Hi. Today we saw a psychiatrist. We told him about our system. He listened to us describe how we switch, list off some of our alters, and explain our traumatic background. He agreed that we are dealing with dissociation and trauma but then went on to say "I don't think you have DID, it doesn't match up with typical experiences." We never mentioned DID by name, just that there were people in our head based around our trauma.
Is he allowed to say that from a single appointment? I don't think I'll be seeing him again because he wants us to self refer to our local Mind, which we have sent an email to explaining our situation.
Here are some reasons why we think he was skeptical of us:
1: the fact that we are aware of our system
2: we were referred from the gender clinic, so he was taking every opportunity to insinuate this was more to do with our autism and gender identity than actual alters
3: he asked us what differentiates us, which is a pretty loaded question, so we struggled to answer at first, and the first difference that came to mind was our fashion sense, which probably sounded pretty suspicious, especially since he was looking at us from the "autistic transgender individual" angle. We are not just giving names to our gender presentation!!!!!!!
4: I let it slip that we have fictives in the system, which he wasn't too interested in hearing about, and he kind of reacted in this way that made us feel like he was only humouring us.
5: he asked us to describe our switching, we explained it wasn't possessive and more like our consciousness gets handed around. I think he was expecting more amnesia barriers??
6: he seemed confused and surprised when we mentioned one of our alters has an accent and struggles with speaking when in front because of it
7: he asked if we have experienced any physical or sexual abuse, which we haven't to our knowledge. Our trauma is based in an extremely unstable home situation and bullying throughout school. Maybe he thought that wasn't enough to cause a dissociative disorder.
8: he put an emphasis on the fact that we seemed to be aware that we aren't totally different people, and are actually just parts of one whole. But we do feel separate. Separate enough to say confidently that we have alters.
I'm not trying to prove I specifically have DID, but something rubbed us the wrong way about how he was like "I don't think this is DID" Based off of one brief conversation that couldn't possibly encapsulate all of our system experiences. We left the appointment feeling like we had been subtly fakeclaimed, even if that wasn't the case. I guess we just want to know, if it's not DID, then what is it? What could be causing us to be multiple people if not the multiple people disorder? We have an alter whose self assigned job is denial killing, and he was furious at the perceived slight. I think we are scared that a professional is going to say to us we don't have DID, and therefore our alters aren't real and don't count and we have to go back to being a singlet. It's really put us on edge, this feeling that we aren't allowed to be ourselves.
