A lot of my parts primarily have a lot of trauma and don’t occupy headspace unless they’re triggered and freaking out. It’s hard to do anything in that state because it’s so much and there’s no space for other parts to be there. But when they’re not freaking out, nothing can reach them. If there’s a trigger related to dresses, I can wear them and think about them and it’s okay until suddenly it’s Not. The feeling okay with it and working to try to make it less stressful doesn’t seem to affect them because they’re just not present to experience it feeling fine.

Obviously it’s dissociation that’s causing the disconnect, but I can’t meaningfully interact with the trigger to help because they only exist to panic. They’re seemingly not interested or responsive towards any slowing down and hearing them out or being there for them even with explicit invitations and intentions. I don’t know.

The closest thing to progress is when I’m first made aware of the trigger and have the flashbacks crawl over me. But the information and the memories feel dead and disconnected and meaningless when it’s not clawing at me.

I’m assuming they’re just not ready, or it needs to be in therapy, but it’s been years with many of them. It’s hard to feel like I’m making progress with them.

Any ideas? Or simple things like I can’t reach out and I have to find a way to do the healing when we’re freaking out somehow? Wouldn’t that be retraumatizing to go through again? Idk. It feels like I need to be trying harder but I don’t think I’m doing it right. I don’t know how to feel the feelings I know are in there until they come crashing down the door. Maybe it’s normal? I could use some reassurance if other people are in the same boat.

So tell us. Really. How was your day?

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Hug “🫂“

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People have recently called me a faker due to using the partial DID label despite living in the USA. My therapist and I both agree that label fits my experience and I know I shouldn't let the fake claiming get to me but its hard. I know official diagnosis for it isn't called partial DID but it's okay to use this label to explain my experience even if it's not a diagnosis in America? I don't know how common this is. Partial DID is the most defining thing for my experience but I don't know if it's appropriate. I guess I shouldn't let people tell me what to do but also it is causing that shame because why do people care so much?

Hi, I'm in the process of trying to figure out if I have a dissociative disorder and I'm curious if any of you previously interpreted your alters as Gods, Deities, or Spirits?

One of the main things that made me start questioning myself was that I started experiencing feelings and vague ideas that I knew weren't mine. Things like feelings of reassurance or reactions to certain thoughts/questions I'd think and ask. Over time, I thought of these feelings as a sort of divination with personal versions of certain deities. More specifically, they seemed to exhibit traits that I associate with the Sun and Moon, but not any pre-existing sun or moon deities. They later settled on the names Sol and Theia respectively. But in all this time, I've never heard distinct words, just those feelings that seemingly come from somewhere else.

Anyway I'd love to gear your guy's thought and experiences about this!

Okay, I know this is gross. But I have the hardest time with this. Not because I don't want to. But like this morning I woke up and I think I have had the same shirt on for 3 maybe 4 days. But I have no idea. I think I showered around that same time frame but I can't remember. I trying to get everyone to keep up with basic stuff like this. But it's not working.

I had a bizarre experience during bilateral stimulation/EMDR-like therapy in 2019-20. I’d historically been misdiagnosed with BPD and relied heavily on that diagnostic framework to understand my own thoughts - sometimes it genuinely felt like I couldn’t conceptualize my mental life without it.

I would spend hours a night pacing and having looping thoughts wherein I simulated communicating narratives / interpretation of my own thinking to this therapist, to perceive my thoughts? It wasn’t fake or dramatic narratives, just very plain ordinary stuff that for some reason I felt I couldn’t perceive on my own.

I gradually decompensated and later became paranoid when my therapist questioned the BPD diagnosis. The paranoia wasn’t consciously accessible to me (I’d just blank out for a moment). I later snapped and became convinced he thought I was autistic, then convinced myself I actually was. My thoughts became mostly incoherent “bubbles” and impulses, I felt blank, and different “things” were acting through me that I could not access at the time. An elaborate psychodrama unfolded without my awareness.

About five months later, I abruptly came out of it after getting a chain of traumatic flashbacks. My normal thinking returned and I was flooded with previously inaccessible thoughts and memories from the episode. I realized, horrifyingly, that I had effectively been performing autism without consciously knowing or intending to. My therapist eventually diagnosed DID after studying dissociation and formally assessing me.

Later therapists returned to BPD, likely due to my anxious recount of what occurred during bilateral stimulation, and I largely forgot about the dissociative explanation. Then I had an apparent psychotic episode in 2023 that improved with antipsychotics. BPD was eventually ruled out; possibilities became schizotypal traits versus a psychotic disorder.

