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Could Tom, or any other French speakers, let me know if i would be correctly translating “ça passe ou ça casse” as “make it or break it”?

I too have always felt that there was some logical reason behind these feelings, that i was being prepared for something, that through perserverance, all would become clear.

But, the longer this goes on, the less and less i can hold the faith that there is any rhyme or reason to it all. And so, i similarly find myself in a make it or break it mind set.

Tom, you should not have had to endure what you have, and there is absolutely nothing that anyone can say that would ever make that right or even bearable.

But my question to you, if being a one handed man makes you feel good, if it makes you more confident, more able to love and trust and better able to interact with those around you - is it really such a bad thing?

And perhaps, is it something that you need to do to take back what your father took from you? To regain control?

PS - I’m going to email you as well so we can talk in detail - love from me.

Yes, it means “make or break”. But I wrote this almost a month ago and haven’t done anything of that kind since. I wrote this in one of these moments when my biid goes out of control, I assume most of you understand this.

Dear Tom,

At last I have had the time to read all your thoughts. Thanks you for writing and sharing.

What a shame we got to know one another the day AFTER I left France!

For years, like you, I wanted to overcome the desire. But from day one of meeting all our friends here and in the groups, I soon found that therapy doesn’t work. Having BIID, like GID or simply being gay is us. As the song goes “I Am What I Am”. We are disabled. Our bodies have been made wrong.

Peter

Hi Tom, hi All,

I just now happen to read this text.

And I find a lot of myself in it! I, too, have such a feeling that BIID might not be the core, but a layer, not be the depth, but the surface, not be me, but …?

Does BIID hide something from my conscious knowing? Does it cover feelings or desires I wouldn’t be able to stand?

But like you, I have tried a lot and BIID hasn’t diminished. Just my feelings of guilt and shame have diminished, and that is great.

If anything seems to have some truth in it when I think about it, it is this: BIID might have to do with me being unable to slip into my body (I imagine it like slipping into a pyjama or so) and feeling at home there, feeling comfortable. So maybe it is a sign that I am not really IN me.

The question is: can I learn it, can I do it, can I better, deeper slip into my body? Or has my body to be adjusted to my soul?

Or have I just to endure it and learn something doing so?

All these questions remain open.

But there were times when my BIID was very low and I thought it had vanished, and I felt much more at home in myself and in this world. Maybe I just hope I could get this feeling, this liveliness again - without having to have my legs cut off…

I have come to the point where I think that at least no option is worse than the other and none is evil: to endure it, to overcome it, to become an amputee.

It’s exhausting, sitting on the fence all the time. But what can I do?

One good advice I got from my therapist. She said: Treat yourself not worse than you would treat anybody with a disability. Be compassionate with yourself.

Best wishes
Phil

Hi Phil,

I’d like to share my view with what you wrote. Hope I won’t be to verbose :)

“I, too, have such a feeling that BIID might not be the core, but a layer, not be the depth, but the surface, not be me, but …”.
I see BIID as a symbol (and this my own view only, I make no assumption about what BIID is to others). A symbol is a split object (used to be a stick in ancient Greece; when friends or lovers parted, they would break a stick into two halves for each one of them to take it with them as a representation of the other person who held the other half). The split object has two part, but you only have one of them. It is, then, up to us to find the other half (and reunite with the loved one) and to understand (or remember) how this thing got broken into two. There are some elements along these lines in the book by Gregg M. Furth and Robert Smith: “Amputee Identity Disorder: Information, questions, answers and recomandations about self-demand amputation”.

I could elaborate quite a bit on this. If BIID is a symbol, why do we love this symbol so much? Why is it so hard to find out/remember how the symbole was broken and where the other half is? You write “Does it cover feelings or desires I wouldn’t be able to stand?”… this is a good question. The symbol is not the thing that it represents. Rather, it reminds us of something/someone else (or some other part of ourselves?) and of the separation (which may have been a traumatic event). And certainly, a symbol indicates that something is missing.

There are only individual, personal answers to these questions, but opening oneself to others with similar feeling doubtlessly helps in finding answers - not that the answers should come from the others, but sharing with others contributes to knowing oneself better.

