An aha Moment

[The People]

I watched a show called Switched at Birth on Netflix for a while. definitely a show geared for teenagers but a few of the shows gave me food for thought.

I could never understand why the deaf community would get up in arms when the hearing community tried to force them into considering Cochlear Implants. Many view it as a slur, in real life this is also true. I worked with the wife of a deaf person who educated me on the subject from her husband's perspective. On the show someone explained that it is not always successful, involves playing with the brain, and most people find that they are caught between 2 worlds when they go for the implants.

It was the most well explained reason why deaf people are against them. Why they fight to remain within their own community. They function just fine in there. It is the people watching who want to "help" who have the issue.

DID is the same IMO. I have had people tell me that the I word is the only means of recovery for multiples. How would they know? They aren't multiples. They realize that, for many it is an impossibility and for many it is a threat to all we know. I think I will use this in my book.

[Cammy]

Bad as it can get, we are what we are and this is what we have adapted to. Changing the whole way we relate to ourselves and the world by becoming one cohesive entity, while some have done it, most multiples recoil at the thought. Why? Because after all this time of living and coping as a multiple it is what we know and it is the way we have learned to function both inside and out. Like those born deaf, thrusting an implant into them is more than just surgery to create hearing - it is changing the entire way they relate to the world. It's like asking someone who speaks only English that starting tomorrow morning, they are to speak only Mandarin. That's a huge leap into a place where you no longer understand the world around you, and changes your ability to relate to it and communicate with it. I recall a patient who had multiple mini-seizures daily to the point where she could not read a book because in ten minutes a seizure would occur and wipe her memory making her start over again. But she lived this way her whole life and adapted to it. She married, had two lovely boys, and functioned quite well. One day they decided to give her surgery to completely stop the seizures. Well, the surgery worked. What they didn't anticipate was that her psychological reaction to suddenly remembering everything in a cohesive fashion was going to end up severely traumatizing her. The surgery not only changed the way she had to relate to the world, but horrible traumatic memories from childhood abuse previously hidden, were suddenly available to her. The end is sad - she simply could not cope and took her own life. What initially seemed to be a great idea and cure for this young woman, turned out to be her undoing. Well-meaning doctors and neurosurgeons never thought about the potential psychological impact that this would have, and the procedure that was supposed to make her life better, ended it instead. Sometimes it is better to leave things alone. The old saying of 'If it isn't broke, don't fix it' can be applied here in the sense that if a person is fairly functional then perhaps intervention isn't the optimal thing to be doing and can in fact make things worse. In terms of DID many of us are functional as we are, and we are accustomed to what we are, so even though the knee jerk reaction of the uninformed is "integration", that is purely an individual matter which for many of us might well end up being detrimental. Just sayin'.

[MakersDozn]

We strongly agree with you both. Sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone. We know ourselves best.

MDs