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The Esoteric System is a confluence of consciousnesses sharing one body with a passion for introspective spirituality, magical theory, and trauma informed plural perspectives. In this article, written by Tristan and Jana from The Esoteric system, they share about their journey with Dissociative Identity Disorder.
”When first confronted with the fact that I might have DID there was an instantaneous relief; if this could be me, then there was hope. When I started seeing my current therapist and received a DID diagnosis those fears about myself continued to fade and it cemented that whatever I was facing was not a life sentence of misery. It gave me a glimpse inside a future where I could be happy and experience myself fully, not as a compartmentalized self locked away from the rest but as many, as me and we and shades in between. This was something that had been missing from all previous mental healthcare I received for more than a decade.
As it turns out I was in great hands. My therapist is one of the leading clinicians treating DID in my country and has some association with Richard Schwartz, the inventor of IFS and author of No Bad Parts. Relatedly, adapted IFS alongside EMD(r), is our focal point in therapy. Unaware of this at the time, I still had the distinct sense that this was different, that this would help me. With some immediacy upon reaching out to her I was given the MID assessment and, upon scoring conclusively for DID and identifying more about this in post-test interviews, we began treatment related in March-April of 2021 closely following a destabilizing mental health crisis in December 2020.
Previously, I had not been exposed to much information about DID even in very notorious but stigmatizing media scandals and crime spectacles. For whatever reason they often flew under my radar or, when made aware of them, the specifics surrounding DID never stuck in my brain. I didn’t know about systems or plurality. I at times wonder if this was its own protective measure against prying too deeply into the possibility and that it was kept deep in our subconscious until we were ready; the more I entertain this notion the more I feel it must be true. Regardless, a lot of the stigma and controversy surrounding the diagnosis was unknown to me. What I did know about it was based on a google search of dissociative amnesia, a search prompted by the terrifying realization that I was losing days to weeks of my life and had no idea what was happening to me to cause this phenomenon. This ultimately worked to my benefit because all I knew going into the process was “I think this describes me”. Stigma can be terrifying and lend itself to doubt and imposter syndrome as a part of systemic and ableist harm that prevents people with such disorders from accessing resources, compassion, and care. Spared these notions, I came in with no judgements or assumptions, just seeking answers. Having an open mind about it and operating off of the most basic understanding of what my experience might be saved me a lot of trouble and catapulted me into rapid acceptance of myself and selves the more I learned. Though it was a shock to me, it challenged all previous notions about myself whose outcomes were grim. It was a shot at life again, and with that in mind I was ready to face that in its entirety.
To my surprise, DID not only explained the amnesiac episodes I was experiencing but countless other unaddressed experiences throughout a lifetime of history that aligned significantly with the extensive, prolonged nature of many of my traumatic experiences ranging from childhood to adulthood.
From this research I knew that it was a dissociative disorder characterized by amnesia, dissociation, and identity alteration, all things I knew for certain I experienced even though much of it had been concealed from me and the extent was still unknown. Suddenly however there was a context in which all of my previously misunderstood experiences were understood. Childhood quirks and troublesome memories were illuminated beyond just characterizing myself as a little bit of an oddball. Scary symptoms like egregious gaps in memory and what appeared to be deteriorating functioning that misinformed doctors told me was characteristic of degenerative brain damage (dementia), were not only explained but also with treatment and knowledge of my system became manageable with some immediacy in therapy. It was a vector through which many frightening experiences lost their teeth. I was no longer scared I was losing my mind and dying and I was comforted that what I was going through had a name and others who experienced it too. I finally had a clear path to pursuing trauma recovery and symptom management, a map laid out before me reassuring me that I no longer had to do this alone or without guidance.
It’s worth examining that these were not new symptoms I was observing, either. As I started piecing myself together, more and more I was pinpointing ways in which this manifested throughout my life. It was vast and storied throughout both childhood and adulthood.
I had first noticed I had limited memory of my experiences as young as 14, the age when I first noticed a prominent, deep, and elongated scar on my back with no memory of any such injury that could cause something so significant. There were many hints like this buried throughout my memories but without the language to describe what I was experiencing or the knowledge it was significant enough for me to even be concerned with in the first place, this went undetected until my adulthood. As it continued into my 20s with such standout incidents as giving my dog a serious haircut and only knowing this happened because I found hair all over the bathroom floor, all the way to receiving countless packages at my door and outstanding amounts of money spent I didn’t remember, I began to seriously examine the fact that something was wrong. The more I noticed this, the more I noticed the normalcy with which I was missing time and finding myself without knowledge of my own actions. Tracing my footsteps to a cause always proved difficult and I received unhelpful, conflicting, and inaccurate medical advice from doctors as to what a probable cause was; moreover the medical guidance I received was terrifying and convinced me that the TBIs I experienced at various points in my life were going to eventually kill me. Though it’s true the TBIs likely contributed to trauma and dissociation as there is a known link between both TBIs and medical trauma with dissociation, it was not true that my brain was incapable of healing from these things and was degrading; saying so with no testing or imaging of my brain was a serious form of medical neglect not rooted in scientific and medical reality. It was in this way that receiving a DID diagnosis became lifesaving.
