I just wanna find out if anyone else has ever done something similar to this before to themselves.
Basically when I was younger and basically getting bullied by everyone from classmates to people from other classes to teachers to even the admin staff (principal and vice-principal) of my primary school, the kind of barrages I get from them is close to intolerable for anyone, Aspie or otherwise. These abuses ranged from verbal, to practical, to even physical (getting whacked by classmates, and having a particular madman one day try to strangle me to death from behind when I was at the canteen area). It's strange exactly how evil children can be, and it's not something that the world at large likes to admit is true.
As you might expect this kind of nonstop treatment threw me into relatively severe depression. My desire to live dropped below zero (aka, was suicidal at that time), my ability to study dropped significantly, and my interests aligned to ways of escaping my current life, primary among which was computer gaming, in which I could live virtually in a completely different world.
To cope with all of this, I created a technique de novo to split my entire psyche into two. The first half, the more rational, practical and reserved part, I keep within myself, and this dictates the great majority of my behaviour and thought patterns. The second half, the more emotional, idealistic and social part, I "sealed" into a particular stuffed animal, and when I animate the stuffed animal, its entire behaviour is governed by that side of what was once me.
This almost completely negated all emotional effects of the bullying and I was able to complete that phase. Later on, things steadily got better when I went to a higher educational level. I still was bullied, hit, and shot with hornets, but at least nobody attempted to murder me outright. Even later than that, things got better enough in my pre-university years that the abuse reduced to mere verbal abuse, and around this time I finally had my first few friends.
About this time, I departitioned myself somewhat again, and things went pretty well for two years.
Then I was conscripted into the military, and everything went straight to hell again, so after about one or two months of that nonsense, I managed to repartition myself. After this I kind of gave up, and from here on out I'm planning to leave myself in a partitioned form more or less for the rest of my life. Somehow, the benefits I gained from allowing the emotional side to coexist tend to be less than the costs of doing so - even in the better times in life, the amount of negative emotions I get always outweighs the positive ones, though the degree to which it outweighs changes significantly depending on the life situation.
To date that stuffed animal still holds great importance to me, more so than any other thing I possess, mainly because it's not just a stuffed animal anymore, it's functionally an extension of me.
So, has anyone here even used this kind of partition technique before? I've been doing some research recently, and I realise I cannot find any reference to this anywhere. Terry Goodkind did briefly mention the main character doing a similar partition in one of his fiction novels, but I've never been able to find any non-fiction source that references this behaviour.
Partitioning seems to take at least a month to achieve. I cannot describe how I do it, or even what it feels like to do so, but conceptually it's like using your current identity, creating two blank identities for yourself, stuffing attributes into one of them and stuffing all the others into the other one, then taking on one as your current new identity and stuffing the alternate somewhere else. Limitations are, of course, only aspects that are already part of me can be partitioned. I can't create abilities out of nowhere during this process, so it's only useable to reduce your current capabilities to a subset of it.
I'm not sure if it has any other useful applications, but partitioning emotions does seem to significantly enhance one's ability to view things from an objective angle. Also, not everything can be partitioned away. I tried doing something along the lines of partitioning fears together with emotionality away, but it didn't quite work - I still have quite some level of social phobia.
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"Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie."
- Terry Goodkind's "Wizard's Fifth Rule"
20 Sep 2011, 6:32 am
