So recently I had surgery on my stomach along with a bout of pneumonia a month later which I am still recovering from. I used to be a heroin addict and I have rheumatoid arthritis fibromyalgia and degenerative disc disorder which causes chronic pain and I’m soon to be going to the pain clinic for pain medicine and treatment and and struggling with the whole dual diagnosis can I control my use of opiates right now and I’ve so far maintained but it’s just getting kind of fearful for my sobriety play if a doctor prescribes that it’s okay according to the text but I don’t want to use it so I’m looking for a people in my life that I can trust to help me stay accountable sorry I haven’t posted in awhile it’s been hectic my best friend passed away and as I said I’ve had medical issues and I’m looking for employment so that’s why I haven’t been posting and also I am in the middle of applying for disability which is taking forever and Medicaid so that I don’t have to pay absorbent amounts of money for doctors my specialist included any comments would be great love you guys bye

So just an update we finally got our apartment and it’s nice studio one bedroom one block from the ocean. We haven’t been in therapy because of the whole Corona Virus thing or working. We’re having trouble finishing my disability application because of this stupid virus it’s very irritating! But also since we’ve been cooped up we decided to use my knowledge of Psychology and personal experiences with DID to formulate a therapy specific for treating clients with DID so if anyone has any suggestions please please please send us thoughts, ideas, and experiences of what worked what therapies you’ve tried and anything else you think would help me to do this. I have a 4 phases model but 1-3 are the only required phases while 4 is used for integration if your system wants to do that. If you can please send me anything you experienced with effective treatments and techniques used by your therapist thanks love y’all!

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A friend of mine made an excellent post today on social media, and I thought I would add to it and post it here. It’s taken me over an hour to write this, due to my own mental health. After this posts, I will be retiring from the internet for a couple hours/days, so my own system can recharge and heal. The following may hold triggers for some people, so please proceed with that in mind, as I do talk about trauma, mental health, current global/national events, and some negative/toxic people.

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My friend said the following on Facebook:
“DID is not fun.
DID isn’t cool.
DID isn’t trendy.
DID fucking hurts.”

So, allow me to tell you WHY it hurts, and WHAT living with DID is really like:

It is being constantly on guard, watching out for triggers, both positive and negative, so that certain alters aren’t pulled to the front when they shouldn’t be.

It’s debilitating PTSD flashbacks that can cause severe side effects, sometimes lasting weeks at a time, infecting your sleep (or lack of) and increasing the chaos in your system, not to mention other psychological and emotional distress.

It’s blinking and finding yourself in a different place, situation, and time than you were when you were last conscious, not able to remember anything that happened when someone else was fronting. It’s the terror of not knowing what happened, how you got to this point, or even who was out.

It is massive amounts of hard work and therapy, sometimes even a battle of wills, to try to learn to understand and communicate with your alters, so you can try to get better mentally and emotionally. It’s constant missteps, numerous flashbacks, and sometimes you push too hard and the amnesia walls come down too fast, crippling you with memories and trauma one or both of you were not ready to deal with. It can take years to get to a point where you can be fully co-con, so you can have some idea of what goes on when you are not the one fronting, and you have to repeat the process with EVERY alter, because not all alters are able to be seen or heard by one another.

It’s frustrating conversations, when people ask you questions about events you were not conscious for, recognize you because of a different alter, or because they tend to favor one alter over another. It’s constantly reminding people that you have little to no control of who fronts or when they front, and that you can’t just “ask them to come out”. It’s biting your tongue so you don’t scream or cry when hanging out with someone and they ask you to “let _ out so I can hang/party/talk to them”, especially if you put extra effort into making sure you were the one that could be with that person/at that event.

It is additional stress and work when it comes to relationships. It is a learning curve for lovers and spouses, trying to learn each alter’s name and what they like/dislike/need. It’s them learning how to respond to each alter, and learning how to react/treat each alter differently, because while you and your SO might be romantic, another alter might see them only as a friend/sibling/rival/caretaker/etc. It’s you being patient with them as they learn about each alter, understanding that they might make a mistake or accidentally say/do the wrong thing. It is both of you having to learn that sometimes being intimate isn’t possible or has to be postponed, because of what is going on in the system or because your switches are too sporadic that day.

