Venting I have Dissociative Identity Disorder and it's killing me.

[dissociatedmess]

I thought going into the research track at uni to study it would help me understand myself better. I was hoping to come to terms with it. But it sort of had the opposite effect.
It made me feel way more powerless knowing how many people out there have so many horrible opinions about something they literally do not understand. I hate the entire culture built around the thing that is fucking debilitating to me.
I got more alone and more isolated and more afraid of myself.

I try to keep it under control but I can't stop the voices. I can't even talk nice to myself. I get attacked internally. I get screamed at, mocked, belittled, laughed at, and I can't live with voices constantly telling me I should kill myself. I shut down. I don't "black out" but time just seems to slip away. What happened yesterday was actually two or three days ago. Did I shower? My hair is damp so I must have. I saw that movie! But I just can't remember it... But I loved it! But I can't tell you anything about it. Did I really say that? Oh I didn't know you were coming over! We talked about it earlier? Sorry I'm just a little frazzled. Wait, why am i here? I'm halfway through this outing... I keep trying not to go out with them why do I keep winding up here?

"Why are you bringing this up again?"
I didn't know I brought it up the first time.
"You said you loved this show"
I've never seen it.

I know I said I felt this way, or that way, but now I feel weird I ever said that because I just don't agree.

I remember, and then I forget, and then I remember!! and forget. Fuck! I know I knew it just a little bit ago.

I'm always rereading my messages. My journals. Videos. Pictures. Voice memos. But all of it feels like I'm snooping through someone else's things.

I cut my parents off a few years ago because I couldn't take it anymore, but they have homes inside my head, too. I can't get rid of that.
I can't stop hearing the way they'd sneer at me for thinking anything I went through was halfway bad. DID? Fucking insane. Fake disorder. I see them roll their eyes at me and tell me just to kill myself already because all I ever do is manipulate them all. I never figured out what I was manipulating them for. I don't know what I was receiving from being in pain.
But my mom loved it, too. She loved the hospital trips and the medicines they put me on and the books she bought to protect herself from my abuse. I was 15 when they put me on antipsychotics for a disorder I didn't even have.
I was 15 when I wrote the suicide note she kept tucked in her nightstand until I found it at 23, ripped it up, and threw it away.
I wondered what was so prized about that memory for her.

I told my therapist I think I'm just unhelpable at this point.

I'm so embarrassed and ashamed to be alive I cannot express it—I can't emphasize it enough. I was supposed to be dead. It's what my parents wanted. I've tried and I can't do it. I wish it were as easy as snapping my fingers and disappearing.

How the fuck did I make it into my 30s

This post got away from me, just too many feelings and nowhere to fucking put them.

 

[Kokonoe]

I thought going into the research track at uni to study it would help me understand myself better. I was hoping to come to terms with it. But it sort of had the opposite effect.
It made me feel way more powerless knowing how many people out there have so many horrible opinions about something they literally do not understand. I hate the entire culture built around the thing that is fucking debilitating to me.
I got more alone and more isolated and more afraid of myself.

I try to keep it under control but I can't stop the voices. I can't even talk nice to myself. I get attacked internally. I get screamed at, mocked, belittled, laughed at, and I can't live with voices constantly telling me I should kill myself. I shut down. I don't "black out" but time just seems to slip away. What happened yesterday was actually two or three days ago. Did I shower? My hair is damp so I must have. I saw that movie! But I just can't remember it... But I loved it! But I can't tell you anything about it. Did I really say that? Oh I didn't know you were coming over! We talked about it earlier? Sorry I'm just a little frazzled. Wait, why am i here? I'm halfway through this outing... I keep trying not to go out with them why do I keep winding up here?

"Why are you bringing this up again?"
I didn't know I brought it up the first time.
"You said you loved this show"
I've never seen it.

I know I said I felt this way, or that way, but now I feel weird I ever said that because I just don't agree.

I remember, and then I forget, and then I remember!! and forget. Fuck! I know I knew it just a little bit ago.

I'm always rereading my messages. My journals. Videos. Pictures. Voice memos. But all of it feels like I'm snooping through someone else's things.

