Always an Exciting Journey
Welcome back! This is going to be a different post. I’ve always found myself through the stories and experiences of others. This is why it’s important to me that I tell mine, in hopes that someone else can find the puzzle pieces they need to know themselves better.
I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection recently, with the help of therapy. I’ve been saying for a while that there’s one last thing left undiagnosed in me. And I’ve found it. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I found out today is DID Pride day, and I figured I’d make this post to celebrate.
What Is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)?
DID is a trauma disorder formed in early childhood. When a child is exposed to extreme trauma, so extreme that their brain doesn’t see a safe way forward, chooses to isolate those incidents in the brain, and walls off those experiences. Because of the developmental stage the child is in before a single identity is really formed, these traumatic events become alternative selves. Alternative selves, or Alters as they’re commonly referred to, become full identities on their own. The number of alters vary person to person. The average is 12-15 and the extremes are in the 100s.
Alters hold their own memories as well. This is to preserve the brain from having to always remember the trauma. Some alters can hold certain sensations or sensitivities, meaning that they’re the only ones who would have an aversion to some foods or textures.
Each alter has their own identity and sense of self. Any way that people can be diverse alters can be diverse. It’s actually expected that alters will differ in major ways, one big one is gender identity.
Considering this post is live on the website called Trans Agenda, that one is of obvious interest to me, so I’m going to talk about it a little. Gender identity is something I’ve always struggled with. Whenever I look back at my thoughts and feelings about gender, it’s always felt consistent. However, whenever I answer the question of what is my gender, the answer always changes. This has made it hard for us to figure out what we want to do with our transition. Knowing this about myself, I can negotiate with everyone about what body changes we would like. Thankfully everyone seems to be on board with the same direction. Some alters would like to see us not transition, but they’re okay with us doing it.
How did I start to figure this out?
The symptom that troubled me the most was memory gaps with a consistent trigger. I’ll be in a meeting at work, someone will ask me a technical question, and I’ll go on for a couple of minutes talking about my answer, discussing it with others, and everyone acknowledges what I said as a reasonable answer. However from Cate’s view, what would happen if a question gets asked, I blink, and then I suddenly see everyone accepting my answer, and I have no memory of what the question even was, never mind that I gave an answer. This happens constantly to me, in many scenarios.
Whenever I would get excited about something coming up, like a couple of days till vacation. I always felt like I’d blink and the time is gone. I spent years trying to figure out how to trigger these gaps in time. Whenever I tried, I never could I always had to wait for time to pass, but when I finally start to leave for vacation, I have no memory of the past couple of days.
What’s actually happening behind the scenes though is I actually “switch” to a different alter for a while. So as far as “Cate” is concerned, the time did skip. However, one of the others has to come up and wait for the exciting moment to come, which is always excruciating.
I was prompted by a friend when telling these stories, that it sounds similar to their DID friend. It wasn’t the first time someone had asked me that question. So I started diving down the rabbit hole, and the more I looked, the more it fits.
What’s Next for me?
Therapy.
What’s Actually Next?
Still Therapy – but there’s a lot of work for me to do there. It can be possible to build a sort of inner world where alters live when they’re not upfront. Hopefully, this will enable better communication between everyone, and make everyone aware of what's going on. The goal is to help share memories and make transitions as I mentioned above when switching easier to manage.
It is possible for some to start to merge identities, sometimes to even a single one. This isn’t possible for everyone, and not everyone wants to. That’s okay. I don’t know where I’m going to land as it’s still very early for me, but if you want to come along for the ride, sign up for a free subscription here, and you’ll get an email whenever I make a post!
DID Tools.
I wanted to talk for a moment about some tools I’ve started developing for myself. As an app developer, one of the first things I did was look in the app store for apps. I’ve found one, and I like the concept but needs some honing in on some features.
I’ve decided to build an (soon to be) open-source app for the community. Once released, the source code will be released on GitHub as well. To sign up for notifications head over to the All You App landing page and enter your email!
Thanks for taking the time to learn and share with me.