DID Awareness Day and Plural Pride Day 2019

Today is DID Awareness Day and Plural Pride Day. I really want to share something for it, but I struggle with knowing what to share. I haven’t written about our experience of being plural in a long while, so maybe today I should jump at the opportunity. For today’s post, I am just going to introduce the subject of DID and our system to people who may not be aware.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a trauma-based mental health condition in which the sufferer experiences two or more distinct identities or personality states, each with their own unique way of perceiving and relating to the world. People with DID also have amnesia for important information either in the present or past that is too extensive to be due to ordinary forgetfulness. People who do not have this type of amnesia, or whose identities are not fully formed, may be diagnosed with other specified dissociative disorder (OSDD) type 1A or 1B.

We were diagnosed with DID in 2010. At the time, we could be pretty in your face about ourselves, because we were in an environment where we felt relatively safe to be ourselves. This, however, also opened us up to suggestion, as our therapist concluded pretty early in the process that we have DID. Normally, a diagnosis of full-fledged DID is not made after initial assessment, but requires at least six months of therapy with a DID therapist.

Anyway, we probably do experience some level of amnesia, but didn’t know how to explain it to our therapist. For this reason, we would report we didn’t remember something, even though we showed in our actions that we did. This got people to assume we were faking our amnesia and by extension the whole dissociative experience.

When we moved from one psychiatric institution into another in 2013, we no longer felt safe. We actively denied the alters and started to explain ourselves away as bad moods. That’s probably one reason our diagnosis was changed from DID to borderline personality disorder (BPD). My next psychologist, some years later still, went so far as to say we invented our DID because we felt it’d be an interesting diagnosis. Well, no.

We first became aware of ourselves in the summer of 2001, when the body was fifteen. At the time, the host didn’t see the alters as part of herself. In fact, if I reread my diary from back then, it felt as though I was bordering on psychosis. I wasn’t though.

In early 2004, the alters started to appear more and claim their own names. We denied having “multiple personalities”, but only on the grounds that we didn’t lose time. Like I said above, while this could rule out full-fledged DID, it doesn’t necessarily do so (identity amnesia and amnesia for past events also counts), and it still means we’re multiple, ie. diagnosable with OSDD.

Currently, we don’t have a diagnosis of a dissociative disorder. We’re not ready to undergo the assessment process for it, as psychological assessments are a huge trigger for us. However, here we are, all 26 or so of us.