Throughout my life, my identity if anything can be called transient. To many, it appeared that I was in a perpetual state of trying to find and understand myself. I would notice behaviors and actions that I remembered taking but that seemed nothing like me or that felt as if I was watching from the outside; there was often a disconnect from who I understood myself to be and the evidence of what my “self” actually was. There were conflicts with what names I wanted to be called, the pronouns I wanted to use, how I wanted to dress, the language I used and way I dictated and spoke, and even more significant things such as my interests, core belief systems, and future goals. I was tugged in many different directions and in ways I didn’t fully attribute to myself without understanding why.
There were many conflicts in both my adult and adolescent life that hinged on behaviors and actions that I felt strongly didn’t represent me and that I frequently wouldn’t remember. This is not to excuse those actions, of course, but it does supply evidence of how this was manifesting maladaptively as I was growing up. There were many distressing experiences of behaviors that didn’t just betray my sense of self but were hurtful to me and my peers, things that I couldn’t excuse or defend but was puzzled to find connected to me. When I did remember my actions, I was appalled and it felt as if I was not in control. When I didn’t remember my actions, I started to doubt myself and the people around me or suspect that they were perhaps wilfully manipulating my understanding of reality. This took a significant toll on my mental health as conflicts amassed and I struggled to get a handle on myself while also facing ongoing trauma.
The most magnified my symptoms were, causing the most turmoil in my life but simultaneously when they were least noticed was explicitly when I was living through the worst of my traumatic experiences.
It can be said that all aspects of self I experienced diverged into other selves that conflicted with my own contributing to such turbulence while simultaneously protecting me from circumstances and environments that were inescapable to me. It wasn’t until I understood and identified that I had a plural experience in part related to my having DID that I began to find a degree of harmony and understanding with these divergences and accept them as all valuable perspectives contained in my multitudes. This wasn’t just me containing conflicting ideas as myself, it was other selves, alters, having their own and separate ideas that I was unable to reconcile without the knowledge of the system or their and our collective existence.
Perhaps among the most extreme examples of this was when one alter came to the conclusion that they are not attracted to cis straight men, a sentiment many of us echo as a collective of queer and trans people. It wasn’t long after this and an in depth exploration of our gender identity and sexuality that we went back into the closet and subsequently married a cis straight man. In many ways, our marriage was out of survival necessity. The identity occlusion was brought on after a violent lack of acceptance of our gender and sexuality, the threat of homelessness we were facing, and the endless searching for a way out. The person we were when we got married was an alter who took on these traits to help us survive and mask as cis, straight, and relatively normal. Their style of dress, speech, behavior, and beliefs radically diverged from many of us to help fit the niche of our then husband; they fit themself into whatever role necessary and this contributed to additional actualization of the shell around us. They completely effaced the rest of the system, shut down the internal monologue, and became the filter the rest of us experienced the world through unknowing. They were doing what they knew best to keep themself safe and escape abuse. This was not a duty done out of any sort of malice or ill-intent, it was a coping mechanism we had deployed countless times before doing what the coping mechanism did best: getting us out of situations we were being harmed in. These kinds of complications within this dissociative coping mechanism were present constantly throughout my life.
Though the DSM disclaims that alters are not better explained by childhood imaginary friends and fantasy play, I do find it significant to my experience to make mention of the manifestation of what I considered– as a child and into my late teens– to be my imaginary friends or characters. Having internal caregivers and relationships with these internal people was a frequent experience of mine and that exists in my memories almost as far back as I can remember. Where my memories at home falter and come up blank, I have extended memories of fantasy play intentionally obstructing my relationship with reality. When things were scary or too much I delved into playground roleplay as a primary coping mechanism and although this appeared as just in depth fantasy play at school with friends, the characters and ideas didn’t cease when I got home. They became the sole way some of my material, emotional, and spiritual needs were fulfilled. I often caught myself engaging in conversations internally, giving names to or finding my internal friends had names themselves, and beginning to build relationships with them that were as complex as my relationships with the outside world. When I first noticed and questioned myself doing it, I explained it as myself being very imaginative. The only point of reference I had to understand them was imaginary friends. Where it becomes divergent from normal imaginary play becomes a bit more convoluted and difficult for me to characterize myself. To start, this lasted into my late teens and really only began to be concealed, but did not cease, only because of the decrease of social acceptability of having imaginary friends. There were moments in which it was increasingly pointed out to me as being strange. I would get caught having “fake boyfriends” and “fake friends” when I would attempt to describe my relationships with these internal people and the realization set in that this was not an experience that was socially appropriate for me to discuss and express. As I grew older, still interacting with the people I shared a body with, I began to find ways to distinguish myself from them and subsequently isolate myself from them or “turn it off” as I referred to it. Despite this, I was still in my private life interacting extensively with these so-called imaginary friends and their relationships were incredibly significant to me. They were not just imaginary playmates, we had complex relationships, conflicts, and they had their own separate emotions, personalities, and traits I was not in control of.