It’s having to have the same conversation over and over again, with each person you tell for the first time about your diagnosis, explaining what DID is and how it forms. It’s having to constantly live in fear of how people will react when you tell them: will they be afraid? Call you crazy? Accept it? Treat you differently? Compare you to Split?

DID is NOT something you should try to copy/pretend to have! It is not all “party in my head” or “super cool”. It’s a Disorder, caused by repeated childhood trauma before the age of 7-9 years old, especially in those who did not have a good support system through it or who were cut off from those that they needed. It is NOT okay to ignorantly/deliberately mock, or try to become, a part of the DID community. Your negative and triggering behavior can often cause damage to systems, including new alters (inactive alters becoming active again, alters splitting, new alters being formed, etc), flashbacks, triggers, chaotic switches, system breakdowns, and even a regression, meaning months or years of therapy and communication down the toilet!

Please be thoughtful of your words and actions, and if you have a loved one or know someone that is being effected by the current pandemic, certain damaging YouTubers, or the economic downfall, please reach out to them! They are suffering even worse during this time, and many are going to be worse by the time this is all said and done. Just a simple “hi, I have been thinking about you. You do not have to reply, just letting you know I am here for you, all of you.” can go a long way.

I’m just going to write thus fucking article and then edit it for clarity a bit later. New alters coming forward doesn’t mean that you’ve failed, either as a host or a protector. I’ve been told by a few people that new alters coming forward are not new. They’ve been there all along, and they are just coming forward now because they feel safe. Granted, there are other situations where new alters come forward in order to protect the rest of the system in stressful situations. This is an opinion piece, and i’m going to say that upfront. Please don’t take this as a professional piece. In November alone, we had twenty-five new alters come forward. In the past month (March) we’ve had six. With everything that’s gone on, this has been pretty stressful. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve failed. It means that we needed different alters from further back in the headspace to handle things.

We are a polyfragmented system. That means that we have a hundred or more alters. (In the system, we actually have a thousand!) Being polyfragmented also means that you have alters who have alters of their own, or sub-systems. We have both. Originally though, when we started documenting our system, we only had twenty alters. In the year and a half that has followed, we have uncovered and gained new alters in huge sweeps –uncovering groups of twenty to thirty alters in a single month. For a long time, I thought that this was just because I was really stressed and freaked out and that it meant that Io-host had failed to protect the others in the system. It wasn’t until I posted about it on a couple of social media sites that I realized this wasn’t a failure.

Hello all, first time poster here. My name is Kami, I’m a singlet ally and a recreative hypnotist. As so, I encounter very different type of people. One of those people is a great friend of mine, who, as we discovered together, has DID.

At the beginning, one thing that struck me about my friend is how he talked about his wolf. My friend is therian (trans-species) and he told me about his inside wolf. At the time, I didn’t know really about DID and he was the first therian I met, so I just registered it without judging, as anyone should do. One thing that really interested me was how, when I was using a suggestion to make him forget something, he told me how his inside wolf would tell him some hints. Sometime, his wolf would just laugh at him “Oh, let’s see you get out of this one”.

Then, I found out about DID. I tried to learn everything I could (it’s not hard, some systems have a YouTube channel and are really good at educating. My favorite is DissociaDID. They are really awesome). And then I remembered what he told me about his wolf.

One thing very important in life, is whatever proof you think you have, never put an etiquette on someone. So, my role in that was to give him information. I talked with him about those very interesting video I saw. And gave him the link (I actually shared the link to that channel on my facebook page. Giving visibility is always a good thing when it’s done respectfully). So one day he comes to me and say “I think I have DID”.

The first and only thing to do, when that happens, is accept it. That’s all. 1 to 3% of population has DID, and that’s roughly around the same amount for red hair (2%). You’d never second guess someone who tell you they have red hair, so why would it be different with DID. So I embraced that news, and we’ve been experimenting with hypnosis.

