Is this DID stuff real? How do I know if I really even have it or if I just listened to my therapist and am basically creating it myself?
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
i figure if i could have all of the listed symptoms of something before i knew anything about it, and if it turns out that these symptoms aren’t something that everyone else has, then either i am psychic and know that i will want to fake having something in a few years, so i somehow figure out how to fake all of the symptoms without first knowing what they are, or… i really have it.
in my case it can’t be iatrogenic (ie, therapist-induced) because i thought i might have it before my therapist mentioned it. yes, it was therapy that made me aware of the fact that i dissociate way more than normal, but it was something i’d noticed before.
and i just don’t know how i *could* fake the physical changes. i could see faking changes in handwriting, or even someone who was able to fake the slight changes in accent between my different parts (even though *i* didn’t notice them until friends pointed them ou). but i couldn’t fake how sometimes, i’m allergic to a food, and other times i’m not. or how my vision changes distinctly between parts (with some being nearsighted and some being farsighted). or how some parts are ambidextrous and others aren’t.
It took 4 separate therapists diagnosing me with DID over a period of 10 years, and 3 years of denying I had it (part way through the process), before I started really believing I had DID! No matter what anyone told me, I really had to weed through it for myself to believe it. I had to experience shifting over and over again before I could really remember how it felt when it was happening. I had to experience the room shaking momentarily, my head going really heavy, hearing another voice come out of my mouth, feeling like a passenger in my body rather than the driver, extreme dysfunction, lots of physical pain, tons of dreams and nightmares……… and, and, and…. etc!….. before I really started believing that I was REALLY this way. I needed repetition to believe I guess.
And I needed to decide that I WASN’T DID for a while and I tried really hard NOT to be! So that’s where I tried for 3 years to not be DID – and well, ya – I couldn’t fake it or keep it in. Whatever was trying to come out, was going to come out – and all my efforts to fight it – didn’t work. I needed to fail at trying to be ‘normal’, before I would believe.
Now I do. I know (except for the times I still try to be stubborn and ‘don’t’ know!).
It’s really interesting to keep learning about other DIDs too – to find out how different we all are. And also how much is the same. Everyone’s journey is so different in some ways. And it seems everyone has had to figure out their ‘way’.
Side note – I’m going on vacation so might not be able to post much for a couple weeks. But since it’s mostly me and another who post here – I guess it won’t matter much! Take care all.
DID must be real, you can’t fake physiological changes in vision. I have this pair of glasses that most times give me a headache, and make my vision blurry, but other times they work great and enhance my vision.
The first time I saw a therapist was for gender issues/depression, not for multiplicity. I still haven’t seen a therapist for it (no insurance + good ones are hard to find, although I did take a shot at trying to explain a bit to feel one out once when I checked myself into the hospital for flashback and memory trailing, anyway, explaining didn’t work no matter how much I tried), so it would be awfully hard for a therapist to induce it. From what I knew about myself when I was younger I’d thought it was fairly normal, perhaps just a -bit- out of the ordinary but hey, no harm no foul, right? I suppose I figured since no one had asked, I didn’t have to tell them. I remember picking up “When Rabbit Howls” at a yard sale when I was around eleven (I think) and it still didn’t connect. Was a few years after that I was hit with the klew stick of ‘Hey, wait just one moment there…”. Annnnnnnnnnd then I deliberately ignored the knowledge (this happened several times, actually. I’d just settle down with a tentative ‘alright, now what’ and then I’d end up squeaking back into deliberate ignorance. It’s…a really bad habit of mine. Anyway, I’m currently still figuring things out.
Forgot to clarify, my experiences don’t seem to be nearly as extensive as Chase’s, it was simply the first book picked up about the subject. You have an interesting webpage.
I read that book – When Rabbit Howls.