One of the ways this manifested later in my life as an older teen and young adult was in narrative roleplay. I had a set list of characters with rich backstories and identities that acted as an outlet through which various people within my system could express themselves. Though I did not fully realize that this is what I was doing through roleplay it became increasingly apparent after my DID diagnosis that this was the case. Many of the characters are well-known alters in my system and their backstories were increasingly revealed to be expressions of real trauma that we were not in a place to confront on our own. This realization came with significant embarrassment, the sense that I had been blasting and projecting many very sensitive experiences to public audiences through the forums I roleplayed on. Despite this and in overcoming the shame associated with this it did create a unique form of intimacy between myself and my headmates because many of us were already familiar with one another. We used voices we had heard before, we had stories and names that we already knew, and building relationships and connections with one another came more easily with this shared history. Though roleplay became entangled by extension with my unhealthy coping mechanisms related to trauma based dissociation and identity alteration, and the behaviors contained within often landed me in uncomfortable and harmful situations, it laid a foundation for us to build a robust plural philosophy that helped us adapt, overcome and go on to lead healthier and happier lives. Writing was an outlet for us that defined how we know and love who we are today.
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Although the writing and roleplay in many ways were our healthiest coping mechanisms, they later came with their own complications. It only served to distance me more from my system and conceal its existence in its entirety. Many internal processes began shutting down or hiding themselves, a silent chaos that intensified many of the existing maladaptive coping skills we relied on. As a result for many years I didn’t even believe I possessed a mind’s eye or internal monologue and thus memories of interacting with my imaginary friends were buried, obfuscated, and additionally mischaracterized in order to continue to create distance and denial of the system. Apart from the specifics of my trauma, this additionally contributed to the formation of a shell alter. In many ways and because of the increasing shutdown of my system, utilizing fantasy play was one of the only ways that the other alters in my system were able to express and be seen as themselves. This was especially true after the shell was implemented which prevented them completely from acknowledging their own personhood. The shell was the convenient appearance of being a singlet that the system passed through and what made us believe we were one unified person regardless of any evidence to the contrary. This was not sustainable long term, however, as this was a contributing factor in the later mental health crisis in our early twenties which resulted in the discovery of our system.
It’s important to note that though this was an expression of the alters in my system, my imaginary friends and many of the characters I wrote were not just there for fantasy play for me and never had been. They did not start as fantasy play even though this was the only frame of reference through which I was able to characterize those experiences and primarily interfaced with them through. They were, and are, real; they are their own people. There were times in my life where my relationships with them were far more significant than my external relationships due to the unique nature of the isolation I experienced. They were there to keep me safe, they were there to soothe me, they took on many roles and represented many of the concealed experiences I didn’t have access to the memories of. Many of those same people who expressed themselves in my childhood, teenhood, and early adulthood are still around in my system today which was significant in helping me navigate and accept my experiences with DID. During times of duress and trauma, I receded inward to an innerworld where there lived the characters who fulfilled our different needs and sometimes took away and hid traumatic experiences. Sometimes this was expressed by internally reenacting trauma and there were experiences in which other system members harmed us both internally and externally as an expression of things done to them. Self-injurious behaviors were most common during my childhood in which we had limited outlets to express ourselves but is an added dimension to the complicatedness of this experience that to me distinguishes it from normal childhood fantasy play.
Even knowing parts of this and being seen by countless doctors, this was not readily identifiable by me, my parents, or professionals seeing me and when it was, my external caregivers had a tendency to disregard and discredit it. When I was a child a pediatrician characterized some of my experiences as regression. This was something that my parents shared with me as a funny anecdote in which they characterized these concerns as unfounded and ridiculous. Later as an older teen when a lot of my more concerning behaviors were expressed outwardly, a psychiatrist told my parents that I likely had DID. Despite not understanding what this meant, I remember feeling infuriated at the notion, disregarding it in its entirety, and it wasn’t long after that my parents stopped taking me to see him. This was a common trend in the handling of my mental healthcare in my adolescence. Someone would begin to cut close, challenge the ideas of my caregivers, and then suddenly I wouldn’t see them again. The signs were there from the beginning even when I wasn’t aware that they weren’t normal and even when the professionals pointing out the signs weren’t taken seriously. Much of this happened before I had the autonomy to critically apply their theories in my life under the close watch of my parents. These were all things that were thrown in the vault and forgotten about. In the meantime I was navigating the world with increasingly stacking experiences that lent themselves to the validity of my later DID diagnosis but with seldom the consideration of DID to begin to characterize and treat them and so this persisted for years.
Finally discovering I was a system without the language to describe it was in many ways its own form of trauma as it culminated into a severe mental health crisis that sent me inpatient.
Previous clinicians I’d been seeing had already diagnosed me with PTSD, GAD, and MDD and I understood that these were all major players in the landscape of my mental health, but there were other things I wasn’t quite sure what to make of and things I didn’t even realize were cause for concern or evidence of an underlying experience that couldn’t be explained by my existing diagnoses. In the wake of my divorce and sudden uprooting of my life with an abusive husband forcing me to move back to my hometown, I began seeing another therapist that I hoped could help cut deeper to the root of these issues. This was helpful for a short time but became complicated when this therapist administered EMDR without a proper assessment of my trauma or building the coping skills necessary to delve into a therapeutic technique of this magnitude. Then as an added dimension I lost insurance coverage forcing me to seek help elsewhere in the midst of a shitstorm. As a result of the mishandling of my treatment with EMDR, I went through a year-long period of recovering previously concealed trauma memories which shone a scary and daunting light on my past.