I cut my parents off a few years ago because I couldn't take it anymore, but they have homes inside my head, too. I can't get rid of that.
I can't stop hearing the way they'd sneer at me for thinking anything I went through was halfway bad. DID? Fucking insane. Fake disorder. I see them roll their eyes at me and tell me just to kill myself already because all I ever do is manipulate them all. I never figured out what I was manipulating them for. I don't know what I was receiving from being in pain.
But my mom loved it, too. She loved the hospital trips and the medicines they put me on and the books she bought to protect herself from my abuse. I was 15 when they put me on antipsychotics for a disorder I didn't even have.
I was 15 when I wrote the suicide note she kept tucked in her nightstand until I found it at 23, ripped it up, and threw it away.
I wondered what was so prized about that memory for her.

I told my therapist I think I'm just unhelpable at this point.

I'm so embarrassed and ashamed to be alive I cannot express it—I can't emphasize it enough. I was supposed to be dead. It's what my parents wanted. I've tried and I can't do it. I wish it were as easy as snapping my fingers and disappearing.

How the fuck did I make it into my 30s

This post got away from me, just too many feelings and nowhere to fucking put them.

i have DID, too. it's such an awful disorder to live with. i like to call it the evil hell disorder for a reason. there is just nothing else like it and it's crazy the sort of things the human brain can just decide to put itself through.

if you ever want to talk about DID i'd be willing to. it's pretty rare so talking to someone who can know what it's like can be hard to come by.

 

[FF777]

(sorry i'm going to be naive here but) that doesn't sound like a fun existence.. i don't know much about DID but does some thing traumatic have to happen to cause it, or does it just happen to some people for no reason?..

and are there any real cures or treatments for it?.. i'm sorry you have to live like that and i wish there was some thing i could do to help some how.. i hope it helps you a little to type out your situation and feelings like that on this forum..

 

[dissociatedmess]

(sorry i'm going to be naive here but) that doesn't sound like a fun existence.. i don't know much about DID but does some thing traumatic have to happen to cause it, or does it just happen to some people for no reason?..

and are there any real cures or treatments for it?.. i'm sorry you have to live like that and i wish there was some thing i could do to help some how.. i hope it helps you a little to type out your situation and feelings like that on this forum..

There are multiple factors. It does come from chronic childhood trauma and forms before the age of 9. But some people have horrible trauma and don't get it. Other factors include already having an innate capacity or tendency toward dissociation, large imagination, and lack of support system—nobody to talk to about literally anything, no one to save you. DID is the escape when it's actually an inescapable situation.
It's also a relational disorder heavily steeped in betrayal trauma (people who are meant to love you or care for you are hurting you).
So sometimes my brain idolizes my family and says I'm bad. And another me says my parents were terrible people and tries to run as far away as possible. And those are in constant conflict. The disagreements have caused me to run crying home to abusive people multiple times because I forget what they did.


The way I've looked at it for me personally is that something went beyond fight>flight>freeze>fawn, into something called attach-cry, where your only last option for survival is to scream for help (seek connection) because only someone else's intervention can help, but then that didn't work either. So to face annihilation, psychic or physical, the brain shuts off because the emotions are too intense to cope with.

A lot of people think the abuse has to be like the worst possible thing they could imagine, and sometimes it IS horrible terrible things. Sometimes it's neglect, isolation, emotional neglect (huge factor), physical abuse, sexual abuse, etc. Again—chronic.

There are no medications, but a lot of people take anti-anxieties, SSRIs, mood stabilizers, etc for other symptoms or comorbid disorders. For derealization and depersonalization, the amnesia, as far as I'm aware, there are no medications for dissociation specifically.
The treatment modality currently is sort of this non-linear phasic therapy that moves from stabilization to trauma processing to integration/rehabilitation with parts of self. Though not everybody wants to integrate the parts of themselves. It's sometimes the only form of family someone really has, as fucked up as it can be.

It's just crazy to me that my body has kept me alive for 30 years with all of this, even for all the patches of life I can't remember, and I am forced to trust that I'm going to get everything done whether I'm aware of it or not. Which is rough. But I had a near 4.0 all through uni. I go to work. I make music. I have friends. And no one knows about any of this. Dunno how I do it at all because I can't imagine wanting to do any of it.

