Dissociative Identity Disorder: Our Experience

How It Began

What exactly is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)? Dissociative Identity Disorder is a dissociative disorder. Between the ages of 7 - 9 years old the personality integrates, but, if repeated childhood trauma happens, before the ages of 7 - 9, the personality doesn't integrate and causes a system to form to help cope with the traumas. A system is a collective of alters and alters (alternate states of the personality) is what members of a system is called. Please remember all systems are different and will not present the same. Also remember, DID is not a personality disorder it's a dissociative disorder.

So now that you have an idea of what DID is and we hopefully cleared up some stigma you may be wondering how we found out or what it's like to live with the disorder. Well, we can talk about both in this book. How we found out is super boring but probably a way a few other systems found out. The host (the alter who does the day to day tasks) at the time was writing in a notebook and was watching a YouTube livestream by a DID YouTuber. She wrote a quick hello and a little about herself not really expecting to get anything written back. Amelia fronted (took control of the body (No not possession.)) and replied to what the host wrote.

That's how we found out we were a system. Basically, what it's like to live with DID is a lot of this.

"I don't like that shirt."

"No not that one."

"Can we get Chinese food?"

"No I want to cook"

It's hard to agree on anything and hard to concentrate. Even though we get along relatively well we don't agree on food or clothing unless we don't have a choice. Then there's also being triggered, flashbacks, memory loss and more. It's not fun but there can be fun or interesting moments. It's just not all peaches and cream or all bad things. We can go to college, we can finish high school, we can get a job we can do everything anyone else can. We ourselves managed to get our GED and now we're working on our CNA (Certified Nurses Aide) training.

Our Childhood

Our childhood was pretty rough as you can imagine but we're not going to talk about that. What we know is that we were almost always in the nurses office at school for a headache or accidently getting hurt because we weren't paying attention. Thinking back on this, I can now see that may have been the host preventing others from fronting and dissociation causing us clumsiness. Regarding how we acted as a child we were generally pretty quiet and wanted to stay alone.

Obviously, wanting to stay alone didn't last long and we managed to make some friends. We had amazing friends and they helped us through a lot. As a child DID is usually not obvious because the whole point of DID is to protect the child from what's going on around them. We do remember a few times where a alter was definitely fronting.

Cal and our niece sneaked cigarettes (we don't condone this please don't smoke kids it's bad for you) but that's how we can now remember a time period where he was fronting. A better example would be when the host saw one of the littles as a hallucination and heard them speak. This isn't a thing that happens for every system but systems may have the experience.

We can remember some good times we had as a kid though too. For example, our dad would always take us to this local place and get us breakfast on his payday. It's one of the best things we can remember. However just because we don't want to talk about the bad doesn't mean it didn't happen. It's merely because we feel uncomfortable at this time to talk about it.

Note: Sorry this chapter is so short but we cannot think of anything else to talk about in this chapter.