Without insurance I sought help through a mental health subsidiary that allegedly provided affordable counseling and therapy through telehealth. The counselor I was matched with did more harm than good. When revealing that I was having troubling and constant memories of traumatic time periods I was encouraged by her to continue to dig into this and explore my trauma. However, when this was distressing and causing dysfunction in my life and I would show up to session prepared to unpack my findings, she was unwilling to actually discuss them with me, would deflect around other less pressing issues, and eventually started outright ignoring me in sessions often spending it on her phone or chiming in with feedback that was clearly not tuned in to what I was sharing. At this point, I discontinued my sessions with her and ended my subscription with the platform. I knew it would be difficult without help and kicked into high gear to try and recoup insurance. The damage was already done, however. The dissociation and amnesia increased, my behaviors became more and more out of touch with my reality, and I was rapidly losing my grip on my life. This grew and grew until, from the stress of life, my environment, and the realization of past traumas, I eventually suffered from a psychotic break brought on by sleep deprivation.
At this point I had resumed seeing my previous therapist as I regained insurance. She was someone I thought I could trust in the aftermath of so many other professionals mishandling my case or outright harming me. I was excited to resume seeing her and grateful that someone seemed to have more trauma literacy than others but once again at the point of crisis I was let down. In revealing these specific traumatic experiences to her, she coaxed me in a vulnerable and malleable state to reveal these experiences to authorities by contacting local SVU. I still feel shame and fear when I recall, in my distressed and elevated state, disclosing scattered and emotionally taxing experiences to a strange man in uniform while the chatter from his radio crackled in and out. Though the trauma was serious and well within the jurisdiction of SVU, I was not in a safe position to take such actions against my abusers and this point of contact did more harm than good. What was happening within my mental health crisis was never actually addressed by my therapist and in retrospect I felt taken advantage of. Her last words to me as I stumbled out of her office were “You should probably change your name”. I was chucked out with more intense fears related after such an escalation and my therapist, who perhaps bit off more than she could chew, stopped contacting me altogether. At this point, I could no longer rely on her despite the increasing crisis. I was on my own.
All at once everything came to the surface and it was up to me to figure it out and piece together the messages my brain and body were sending me. There was no hiding that I was a system and that we were we. Suddenly, we were talking, we were collaborating. Much of this dealt with the specific traumas that spiraled us into such a crisis in the first place and the fears instilled in us surrounding those traumas. We were rehashing old wounds that felt as fresh as the day they were created. Some of it dealt with us trying to figure out what the hell was going on and oddly there were moments of crystal clear lucidity in which we acknowledged: we are multiple people. There was arguing and denial, back and forths about ideological squabbles, and there was protection, there were parts saying we weren’t ready for this but we were there and had to take care of ourselves. At one point, myself and some of my headmates wrote poems back and forth to one another. There were parts of it that were beautiful and blissful, as if a grand reunion of selves, and there were parts of it that were scary, despondent, and embarrassing to look back on. We knew we needed help, we knew all at once we were multiple people acting independently, but we were scattered and unable to work together to the degree we do now. We fearfully reached out to friends through some of the only safe means we knew how but our interactions with them were in between the clarity of knowing and the tumult and chaos of psychosis.
Sorting through what was real and what wasn’t proved difficult and denial was a looming beast sullying some of our moments of self-discovery. When the thought of being multiple people seemed too far fetched we debated amongst ourselves if it was some sort of psychogenic or neuropsychiatric illness, a contagion, or even a parasite. There was hate and fear and disgust involved, reviling at the concept of having to share consciousness with more than one person. There was also togetherness and joy. Many parts, people, and things had many emotions about an experience we were going through together and this manifested as many divergent and contradictory ideas about precisely this.
Eventually, we were admitted inpatient. We were first taken to the emergency room not knowing what was actually going on before it was determined that this was a problem better handled by psychiatry at which point we were transferred over, taken by ambulance all while not understanding what was happening or why. When we were dropped off in the waiting room at the psychiatric hospital, we were alone. It was scary and confusing. By this point we had been awake for the eight days of our crisis and were distant from reality despite not being a danger to ourselves or others but in need of assistance to sleep, hydrate, nourish and be well. This was difficult for staff to understand. We were left alone in the waiting room for an extended period of time after hours in the hospital and, finding that the bathroom doors were locked, we urinated on the floor. Because of this we were assaulted by a staff member. We were then given sedatives a couple of times with little effect and by the time we were admitted and on the floor, hospital staff were misgendering and deadnaming us despite our insistence otherwise, making unfounded claims that the chosen name of our host at the time was a part of our delusion, and we were faced with additional psychiatric trauma on top of our existing turmoil. Despite this pain, we were able to advocate for ourselves because we were now aware of ourselves; we leveraged this presence and we advocated for the use of our chosen name and pronouns until hospital staff agreed, we advocated for knowledge of what medications they were giving us before taking them, we advocated for the experience we were having with dissociative amnesia making clear distinctions about some of what contributed. This, though incredibly difficult, laid the groundwork for us to get out and get better and it wasn’t because of staff or clinicians there whose knowledge of dissociative disorders and literacy on our experience was lacking, it was because of ourselves… our own hard work.
When we were discharged it was a whirlwind of mixed emotions and sorting through what experiences had merit and what were the result of psychosis, something that my current therapist has remarked shares a fine line with dissociation sometimes mingling together with no clear distinction. It is helpful for me to remember that the psychosis was also dissociation, that they bled into one another as the same.