EDIT to add that DID is not as rare as people think. It has similar prevalence rates as bipolar I, bipolar II, Chronic major depression, anorexia nervosa (somehow, idk, that's what the numbers said), and schizophrenia. DSM-V places DID around 1.5%, which, is at least 1 in 100 people.
1 in 100 people.
But for the most part, it goes undetected. It's a covert disorder. 5% of the 1.5% of the DID population has a florid presentation (different parts of self are dramatically OVERTLY different from one another in a way that is obvious to people around them.

 

[Lucifer’s Son]

I also have (polyfragmented) DID, and you're right about how much it sucks that there are people who are dedicated to hating us that much.

 

[dissociatedmess]

I also have (polyfragmented) DID, and you're right about how much it sucks that there are people who are dedicated to hating us that much.

Doesn't help that the denial inherent in the disorder and the self-hate generally instilled by the trauma is rampant too so... People on the internet don't need to punish us any more than we're being punished anyways. Nobody could hate me more than I do, trust me.

Oh and fuck you, Elizabeth Loftus
I will not elaborate.

 

[Lucifer’s Son]

Doesn't help that the denial inherent in the disorder and the self-hate generally instilled by the trauma is rampant too so... People on the internet don't need to punish us any more than we're being punished anyways. Nobody could hate me more than I do, trust me.

Oh and fuck you, Elizabeth Loftus
I will not elaborate.

Yeah, I know about her. Fuck her hard.

 

[FF777]

There are multiple factors.

thank you for telling me all about that stuff.. i had really never known what DID was like that much really.. and i thought it was rare but i guess it is more common than i thought..

this isn't any where near the same as what you are going through, but my half-sister (we have different moms) had a mom that was emotionally abusive and neglected her a lot, and it ended up giving my sister a strong complex where she felt worthless and inferior.. and even today she still carries a lot of that complex with her, and i think it has caused her to end up with husbands that have been kind of abusive to her.. maybe almost like she thinks that is the kind of relationships she deserves or some thing, because of that complex..

but she is an attractive person (there are no ugly people in our family), and so it's just weird to me that she doesn't have high confidence and high self-worth.. but i guess it's because when you are growing up, what ever you experience during early years ends up getting kind of cemented in to your personality, and then that kind of "hardens" and it is really hard to alter later in life through things like therapy or other stuff.. it's probably like layers and layers of deprogramming that a person has to go through, and of course a person can probably never 100% revert all the damage that was done to them.. it's really sad though.. because these abusive parents don't even think or care about that their abuse is going to ruin some one's entire life, not just their childhood..

i'm not even sure what to tell you that might help.. but i think first of all knowing that none of that crap that happened to you was your fault and you didn't deserve any of it.. people just have piece of crap parents some times..

and secondly, i think it is mentally healthy to have self-confidence and relatively high self-worth.. it just makes you feel better and improves your life i believe.. i'm not sure how impossible it might seem for you to raise up the self-confidence in your self, but if you are some one that thinks super lowly of your self then that isn't helping you and isn't healthy for you and your confidence/self-worth level shouldn't remain like that for ever.. some thing needs to change at some point here.. and so if you can some how, try to start some sort of mental change where you actually realize that yeah, you ARE worth some thing, and tell your self you are amazing even if it feels fake and sarcastic at first, and just keep doing that and slowly over time it might start to feel less fake and more legit.. you are kind of normalizing feeling better about your own self..

i'm not really good at this type of thing so i don't really know what else so suggest besides starting with things like that.. but i hope there is some way forward that you can find some how to try to mitigate all the trauma and every thing that you had to endure through for so long.. it shouldn't have happened, it wasn't deserved, and most tragically it was done to a cool and awesome person (you)..

i hope being on these forums helps some how.. as you've seen already there are some other people here and there that have some type/version of the same thing.. i think it is tragic that so much child abuse still happens in the world.. i don't know why so many parents have to be piles of shit to their own children they are supposed to love.. it doesn't make sense and kind of makes me angry when i think about it..

but any way.. i'll stop yapping at you for now, but let me and/or other people know if you need any thing and keep posting things on the forums (this thread or new threads etc) if that helps you to feel better.. stay strong and cool..

love and light..