I definitely agree that it would be hard for a therapist to induce somehow. I think time tells the truth more than anything else. If it’s real, you can’t really keep on faking it for any length of time. I have asked my therapists over time, “are you SURE??!!!” and they all smiled and nodded their heads, and rolled their eyes like “you still don’t believe?”. My current counselor – I asked him this several times too of course. He’s gone ahead to explain that he has seen people faking various disorders over time – and it always becomes very clear when someone is. He said he knew I was a “real DID” the very first time he saw me shift. …..I’m often not a very fast shifter – I struggle for a bit I guess, struggle against the heaviness, try not to let it happen. Well anyway, I guess by the time I’m done “changing” it’s pretty clear to anyone watching that I didn’t just do that for fun.
In my case, I am still in denial. Still convinced I’m faking it all. But I have years of friends calling me “Sybil”. Years of conversations with multiple people at the same time on Instant messenger clients where I will be talking about multiple disparate things at the same time. Without even a breath of seconds between saying things that don’t even sound like the same person. And the “voice” is consistent across entire conversations.
I have years of writing. Poetry and journal writing where I talk about being fragmented, about voices, etc.
I have years of notebooks where I have taken notes on various different things. And it’s in different handwriting.
I can explain it all away, but it definitely puts me in the category of “conflicted”.
But then there’s the fact that I can sometimes jog for 45 minutes and not have knee pain, back pain or shortness of breath. Other times I can’t run a half block without keeling over and gasping. Sometimes humidity makes it so I can’t breathe. Other times it doesn’t bother me at all. Some days I’m terrified of something, other days I can’t figure out why it scared me. Some days my glasses give me a horrid headache and I have to wear contacts. Other days I can’t wear contacts because the prescription feels all wrong and like the lens doesn’t fit my eye properly. Sometimes I can’t use hearing aids and don’t need them because my lipreading skills are excellent. Some days I can’t survive without them because I can’t understand ANYTHING that ANYONE says. Even with them. My posture changes, my body odor reportedly changes… I’m uneven. Very. Very. Uneven. Jagged, even.
Then there’s the things I don’t remember. I’ll clearly remember being one place and doing one thing.. Maybe it will be a little bit vague. But I will find out later that there’s PROOF that I was not where I thought I was when I thought I was.
Honestly, half the time I end up thinking that people are playing a really bad joke on me.
yeah. just… yeah. most parts of my system are no longer in denial, but there are still those who struggle. who think i/we are exaggerating things that happen to everyone (because LOTS of people have that kind of stuff going on with their bodies, sure. or because TONS of people can fake something before they know what the symptoms are, and know what all the symptoms are before they read about them, and can manage to do things like use the same voice/handwriting consistently even when they are telling themselves it isn’t happening….)
and it’s not like i’ve gotten any benefits from “faking” this that i wouldn’t have gotten far more easily by just telling people about the stuff i knew for sure happened during my childhood… it’s not like people weren’t sympathetic and supportive even before i knew i was multiple.
Years of feeling at war with myself, thinking I must be crazy. Constantly analyzing myself. I keep denying the DID, but whenever I think that I hear in my head “WE are denying OUR DID.”
Crazy, or what?
We wanna each have our own bodies. This only-one-body-thing definitely sucks.
So there’s 2cents worth o’ nothin.
For years before I was officially diagnosed, I had wondered whether I were multiple. But since I convinced myself that I didn’t fit the mold (well, ok, so I didn’t find things in my closet that I couldn’t believe I had purchased, although I might not remember getting them exactly… and I might not be able to remember what I’d done all day, but that was probably because I had a bad memory, and so on….)
Anyhow, I had convinced myself that I was just highly dissociative. That wasn’t hard to believe, and would have been impossible to deny. I had done enough work with survivors of domestic violence to recognize the symptoms of trauma-related dissociation in myself.
So I decided that while I might have starkly different aspects of my self, it was more like a stress fracture–parts that were slightly separate from each other, but not actually separate. And since I was so committed to that vision of my self, and so ready to deny the evidence of different parts, things went on like that for quite a while (like 10 years).