All of this happened before I googled dissociative amnesia… but dissociative amnesia was the language we used to characterize the experience of memory loss while inpatient with specificity. I didn’t know how I knew to know that, but I did. It was because of this that I was able to retrace my steps and research dissociative amnesia to understand why this specific term came up. It was a very classic amnesiac “why are all these links purple” moment. It turns out, we were collectively without realizing noticing and researching the same things in an attempt to find answers. In our moment of crisis, we combined our knowledge and experiences, increased awareness of ourselves and our system, and worked together to get through it. Difficult as it may have been, it was through working together and our combined knowledge that we persevered. Without working together, we might not have made it out of this experience at all. That realization has catalyzed much of how we understand ourselves today and created a sense of connection, security, and bonding between me and my headmates that paved the way for healthier advancements in our recovery as a system.
Researching dissociative amnesia brought up DID and it was at that moment I realized… this might be me. I initially texted my previous therapist, the one who a year previous had done EMDR with me and later during the crisis contacted SVU. Given the fact that she had ghosted me during the crisis, it was clear to me that she likely would not respond but I wanted to do my due diligence to reach out and see if we could reconvene. I told her that I wanted to explore the possibility of DID given the nature of my crisis and trauma revealed within. She did not respond. In reaching out to my community for help I discovered I was not the only person with DID whose treatment this specific therapist had mishandled resulting in equally severe crises. It was a pattern that was difficult to ignore and still causes me feelings of betrayal and misunderstanding. She didn’t believe in DID and this was the core failure at play in her mishandling of my case. Had she had more literacy on DID and believed in its existence or even trauma based dissociation, I might have been spared the severity of the crisis and avoided the trauma of an inpatient hospitalization.
I was referred to my current therapist by a friend with a similar background whereupon following up I started seeing her regularly. We went over my history, I took the MID, and later received a diagnosis. Treatment with both my current therapist and a student therapist under her specifically as a clinician with experience treating DID and a non-stigmatizing approach to system experiences has made a night and day difference in my recovery. If anything it feels as though my life has been completely transformed and for the better. I have had ample space to develop my own understanding of my experiences and approach them in a way that works for me, taking command back over my life, learning about myself and my system, and actualizing the goals surrounding becoming a happier and more confident person.
It shouldn’t have taken all of this trauma to get to this point and though I have a great deal of gratitude to myself and my system for where we are now, these destabilizations had tangible consequences for me that still affect my life. When I reflect on the years I’ve spent in the psychiatric system as a patient, a part of me feels angry and despondent. It was not as if these experiences were hidden but there were very few people willing or knowledgeable enough to point it out for what it was and when I finally needed someone who believed me, she had already decided that DID was not real.
The reality of DID is that we are incredibly vulnerable people often with extensive backgrounds with abuse, exploitation, psych survival, and other forms of trauma. The reality, too, is that the experience of being multiple people and/or having alters is heavily stigmatized, misunderstood, and seldom discussed in the mainstream outside of the context of stigma. It is frequently misdiagnosed and not in the sense of exceedingly rare cases of malingering or alleged iatrogenic conditions, it is misdiagnosed in the sense that doctors frequently have no idea what to make of it, how to identify it, how to treat it and patients with DID often don’t know how to characterize their experiences to doctors in order to be treated for it. On average, it takes people with DID 6-12 years in the psychiatric system to be diagnosed; this is just as much true for us as we spent about 11 years in and out of therapy and in multiple inpatient hospitalizations and IOP programs before realizing what was happening and finding treatment. This means that, despite having DID for that entire length of time, our and others experiences go unidentified and untreated alongside limited resources for and understanding of DID. This, in my opinion, contributes to many of the vulnerabilities people with DID experience that lead to additional forms of harm in attempting to seek care. A study of barriers to accessing care for dissociative disorders found that 97% of participants experienced one or more barriers to care and 92% stopped treatment altogether because of these barriers with 42% reporting that they were not believed by providers.
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My experience is nothing like what stigmatized portrayals or scaremongering about iatrogenic/sociogenic illnesses would have others believe. My system was not created by a psych taking advantage of gullibility, it had always existed in me. I was not influenced to come to this conclusion about myself, quite the opposite. I did not hop on a trend or want to roleplay characters externally, I went through hell to get here and found happiness inside of the kinship of my headmates. The disbelief in and skepticism towards DID is in direct opposition to empirical evidence of our existence and centuries of anecdotal plural experiences throughout history both within and apart from the pathologization of DID.
The propensity of denial and accusations of lying or faking towards people with DID is largely a concentrated misinformation campaign about what the disorder looks like; this has a heavy focus on stigmatized experiences regarding plurality and alter presentations. Despite numerous empirical studies disproving the majority of these accusations and the statistical improbability of malingering, they still persist in the popular mythologizations surrounding DID and serve as broader harassment campaigns towards anyone claiming to be a system. While many may believe they’re defending true DID cases and standing up against harmful misinformation, what they are doing in actuality is contributing to it, they are supporting an existing institution that is designed to doubt, malign, mistreat, and deny the existence of DID and the real people living with the disorder who are at the mercy of these institutions; that is they are falling in line with a status quo that, demonstrably, already harms people with DID.