 

[gattara]

sometimes i think i have some form of this, because ive struggled with chronic dpdr for over a decade & my boyfriend tells me i speak in different voices. i have a "baby" voice i speak in for days at a time and then a "manly" voice. i think he prefers the baby voice because he makes fun of my manly voice, but i feel like the manly voice is the real me. not to say its actually manly, it just sounds like an adult, mature version of me. i wasnt really aware of this until he told me. i definitely experience different states of being and hear different versions of myself in my head. but im fairly aware of them so i don't think i have full-on DID. right now i think im in a dark state, its so foggy and blurry mentally. im going to go attack myself mentally for a few hours to relax.

 

[FF777]

i definitely experience different states of being and hear different versions of myself in my head.

i have some pretty strong and different personalities in me..... i mean, i don't know where the line between "moods" and "personalities" is, just semantics but, so i guess you could call them really different moods.. but it feels like they are more than just different moods i am in.. but yeah i'm always aware of every thing, so it is nothing like what DID is..

 

[fadedghost]

I thought going into the research track at uni to study it would help me understand myself better. I was hoping to come to terms with it. But it sort of had the opposite effect.
It made me feel way more powerless knowing how many people out there have so many horrible opinions about something they literally do not understand. I hate the entire culture built around the thing that is fucking debilitating to me.
I got more alone and more isolated and more afraid of myself.

I try to keep it under control but I can't stop the voices. I can't even talk nice to myself. I get attacked internally. I get screamed at, mocked, belittled, laughed at, and I can't live with voices constantly telling me I should kill myself. I shut down. I don't "black out" but time just seems to slip away. What happened yesterday was actually two or three days ago. Did I shower? My hair is damp so I must have. I saw that movie! But I just can't remember it... But I loved it! But I can't tell you anything about it. Did I really say that? Oh I didn't know you were coming over! We talked about it earlier? Sorry I'm just a little frazzled. Wait, why am i here? I'm halfway through this outing... I keep trying not to go out with them why do I keep winding up here?

"Why are you bringing this up again?"
I didn't know I brought it up the first time.
"You said you loved this show"
I've never seen it.

I know I said I felt this way, or that way, but now I feel weird I ever said that because I just don't agree.

I remember, and then I forget, and then I remember!! and forget. Fuck! I know I knew it just a little bit ago.

I'm always rereading my messages. My journals. Videos. Pictures. Voice memos. But all of it feels like I'm snooping through someone else's things.

I cut my parents off a few years ago because I couldn't take it anymore, but they have homes inside my head, too. I can't get rid of that.
I can't stop hearing the way they'd sneer at me for thinking anything I went through was halfway bad. DID? Fucking insane. Fake disorder. I see them roll their eyes at me and tell me just to kill myself already because all I ever do is manipulate them all. I never figured out what I was manipulating them for. I don't know what I was receiving from being in pain.
But my mom loved it, too. She loved the hospital trips and the medicines they put me on and the books she bought to protect herself from my abuse. I was 15 when they put me on antipsychotics for a disorder I didn't even have.
I was 15 when I wrote the suicide note she kept tucked in her nightstand until I found it at 23, ripped it up, and threw it away.
I wondered what was so prized about that memory for her.

I told my therapist I think I'm just unhelpable at this point.

I'm so embarrassed and ashamed to be alive I cannot express it—I can't emphasize it enough. I was supposed to be dead. It's what my parents wanted. I've tried and I can't do it. I wish it were as easy as snapping my fingers and disappearing.

How the fuck did I make it into my 30s

This post got away from me, just too many feelings and nowhere to fucking put them.

I don't really understand DID. What you're describing sounds more like schizophrenia to me, but I am ignorant on this topic.

Trigger warning, I have questions about DID that may involve stereotypes, skip this paragraph if you want to. I don't really know if I think DID is real or not. It wasn't really talked about historically at all, like no one really had DID in the 1800s literature, until that movie came out, what was it called? Sybil... and then after that all these people said they had it, and I just don't know. Because not much was even in the history books. That's what makes me wonder. Because many other things are in those 1800s histories of mental maladies. But I am also extraordinarily ignorant on this topic.

I am biased though. The person who sexually assaulted me was a compulsive liar (and said many tall tales and flat out lies before I figured out that they were a compulsive liar) and one of the things they told me was that they have DID or an alter, or they talked to me as an alter once online, and I never knew if that was just a lie or something they made up or true. This was the person who sexually assaulted me brutally and damaged me horribly and ruined me. I was in love with him after meeting him, and then... it didn't turn out so well. I wish he had just killed me; it would have been less painful than leaving me physically damaged and unlovable and essentially asexual. He probably didn't have DID, he was probably just a horrible person. He claimed to not remember attacking me, but I think that's a lie too!