A lot of things are really special when hypnotizing someone with DID. First of all, I never try to use a suggestion to have other alter being hypnotized too while the one fronting is hypnotized. Also, I never force a switch, even without hypnosis, forcing a switch without consent is a big no-no. So what I found out is that when I hypnotize whoever is in front, if the other alter is aware, they would not be hypnotized. And a suggestion could then affect an alter, but not the other.

Since then, I’ve talked a lot with his wolf (non-human alter), who now has a name. I wasn’t aware before of talking to him but he told me it happened, but he tried to pass as the host (I heard it’s something that can happen when an alter is not comfortable about being found out). I’m still learning about DID, because there’s always more to learn. And now I’m beginning to wonder about that other friend who told me about their subconsciousness wanting to play with hypnosis, or who sometimes wanted to tell me things. 1 to 3% is a lot of people. Someone you know, might have DID and you are unaware. Respect them. Make the good information visible.

As for me, I’ll continue exploring hypnosis with my friend’s system 🙂

See ya,

Kami

Love’s

1. Never being alone in my head I’ve always got a conversation going on inside my head or more fun and interesting out loud. This was a comfort because for so long I thought I was crazy because I’d talk out loud to myself and reply which you know is Crazy Right? But then I found out it was my system usually responding and through journaling I learned my systems names ages and likes dislikes so it’s like having my own personal family which was a huge relief because first I wasn’t psychotic lol. Second I had a fear of abandonment for years and no therapy helped until I started becoming co-conscious of my system which in turn got rid of the abandonment issues!

2. So for years since I was 16 I had gone to a Rheumotologist for a lot of autoimmune issues Juevenile Rheumotoid Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Raynauds phenomena eccetra. Anyways I had to get bloodwork every three months to see what my blood levels where and my doctor was amazed after a year of bloodwork because never in 30 years of practicing medicine had he seen a patient test positive for RA Factor and positive for antinuclear antibodies and then 3 months later negative and then positive for 6 months then negative again it’s legit unheard of. And it wasn’t the labs fault he checked. So what’s amazing about this is my host personality has a bunch of medical issues and some alters have asthma and epilepsy recently narcolepsy as well and co occurring mental illness as well different alters different diagnoses. Anyways what’s amazing is that your body and mind actually separate and can develop different diseases or conditions or in my case test positive one month negative another for a test that once you turn positive you never should be negative again. Lmfao!

3. I had and sometimes still have a legitimate and honest I don’t remember saying or doing that card. I used to get very mad at my system for the amnesia because I would say or do something and my parents or friends would be like you said “blah blah blah” or crashed my car and now that it doesn’t happen as much though I still have it on a less frequent basis. I miss it! It was kinda like drinking blacking out and realizing you did all this crazy cool stuff or not so cool stuff by someone else’s experiences of it and no memory. But now I remember everything mostly and it sucks.

4. I used to have to go to daily AA/NA meetings for drug addiction now that my alcoholic/druggie alter. Mimi and I talk internally now and I only go to a meeting when she wants to go. And second since I have a lot of medical issues I’m obviously one a lot of medications some narcotics when I used to abuse them now I can literally take them as prescribed and have my therapist count my meds weekly as a backup in case Mimi wants to take more or front but the whole system agreed to make sure Mimi’s needs are met emotionally which she agreed to only front when she’s really stressed or lonely and we go to the meeting co-conscious.

5. I have a legit superpower as do all people with DID do.

Hate’s

1. Some doctors and therapists even friends and family think I fake this.

2. When I switch at night and don’t get any sleep because a Teenie wanted to binge watch his or her favorite show on Netflix for the whole night.

3. Having people kinda back off when I say I have DID because of what the media portrays us as

4. Having so many thoughts and interests that I couldn’t pick a college major and stick to one. Finally we all agreed psychology because we can help people like us and we like helping people! Thank the Gods!

