GH Annie Bear

Hey there, y'all! I hope you have a bit of patience as this got a mite longer than the usual intro. But, I hope y'all will understand by the end.

First things first. No, GH Annie Bear isn't my legal, given name. I kinda wish it were, though, because it's got some wonderfully loving meaning behind it. The GH comes from a signature I used in a peer support group that a handful of us people on a health site who were dealing with chronic pain and insomnia started. It stands for "gentle huggies," which I used instead of "hugs" because regular hugs hurt for most of us. I wanted to make a point of that because, when a person can't even receive a hug to help them feel better emotionally, that can add to the pain we're already feeling.

Annie is the name I gave myself (instead of Ann, which is my legal, given name) after a couple years of intense psychotherapy about abuses I lived through as a kid. That not only caused a good deal of emotional problems for me, but also caused a mental health issue now referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID for short) that used to be called having "multiple personalities." It means that I have, inside of me, a number of what are commonly called "alts" (short for "alternate personalities") who handled what I could not as a kid, and kept those memories blocked from me until I was mature and stable enough to deal with them more appropriately.

It used to be that the end goal in therapy for someone with DID was an integration that left a single persona with all the memories and a conglomerate of the characteristics of all of the alts. When my therapist and I discussed integration, to me (and my alts) that felt incredibly ungrateful to them for all they had done for me for the first 30-some years of my life--and rather like killing them off. We chose, instead, to continue on as a multifaceted person. To honor that choice, I threw myself a "baby shower" for all of us to celebrate having been born. Part of that was a renaming ceremony where I chose to be called Annie, as Ann was the core, adult personality I'd always shown the world. Annie is "the I that is me, that is we," representing all of us.

The Bear part of my name was rather a happy spontaneous action. Believe it or not, when I went to sign up for "gh.annie" at GMail, it was already in use. I'd bought a teddy bear for my dearest friend who was beginning the intense therapy I'd been through, and she named him GH Bear. S