It should be said that portrayals of plurality and alters in an overt way cannot be taken as a sign of faking or maladaptive coping, but rather the ability of a system and all members to have the autonomy of self-recognition, something that is crucial for some in living more fulfilled lives or may even more specifically represent the goals of their recovery process. The experience of being a system is one that is incredibly diverse and such that many people see these divergent experiences or experiences they don’t understand and assume they must be fake. This can be guised as well-intentioned but it is never not malicious and potentially endangering to those on the receiving end of accusations of faking. There is no use in narrowing what a system can look like or how an individual identifies in good faith because this invariably leads to harm against systems and plural-negative sentiments that permeate broader society and are embedded in the structures plurals rely on for care.
Additionally, trauma is a sensitive subject that should never be invaded upon, something that is often presumptively required in the process of picking apart someone’s lived experience with DID or as a system. Demanding others share the details of their experiences in order to determine they are real is as cruel as it is unrealistic. This is counter to the recovery process in that it forces people to address experiences they may still need protection from while simultaneously demanding they not be themselves in a capacity that allows for growth and healing down the line. It would be irresponsible and unethical for a professional or practicing clinician to do this to someone and even more so for strangers who make these determinations about others. It is in this way that the people perpetuating this stigma by seeking out systems to deny their experiences construct an environment in which vulnerable people are forced to disclose sensitive trauma information to be believed while also facing undue criticism and potential threats to their safety for disclosing this kind of information. It is also worth noting that there is no proven therapeutic benefit from reliving or forcing people to confront and accept traumatic experiences. Any attempt to do so is an unfounded attempt to cause harm.
There is no such thing as a typical system experience, we all come to these conclusions about ourselves differently and may require different things in the process of understanding this and building a relationship with ourselves wherein we find value and harmony. It should be assumed on principle that anyone claiming to be a system knows their experiences best and it is not anyone’s job to dig for reasons to deny their experience or claim they are lying or malingering. No one is equipped to make these kinds of determinations about someone else’s reality especially as it pertains to disorders like DID and the subjective internal experiences connected such as plurality. There are many reasons why someone may not present the way someone expects. Some systems and people with DID identify as plural, meaning that they may conceptualize their experience as being multiple separate people as a part of their identity and all alters/headmates should be respected as their own individuals.
An additional reason that claiming others are faking or malingering is so harmful is because of the intensity with which many people with DID deny their own experiences. Dissociation is a mechanism structured and designed to distance an individual from their experiences. Many people with dissociative disorders will find that they doubt themselves, their recollection of events, or find that they seem distant and separate from them, that they don’t appear real. This makes it incredibly easy for people with these experiences to erroneously deny they exist. They are among the most likely to have difficulty trusting their own experiences. To take this further, in some expressions of DID there are alters whose roles specifically are to conceal the system and deny it exists or to deny that trauma exists at all. When it comes to the overemphasis on malingering and faking in which doubt colors the automatic responses systems are met with, it is indisputable that this enables these denial mechanisms to persist. This can not only setback personal pursuits of recovery but more broadly be triggering and harmful to systems who are coming into acceptance of their experiences and make them unsafe.
Unlearn the perpetuation that people with DID are broken and that they are not whole because who they are appears separated. Many of us experience ourselves as whole as individuals as much as we are whole collectively. The idea that we are all fragments and parts of self and not our own whole selves does not fit with everyone’s experience and can negate the personhood of those in the system; be mindful of the language people use to describe their systems, not everyone uses “parts” and some systems don’t prefer “alters” and instead use “people” or “headmates”.
My system uses alters and headmates interchangeably with a heavy preference for being viewed as people and despite having other experiences within this we characterize as “parts”, “fragments”, and “facets”, we view these parts of self as equally as capable of actualizing and asserting personhood. Though this is what works best for us and has been the leading philosophy behind our recovery and renewed happiness and trust in ourselves, it is often the most difficult thing for people to accept about us. An inability to recognize people in my system as their own people is an aspect of stigma that has been the most difficult to navigate interpersonally as a person with DID. There are plenty of people, former friends included, who understood me when I said I have DID and when I said I have CPTSD and trauma based dissociation but who could not understand why identifying as plural and having the autonomy to distinguish ourselves individually was so important. It is normal in society to expect that a body possesses only one consciousness and anything else is treated as a delusion. When coming to terms with this I was faced with horrific statements from people I previously thought I could trust. One person confided in my partner at the time that I was too mentally ill to associate with and later another acquaintance of theirs referred to me having DID and identifying as plural with, quote, “Imagine being so delusional about reality that you literally force others to make your delusions real”. This was one of many responses to my diagnosis and emergent plural identity that began to drive home the seriousness of stigma against DID and plurality.
