We must be one.

As I delve deeper and deeper into the depths of my mind with my shrink, I realise how important it has been to survive . I have been seeing him for many weeks and I feel quite comfortable around him. We joke and have quite a good rapore. He sits in a chair that is a good safe distance away from me, and he NEVER makes any attempt to touch me in any way. These are all very good things. Slowly we are releasing more and more information about ourselves and the workings going one inside. But we now come to a hitch. 
For our entire lives we have had to work so hard to appear as one united person functioning seamlessly. We do not advertise our differences nor do we point out the changes we go through. It is of course survival, to act as one so that no one can ever know we are different. 

This however can be a problem when it comes to working on healing. We had an alter come out the other day who comes from very deep down in our system. We were in with our shrink. He kept asking questions of this Alter that they had no idea of how to answer because it was not their area. Now you may think that the easy explaination is the tell him that we are not who he thinks we are, and in theory it may be. But that would mean exposing our multiplicity. Dont get me wrong, this shrink knows we are many, but we have not really come out in such a forward way before. Although this alter was out, we still didnt want to let him know that he was talking to someone else. 
I realised that day that we dont, as a rule, let too many of our alters out too often. Even with my multiple friends, we let a few out for a short time, but we are still very protective of keeping up appearances that we are one.  
The need to be seen as one is so very very strong, even infront of a person who has experience and knowledge in dealing with people who are multiples. We have shut up shop a bit today and I feel like we are going into a semi hiding place for a while, to help us not to feel too exposed. I expect for the next few days we will be functioning very much as one person just to bring us back into a sense of security. It may take a while for us to feel safe enough to open up to him and let him see who we really are. It is a very big step. No one gets in here. That how we are safe. This is our world and only we can enter. The trust levels must be very high to let some one in, and I am not sure I have ever trusted anyone that much before. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have someone who knows what it is like inside me.