 

[dissociatedmess]

I don't really understand DID. What you're describing sounds more like schizophrenia to me, but I am ignorant on this topic.

Trigger warning, I have questions about DID that may involve stereotypes, skip this paragraph if you want to. I don't really know if I think DID is real or not. It wasn't really talked about historically at all, like no one really had DID in the 1800s literature, until that movie came out, what was it called? Sybil... and then after that all these people said they had it, and I just don't know. Because not much was even in the history books. That's what makes me wonder. Because many other things are in those 1800s histories of mental maladies. But I am also extraordinarily ignorant on this topic.

I am biased though. The person who sexually assaulted me was a compulsive liar (and said many tall tales and flat out lies before I figured out that they were a compulsive liar) and one of the things they told me was that they have DID or an alter, or they talked to me as an alter once online, and I never knew if that was just a lie or something they made up or true. This was the person who sexually assaulted me brutally and damaged me horribly and ruined me. I was in love with him after meeting him, and then... it didn't turn out so well. I wish he had just killed me; it would have been less painful than leaving me physically damaged and unlovable and essentially asexual. He probably didn't have DID, he was probably just a horrible person. He claimed to not remember attacking me, but I think that's a lie too!

This may come off as harsh, but my intention is just to be matter-of-fact here.

It is different from Schizophrenia for a multitude of reasons. One being Schizophrenia comes with losing touch with reality, which is not often a feature of DID. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder, and DID is a dissociative disorder. The voices in DID also differ because they are not external, nor do people with DID tend to hallucinate. I don't owe anyone a crash course on how my disorder works, because that is not supposed to be my job, but you thinking DID is real or not doesn't change the fact that it's been studied for decades, existed before Sybil (it just wasn't well-known or well understood), and it is in the DSM-V and will continue to exist in further iterations.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most burdensome things about having DID. You generally can't vent about it without people expressing their fascination or whether or not they believe it's real. So there are so few avenues to actually discuss symptoms and what is happening to people like me because all anyone seems to care about is whether or not they think it's legitimate. And there are plenty of cases on platforms like TikTok that DO make a mockery of it, embellish things, and an award was just given by the ISST-D (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation) to a couple of researchers for studying whether or not the social media presentation of DID was representative of the disorder as a whole - which it was found not to be.

Most cases of DID are covert. And most clinical patients are phobic of their disorder. You wouldn't know if you were in the room with me, or the other me, because its meant to be hidden and it's developed to keep people moving forward through things that would otherwise be unlivable, physically or psychically. 5% of the 1.5% of people with DID are noticeable cases - meaning that it would be clear to you that it is happening. And on the topic of Alters, there is never a literal other person in someone else's brain, no matter how it's framed. They are fragmented pieces of one person that are stuck in different modes of existence based on their current situation/survival needs, and they carry conflicting thoughts, desires, opinions, fears, phobias, etc. There are times a person with DID feels suddenly very young, because trauma happens at a young age in this disorder, and we basically just live in flashbacks. Time can feel distorted or non-linear, but reality testing in DID remains intact. The most lost with reality I get is during flashbacks, because it's a trauma disorder... which is also almost always comorbid with CPTSD.

The separation in DID is a disconnect in ownership - having thoughts that didn't feel like yours, not understanding your own actions because they contradict you, etc. The mechanisms behind the amnesia are complex and still being studied, but the amnesia is not as simple as blacking out and coming to somewhere else. There are multiple versions of amnesia - emotional amnesia, partial amnesia where some or most of an event is missing, grey-out amnesia where memory is incredibly patchy/very foggy. And less commonly, the severe form Dissociative Fugue that is the classic blackout depicted in the media. Please, for the love of god let me emphasize: THE MEDIA DOES NOT PROPERLY SHOW THIS DISORDER. IT EMBELLISHES IT EVERY TIME - even when people (Such as Richard Kluft) work alongside productions to mitigate the damage. Hollywood cares about money first.

You can believe in it or not, I still live with it every day.

