You seem to be very brave posting about this on such a mainstream sub. I hope everyone else is cool, last time I saw one of your posts I was upset by all the people talking out of their ass about DID.
the trouble that ive noticed is it seems to kinda depend on the case at hand. so one person will say they black out and cannot remember anything and they arent lying, but someone else will say there is a degree of shared memory.
My understanding is that it depends on how integrated the alters are. The closer they are, the more they overlap, and start sharing memories and skills. Obviously this is a very personal and very tricky process, so no two people will have quite the same experience.
I've been reading a bit about integration and "curing" DID ("cure" may not be the right word, since not everyone wants to fully integrate.) It's fascinating stuff, the human mind is amazing. As I said on a different comic, its awesome that the mind can do this as a defense mechanism, and horrifying that children find themselves in a situation that requires such a defense mechanism.
im kinda not sharing the whole story, because while not diagnosed as DID i am active in the plural subreddit due to some dissasociative issues of my own. We suspect OSDD not DID. in my experience alters can share some information but its always incomplete. like i only get a message of what happened not the memories. so if something happens ill know that it happened but have next to no clue how.
It doesn't happen every time. Some alters have a higher degree of separation from the others, which makes it harder to manage.
And I'm not really sure how to answer that last question. There's the "host" which takes the wheel the most often, otherwise there's a kind of group of us that come out more often
Oh I hate switches like that! We've tried a quiz too!
What's worked for us, instead of asking "who am I?", we like to ask "who do I want to be?" And then we do the grounding exercise for that person, which is usually just playing a song they picked out. I've suggested that to other systems that have had difficulty with switches, but as always with these things, ymmv.
I think the answer to "who do I want to be" is often a much smaller list than "who might I be", which is why it seems to work better. For us anyway.
It doesn't always work though. Like our V doesn't have a switch song and isn't really in touch with her identity yet, so there's not really anything for her to ground with. She struggles to hold the front or ground through a bad switch because of that
how do you know that she isn’t in touch with her identity? what else happens (vs what doesn’t happen) to tell you this? I hope my question makes sense. If (if) you get amnesia from switching to her, how do you know she doesn’t have a strong personality?
I am curious how relationships work with alters. Do they sometimes have different tastes, needs, wants from relationships? I imagine it is hard to maintain relationships when there is some memory loss between switches.
Yeah. Luckily we have understanding friends and an understanding partner, though we have lost a lot of good people in our lives because of misunderstandings due to the amnesia.
Some of them don't have the same sexuality or romantic attraction to our partner, and some are younger so he takes a caregiving role by default for them.
It's a lot like having coworkers from different departments, you see them roaming around hallways and you'll say hi to each other but you don't really have time for in depth conversations lol
We know about each other and there is memory loss upon switching, lol.
I don't think our voice changes That drastically, but there definitely is a difference in pitch, timbre and I've been told some of our alters have a lilt.
I don't know how many alters I have and I don't really care to count them. I also know there's been a court case with a woman with over 2,500 alters, she actually got her abuser convicted IIRC.
Is there like a Central Identity? like i assume the alters have equal staying power over the body but is there like a core person that acts like the host? and would that be what the legal identity is?
im just imagining going to the dmv and giving the wrong name and birthday to whats on file
There is a host but we don't see them as a "central" identity. The legal identity is just what our body is called. None of my alters actually go by our legal name, I talk about it a little bit in the previous comic.
Also, I could never forget my birthday. 4/20 might be one of the most memorable birthdays ever lmao
OSDD haver here. I was once in that situation. My boss was proving a point that nobody forgets their birthday. She asked me for mine and I had to really think about it. The look I got from her was something.
Some people have brains that get creative with the switching process at some point and they collect absolutely ludicrous numbers of alters in the four digits. There's not much to them though.
We can kind of talk in the "inner world", depending on who is talking to who. It's easier to talk to alters I already have a relationship to, and are "close" to me inside of the brain (I genuinely cannot describe this phenomenon).
The most reliable way to communicate is through our private discord, but even that's a hit or miss. I'm out here thinking "I don't remember writing something in there so nothing is there" when there will be whole conversations that I have missed. I also keep a journal for the more important things.
The person fronting is the essence of a primordial soup that sometimes has features both young and old. It's just a shambling mess of gooey abstract shapes with no particular motivation, just to consume...
Using We pronouns isn’t something I had considered before but makes a lot of sense. I accidentally use our and we instead of I a lot while I’m by myself, like “we need to do the laundry” or “oh we need to get ourselves some dinner” and yet that’s just an odd habit I have, this is like actually being plural by yourself.
Mostly randomly. There are some triggers and some circumstances that make certain alters fronting more likely, but usually if we try to do it on purpose we get headaches
Different tastes for sure, and eyesight for us generally stays consistent. I know of some systems that have alters who need glasses while others don't.
Speaking of handwriting, I had an experience once that gave me the tiniest bit of insight into what DID can be like. I was in college, walking through the student union, and stopped to sign a petition. I bent down, scribbled something, and then realized I had no idea what name I had just used. My handwriting is atrocious, so I couldn't actually make out the name, but it definitely wasn't mine. For the briefest moment, some other part of my mind took over and wrote something, and I had no idea what.
To my knowledge it's never happened again, and I don't pretend that this is anything on the level of DID, but the brief moment in which I had no idea who signed the paper was terrifying.
I actually had a picture somewhere of our different handwriting during a shift at my old job as a server, but unfortunately couldn't find it. I know one of us did a comparison with text from some of our character ref sheets, so here ya go.
Generally we have a set of rules that we follow when interacting online to talking about our DID.
The biggest one is no names will be revealed unless the alter themself reveals it. I'm not gonna list all of them out right now, but everything I post is free game :)
Ugh. Yeah. Any comment I make here related to plurality is downvoted too. I've just accepted it. I figure that's all the sour gatekeeping bigots have left that they can get away with, without being called out for their shitty behavior.
Don't you know? If you don't post your private medical documents that say you're diagnosed then you're faking and Misrepresenting the Horrible Trauma Disorder because it's so rare no one on the internet could possibly have it.
I'm surprised I don't get more comments about stuff like that. Grateful, but surprised :0
Does each persona (for lack of a better term, please let me know if there's another term you'd prefer for me to use) have a distinct voice in your head? When were you diagnosed? What's it like day to day?
I have so many questions, and this is the first time I am meeting someone who has been diagnosed with DID, so please let me know if I am overstepping in any way, and I will back off.
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u/Anusgrapes 3h ago
You seem to be very brave posting about this on such a mainstream sub. I hope everyone else is cool, last time I saw one of your posts I was upset by all the people talking out of their ass about DID.