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Complex Dissociative Disorders and You


Fair warning, this gets long. This is also not a proper resource, I'm literally just infodumping. Please read through the links on the right for some actual resources.
I update this from time with minor corrections and new info.


One of my biggest interests as of late has been reading up on dissociative disorders, spurred on by looking up dissociation on tumblr as a teenager, and finding people go on and on AND ON about their imaginary friends alters.
Unbelievable sludge aside, for a second, I found some actually relatable posts, and had a brief moment of "wait, could I have DID?" before I did the rational thing and looked up the actual diagnostic criteria. If you know me personally, you'd also agree that I clearly don't have DID. But not everybody has the benefit of being doubtful to a fault like me.
There's a lot of people online who only learn about dissociative disorders, or disorders in general, from their communities.

This will largely discuss DID, as it is the most misunderstood dissociative disorder, but because dissociation and trauma is a spectrum, a lot of this still applies to other disorders.

For those unaware, the online mental health community, and especially the DID community, are basically the internet's own digital superfund sites, places that turn incredibly harmful if you're exposed to them for too long. Another example would be sites like 4chan.
Compared to 4chan, these are still terminally online, but in the hyperinclusive way, featuring a mindset of "more oppressed = more respect, power, and attention."
Almost nobody is actually clinically diagnosed, especially for more rare or severe disorders, and if you express doubt over self-diagnosis, you'll often get peer pressured into changing your mind, leaving, or straight up get kicked out by force.
Even something as simple as my opinion that diagnoses don't actually mean anything outside of treatment, and thus they're stupid to use as identity labels, is considered ableist.

Dissociative identity disorder is largely understood to be caused by trauma during childhood development, although a lot more goes into it. There's been ties to genetics, neurophysiology, attachment style, and a whole heap of more subjective topics. While nothing has been proven to be the sole reason why some kids going through trauma will develop a dissociative disorder, it's all coming together to show why exactly DID is so rare.
It's not a case of "you need one of these things", you need almost all of them.

And so you may ask yourself why, if DID is so rare, is there hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people online claiming they have it.
It's simple. Dissociative identity disorder is extremely interesting as a concept, especially the distorted version caused by misguided research and poorly explained concepts.


So, What is DID, Really?

Early Development

DID develops if a child's brain convinces itself that they are not the one experiencing what's happening to them, during repeated traumatic events, before an age where the child has a stable fused identity (which is prior to ~age 6). This is called dissociation, and does not make DID on its own.
In healthy development, the child is able to reconnect with these traumatized parts of themself when they're reassured that they're okay (through therapy, or a stable parental figure). This is why treating trauma as early as possible is essential for preventing more severe symptoms in adulthood.
In complex dissociative disorders (and certain other trauma-based disorders), this doesn't happen before the next traumatization, and the parts stay unable to reintegrate. In C-PTSD (ICD-11) and BPD, these parts stay pretty primitive, being very basic trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn), and by all means aren't actually distinct. In DID, however, they're at the far end of the spectrum, where the person's mind is fully convinced these parts are other people.

Following the theory of structural dissociation: in disorders like PTSD, this happens to a minor extent. Having an apparently normal part (the regular self) and an emotional part (the trauma response), the latter of which appears when triggered, taking the person back to the emotional state they were at during the traumatic event. DID is the exact same, but with more severity. It's inherently a trauma response.

Later in Life

The parts in DID stay relatively low-key throughout childhood, and in the most severe cases may start showing symptoms in adolescence, but often stay hidden well until the person is out of their traumatizing environment, or even all the way until the abuser responsible for the trauma dies. That's why most people are diagnosed extremely late in life compared to when it initially starts cooking. This is when they start becoming destinct enough to cause issues, and thus distinct enough to notice.

"B-b-b-but everybody I know found out about their alters as teenagers!!"... Oh brother.


Parts, Alters, etc. etc.

The Basics

Parts, or as you may know them, "alters" (alternate identity states), aren't actually other people in the person's head. They're not literally seperate "parts" either. This may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised at the death threats going around to people saying that in the DID community.
Parts are essentially just the person's brain refusing to accept that they're the same person at all times, often clouded by a layer of delusion, especially if they're aware of them. Delusional behavior seen in DID includes believing they're supposed to look a certain (different) way, believing they're actually somebody else during these episodes, or having delusional beliefs about their parts abilities, traits, or personhood (e.g. "I didn't say that, my other alter did", or "my boyfriend is only dating these three alters").
Based on the severity of symptoms, they can act differently, have differing beliefs from other parts, and so on. It's all based on what their brain deemed was necessary traits to adopt to survive their traumatic environment.

I think it's important to note in general how people with dissociative disorders (and trauma in general) are more prone to psychotic and delusional behavior. You can also see this in how they're often described as "easily hypnotizeable" i.e. being suggestible. This isn't a personal failing, it's just a consequence of having a worse than average grasp on reality due to trauma.

Parts, essentially, are just episodes when the person feels like they are somebody else. It's actually kinda disingenuous to call them parts because all it is, is dissociative episodes. They are not their own people, nor should they be treated like it. Giving them the individual personhood they may demand, is actually feeding into the delusion and dissociation keeping the person from acknowledging their trauma and thus being able to heal from it. This is why it's emphasized that the professional should never encourage naming, assigning traits, or anything regarding their client's parts. They used to encourage separation during the satanic panic, and it ended in chaos.

So, What Can I Do?

