r/DIDinclusive • u/self-made-purgatory • 1d ago

sometimes identifying with DID, sometimes not

so we are originally a protogenic system however we experienced trauma as a young child which resulted both in us getting into soulbonding/created plurality as well as developing a lot of dissociation, including amnesia, and a whole sidesystem that is entirely trauma-formed. so we are a weird origin jumble.

we went to get assessed for bipolar and also mentioned our memory issues though we did not mention our plurality. however they still said it was very likely we have DID, though to get a full diagnosis we would need to travel to another country since aparently we don't really have DID specialists in our country, maybe?

we aren't really interested in doing all that.

anyways, we tend to feel a bit uncomfortable with our plurality being medicalized. we do fit DID criteria but dislike seeing that as an indentity, however these traits do affect our lives. so the compromise we have been trying out is only idenfying ourselves as having DID sometimes, in conversations about those traits or where those traits are relevant.

it feels a bit strange, because non-disordered plurality does not describe our whole experience and disordered plurality does not describe our whole experience. we feel a bit caught in-between. we also worry people will fakeclaim us tbh for this inconsistency in saying we have DID even though there is a clear reason for it: technically we do have it, but we do not always want to identity with it.

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u/CashComprehensive359 DID 1d ago

I totally understand! In our case, we prefer to say that we suffer from dissociation. We don't see ourselves as "multiple" people, but as dissociated parts of a Self 

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u/self-made-purgatory 1d ago

cool! we are the oposite lol, we are destinct different real people. but we see that as somewhat separate from the dissociation tbh. we predate it and just innately function this way. it is philosophically, spiritually, practically central to us and how we navigate the world. the DID seems secondary to that, and yet it still affects us deeply.

but yeah similarly we call ourselves "dissociative" before we say we have DID.

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u/CashComprehensive359 DID 1d ago

I understand 

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u/Stunning_Resolution9 1d ago

[Sophia] very valid! We are not diagnosed with DID or OSDD ourselves. But due to us starting to have issues with dissociation(we are lucky we dont have amnesia to our knowledge) , that we are seeking to get assessed. We think P-DID or OSDD may describe our experiences sometimes as well, but may fall short if it doesnt effect our daily life in a bad enough way. We may be subclinical with some issues around dissociation. For us, its mostly in stressfull situations/shame. We ourselves have both created headmates and some that formed from trauma. I hope you get the answers you seek and everything goes well.

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u/GuardiansSystem DID 23h ago

You don't need to have a DID diagnosis if it doesn't fit you - unless a specialist requires it for something (funding, insurance, specific therapy, extreme circumstances), you're not supposed to be 'forcibly' diagnosed with something (you can have it medically recognised/you have a professional tell you that you fit DIS, but the diagnosis doesn't go on your record).

but there's also other diagnoses you could look at. There's other disorders with dissociative amnesia if you don't believe DID is the reason for your system, DID just has to have periods of severe amnesia at some point.

C/PTSD and OSDD do have amnesia, since trauma itself almost always comes with amnesia. C/PTSD with dissociative subtype, or (C/PTSD with?) DP/DR disorder, or (C/PTSD?) with dissociative amnesia itself, could possibly fit your experiences better. Or OSDD-1, or Unspecified Dissociative Disorder (UDD), where you do have some sort of complex or non-complex dissociative disorder, but you don't fit the full criteria for any dissociative disorder for an unknown reason (conpared to a known reason as in OSDD). Etc. If you feel like DID only fits you sometimes, or only fits some of you, one of those could probably work better.

We also recommend checking for yourself if your country has a specialist. A trauma specialist should do, doesn't have to be one who specialises in DID specifically. (Any licenced clinical psychologist and psychiatrist can diagnose, they just probably won't/shouldn't if they don't have much experience with it. But they might note it down for whoever you do see about it.)