If my experience was not being broadly dismissed as a delusion (which somehow negated their ability to have compassion for those experiences), people were falling over themselves to share stories of murderers and abusers they knew who had DID, somehow choosing to compare this to my own experience. Alters and headmates are not delusions and there is no empirical or clinical basis for this. The crime spectacle surrounding DID that typically features someone with the disorder leaning on this to excuse heinous actions and abuse either through malingering or legitimately having violent alters is a farce that ignores the fact that the vast majority of us are far more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetuate it. Not only this but when people with DID have what might be characterized as violent behaviors, they are typically directed inward, at themselves through self-injury. Relatedly, a study revealed that 72% DID patients in residency alone had attempted suicide with the majority having multiple attempts. The risk to ourselves statistically far outweighs the risk to others. Within all people there is a capacity to cause harm and being diagnosed with a serious mental illness like DID does not increase one’s capacity for harm despite the terrifying overarching theme in popular media to portray DID in this way. Seeing friends and people I love express a fear of people with DID, associating it with violence and danger, and projecting this onto me was isolating. It collapsed many of these relationships inward and left me skeptical about forming relationships with other people.
The interpersonal response to my emergent DID diagnosis ended many friendships. Outright stigma coupled with broad assumptions about what my system’s experiences are, made it clear that many were not really curious about this. They trusted their narrow view of my reality over my own. It meant that people, even when I was right there and willing to offer answers to their questions or explanations of my humanity, were more sold on the assumption of what this experience meant than who I was, who my headmates are, and how we conceptualized ourselves. They were more attached to these ideas, no matter how heinous, than they were to me as a complex human being and excused discarding me or treating me poorly around this.
Unlearn the idea that a body can only contain one consciousness and thus be only one person, unlearn the idea that in order for someone to contain multiple consciousnesses they must be broken and cannot be whole. Discard the notion that DID is just a traumatic fragmentation of self and accept that some people go on to live fulfilled and non-disordered lives as multiple people regardless of the origin of their system.
Normalize not needing to know or understand the origination of a system, especially regarding trauma, in order to respect them and theirs in their entirety. Few other communities demand intimate trauma details in order to respect someone’s experience than the DID community and, as voiced by many others apart from me and mine, this is something we should collectively move away from. Details of trauma, stating trauma exists at all, and explanations of system origins should not be necessary for the experience of being a system to be taken at face value and respected. Ultimately what this seems to be asking systems is how their personhood came to be in which people feel owed answers about the trauma history of strangers to owe them personhood. This is an idea that should be abolished entirely along with any notion of expecting to know and understand if someone went through trauma at all and what the makeup of this trauma looked like.
Furthermore, not all systems want to pursue final fusion. This does not mean they are anti-recovery, this does not mean they are perpetuating delusion, this does not mean they are not living in reality or that they are not present, and all of these things are not reasons to discard and discredit someone in their experiences; it does not slip past me the way that delusions and experiences of unreality are stigmatized alongside DID, that they are used as reasons to deny others their personhood. If the difference between a delusion and an alter is how someone respects someone else’s personhood, then the issue is neither the delusion nor the alter, it is sanism and stigma. Not all systems want to or can be one. There are many ways to live with DID and many ways to be plural. Functional multiplicity, the experience of living as multiple people or more than one to increase life functioning, is a real and valuable goal for many people with DID, our system included. Understand that this is not anti-recovery and that final fusion has a limited success rate that makes functional multiplicity a more realistic goal for many. It is not facetious or made up, it is a way of life and it is a means for many to break free of stigma and fully experience their lives. Understand that even pursuing recovery at all is impossible and inaccessible for many, that being able to function and recover is a privilege within a society of ongoing and ubiquitous harm. The most important thing apart from all of this is respecting the good faith identities of each system and individuals within their systems and discarding the harmful stigmatizing beliefs that permeate a world designed for singlets.
We are we and we are happy that way. One of the most fulfilling things about being a system is getting to live as we. Before, the narrow confines of our singlet understanding of self were constricting, hurtful, and increased dissociation and amnesia in our daily life. Through living multiply, experiencing ourselves as multiple people, and identifying as plural, our lives have improved considerably and we’ve made some of the most significant and long term therapeutic progress than ever before in our life, in over a decade of therapy, intensive outpatient programs, and inpatient hospitalizations.
My personal outlook is that DID is the pathologization of my experience, the disorder. It is the trauma and the maladaptive coping mechanisms emergent that constructed my system. It is dissociation and amnesia separating alters and parts, separating us from traumatic memories, it is the life difficulties emergent from these things.
Plurality is the philosophy that has given life back to me and my system and enabled us to view ourselves in a normalized, fully realized, and self-neutral to positive manner. Our view of plurality is complex and vast. For us it is the state of being multiple people. In a broader sense it is any experience of being more than one which can be experienced in as infinite ways as there are people. This can include experiences where someone might not conceptualize themselves as multiple people but rather as a person with multiple less differentiated sides, facets, and parts and that different experiences of plurality can exist within the same system with their own complexity. There are many shades in between a me and a we.
It is through these combined experiences– both DID and plurality– and identifying what works for me and my system specific to ourselves that the therapeutic process has had any merit at all.
I view my system in a non-hierarchical way. All alters or headmates have value and purpose, they all have the space and autonomy to actualize, to express themselves and identify how they choose and no one is more important, more real, or more privileged to this body than the rest. Those who front have all of our combined resources at their disposal and can utilize this to be well. To make this possible, we have taken steps to make the tools necessary accessible and create tools individualized to ourselves with this. We view other parts and fragments, less differentiated and distinguished than alters/headmates in our system, as capable at any point of also actualizing in these ways should they develop over time. We view fusion as a process that may or may not happen naturally over time and not as a strict goal for our system. We view integration as a process of sharing and communicating, dissolving dissociative barriers to share memories overtime and retain experiences so that alters and headmates can continue to have the autonomy they deserve in a safe and aware environment. We believe that all people, within and apart from our system, deserve happiness and that happiness is getting to experience the full breadth of human emotion while living under a stable community that is providing both the basic necessities as food, water, shelter, and materials to create goods and explore creative talents while simultaneously getting to share all of these things with everyone else within the system.