As a regular person or loved one, you should never treat a person with DID as different people sharing one body. That's up for their therapist to decide to do only during therapy sessions, and you are not their therapist. By treating the person as different people, you WILL fuck up their recovery.
If the person with DID says they know better, or that their therapist said it was okay, they are lying.
Again, it's important to understand that this is similar to delusions, and the person suffering is simply trying to stay in it because their brain assumes they can't survive otherwise, but they by all means can.
These feelings are remnants from when they actually needed to dissociate, during their traumatic childhood. When they're out of the traumatizing environment, they no longer need this dissociation to survive.


My Perspective and Experiences

The Origin

As I mentioned, I fell into all of this that one fateful day that I looked up "dissociation" on tumblr. I'd been in therapy on and off throughout my life, and had recently gotten the suggestion from my therapist at the time, that I experience dissociation under stress.
Dissociation, of course, is a completely normal and common experience, especially when it comes to stress, boredom, and mental fatigue. For me, it seemed to disrupt my everyday life, and I wanted to find some sort of comfort in reading other people's accounts of it, as a way to understand it better.
Instead, I got people using it as an excuse to roleplay. It left a sour taste in my mouth, but I tried my hardest to understand it, and never did, obviously.
What I saw online was all nonsense.

Dissociation never made me miserable, and I'm not claiming it should do that either. I have bouts that are worse than others, but they're rare, and if I avoid triggers, I tend to forget I even struggle with it at all. This is obviously after some rigorous self-help, and the spotty therapy I went to now and again.
The point I wanna make is that while I'm not miserable when it happens, that's the entire reason it happens. It numbs your mind, and isn't healthy in excess. Especially not when it completely destroys your sense of self like it does in something like DID.

What Was it, Then?

A lot of people forget that having an unstable sense of self, and wanting to be a different person (or straight-up pretending you are), is common.
It's not a sign of DID, it's a sign that you're unhappy with who you are.
If you feed into it, acting like someone you wish you were instead of who you really are, you risk it becoming a real delusion.
For me, the key ingredient was having friends that responded negatively whenever a shred of my real self came out. I shaped a lot of my life after the idea that I was someone my friends would like, isntead of realizing I'd pushed my real self so far down I didn't even know I was doing it. I thought my real self was the persona up until a few years ago.
Basically, who I was around my friends, and who I was elsewhere, were complete opposites.

Sometimes I still catch myself acting completely different from who I really am, and instead of assuming I have a debilitating disorder, I recognize that I'm a little insane, and this is just my brain reacting to a stressful event. I don't have 30 different characters in my head like some people claim, and I don't have real DID either.
As I cut ties with people that held me back, and find the confidence to be myself online and in real life, I find myself not having these episodes anymore.

And... You

If you yourself are considering joining that godawful community, just give it a bit. Cut yourself off from your social group for a while, and spend some time on self-discovery. Pick up new hobbies, disengage from social media, learn to appreciate the smaller things in life... and please: read a self-help book or two. Maybe read up on trauma first, if that's the angle you wanna approach from. Go to therapy if you can afford it. Even if you don't get the diagnosis you want, if you're honest about your symptoms, you will get the help you need.
Trust me, as cringeworthy as it seems, it does help when you learn to tolerate yourself as who you really are.


But, I See Systems Everywhere!

Fine, I'll Talk About "Systems"

When I say "systems" I mean people who identify with their DID. This mainly includes, but is not limited to: people who openly identify as individual parts (alters, headmates, whatever they call them), and clearly do not want their disorder to be treated, as well as those who just can't stop telling people that they have it. In research, they're referred to as having "significant narcissistic investment in the alternate identities and/or DID itself."
My opinion on if they actually have it or not is irrelevant, because 1. I am not their psychiatrist, and 2. this applies regardless of if the symptoms are real or not. It has been observed in both imitated DID, and real cases.

The Identity Label Issue

When people center a large part of their identity on their disorder (regardless of which disorder it is), they limit themselves to being only seen as that disorder. This goes for anything used as a label, and in my opinion labels should be limited to... well, actual personality labels, MBTI and shit.
When it comes to DID, which is fully treatable into near non-existence, in some cases within a year, it's not ever gonna be a permanent part of the person's identity. And DID is not part of their identity, it inherently disrupts it.

But My Alters are Part of Who I Am!!

I've already gone over how harmful it is in Parts, Alters, etc. etc. so this time I'm just gonna be straight-up mean.

Nobody gives a shit about your alters.

The only people who care about other people having DID, are the ones using it as a way to validate their own attention-seeking. Plain and simple. If nobody claimed to have "fun" alters, or gave them any attention, the amount of people openly boasting about having DID, or lamenting about how hard it is to... (checks notes) have emotions?, would drastically decrease.
The whole reason people crowd to those who claim to have DID, is because it's performed in a way that's supposed to be entertaining. Even if you try to tell yourself that's just how you cope with having a debilitating disorder, it's a performance. Using proxies, seperate accounts, dressing up, etc. is inherently performing. And performing has always been a sign of malingering, even if the person truly has the disorder. It's self-obsession to a whole other level.

It's not even that self-obsession is bad in small amounts (this website is a case of it, if you think about it), it's just incredibly frustrating reading people trying to justify their self-obsession with false claims of what's good for them or not. Just admit you like the attention DID, or any disorder for that matter, gives you.
I'd have a lot more respect for people openly saying "I overemphasize my dissociative parts for attention because I think it's fun" compared to the ones going "not all cases are covert!! the treatment guidelines (which are outdated) say separation is good actually!!!"
Trying to pass it off as healthy is ruining people's lives.

FURTHER READING
DISCLAIMER
I don't care what you think "as a system." I stand by all of this.