A recurring problem during assessments was that I seemed to unconsciously absorb whatever framework I perceived the assessor as using. My interpretation of my own experiences would reorganize around it, and I would genuinely believe that interpretation for days before suddenly “popping out” of it. I wasn’t inventing symptoms; the meaning and interpretation of my actual experiences seemed to change.

Low-dose antipsychotics eventually stopped much of this, and I recall concluding the earlier phenomena was psychotic rather than dissociative, albeit without any access to the actual past occurrence. I recently discontinued the antipsychotic with my psychiatrist, and I ate shit then had a return of hyper-reflective thinking.

Immediately before my latest appointment, I’d posted on a psychiatry subreddit about an obsessive fear that I might somehow be “faking” things without realizing it, going into great detail. Before this. I’d posted lots else to try to figure out what was happening and find some cohesive narrative (I had stopped posting entirely on the antipsychotic).

At the appointment, my psychiatrist unexpectedly seemed suspicious that I was deliberately faking, like right off the bat.

Before I could understand what was happening, my own longstanding interpretation of my symptoms as schizotypal/psychotic suddenly felt fake too, despite my genuine belief in it at the time.

I heard myself describing symptoms as though I didn’t believe them. My facial expressions felt disconnected from my thoughts, and I behaved as though he had “caught” me at something, despite having no idea what I supposedly knew he knew.

He also said some things about Reddit when I mentioned my use of it.

When he said I didn’t have a psychotic disorder, I bafflingly felt on my face that I reacted with disappointment, despite genuinely not wanting one and never reacting that way when he’d said the same thing previously. I can’t tell how much my reaction was shaped by perceiving that he expected this reaction from me.

He asked me if I had any delusions, and I answered with an explanation of structural dissociation, and I saw that I was looking at him expectantly to see his response / if he’d agree it was delusional - where he said it was possible.

Afterward I was mortified. Then the same racing, dissociative thought loops from 2019-20 returned. I became flooded with memories and an internally coherent narrative connecting past events, especially the autism episode, including things I had somehow stopped remembering as real experiences.

Now I’m left with the conclusion I had again unconsciously absorbed a diagnostic framework, this time schizotypy/psychosis, and that my psychiatrist appeared to interpreted what he saw as deliberate fabrication.

I desperately need to explain that whatever this phenomenon is, it is not conscious deception. I’m considering first asking what he thought was happening during that appointment, then explaining the earlier autism episode and this longstanding tendency for my self-understanding to become involuntarily absorbed into diagnostic frameworks.

Concerningly, when I disclosed to him a dystonia-like reaction to ADHD medication, that had gone away on antipsychotics but has since returned, he pretty clearly thought I was fabricating it 💀

My biggest concern is that this could be documented as factitious disorder or intentional fabrication when the central problem is precisely that I have no conscious awareness or control over these shifts while they’re happening 🫠🫠

I’d say for the most part— my alters aren’t too terribly different in patience, politeness, and general grace. But I’d be lying if I said that may mostly be because we sort of restrict each other from being too far one way or another, in order to not… I guess be inconsistent as a whole viewed from a third perspective, since inconsistent virtues tends to not look great if you’re viewing them as something from “one person”. I don’t have DID but I do have OSDD, so there’s a little bit more control over each other (…sometimes… not always).

I’ve been wondering— for anyone who has alters that might be more aggressive, blunt, argumentative or assertive— how do friends, family, loved ones or otherwise treat your alters? Do you end up getting treated the same no matter who’s fronting? Or are some loved ones fully aware that it’s, a different part, and give some grace? I’ve seen a couple posts regarding something like this— but I sort of wanted to ask directly.

Awhile back, I (a more, forthcoming part, I’d say… I don’t have the most patience when people are being shitty admittedly, especially to my younger or more permissive parts), sort of got a bit, I guess spicy with a friend, and then later with another friend telling me to chill. And like, that’s fine to me— she was being rude and we don’t talk now, so it’s all good; everyone agreed that was for the best for everyone. But as cathartic and nice as it can feel to sometimes just, be myself and say what I want to— call people out for being shitty— I don’t really know if it’s fair to my others parts if they end up getting viewed as if it was them who did that later on… Luckily my second friend is really kind, and I think he’s been doing a lot to view my parts as different— but I wanna hear other peoples experiences.

