Communication (Me)

It's come to my attention lately that a focus on communication is a pretty major underlying foundation in my life. I'm good at communicating; I do a lot of it. If anything, I'm guilty of over-communicating, telling people around me more than they want to know. But so many of the problems I see other people having are due to too little communication between them.

Of course, the most obvious spot for this is in relationships. And in the breakups, you really see where communications have been neglected. In the last six months, I've had two majorly traumatic breakups. The first one started off with him making the assumption that I had stepped out of boundaries we had agreed upon in our relationship. He started off stating that I was lying to him, then refused to talk on the phone to me at all. Guess what? This breakup was horrible. First things first, I hadn't stepped outside that boundary. If he'd simply asked about that, I could have told him so, and that would have been that. But he took what someone else had told him and went off half-cocked, and destroyed any chance we had of making things work. Emotionally, I was shattered - didn't even have the chance to defend myself. Now, I can barely be in the same room with the man. And he won't even meet my eyes and say 'hello' when we're forced together in a group.

The other breakup was this week. I was - and am - much more deeply attached to this man. He and I talked for a few hours about why he was breaking up with me. I understand it, even if I don't like it. Have I been emotionally crushed? Of course. But I haven't been raging and depressed and feeling like I'm going insane over it. Heck, he's even checked on me afterwards to make sure I'm handling it okay. And if we happen to be in a group of people together, we'll be okay. I'll hug him hello and talk to him. I may have to excuse myself to go to the bathroom and cry a little, but I'll be okay. Because we talked. A lot. And I'll survive.

In the kink world, we talk a lot about communication being even more important than in regular relationships. After all, if you don't communicate about the kind of stuff we do, someone could get actually hurt. Health issues, injuries, mental triggers - you have to talk about this kind of stuff. Which means a great deal of self-introspection is in order. That doesn't mean it always happens, though. But if you don't delve into your own psyche, and pay close attention to your physical self, how can you tell your partner or partners what's going on with you? And thus, this blog. This is me, examining myself. Myselves. Ourself?

Yeah, communication is important internally, too. The six of us active alters have got to talk to each other. When one of needs something, the rest of us have got to pay attention to that and deal with it. If I'm getting depressed - say, over a breakup this week - and I don't pay attention to that, it's going to come out somewhere. I could turn my unhappiness over to Rubi - and then I need to get into a fight with someone, or have some really aggressive sex, or she might do some cutting. Or I could turn it over to Sam - and she'll overwhelm it by teasing and picking on friends and whooping it up, trying to party the blues away. Or Kiara might get it, and hide at home coloring page after page. But if I don't ask one of my alters to help me - or even several; we can all chip away at the unhappiness a little bit - then it's still going to come out. It might affect my work or my friendships. It will come out one way or the other.