But at one point, my partner was helping (what I can now see was) one of the little kids with getting to sleep, and part of that was visualizing a “magic house” inside my head. And it finally occurred to me that, if every time I went into this magic house there were a whole bunch of different “me”s, all of them doing different things (or doing things with each other), then maybe it wasn’t quite such a stretch to think I might be multiple.
Once I started to accept the diagnosis, I also found things like pages in my journals I had simply never seen. I mean, this could even be *parts* of a page, where I had been writing for part of the page, and then another part came in and started writing. And I had never SEEN it, even when I went through the journals. Or things like finding I’d kept journals I didn’t even know existed. There was one, from about 10 years ago, where some part had actually even written about the different parts they knew were active at that time.
This isn’t to say there aren’t times when I still have my doubts, but the evidence is far heavier in terms of me being multiple than it is for me being just one person. It’s still hard for me to believe I can’t just think myself out of this, but I guess that’s my job. 😀
One odd thing for me is that the more frequently my parts come out, and the more they speak in their own voices rather than speaking alongside of me… The less I believe it’s real. My mind rebels. “THIS IS NOT REAL” and shoves it in a corner, making me take 20 steps backwards realllllly quickly.
i think i kinda understand that. like, not wanting to believe that it’s really happening, so you just kind of deny it.
for my system, we’d mostly believed we weren’t separate for a long time. there’s always been a fair amount of co-consciousness, and we’ve always been willing to take responsibility for each others’ choices (so we made a self-image that was able to accommodate things like playing with play-doh during graduate classes, because that was necessary to keep myself in the room without hearing that voice in my head saying “this is BOOORRRRIIINNNGG!!” which is weird, because i was interested…)
anyhow. but there are some parts who represented a more stark division between how they felt and how the rest of us felt. the suicidal ones–i could go from being perfectly fine and happy to all of a sudden suicidal, and then snap back into normal. and it really didn’t seem like the kind of thing my bipolar friends were going through, because i could go in and out of that state… well, differently. i guess because i would switch, which meant i could go to class and function normally, and then snap back to suicidal when i wasn’t involved in something that called out a different part.
whatever the reason, the times i wrote about how i might be multiple in my journal, and the time i finally accepted that as the most likely possibility, were after periods when suicidal parts had been really active, and then all of a sudden *weren’t* any more.
maybe it’s just because there’s not the whole “accept your inner suicidal teenager” in the way that there’s the movement to spend time with one’s “inner child.” so i was comfortable with how my inner children acted (mostly….) but not with how the suicidal ones did.
Hi~
I know that D.I.D. is real jsut because of past experences
(bare with my spelling)
But i thought that i had it once… but i have my doubts, for me… hmm.. this is hard to say kind of. Well i feel i have not gone through Enough to have Alters… but sometimes i feel like i do. i just don’t know.. i mean im only a kid and i havent gone through nearly as much has everyone probaly on this site. but anyways i mean once or twice i have felt like im sleeping kind of… But i jsut dont know! well anyways,… I do knows it real. FOR sure.. i mean, yeah.
Hah. I know the feeling. “I didn’t go through enough to have DID. I was not .. insert long list of things that did NOT happen to me… therefore I cannot have DID.
The thing is. People have DID that have been through LESS than what I’ve been through as well. And when I hear their stories I don’t think “you putz, how could you have DID? that wasn’t that bad.” I think “Oh god, how can a child live through something like that?”
DID has made me numb to my own experiences. I lack empathy for myself and for my parts.
Maybe some of that is going on with you as well?
I mean I guess so Yes. but, still sometimes i think im jsut making it up because i know someone else with it… but i mean who knwos maybe i have gone through Enuf to Have it. that would interesting. i mean im pretty much a teen. that could cause some problem aroudn the family and friends area… and bringing it up to my family would be like im copying the lady i knwo to them… but whos knows…