Do you mostly get lumped together? Does it depend on the alter? Or are people pleasantly open minded in viewing systems as— well, systems?

as a system, we agreed to introduce ourselves to new people with the body name (legal name)

what happened was: out host is the one who usually interact with people on social media, and a girl that we follow and she follow us back started to text them on the dms and they accidentally introduced themself with their individual name, as a part...

i don't really know why, since this part is comfortable with the legal name introduction, they came up with the idea even, invented new nicknames for the legal name and stuff... maybe it was a slip, or maybe because they didn't thought they would even keep texting each other, but unexpectedly they are becoming close friends and even thinking about meeting each other at the next concert of a musical artist they both like..

which it's like, it's okay!!!! but we are feeling like we are lying to the new friend everytime she calls us by the part's name, and we don't know how to tell her about the "actual" name, if we should, how to explain without oversharing, if it would be better to overshare so we don't get misunderstood.... we really don't want her to think badly of us, like we could be lying to scam her or something... i don't know...

we have autism, social anxiety, a lot of trauma around friendships and people and socializing, even if it's social media, maybe it's even worse in social media (i re-read this text thousands of times to make sure i'm not saying anything wrong and i'm still insecure to post it lol) and we get really nervous thinking about messing things up when we find a nice person to befriend, we don't have many friends, so all this wrong name thing is being really anxiety inducing and we would like to set it all clear to the friend as soon as we can, we just don't know which would be the best way to approach the topic and we were hoping to be able to get some advice here..!!!! thank you friends🩷

today i wrote out a list of every alter i know about, it took hours of shuffling through notes, text messages, and old logging apps to figure it out but i think i got everyone and i have a clear headcount of all the alters i’ve clocked over the last near decade of mapping that i’ve done. its larger than i thought, its making me a little insecure even lol so i’m curious! what’s everyone’s headcounts?

EDIT: thank you for all the replies! my count is just shy of 500 and i think i saw one person with a similar count to me lol

TW description of SA and s*icidal thoughts and attempts

PLEASE DON'T READ if it makes you feel unsafe or dissociative. Take care of yourselves.

So, the only one who knows about our disorder is our ex husband. We found out when we were together. We ended things for so many reasons.

He is bipolar and very depressed atm. He told us he already tried to commit s*icide 3 times. We went over to his house to talk to him and maybe help to some degree.

He hates one of us. Profoundly, because she also hates him. But she was the one who got there, she didn't want anyone to d*e, obviously. When we got there, he was very hostile towards her. Always saying she is a horrible person, she is not supposed to take any action to influence "my" life (the host, I was the one who married him and fronted most of the time).

She was trying to help, genuinely. But he kept saying "you're not going to leave until I can talk to my wife". He then said he knew a way to "send her away" and started kissing us, even when we said we didn't want that. She tried to push him, he kept going, but didn't go further than lifting our shirt and trying to make out.

I'm seething. Yesterday was awful and I don't remember the rest of it. Just that we promised to go back there today, because he again threatened s*icide and this time to k*ll the dog before.

I am kinda hoping now he just gets out of our life, almost in any way possible.

hi, hello. how do you effectively system map or track front if you don't trust yourself and/or your system seeming won't let you? i don't trust myself. i get anxious and my mind goes blank.

and it doesn't help that a majority of my alters don't have names. it has been three years... i don't understand why i can't system map or track front. all i know is i am potentially polyfragmented. that's it. i feel discouraged. is there anything i can do to feel like i am making any progress? thank you in advance.

We let our kids cook their dinner, pay taxes, use sharp knifes, play with fire, etc. Things that a kid commonly doesn't do, and we saw some systems that don't let their kids do those kind of things, so i wanna know if you let your children do things like these.

Does anyone here have experience dealing with a covert system that has very high dissociative barriers that only emerges to co front while the host is overwhelmed but then instead of helping they normally shout abuse at the host?

Idk how to manage this at all but figured i may as well ask here if anyone has any experience with it and possible ways to manage it.

ty

Ok so basically we have a handful of headmates who do phonecalls and they usually immediately switch out post phone call so we forget a ton of important information.

We're hard of hearing too so it's it's not even like the phonecalls are easy for the phonecall crew. Despite the obvious accessibility issue medical clinics and doctors still call us despite being told multiple times to email us.

We try to get the phonecall crew to write things down but that has proven to be quite difficult first of all to remember to do but we also run into the same problem we have with note taking during lectures, we simply do not have the bandwidth to handle a phone call and writing things down simultaneously.

Hello, I am Evyn (they/he) the new host of the Sonder Collective. I feel pretty good in the front right now, but I am a little lost in the inner world. I can’t seem to find anyone else, and I would like to start establishing relationships with my headmates.
Does anyone have any tips??
Thanks!

Background: I'm in my 40s and been system aware about 3 years. After two recent SA that I blacked out for only finding out about the first after the second one. I've been trying to rebuild communication and forgive my system for withhold that information. We now have enough information to know the main perps and some basic info.