I'm on a website for suicidal people trying to justify my life and that feels ironic, or something.

I don't really understand DID. What you're describing sounds more like schizophrenia to me, but I am ignorant on this topic.

Trigger warning, I have questions about DID that may involve stereotypes, skip this paragraph if you want to. I don't really know if I think DID is real or not. It wasn't really talked about historically at all, like no one really had DID in the 1800s literature, until that movie came out, what was it called? Sybil... and then after that all these people said they had it, and I just don't know. Because not much was even in the history books. That's what makes me wonder. Because many other things are in those 1800s histories of mental maladies. But I am also extraordinarily ignorant on this topic.

I am biased though. The person who sexually assaulted me was a compulsive liar (and said many tall tales and flat out lies before I figured out that they were a compulsive liar) and one of the things they told me was that they have DID or an alter, or they talked to me as an alter once online, and I never knew if that was just a lie or something they made up or true. This was the person who sexually assaulted me brutally and damaged me horribly and ruined me. I was in love with him after meeting him, and then... it didn't turn out so well. I wish he had just killed me; it would have been less painful than leaving me physically damaged and unlovable and essentially asexual. He probably didn't have DID, he was probably just a horrible person. He claimed to not remember attacking me, but I think that's a lie too!

Now I want to move on to your specific case as it is terribly disheartening and I am SO sorry that happened to you. While I can't say whether or not that person had DID, statistically speaking, those with DID are far more likely to be abused than become abusers and are not known to be dangerous (ignore the movie Split). And clinicians use several diagnostic tools to weed out people who are simulating DID, especially in cases where the patient would have something to gain from claiming they have the disorder (such as... evading culpability for a crime).

Whether or not he had DID, he was a horrible person, and you did not deserve that. Nobody does. I also do not know a person with DID who does not own up to the things they have done, whether or not they remember them, because at the end of the day, we did that, and if it affected people negatively it matters. Narcissists, on the other hand... Well, they tend to pull the "I don't remember!" card for anything that paints them in a bad light.

Again, I can't say whether or not he had DID, but I'd probably make money off a bet saying that he did not.
Edit - a note about amnesia
From my experience and a lot of things I've read, the memory issue is less of a "the memories are all gone!" thing, and more a state-dependent memory where in one state I may remember some things and while in an altered state, I don't have access to those same memories.

And sometimes it can feel like my memories sort of get, what I call, swiped? I know it's there and I just can't access it or see it and it can cause headaches. It feels like they're constantly in my peripheral vision (metaphorically) but I can't look directly at them.

Which is frustrating, and lends to the "I remembered! And forgot, and remembered I forgot."

The other thing with amnesia is that many people do not know that it is happening because of something called meta-amnesia. So many people with DID often do not realize they have lost time. Shows like United States of Tara show scenes of her suddenly coming back as herself after being an alter but switching is generally much more subtle.

Every time I want to shut up I remember something else to say because Complex Dissociative Disorders are, aptly named, complex.


I don't know everything about it, there are several models/theories of dissociation, but what information I've provided feels like it aligns well with at least my own case and aligns with much of the current clinical research.

 

[fadedghost]

This may come off as harsh, but my intention is just to be matter-of-fact here.

It is different from Schizophrenia for a multitude of reasons. One being Schizophrenia comes with losing touch with reality, which is not often a feature of DID. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder, and DID is a dissociative disorder. The voices in DID also differ because they are not external, nor do people with DID tend to hallucinate. I don't owe anyone a crash course on how my disorder works, because that is not supposed to be my job, but you thinking DID is real or not doesn't change the fact that it's been studied for decades, existed before Sybil (it just wasn't well-known or well understood), and it is in the DSM-V and will continue to exist in further iterations.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most burdensome things about having DID. You generally can't vent about it without people expressing their fascination or whether or not they believe it's real. So there are so few avenues to actually discuss symptoms and what is happening to people like me because all anyone seems to care about is whether or not they think it's legitimate. And there are plenty of cases on platforms like TikTok that DO make a mockery of it, embellish things, and an award was just given by the ISST-D (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation) to a couple of researchers for studying whether or not the social media presentation of DID was representative of the disorder as a whole - which it was found not to be.

