then I felt humiliated.  It was pathetic, I told myself, to be pleased at having learned to find my way, when other people (like one of my brothers, whom I will refer to here as Engineer Brother) have been able to do so instinctively ever since they were toddlers without even needing a map or compass.  Having had to learn something was a painful reminder that I hadn’t been born perfect (after all, knowing everything is a perfection, so not knowing everything must be an imperfection, mustn’t it?).

I knew that I was being irrational.  I knew that I had learned some of this irrational sense of my own uselessness from my dad, because it wasn’t easy to learn other things (such as navigation) from him.  He thought he wanted us to ask questions and learn things like how to navigate, but in practice, if I asked, ‘Why are we going this way?’ then instead of explaining the answer, he would feel that I was questioning his competence, and retort, ‘I’ve been finding my way around for longer than you’ve been alive – don’t you think I know what I’m doing?’  If my mum mentioned that I had done a good job of finding the way when the two of us had been on a walk together, my dad would laugh this off as obviously impossible, because everyone knew that Temple always gets lost.

Like me, he didn’t want change.  He wanted to be able to hold in his mind the distinct stereotypes of ‘Engineer Brother who has always been good at pathfinding’ and ‘Temple who has no sense of direction’.  As my other brother, whom I will call Artist Brother, says, because Engineer Brother was the one who was good at knowing what tools dad needed for a job ever since he was a toddler, he was the one who got encouraged to help with practical tasks, therefore he was the one who developed his practical skills further. 

My dad never wanted to make the mistake that his parents had, of stereotyping one of his children as clever and another as stupid.  But he did assume that if one of us was particularly clever at a particular skill, there was no point in encouraging all of us to develop that skill as far as we could.  As Artist Brother says, the only activities that he and Engineer Brother could enjoy together as teenagers were sports like mountain biking and kayaking in which each of them considered himself to be the best at it.

Being able to recognise all this didn’t make me feel better about it either.  It just made me feel that I was so psychologically messed-up that there was no point in trying to catch up now, because I had already failed to be perfect.  So then I felt ashamed of myself for not having the right attitude.  I wished that I was the sort of imperfect person who could view my life as a heroic journey of adventure – or for that matter, as a spiritual journey towards a deeper awareness of God’s love and grace.  I wasn’t just not perfect, I was the wrong sort of imperfect person!

I knew that it was ludicrous to blame myself for not having been born perfect and omniscient and omnipotent and with no need for further development.  I knew that I wouldn’t judge anyone else by these standards, and that it was very arrogant to tell myself that I ‘should’ have been perfect for all time, as if I were God.  Yet laughing at myself for reacting like this didn’t stop me from feeling upset.

Once I got close enough to Shepton that there were street lights, so that I could use my phone as a phone rather than as a torch, I phoned PDB11 and talked to him until I’d calmed down.  Then he talked to my mum on the phone until he’d calmed down from the stress of dealing with me when I was in an irrational mood.  Meanwhile, I cheered up once I’d got into town, bought a sandwich for supper and a packet of cakes to share with my friends, and spent a fun evening role-playing fighting a gelatinous cube monster in a hag’s castle in a swamp.

I still don’t know how to learn to have a more positive outlook when depression kicks in.  But I need to keep trying.  At least I can be glad that other people, especially PDB11, don’t see the world I do.  Also, I can be glad that, no matter how hard I am to live with, PDB11 and I still love each other, and still regard each other as the best thing that has happened to either of us.