One of the ways this is made possible is with a crisis note for those experiencing more intense and specific amnesia, who might not know how they got to this point, who they are or why. It contains contact information for safe people, our therapist, and hotlines specific to some of our lived experiences. It explains our diagnosis of DID in an approachable and comforting way. It includes our therapy times and dates and it reassures them that they are allowed to utilize whatever resources they need for having their needs met. It lists some of these resources and how and where to access them. Despite only having to use this list three times since discovering we’re a system, it has been immediately effective in helping members of our system adjust to our current life in a safe and deescalated way. This success reassures me that this is a philosophy that works for us, that we are on the right track, and have all of the tools we need to continue to build a life we are proud of.
The most significant help to me and my system has been building a community that is non-stigmatizing. The people I am friends with and love are all people who embrace these experiences with an open mind or are systems themselves. My therapist is one who understands the complexities of being a system and meets me and my system with the same respect and autonomy. Overall, this has been the most affirming thing as we navigate recovery. Our trauma was vast and went unaddressed for decades of our life and in spite of this we found avenues of care and compassion that protected our ability to be well. It was difficult and the path was often blocked by disbelief, lack of literacy for these experiences, and the structure of the psychiatric system itself but the stigma did not stop us. It is possible to form a culture that respects the intricacies of plural identity and the sensitive nature of dissociative identity disorder. It is possible to look towards a future where this is ubiquitous and not uniquely privileged.
We are hopeful for a future where there are less barriers to accessing non-stigmatizing care, that treatment becomes readily obtainable to all who desire it, that we can share a community with one another in a way that others can heal and be enabled to reach their own conclusions about their experiences, and that within plurals have increased safety to be visibly themselves. We have seen firsthand how helpful these things were to us in spite of everything we had to overcome to get here. It is our hope that we can, together, construct an environment through which more people can access care. We are prepared to work for this future and shine a light on the hurdles preventing us from making it a reality.
We have often said that if being visibly plural and open about our journey with DID can help shine a more optimistic light on this experience and potentially help others, it is worth any cost.”
As always, we encourage you and your System to follow your own truth, to soul search, to find words, labels, visions, theories and communities that aren’t only within your values but also match your lived experience and/or long term goals, so that you might find belonging and don’t have to try to fit in.
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Disclaimer: Thank you for reading our peer guest-article; we hope it was empowering, informative and helpful for you and your System. There are as many Plural experiences, as there are Plurals. So not all information on this website might apply to your situation or be helpful to you; please, use caution. We’re not doctors or clinicians and our nonprofit, our work, and this website in no way provide medical advice, nor does it replace therapy or medication in other ways.
About the authors
Esoteric System
The Esoteric System is a confluence of consciousnesses sharing one body with a passion for introspective spirituality, magical theory, and trauma informed plural perspectives.
This part specifically was painfully relatable.
“This realization came with significant embarrassment, the sense that I had been blasting and projecting many very sensitive experiences to public audiences through the forums I roleplayed on.”
I’m 21 and I’ve been roleplaying since I was 12. Possibly earlier. When I was on a roleplay forum at around 16, I realized a group of characters I’ve played as a dysfunctional family was very relatable to my own experiences. Chatting with a friend from there who knew the worst of my life made me look at my characters in a new light. One that pained me. This entire time, I was giving bits and pieces of my life to strangers and friends, publicly. If I mentioned any of my life issues publicly, it was possible members and friends would pick up on the similarities and think of my characters as self-inserts.
So I dropped them. I couldn’t play the characters as they were then. If I ever go back to them, they would likely be so different they’d barely resemble their original story. Which isn’t bad, but it’s sad that I’d have to do it.
Every time I reflect on my characters, I find a reflection of myself. My struggles with being a person of color, exploring new names, exploring my sexuality and lack of it, exploring my gender (going from nonbinary to trans-male to nonbinary trans-masc gender nonconforming), my family trauma… and my plurality. Roleplay, writing, drawing, daydreams, and fiction books were my way to explore myself in a safe, fictional setting. My justifications often boiled down to, “It’s not weird to research genders for my characters, right? It’s not weird to research dissociative identity disorder to accurately write a new character, right? I wouldn’t want to be offensive. I’m just doing research. Nothing personal there.”
Then I look back a year later and go, “Oh.”
None of these characters are alters, but as I grew up, I used them to daydream constantly. I’d imagine what they’d do in whatever situation I was experiencing in that moment and I’d sometimes try to mimic them. They were my guides. They still are. I often daydream or dream being them.
Heck, as a kid, I’d make friends with the creepypasta characters from the internet and imagined monsters that terrified me when going to bed. I’d imagine I was being extremely friendly with these monsters until they just HAD to be my friend, then they would protect me from other monsters until I befriended them. I don’t remember how many I befriended and who they all were, but I still find that part of my childhood to be a sign of what was to come for me.