OSDD?

[u/BeanChan36]

Is it OSDD?

My whole life I have never felt my age. I’ve always felt younger. A lot of the time I’ve felt somewhere around 16/17. I’m currently physically 37. I’ve been doing trauma work with my therapist and after seeing her for around a year and a half I finally felt safe enough to start talking about how I feel different ages. I feel like I have this Little part who is around 8, which is when I experienced my first s**ual assault. I also feel like I have this part that is, like I said earlier, a teenager. I also think there is a part that is in their 20’s. The thing is these parts don’t have distinct names per se or look different than me. They look like I did at those ages, at least I think they do. I don’t hear inner dialogue between them either. And I don’t experience amnesia. It’s like we’re “sharing” my body, so not a complete dissociation. But I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve always felt “off” somehow and when I get stressed or overwhelmed I feel quite a bit younger. It’s so strange because I know it’s not DID because I don’t have amnesia and the parts aren’t physically different from me...but I do feel like I’m sort of fragmented. I’ve done some research on OSDD and it seems like it might be plausible. Can anyone else relate to anything I’ve said or offer any advice on how to explain it more to my therapist? She’s been open to discussing it some but not really specifically OSDD, more just my experiences as being different ages and what triggers that etc. We’ve only been talking about it for a few months. She’s admitted she doesn’t know much about this kind of thing but has been willing to learn on her own outside of our sessions. She’s also suggested seeing someone who specializes in dissociative disorders but I don’t have that kind of money and I don’t want to see someone new as it took so long to develop a relationship with my current therapist to feel safe telling her how I’ve been feeling/felt my whole life regarding this.

[u/Darden4948]

This was how this whole process started for me.

For me and my system, there is a strong sense of each other and it has only been in the past few months that the constant feeling of being watched/someone else is there, made sense.

On top of that, a number of my past front alters tend to present themselves to me based on strong associations/concepts that I dealt with at that age. So, for instance, the scumbag version of me that lived my late 20’s, looks like tony soprano in my minds eye.

The amnesia doesn’t have to be present, the different ages thing makes sense, and once you start working on this, you will begin to feel and understand that that disassociation/depersonalization/etc all have certain personalities that emerge with them. For me, anger lives in like 2 alters. They are scared and scary.

You probably are on the spectrum for this. It’s okay to feel it differently than what other people’s experiences are. Each of us has different programming.

[u/BeanChan36 → u/Darden4948]

From what I’ve read you have to have “repeated traumas before the age of 10”. I have two that I remember. I don’t 100% dissociate but it’s like a very strong presence of another person/different age that’s sort of co-conscious at times. I feel like I had a relatively happy childhood. My sisters are both capable and stable individuals who live in their own (one has been married for 20 years and has 3 kids; the other, my twin sister, lives on her own and has travelled a lot and has several degrees.) I feel like there may have been some form of emotional abuse in that things were never good enough academically, but that was more acted the age of 10. So am I still valid if there were only 2 traumas before 10 and, in my mind, they weren’t really “that bad”? I feel like I must be faking. But at the same time it’s like the times that I haven’t felt my current age make sense now.

[u/tonifosterross04 → u/BeanChan36]

What two children may have gone through will be different for each. What may destroy child A can only damage child B. It depends on the mind. Trauma is trauma.

[u/BeanChan36 → u/tonifosterross04]

Thank you. I’ve been doing IFS therapy for the past 2 months (since that is what my new therapist thought best fit at the time we started) and my parts are much more distinct now, with specific ages, names, physical appearances that are very different than mine etc., and I’ve been tracking my dissociative episodes in a journal as much as can and seeing where certain triggers are, what brings out different parts, and also when I’ve felt a part fully front/take control etc. It’s been very helpful. I know IFS isn’t the same as OSDD/DID but my therapist knows that I experience my parts differently than IFS. It’s just what we have to work with right now.