Moving is stressful. Â Talk about how you’ve dealt with moving: your feelings about it, or how you’d feel if you HAD to move.
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
for me, maybe it depends on the circumstances of the move. i had quite a few moves in my adult life that weren’t traumatic. but we moved recently, and it’s thrown things into a tailspin. maybe part of that is it’s the first move since i was aware of the different parts… well, kind of. there were, um, 5 moves between when i first have comments in my journal about maybe i’m multiple, and this one. but this is the first move where i’m more conscious of it, and conscious as a whole, rather than just a couple of parts writing about it.
more likely, though, it’s the circumstances. this is the first move that wasn’t fully voluntary since i’ve been an adult. well, moves during college weren’t strictly voluntary, but i knew they were coming from the outset, and was prepared for them the whole time.
post-college, though, i only moved when it was my choice, and could have stayed in the place i was if i’d wanted to. so the moves were to something i wanted, and i was happy about them.
this move, i’m more ambivalent about. plus, there are only two places in my life where i’ve lived as long as i’d lived in my last apartment, and the other time i moved after living somewhere that long, well, a lot of parts were created around that time, because stuff got… if not worse, then differently bad. so this move is really calling them up, particularly because some of the circumstances are the same.
so it’s hard to get across: “this is NOT the same as the last move; there are similarities, but there are also differences.” and it’s also kind of hard that things in the new place aren’t totally an improvement. there are things that are better, but there are things that are worse. so that adds some tension, since all the other times i’ve moved, it’s been along the lines of mostly improvement, with just one or two things that make me wistful.
but i wonder about this. it might also be about the constellation of parts who are currently active. reaching around in my brain, i don’t feel like anyone who is really active right now remembers my philadelphia apartments. those were mostly when the adults were around, i guess. there are some vague memories, but nothing really strong. but a LOT of parts remember our last apartment, and i think it was one of the few places in our adult life that lots of us spent time in. so there’s that loss.
some of how we work on moves–hadn’t realized this before–is that we spend time in the new neighborhood before actually moving. trying to spread out the transition, or mark it some way. that didn’t happen before moving to philly, mostly because it was a long-distance move. but i spent a lot of time online, imagining what it would be like when i moved, and i did things to ease that transition.
with this move, we did spend a lot of time in the new apartment, painting and such. but it was still a hard move. it didn’t help that i was already kind of at the end of my collective coping skills, and the move just got piled on top of that.
i don’t know. i’m hoping that parts can start to make the adjustment to the new place, feeling comfortable and happy here. maybe once we have the furniture arranged, and things are a little more settled. hopefully that will make a difference. but it’s hard. really hard.
we don’t do well with change or transitions, and we’re still working on getting to know the new neighborhood.