As for myself, I have identified elements in my life history that cast quite a bit of light on what the BIID-symbol thing meant to me, as I have explained in my other posts. I know how things were broken into two halves. I’m still left with only one half though, I still have to find the part of me that holds the second half, which means I still have BIID, and I may spend the rest of my life with it…. who can tell? Just like you, I’m still sitting on the fence, and this is not very comfortable since my fence is a traumatic event. My gut feeling is that I’m right to try to understand better what I’m sitting on. I’d like to be able to say that I trust the two separated halves will eventually reunite, that I’m sure I will eventually get rid of that fence that is in my way. But, as of today, I am still looking for more information, more answers, more understanding.

It is very much as if I had just rediscovered in an old chest, in my attic, my half of the symbol. I have managed to remember how the symbol was broken, and I’m now grieving on this breaking event. But I still don’t know who holds the second half of the symbol. When I’ll stop grieving, it’ll be time to wonder who/what is the holder of the second half, and to start looking for it.

Yes, be compassionate to oneself makes life easier.

@Tom, the first psychologist I spoke to about BIID, when I was 19, suggested BIID was a symbol and it took me a while to process and consider this. I have long since stopped thinking it’s a symbol. The concept of “BIID as a symbol” is an elegant one, it is appealing, because it seems to explain things so well. In a way, if BIID is a symbol, it means that we can resolve the issue with a little bit of hard work in therapy. Only, it doesn’t work that way. And there are too many people who’ve had relatively happy childhoods with no reason to develop a symbol like that.

Nonetheless, we do need to explore all those avenues for ourselves :)

@Sean, hey you know all that, do you? Very kind of you to let us poor souls explore it all for ourselves :) May I ask you why you cling so hard on that idea that BIID is a standalone phenomenon and a single, comparable condition in everyone?

@Tom, I don’t claim to know the Truth of BIID. I never have and I never will.

I have no doubt that BIID is influenced by a multitude of other things. For some, it’s CSA. For others, it’s depression, or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or GID. Or any other number and combinations of things. In that, it is not stand-alone.

But BIID is what it is: A need to have an (usualy specific) impairment. That is BIID. The other things that might influence it are NOT part of BIID. It does not mean they are unimportant. It does not mean they should be ignored. But BIID isn’t these other things. At best, cousins, not brothers & sisters.

There are too many people who have BIID who do not share these “cousin” conditions. If out of 5 people who have BIID only 2 also endured CSA, we cannot say that CSA is part of BIID, not symptom, nor cause.

It is important to be able to define BIID clearly. As such, being able to compare “traits” of the condition in different people is important. For example, does someone need to become an amputee because they heard God’s Voice telling them it is His Wish, or do they need to become an amputee because that is how they perceive themselves? On the surface, both need to be amputee, and without some definition of BIID, we could say they both have BIID. Except that the person hearing God’s Voice is most likely delusional, and doesn’t have BIID. Can’t compare one with the other. I used an extreme example to illustrate better. Only by having a clear definition of what BIID is, or isn’t, can we all be on the same page.

Having identified what BIID is, we can look at “treatment”. Whether such treatment is psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, surgery, or a mixture of all these is somewhat irrelevant. But you wouldn’t treat someone who is dellusional the same way you would treat someone who has body image issues.

In the end, everything is related, of course. If I had a better handle on my depression, life would be easier, even with BIID. If you had a better handle on your issues surounding CSA, your life would be better, regardless of BIID.

Does that make sense Tom?

Ok, but maybe we can look at it from this angle…maybe BIID or the like is a biproduct of all of these conditions leading to a result or trait of BIID. Kind of like so many different things can lead to depression, transgender, and other things.

Speaking only for myself, I clearly had BIID before any other psychological factors came into play.

Ongoing research in Germany has not found any commonalities between people with BIID - except of BIID itself. No signs of other mental or psychical problems, no “BIID personality”, nothing.

If BIID were a symbol, wouldn’t they find something we all have in common? Some special way of perception, some special way of feeling or thinking?

In the last days I have come back to the wisdom of what Viktor E. Frankl said: We only can GIVE our life a meaning (or sense), we cannot just find it. Maybe that applies to BIID in particular.

@Phil, thank you for this most excellent reminder.