So first thing definitions. Repression is the active and defensive coping mechanism usually done unconsciously. While dissociation is automatic, psychologically passive, and an active motivated defense. Repressed materials are usually experienced, digested, subconsciously encoded, and then forgotten. In contrast dissociation occurs when someone cannot integrate and synthesize experience, and dissociated material is organized in such a way one state requires the exclusion of another state or realm of experience. The metaphor of repression would be horizontal splitting while dissociation is vertical splitting. For example if my dad abused me growing up if I repressed the memories I would deny them ever happening while if I dissociated one state might say “my dad was a great man” while another would be constantly reliving the trauma. Now repression and dissociation can occur separately or together

So one awesome thing about dissociative identity disorder is that most alters (except fragments) each alter has its own Id, Ego, and Superego. So as stated before alters have the capacity for repression and the system usually uses dissociation at least in my personal experience with it as a last resort option and repression as first unless it’s a new trauma which it then would just dissociate.

So let me start off by saying I trust very few people and love fewer because of the trauma’s I’ve endured. But once I love you friend, family, or partner I am the loyalist person you’ll meet, most of the time. The other percentage of the time to be completely honest probably pushing you away to some extent. Nevertheless I do still love all my friends and family that’s supported me even if I act off my rocker sometimes. I admit I have some alters who have a convuluted way of protecting the System be it switching and cussing for apparently no reason or in the case of my adoptive parents one of my fragments sometimes will even get violent and then have no memory of the incident. Which when I am informed of later makes me feel like a burden and even more maladapted then I was before because I feel responsible am responsible for my alters I feel like. So I am going to relate an incident that often happened when I was younger and got triggered before I was diagnosed with my parents. Especially my mother sadly. I would yell scream or cuss at her until my father would try to break us up and then end up either running out of the house or fighting him and her till the police and EMTS where called. This happened maybe once a year growing up and lesser and lesser as I was diagnosed and started treatment. Now that I am back in South Carolina though I moved back in to my old childhood house and hadn’t been properly taking my meds or seeing a therapist because my Medicaid wouldn’t transfer from Ohio. I had started having vivid flashbacks of those incidents as a child and even traumatic flashbacks and switching went from a only in the session with my therapist and maybe when really stressed at college or triggered maybe once weekly to a daily even hourly thing. I consistently told my father and mother I needed to get properly medicated and see a therapist ASAP. But to see a psychiatrist was 3 months away and my mother and father were sick of paying for doctors and shrinks so they kept putting it off or my alters would self sabotage the appointments by forgetting to set a reminder. So I had the incident with the car when both my parents where away and when my mom flew back she started yelling at me all I remember is feeling small again and a burden that shouldn’t live anymore so I attempted suicide with my anxiety medicine at the time. Anyways spent 4 days in the hospital and was released with referalls to mental health follow ups and temporary pills. But the flashbacks wouldn’t stop and my mom yelling “Get out!” Wouldn’t leave my head and of all the fucked up shit that happened to me kept causing panic attacks and mini seizures and insomnia or hypersomnia. I lasted about a two weeks before my persecutor alter came out when my mom was recording me switching and tried to take her phone to delete the film’s to protect the system but I had been throwing a temper tantrum I guess cussing and screaming horrible stuff to both my parents for seemingly no reason to them. Anyways me and my dad and mom ended up fighting and I broke my dad’s phone cops arrested me for assault and malicious damage but could see I was still very mentally ill. So they sent me to the hospital where again I stayed for 3 days and then was sent to jail anyways I plead guilty to crimes I have no memory of except flashbacks sometimes which horrify me remind me of my childhood fights except I had turned into the big figure of my father. Anyways my parents had decided a few years ago to put the house on the market and it ended up selling not shortly after I got out of doing 30 days in jail. And me and my dad are speaking daily which is a good sign and he says he’s not abandoning me by moving to Florida which I was supposed to accompany them too and I believe him. But anyways I am currently in a men’s shelter, waiting on getting on Medicaid and Disability which can take anywhere from 4 to 6 months down here. I do have a therapy intake this Tuesday which I am excited for and then I have an appointment for my medications to be refilled. Anyways there is tremendous guilt that some alters can put on others in a system and I just want to say I am unmedicated right now but I do feel semi confident about being on the right track to starting my life back and getting some peace back by going to school and doing yoga and meditation a lot reading. And this article just turned into a war story sorry. But anyways my point is We don’t have to let setbacks derail us of our objectives. We can persevere and succeed. My mom and dad are still processing the whole incident and my diagnosis of DID though I tried to educate them it seems maybe they’ll never understand the traumatic experience to cause one on them has inflicted on my soul. So starting this blog was first about educating and relating to people with DID or family or friends of someone with it and also a side hobby to occupy my time while I wait for my medical and disability to come through so I can move to Colorado where I have some family support. The blogs changed into a humbling and great testimony that even though that guilt still hurts me, I am unmedicated, not in therapy, but able to start to get some independence and autonomy though with a few setbacks of switching sometimes obiviously, a lot of flashbacks, but with hope anything is possible I am surprised I am not in the psych hospital yet to be truthful but I have those appointments and a Cher concert to go to in two weeks and will be medicated and on the right path towards greatness and the ability to truly right the wrongs and help someone else in these circumstances and disorders.

