Feeling angry, frustrated, and alone....

[MakersDozn]

We've known for 16 years that we're multiple. We've been a member of this community for 15 years. We're high-functioning, employed full-time, and we know everyone inside and how our system works. Rather than using therapy as a place to get help, we use it as a place to learn to better help ourselves.

So why do we feel angry, frustrated, and alone? What it boils down to is that no matter how well we're doing as a multiple, we still have many of the same issues that singletons have, and being multiple doesn't exempt us from this. We still have to get up, go to work, pay our bills, prepare meals, and take care of the house, just as singletons do.

But we still live our lives through the perspective of a multiple, and because this perspective affects every aspect of our life, we can't readily share our struggles with most other people, even if the issues we're struggling with aren't about being multiple.

So we end up keeping to ourselves (very easy to do, since we're highly introverted), and we bottle up feelings about struggles and issues that are common to multiples and singletons alike. It feels like we have a barrier that singletons don't have. And we don't want to see multiplicity this way. Being multiple isn't the problem. The problem is feeling different, feeling unaccepted and unacceptable. And we feel stuck.

We guess that what we're looking for here is for other people--especially other introverts--to share how they've dealt with feelings of isolation. And from people who are more extraverted, how do you present yourself to others in a way that doesn't feel intimidating to introverts?

Wish we could simplify what we're saying here. But these issues are all interrelated for us, and we just want to work them through and move forward.

MDs