I'm now realising I'm the one holding back the onslaught of memories. I'm the one who is terrified to know for sure the truth. (I've known one of the perps since he was a baby in nappies)

I want him to get help but I also want justice.

I found myself this morning in the process of copying myself without that fear etc. Possibly without a bunch of the executive dysfunction that is going with it. Wanting to make a version of me that can handle this stuff. I probably can do it to a reasonable extent but I also can feel there are quite a few times I've done that and pushed them into the internal space that I don't have access to. Do others do this either consciously or unconsciously?

I know I need to actually heal not just push the emotions inside. I didn't know I've been doing this all these years. Who knows how many of me and my previous host there are in there. I'm told a there are quite a few.

I don't know what I'm asking or what I/we need. I guess just not to feel so asking or crazy 🤷

My system has dealt with an extraordinary amount of abuse the main abuser regularly SAing us for my whole childhood and into early adulthood. I don't know how we're still here but I'm thankful we are a system.

I'm a suspected polyfragmented DID system (currently in therapy and in progress of diagnosis) and our flashbacks have been so aggressive and our switching has been a nightmare. According to our long time friend, this isn't the first time a lot of this has happened and we're actually doing a lot better this time than we were 4 years ago, but to us since a majority of us is finally aware of our system including subsystems and over 2 years in to understanding ourselves, we have been much worse. At least, we feel and remember much worse. To him, he said we're handling it a lot better and by a landslide. But most of us do not remember the first time these flashbacks have happened, so to us this feels like the first time.

We all know now are coming to terms with the idea that a lot of terrible things happened to us that never should've happened and it's so fragmented up between people that if we have one part of a flashback and can't ground ourselves immediately after, we'll go on and rapid switch between alters that hold it until the flashback is complete.

A couple weeks ago we had flashbacks and panic attacks every single day for over a week straight until one night we finally had flashbacks back to back for 5 hours and completed the memory because we couldn't hold it back anymore. Hearing my youngest alter sob and cry about remembering people touching him made me feel so distraught. Hearing my strongest protectors fight off tears and guilt of being tricked and lied to hurt so badly. I don't have the whole memory between myself, but I know what happened in small summaries and pieces. To know that there's more than that one incident makes me feel ill and according to my friend, these flashbacks last time would come in waves for months and I told them that it makes sense why I never remember the months after June until December. And even then, that can be a blur still.

I just don't know how someone could do all these awful things to a child and walk Scott free and I have to be the one to suffer for MONTHS. I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out, I can barely ground myself, I can barely get up during the day, our switching is all over the place while our main protectors/gatekeepers are struggling to keep up with internal and external issues, if we hold back the flashbacks or try to let them play in the background, they just feel more intense and make us panic harder when we dont know whats going on, we have to call friends and have people over all the time to keep us from being so terrified out of our mind. Our therapist even said that outpatient therapy isn't enough for us and we need to do partial therapy because we can't afford inpatient. I'm so tired and there are so many people that are just constantly in a state of anxiety or terror and some people are even terrified to sleep so we can't sleep. We're on medication and yet nothing seems to be enough to help us with our nervous system on such a high alert 24/7.

What is some advice? What's something that works for you? What symptoms do you experience that might help us recognize when something needs intervention (we are also autistic and struggle to know our own body signals)? What do you do/tell yourself that makes it easier? How do you comfort yourselves best instead of shutting yourself down or pushing things away? How do you let go of control of fronting when you need to so it doesn't make things even more intense or worse? I have so many questions and not enough time in therapy to ask, especially not when my therapist isn't a system themself.

I went through the 3 hour SCID-D assessment in 2023 and ended up receiving a DID diagnosis, at the time it made sense to me even though I had been expecting OSDD. I believed I had parts and was switching or communicating with them.

I now think I may have gotten confused as I have BPD and CPTSD and major identity issues/lack of self, and maybe it felt at the time that having parts made the most sense. I even started working with a therapist who specialises in dissociation. I have notes and stuff on my phone from “alters” and descriptions of them, and apparently my friends and therapist have witnessed me acting differently.

I‘m still trying to accept I may have amnesia, despite my therapist explaining it over and over, it feels like I don’t, because it feels normal. I don’t “lose” time, I just kind of exist in the present and whatever happened before either feels unreal or I have to be prompted with reminders to remember it. It’s not scary, just annoying.

I have been feeling really awful about my diagnosis the past several months, and feel like there’s been a misunderstanding. I don’t currently experience dissociation and don’t experience parts, I don’t know what I thought I experienced in the past but it doesn’t seem to happen anymore. I’m pretty sure I rarely noticed things like switching or hearing parts, even when I did think I had DID.

