D.I.D....

@soul She's not much of a sporty type, and relaxation exercises seem to confuse her. I don't think she can get her mind into the right state to benefit from them. The most I've been able to get her to try has been controlled breathing, but I'm not sure if she's ever tried that without someone (me...) coaching her through it.

Glad that she has at least one thing that facilitates her state of mind. I found walking was very beneficial for me especially if there was something that was interesting or peaceful to look at. Hope to get back to walking somewhere besides the suburbs soon @Smc.

Does your daughter enjoy listening to music?

Ummm... she used to listen to it a lot. I'm not sure how much she does now as she's not living with us. She likes playing her recorder, and doing craftwork.

Something I was enjoying on my recent visit up to my parents' house was going to the park across the road at dusk and lying on the round webbing swing. Similar to the one in this pic. I'd set it rocking, call up Hubby and younger daughter at home, and watch the stars and fruit bats come out while we talked. If I took a pillow across, I reckon I could have happily fallen asleep there. I need to do something similar at home, somehow. We get more mozzies here than they have there, so that makes it tricky. We do have a hammock begging to be used...

Love those swings @Smc,

I feel more relaxed just with the image of rocking and watching the stars.

I sit rocking in playground swings sometimes @Smc. It used to be an adult pastime too .... similar to swing seats on front porches.

@Faith-and-Hope thanks...

My Mum has probable MI problems too, but undiagnosed because that was "back in the days" when seeing a psychologist got you instantly branded as a basket case. Her Mum died when she was a girl, at about the age you'd expect would trigger DID, and there were other family relationship problems too.

I'm more suspicious of Mum's problems being a form of Borderline Personality Disorder. Some of our daughter's behaviours do remind me (very unsettlingly) of Mum, despite us being careful to shield our kids from Mum's meltdowns when they were young. Daughter never really saw Mum in a bad state until she was maybe 10 or so years old? That was a nasty shock for her.

Daughter seems to have had a tendency to escalate situations even as a preschooler, and may have been dissociating from a very young age. While I was pregnant with her, we moved house, going from a place that had a very supportive and child friendly church community to your average city suburb where you barely got to know the next door neighbours unless you made an effort. I have no idea whether that stress could have affected in utero brain development and neurochemistry. It's a theory which is being explored in research circles, but dunno how you'd pin it down as being a factor. I do think that something predisposing DID may have been there from very early on.

And the latest...

I think Older Daughter's latest emergency department incident shook her up a fair bit, and she came to the conclusion that she needed to see about getting another private psych clinic admission to get herself back on track. She's had a few things going downhill lately. She seems to have largely conquered her fear of water, but has developed other problems. Social anxiety has been getting worse. She can't handle doing shopping on her own at the moment. She's been crying uncontrollably after her psych appointments, to the point where she couldn't handle travelling home on her own from one of them, so we went and picked her up.

The psych who was in charge of her admission last time wasn't going to be available due to contracting issues this time, so her GP put in a referral with the plan being that the clinic would assign someone to her.

And yesterday she got the good but disconcerting news that they can admit her on Monday, and the icing on the cake is that her previous psych is available again, so she won't have to start from scratch with someone she doesn't know. Yay!

She was shaky about it when she rang me yesterday. Sounding excited, scared, teary all at once. So she'll be spending the weekend packing and trying to get her head around the fact that it's actually happening. We'll do the 2+ hour drive down with her, leaving about 8 in the morning to get there in time for admission. It's a pity they can't have a slightly later admission time for country patients. As long as she's coping OK emotionally, we should be heading home again about lunchtime. It would be good to get back before our younger daughter arrives home on the school bus. Understandably, she worries about her Big Sis, and we need to be there to support her too.

This means Older Daughter will be at the clinic for her birthday this coming Sunday. She'd thought about that possibility in advance, and would like us to have lunch with her at a Chinese restaurant that's within walking distance of the clinic. We don't know how many weeks she'll be in. She's hoping that she can get back on top of coping with everyday things before she goes home. Last visit helped... hope this one does too.