Share some/all of your ‘story’ or aspects of it. Keep in mind the guideline of not sharing graphic descriptions of abuse.
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
Well the beginning of my story goes like this:
I was a good student – 3.5-4.0 college student who wasn’t too emotional and seemed fairly together to most people – even admired for various accomplishments and being who I was as a person. Then I got engaged, and about a month later – started feeling sickish and headache-ish, weak and tired. Yet I didn’t have the flu or anything else because it just kept going. Out of no-where this one night, all a sudden my heart rate picked up and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest – for no reason at all! Shortly after this my breathing rate picked up – and basically I was in some kind of panic attack for 2-3 hours.
The first Dr. I saw told me it was “Panic Disorder” and I scoffed telling him I had nothing to be panicking about and that it HAD to be a physical problem…..After this I started getting tested for everything under the sun – to no avail. I started having a hard time hearing the teachers in my classes – it was like something was inbetween me and them and I couldn’t ‘hear’. At church I started ‘seeing’ stuff between me and the preacher up front, and it was like noise in my ears too. All of it blocking me from the outside ‘real’ world so that I couldn’t see/hear.
After getting worse and worse and getting to where I was laying in pain in my bed at night – pain from who knows where or why, after getting some incompletes and a D in a class, after becoming pretty unable to physically and mentally function anymore, and all medical tests showing there wasn’t a thing wrong with me – the Dr. told me I should go see a therapist and maybe start on some anti-depressants. I was so tired of doing so bad after several months that I didn’t care anymore and said ‘ok’.
So off I went to therapy. I had gone from a high functioning, high level student, to a barely passing, barely able to get out of bed heap on the floor who was struggling to breathe. How could therapy be the answer to this??
There we go – that’s the beginning of my journey. But I suppose the real beginning probably started a LOT sooner than that!….. enough for now…..
not sure where to start my own story. i guess in 9th grade. there was a fair amount of stuff going on in my family, and there was one point where i observed something, and walked out the door (to a meeting i was already planning on going to), and i can remember hearing a voice in my head clearly saying “yeah, this sucks. you are going to need therapy as soon as you leave home for good.”
so then i make it to college, have a great first year, and then start to have these… bursts of depression, i guess. went to the college counseling service, concerned that the issue was me being bipolar (i mean, i’d go from perfectly fine to severely depressed to perfectly fine). they said nope, not bipolar, just dysthymia. which was my official diagnosis for the next, oh, 13 years. spent the next year both suicidally depressed and highly functional (although there were a few classes i did really badly in, my overall average was ok).
got out of college, went into more competent therapy (at a community mental health center, so it was interns or volunteers who were only there for one year at a time). had a therapist the first year post-college who administered one of the DID scales because she was covering it in class, and thought it might apply to me. i tested out somewhere in the 80% dissociated range. but she didn’t think i had DID, or i didn’t think so, or something.
but i was working at a domestic violence shelter, and doing a lot of stuff along those lines, so i was familiar enough with the aftereffects of abuse to be able to say, “hm. dissociation is common for people who went through abuse; i’ll have my therapists help me to cope with that.”
so a lot of my therapy from then on did work with dissociation, just not with DID. so things like being more grounded, being able to keep track of what’s going on around me, things like that.
there was a period where i think some part of me strongly suspected that there were different parts, but then i blanked it out again. which has been a pattern: coming close to acknowledging what’s happening, then blanking it out again.
so forward to two years ago. i had a particularly severe bout of depression (looking back, it’s more that some severely depressed parts had come out, obviously) and wound up in the psych ward. they were astoundingly unhelpful, and the therapist i’d just started seeing for some cognitive therapy to get over writer’s block decided she couldn’t handle a client who had issues or something. so i tried seeing the ones the hospital recommended, who started by saying i was probably borderline (based on them asking whether i had volatile relationships, me thinking of how explosive my family is and saying “yes.” the people at the hospital never actually did a family history, and didn’t ask whether i had an abuse history.)
anyhow. so first they said “borderline” but after working with me for two sessions outside the hospital, they said, “well, ok, not borderline. so you’re bipolar.” by that point, i knew the symptoms of bipolar, and was able to point out that it seemed unlikely, since i have neither manic nor hypomanic states. plus, some of my friends *are* bipolar, and they also confirm (based on knowing me for thirteen years or so) that i’m not bipolar.
but they kept shunting me to different people. two and a half months after leaving the hospital, i *still* hadn’t gotten a therapist. so i got tired of trying to be a good patient, proving by not making demands that i wasn’t borderline. instead, i decided to find a new therapist on my own.
anyhow, as i was coping with the various diagnoses that really weren’t fitting my experience, i looked a little more closely at dissociation. i think largely because i’d faced up to the fact that the way the depression had seemed to come out of “nowhere” was similar to something that had happened a lot before. i still didn’t think i had DID, but i was pretty sure that what was going on was closer to DDNOS than anything else that had been suggested. mostly because after the issue that had me in the psych ward, it was like… bang. no more depression. and how the heck did i wind up *here*?!
but the therapists i’d been referred to weren’t helpful. and they kept telling me they would just refer me to someone else, so i kept not having *any* therapeutic support, which seemed like a DUMB idea to me, even if past patterns had indicated i had a good six or eight months before the depression was going to come back in force.
i lucked out and found my current therapist. i did let her know from the beginning that i was dealing with depression, stemming from childhood stuff, and that i dissociated enough that i rarely remembered the content of therapy sessions from session to session. i was careful not to self-diagnose, and since i wasn’t so sure myself, i figured i’d just stop covering up what was happening, and see what the therapist thought.
so she diagnosed me in october of 2008 (after we’d been working together for about six months). and shortly afterwards, when i was mentally able to lift the internal rule against ever considering a name other than the name of my body, it began to be clear that there are actually a bunch of different parts who are pretty distinct from each other.
i guess a different part would tell this story differently, talking about really different things. but this is my version, at least my version right now today.
Just some brief comments cuz nunnuh Us kin type too well.
DID fer Us iz like being uh Lava Lamp. Three big blobz that keep in constant Flux, Sum thymez mergin together, other times comming apart, all waze mit lottsuh liddle Blobbitz poppin on en off, always different, never the same, ALWAYS in Flux.
We used to be afraid to go to sleep because we never knew who we’d be when we woke up. We had to do everything like painting, writing in one day because we couldn’t guarantee that person coming back the next day to continue work on it.
I saw the film “The Three Faces Of Eve” on TV when I was 13 years old. The next day I ran to the Library and found the book with the complete case history and all the technical jargon. The Librarian was reluctant to let me take out the book because she thought I was too young to comprehend it but somehow I convinced her I could handle it. I read it cover to cover in about three daze and then kept rereading it until I had to return it to the library.
I believe that’s when we first became aware of what we were and then we just forgot about it like it wasn’t any big deal. We muddled through highschool in a very consistent (almost autistic), seriously rigid dissociative state and when we got to college we began busting shit up psych wize with pot, LSD, Peyote, Mescaline and Mushrooms. The LSD was a Godsend! We used it to flush our pipes out, knock the chunks of corrosion that were encrusted on us off, shake out our psyche and reassemble like a rebuilt engine. It was often harrowing but we always felt sane again afterwards, like we exorcised alot of bad psychillness. Eventually, tho, this regimine couldn’t keep up with the techtonic nature of DID, eventually enough pressure would come to bear on the plates that BOOM something would crack and we’d be off on an uncontrolled life-altering meltdown/breakdown.
TBC…