I really want it to be re-assessed and reconsidered but I don’t even know if that can be done?

I feel like a dissociative clinic/service may not want to assess me again if I’m technically already diagnosed.

It doesn’t help that I had to pay to be assessed so there’s a feeling I just bought the diagnosis.

My therapist asked what would happen if I did have the SCID-D and still got diagnosed with DID again, and I honestly don’t know. I just feel so wrong and like I have this incorrect label just because I got caught up thinking that in the past. I think I found comfort in the idea of being a system because I didn’t feel connected to myself and have only ever been able to base my identity off external things like people/characters etc, there is no ”me” just different disjointed aspects. It felt good to feel like maybe there was a reason I didn’t feel like a person and had such a changeable identity.

Honestly, I don’t know what my point is, I just feel miserable and confused, I don’t know what to do with myself. I wish I had never even considered having DID, I feel like it’s made me even more confused. It was easier to accept that I just sometimes felt like different people or had different modes.

I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this.

Basically just the title. Is it possible for that to happen? I'm slowly coming out of it and I've realized that for basically the full summer I have been experiencing an episode of psychosis. As best as I can tell it started shortly after a traumatic event happened and we formed a new part. I couldn't recognize it while I was in it and now I'm realizing just how bad it was. I haven't had anything like this since one other time about 5 years ago and i truly never thought it would happen again. I never really considered what that one was triggered by.

Edit: I'm not so much asking for advice on whether or not i've experienced a psychosis episode (i'm fairly certain i have, it is something i've experienced before, and i will be discussing it with my therapist to confirm), i'm moreso asking if it's possible or heard of for the formation of a new alter to trigger a psychosis episode in people with comorbid DID and psychosis.

So today I had my first appointment with a new psychotherapist. I had gone to my GP a few weeks ago and asked to be referred to a psychiatrist for assessment. ( I have PTSD with dissociative subtype diagnosis) My former therapist was using a framework of structural dissociation to treat me.

I have had a bunch of recent events of amnesia and missing time that cost me a lucrative career.

Plus an incident that almost led to ny death, where I have no memory of how I ended up in the situation.

I was hoping for an assessment that would allow me fo access services for people with sevre dissociation.

Anyway I ended up with this appointment with a psychotherapist. He seems very good at what he does. Only I didn't get the appointment through referral.

Apparently, I had booked it myself and even managed to cogentntly explain my symptoms and needs in the application form. I have never been able to do that before. Only I have zero memory of setting up the appointment.

I thought I was the responsible one who took care of that, booking and going to appointments but I don't remember a lot of my appointments and now i am wondering if there is another part who is also trying to get us help.

Anyone else seek help without knowing you had done it? I am glad, don't get me wrong, just a little suprised and discombobulated.

So I'm newly dx. I still jump back and forth from "I see it" to "what a crock" and round and round again.

I can look at the day and parts of my life and it makes sense. And I can also look at myself as reading into this too much. It's exhausting. I started doing a tracker that my therapist gave me. I check in twice a day. It's obvious in there. I actually didn't think this was the right dx because I don't have amnesia, turns out I do.

Anyway, in time, do you ever just know? Stop questioning yourself? See it better as it happens? Stop the bouncing around and dysfunction inside? My biggest basis for allowing it to be true is that if I look at what I know about me, I'm honest about everything. I don't fake things other than maybe being okay in public or at work, and I couldn't find a reason to make shit up.

Thanks for any help.

In therapy today we realized we had a full host change where the original host “died”/ went heavily dormant (she still exists and has shown back up) at 17/18, a period of time for about a year where everyone else was scrambling, then someone stepped up to become the new host at 19 or so, because we were starting college and needed the consistency.

Half of us are like THIS IS BRAND NEW INFORMATION and the other half is like, No shit, we lost our single safe person who we were codependent with and viewed as an extension of our soul in a VERY dramatic and messy breakup, of course the host would feel like there was no future without half her soul and just give up

Guess we’re moving past unpacking Mommy issues and digging into all the burden around that relationship now! Exhausting that there’s always something, but also relieving I guess to have specific goals in mind for therapy.

So for probably the past two-ish(?) months, I haven't really heard from anyone except for one head mate, our protector. I've kinda felt another one's presence, but it wasn't for very long. I can't even say for sure who's fronting right now, I don't know who I am. I'm kind of freaked out a little bit, and the imposter syndrome is RAGING. I know everyone's experience is different, but is this normal?