Dissociation Theme: When Love Activates the split through the glass

Dissociation Theme: When Love Activates the Split - Billy and Monica, Part 1

Monica and Bllly 1

4:12

Dissociation doesn't go away with intimacy. It sets off something in the Opathian mind.

Monica, from The Gate book, was the first person to break through the glass.

Not by force.

That's not the point. Some people have a certain kind of attention that lets them look at you and see not the result of your managed self, but whatever is behind it.

The split through the glass seems imperceptible.

The school bus we were on smelled like old plastic and someone else's food. She looked at me straight in the eye, like she had nothing to prove, and I felt something in my chest that I couldn't put my finger on.

When I got home, I couldn't figure out what had happened.

This is what it's like to fall in love in the Opathian state. There isn't the wide, easy opening that the cultural narrative offers. It's very scary. It makes you feel lost. It's like someone or something is reaching through the glass wall and touching something on the other side, but the other side isn't sure if being touched is safe.

The majority of people who have dissociation were given it to protect them from this kind of weakness. The child who learned that being fully present hurts did not pick that lesson at chance. Their point was clear: if I'm never fully here, then nothing that tries to reach me can ever fully do so. It was the armour that was broken. Love, real love, the kind that sees you as you really are, is what the armour was always getting ready for. The armour will do what armour does when it gets there. It turns on.

We built something real together while we were in high school. Being real means that it's not yet old enough to be strategic. It's instinctual and animal, like a link that doesn't know how to be managed because it hasn't been taught that management is an option yet. It felt good to hold her hand under my bag.

For the first time, she made me feel like my dark side wasn't a problem. For example, the whispers, dreams, and the thing that had been following me since I was a child were not proof that I was too much. They were proof that I was complex, and she liked things that were complex.

After that, she left.

I didn't get it the first time. It made sense to me the second time, but not in the way that you can fully understand something. When she came back, we sat in the garden and talked about something real and scary. We were both being watched, and she tried to tell me about Candace, the pictures, and the thing. I thought it was a lie. I should have known that her nervous system was trying to find words for the same thing that mine had been trying to avoid since I was eight years old.

Monica wasn't being mean when she ranted at me, at the idea of us, at the bar. When Monica spoke, it was her dissociation, the part of her that had decided, below the level of debate, that loving me was too risky. that anything that followed me would also follow her. To protect herself, she should distance herself from me before risking something valuable. It was her anger that the controlled self could use as a weapon: "If I make him leave, he won't see me disappear."

I get this now. At that time, I didn't get it.

What Monica left me with—and what took me years to name—was the Opathian wound of being seen and then losing the person who saw you. It wasn't just sadness that left me feeling empty after she left. It was the loss of the only proof I had that my inner life was worth having. The glass wall got stronger after she left.

The controlled self-made its case stronger. The feeling self had been in the room for a short time and was very scary. It then went somewhere that felt like it might be permanent for a long time.

This is how the Opathian state gets stronger: every time you let yourself be seen and then lose the seer, your nervous system makes new records. The data point backs up the original idea. Being fully present is risky. The reach ends with a loss.

Do not leave the glass.

But Monica also gave me proof that the glass wall wasn't stable, which neither of us knew at the time. That something from my inside had made it through, and something from hers had reached me. The reaching had been real, no matter how it ended. That information, which was buried beneath the sadness, anger, and years of not understanding, turned into a different kind of evidence over time.

Not that love makes you bad. You can be reached. The glass wall is hot or cold, but you can't always tell from their side or yours.

Sincerely,

Bill Bistak