Detached self-analysis

[kiya]

The weirdest thing about being under this level and this type of stress is how, instead of being fairly consistently integrated across my aspects, I'm shifting very abruptly from personality to personality, with each one fronting for a varying amount of time before some stimulus or other sends another one dominant.

It's like a dial, going click-click-click. There's no transition. One moment I'm bawling my eyes out, the next moment I'm analysing the correct language for referring to the personality that's currently in the driver's seat.

I'm Darkhawk now. I was Silver five minutes ago, and back where I was last night before Do Not Baboon knocked me solidly into the Altair's Child for the night. My shirt is still damp from that, but I can see again. Occasionally I dip into Stormwolf for abrupt split seconds of blind rage and then snap into someone else. I'm not . . . the integrated personality, I'm the splinters, each in turn.

Fascinating, captain.

Hm. Kevin's come home. With R&G Are Dead.

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Noodling:

Stress situations . . . narrow the stage? Or maybe it's that lack of time-pressures make it possible for aspects to work together and pool skills, but stress situations don't have time to negotiate number of hands or other grasping appendages involved?

Is the stress constant at the moment, or might there be time to try to negotiate some skill-pooling in advance for the next time it rears its head?

[kiya]

Hrm. I'm having . . . let's see if I can get that translated.

I have periods in which I can relax enough to integrate some, though mostly those integrations are dominated by Darkhawk or Jade. There are . . . hrrr.

The situation is such that I can relax and integrate, and even have Silver out and interacting sometimes, but in which it seems to me that if I do so, I run the significant risk that the situation will suddenly shift to not-safe in a way that, if Silver is out, she'll take the brunt of it. So it's not that the stress is constant, but the . . . derivative stress, the stress that comes of anticipating the possibility of future stress . . . is pretty close to omnipresent.

Resolving the situation that's producing the stress strikes me as being nearly impossible without Silver's active participation. Unfortunately, things that approach the situation in any way directly are also producing very large amounts of derivative stress, because they blow up so regularly. Given that, I've been working on trying to alloy Silver with Darkhawk or Jade to try to protect her in those situations, which helps; however, when the out-of-the-blue blowups happen, I'm not prepared for that particularly well. (And if I get to the point that I'm completely unable to manifest trust -- to front Silver in a gestalt -- I suspect that the relationship will be fatally wounded. Which means that I'm reluctant some to avoid letting her front until things are fixed; if I manifest broken-patterns for long enough, they tend to set.)

Fortunately, the last out-of-the-blue blowup has been acknowledged in a way that reduces stress some; I may be able to parlay that into a reduction in derivative stress in the post-processing, if everything goes well.