Most cases of DID are covert. And most clinical patients are phobic of their disorder. You wouldn't know if you were in the room with me, or the other me, because its meant to be hidden and it's developed to keep people moving forward through things that would otherwise be unlivable, physically or psychically. 5% of the 1.5% of people with DID are noticeable cases - meaning that it would be clear to you that it is happening. And on the topic of Alters, there is never a literal other person in someone else's brain, no matter how it's framed. They are fragmented pieces of one person that are stuck in different modes of existence based on their current situation/survival needs, and they carry conflicting thoughts, desires, opinions, fears, phobias, etc. There are times a person with DID feels suddenly very young, because trauma happens at a young age in this disorder, and we basically just live in flashbacks. Time can feel distorted or non-linear, but reality testing in DID remains intact. The most lost with reality I get is during flashbacks, because it's a trauma disorder... which is also almost always comorbid with CPTSD.

The separation in DID is a disconnect in ownership - having thoughts that didn't feel like yours, not understanding your own actions because they contradict you, etc. The mechanisms behind the amnesia are complex and still being studied, but the amnesia is not as simple as blacking out and coming to somewhere else. There are multiple versions of amnesia - emotional amnesia, partial amnesia where some or most of an event is missing, grey-out amnesia where memory is incredibly patchy/very foggy. And less commonly, the severe form Dissociative Fugue that is the classic blackout depicted in the media. Please, for the love of god let me emphasize: THE MEDIA DOES NOT PROPERLY SHOW THIS DISORDER. IT EMBELLISHES IT EVERY TIME - even when people (Such as Richard Kluft) work alongside productions to mitigate the damage. Hollywood cares about money first.

You can believe in it or not, I still live with it every day.

I'm on a website for suicidal people trying to justify my life and that feels ironic, or something.

Now I want to move on to your specific case as it is terribly disheartening and I am SO sorry that happened to you. While I can't say whether or not that person had DID, statistically speaking, those with DID are far more likely to be abused than become abusers and are not known to be dangerous (ignore the movie Split). And clinicians use several diagnostic tools to weed out people who are simulating DID, especially in cases where the patient would have something to gain from claiming they have the disorder (such as... evading culpability for a crime).

Whether or not he had DID, he was a horrible person, and you did not deserve that. Nobody does. I also do not know a person with DID who does not own up to the things they have done, whether or not they remember them, because at the end of the day, we did that, and if it affected people negatively it matters. Narcissists, on the other hand... Well, they tend to pull the "I don't remember!" card for anything that paints them in a bad light.

Again, I can't say whether or not he had DID, but I'd probably make money off a bet saying that he did not.
Edit - a note about amnesia
From my experience and a lot of things I've read, the memory issue is less of a "the memories are all gone!" thing, and more a state-dependent memory where in one state I may remember some things and while in an altered state, I don't have access to those same memories.

And sometimes it can feel like my memories sort of get, what I call, swiped? I know it's there and I just can't access it or see it and it can cause headaches. It feels like they're constantly in my peripheral vision (metaphorically) but I can't look directly at them.

Which is frustrating, and lends to the "I remembered! And forgot, and remembered I forgot."

The other thing with amnesia is that many people do not know that it is happening because of something called meta-amnesia. So many people with DID often do not realize they have lost time. Shows like United States of Tara show scenes of her suddenly coming back as herself after being an alter but switching is generally much more subtle.

Every time I want to shut up I remember something else to say because Complex Dissociative Disorders are, aptly named, complex.


I don't know everything about it, there are several models/theories of dissociation, but what information I've provided feels like it aligns well with at least my own case and aligns with much of the current clinical research.

I'm sorry you were put in a position to educate me, but I'm less ignorant on it now. Gosh, you seem very smart. Nothing seemed harsh. You seem honest, sincere.

 

[fluorescentpearl]

Reading uur explaining of it makes me feel weirdly seen as someone with osdd, it's a horrible thing to have or go through, I wish the internet wasn't so loving of it all the time..

 

[dissociatedmess]

Always makes me feel better to see someone relate or resonate.

I used to go back and forth like "oh it can't be DID it must be OSDD" because I tend to downplay the amnestic barriers, but ultimately, the treatment guidelines for both disorders are the same.

Hope we can get some good healing in and maybe we won't feel the need to be on this site. But for now, back to the SaSu scroll. Much love to you and everyone else here.