So to start off I am writing a trigger warning to those with the disorder meaning some material will or could trigger you to have flashbacks so if you aren’t in therapy now or in a good headspace with your system please stop reading now.

I have very little memory of my childhood though most are fond. I was adopted at birth by two loving parents who lived in Connecticut. I had a lot of abandonment issues and when I did start memory work a lot of those issues came to light.

First being I was neglected multiple times by a babysitter at age 2. Second molested by someone I believe a female at ages 4 and 6 though I don’t remember all details. Third, I was I was constantly sent to psychiatric hospitals from age 2 on because of my weird behaviors and a multitude of diagnosises attached to me by age 11 when my sister who was the only one I felt a close bond with died in an accidental overdose. I was always bullied of and made fun of for as long as I remember and I acted out a lot to get my parents attention because they both worked which I understood logically but emotionally I felt abandoned. When I was 14 or 15 I was sent to Department of Juvenile Justice in SC for being encouragable and molested in there and hooked on a bunch of narcotics for my physical conditions that started to develop. I had my aunt and uncle die whom I loved die from cancer when I was 17. And during my teen years I was on Grindr a gay dating app hooking up underage with older men because my father was at work and my mom verbally and emotionally tormented me as well as kids in my school so I used these men who I now realized molested me over and over again. When I was 16 my hair fell out and I found out I had juevanile Rheumotoid. Arthritis along with a gamet of other autoimmune diseases. Once I graduated high school I went to college and lived in a dorm style apartment alone and hosted lots of parties to drown out the flashbacks depression and anxiety that plagued me and of course slept around. I also got hooked on heroin since it was cheaper than my painkillers at that time or my alter Mimi took hold of body and mind for a couple of years. I went to rehab got clean would relapse wouldn’t know or remember how and think it was the drugs. My best friends Christine and Victoria left me then as friends because of my spiral and my bestie Carly died.  4 years ago I had been receiving help with relapsing and also counseling and psychiatry but my real problem wasn’t drugs it was the constant flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, and amnesia that’s plagued me for years drugs were my escape. It’s been almost a year and a half since my last relapse thank god. I realized as I did self exploration and journaling and found myself through that that NA/AA were only applicable when Mimi was in control of my body so I only go when she has control and am aware of her. I was diagnosed with DID almost 2 years ago in Ohio and started therapy there moved back to SC about 7 months ago to get back in school, on disability, and back with family and friends though my parents have just sold their house and are moving to Florida. So currently I am in a men’s shelter in Myrtle Beach waiting for 4-6 months for my disability claim to go through the courts then am getting it transferred with me to Colorado so I can then go on campus to Narupa University instead of online for there contemplative psychology program and to be closer to my half sister Nora.