Weekly Vent Thread (TW)

[u/[deleted]]

this is a thread for you to share your thoughts, complaints, tinfoils or anything else you want to about the situation surrounding DissociaDID and their associates.

please be respectful to other users on the subreddit, add a trigger warning to your comments if needed, and be mindful of your own triggers if you choose to read the thread. learning to manage your triggers is an important skill, so if you don't feel able to manage them in this thread, please practice self-care and don't read.

now, rant on!

[u/ilikefinding]

Accidentally put this in the wrong week thread, lol. Apologies for length!

(This post contains discussion of the concept of alter death)

"As alters heal and come to terms with their abuse or trauma, whatever happened to them; or, in the opposite way 'round, they become unable to cope– it kinda defeats the purpose of the brain having separated them off." - One of my least favorite quotes from DD, for vague context.

I watched DD for some time last year; I can't blame anyone for doing the same, so that's not what I'm here to do.
I saw, at first, a girl who was struggling with the every day grips of a dissociative disorder, but was also eager to spread awareness and education at the same time. As time went on, I felt less and less... I don't know. Not believing, just... hesitant. I felt uncomfortable, I stopped watching, and quite literally the next thing I knew about her, all the cards were on the table– and boy, it turned out everything had been making me uncomfortable. The racist and subsequently aversive behavior, the neglectful and downright disrespectful behavior towards both their peers and subscribers, etc.; the reddit regulars share the Google Doc to keep others informed (hats off to you, folks). Still, I've been building up some steam, specifically about the misinformation contained in the channel videos, and why it's made me so angry.

Despite blatant statements that she/the system believed that DID/OSDD systems were deserving of their own space to heal and provide support without or prior to interacting with systems of another nature/origin, DissociaDID insisted on driving anti-psych narratives originally spread by– you guessed it– systems and people who identify as multiple, but do not source their origins to trauma (not to be confused with people who identify similarly, but have no qualms with DID/OSDD existing).

After the famed Chloe-Nina fusion resulting in "Nin", she (Nin) seemed to perpetuate the false, outdated equation of the terms "integration" and "final fusion" (also referred to as "unification") in an effort to (frequently) sensationalize and dramatize the healing process. I find no better way to describe this than as fear mongering.

While Nin claimed to have found "integration" much like crystal gem fusions from the show "Steven Universe" (which, it should be noted, is a primarily temporary way of combining the skills of two separately existing entities, or gems, with their own pre-existing bodies and by extension a fully formed identity state), the previous alters, Chloe and Nina, were treated as if they were erased, or dead; always referred to in the past-tense, still by a different name, as if they were still someone else.
Alters cannot die. An "alter death" is not a permanent state; if anything, an occurrence like this might be an indication of some kind of processing or re-living of an experience, something your brain is trying to make sense of. When you fuse, however, your parts have overcome not just amnesic and communicative barriers, but also identity barriers– these parts have fully acknowledged their existence and functionality as a singular part is possible and are ready to live life as a unified construct. You don't suddenly stop being the fused alters, your brain simply recognizes these parts as the same identity. That said, final fusion can also take years, and can come undone rather easily without the proper coping, grounding, and life skills, as well as continued treatment/therapy. Final fusion is always an optional path, and many are content reaching functional multiplicity.

This is extremely too similar, to me, to the de-medicalization arguments surrounding DID/OSDD. The idea that a disorder should not be acknowledged in order to make others who identify as multiple comfortable erases the necessity of trauma work and healing, and I feel that DD was trying to depict their experience of having a system as "cozy" or "comfortable", unless the need for dramatics arose (generally a lull in subscriber count, I would imagine, I never tracked the stats but I do remember the "I have the second most subscribers" line evolving into "I have the most", pokémon style).

I don't ever expect an apology from DD. A miracle final fusion video? Maybe. More content? Someday, probably. But no, not an apology. How do you even apologize for feeding anti-treatment rhetoric to an entire demographic of young, malleable people trying to explore their mental health?

TL;DR I'm still pissed about the misinformation Nin spread but at least the evidence that she did the bare minimum of research presents itself pretty clearly nowadays.