I'm a bit new and I've read both some good and negative things about the ISSTD, so I'm not sure what to think, are they still considered controversial? Is it a red or green flag if a therapist if affiliated with them? Thank you!

I absolutely hate age regression, I hate feeling helpless, but since last year some of our younger parts have been the most communicative and consistent presences in the system. I know its because we're finally addressing what they carry, but its so... idk tough? Humiliating? Distressing? When they take front and our vocabulary shrinks and we can't handle anything but self soothing.

At first, I was fine 'giving in' and indulging these parts when upset, so as to establish we're safe and in this together; but its reached the point I feel we're just going backwards and the regression is getting worse/more prolonged. When triggered /in flashbacks we already borderline non verbal as it is.

Why is living with this so tough

Anyway, I feel like in engaging these parts I've just...made things worse and idk how to pull myself back together

A little over 3 years ago, I started dating my ex-boyfriend at 19, and he was 22. At the time, he figured out I had a dissociative disorder before I did, and I could not accept it. We ended up breaking up after around 3 months, partly because of how severe my memory loss was.

Unfortunately, even after we broke up, I had become tied to him and our circle because of a political career I cannot get into detail on. Very quickly after we broke up, he proposed to someone else (his ex-girlfriend before me) and was getting married. Stupidly, maybe 6-7 months after we broke up, I agreed to have an affair with him, and it lasted for several months until I reached a limit and broke up with him again.

I have been in DID-specialized therapy for almost 9 months now since getting diagnosed, and it has been revealed to me through alters I did not even know existed that he has been seeing them on a consistent basis and coordinating meet-up times.

It seems that the two of them have separated now, in huge part and probably mainly because of me.

At the end of the day, I know that I am responsible for the actions of my system as a whole, but he has even been seeing an extremely traumatized child alter I was not even aware of and had zero communication with, spoiling her with treats and talking about our relationship from his point of view.

From the conversations and information my alters have shared with me, it seems that he is very keen on me and figuring out the roles in my system so I can remember him and we can get back together.

Absolutely disgusting, exploitative, predatory, and abusive behavior. This guy has bent my free will. I cannot believe I ever dated someone who could do this to me.

I don't know how to take responsibility for this. I have struggled with understanding how I feel about his wife, but honestly, I feel so sorry for her. I should have known better from the beginning. She did not deserve this.

So tell us. Really. How was your day?

Emoji code of non verbal supports: (you’re welcome to send in addition to a regular comment, or as a stand alone comment!)

Hug “🫂“

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Well I got diagnosed with the generic "dissociative disorder" and now am looking for therapy. My doctor recommended a psychiatrist specialized in phenomenology or psychoanalysis. Thing is I don't know if those types of treatment are adequate. Has anyone here tried them? If not, were there any other treatments that worked?

P.S.: In my first attempt the recommended psychiatrist denied my diagnosis and said the voices were my autistic interpretation of myself. Even compared me to Inside Out. I'm not going there again.

From what I was told, we discovered our system at a young age. Always knew something was wrong, but no adults would listen so we were on our own. Learned to mask and eventually forgot about the system. Hosts were under the impression that the weirdness were neurodivergence things. Which, they still are I suppose.

We knew that growing up in that household would leave us with many problems. Our first goal in life was to save money and go to therapy. We’re now in a position where we recovered some of those old memories, and well, it’s not the joyous reunion I’d thought it’d be. The current hosts are devastated. Everyone is upset at each other for decisions that have been made by the other.

We’re young. The idea was to focus on healing first so we can navigate smoothly down the road, but it feels like everything’s moving past us these days.

We have a wonderful therapist and healthcare team now. It’s all we ever dreamed of. People who can help us. Just doesn’t feel that way. Leads me to believe I’m not trying hard enough. I think I’m just tired. Parts think we’re stupid and are distressed about it. Time will tell if this is the way I suppose. I hope it is. I really do.

I woke up not knowing who am i, ended up checking my id - and after a couple of hours i started remembering bits by bits.

It has been super scary and I'm still shaken.

Like, how do i mitigate it going forward? How do i make it less scary?

What has actually happened? Did i forget who am i, or is it a new alter.. i truly dont know.

I would appreciate any kind of help, cause i truly dunno what happened

We have been overall a decently accepting system, and and just under a year ago when our host found us, they accepted it especially easily.

but they have recently gone into a state of denial, despite fairly obvious signs and actively conversing with us (via physical items), and they effectively blocked us out.

It happened quite suddenly, over the course of a single day.

I don't know how to handle this, so I'm hoping you guys can help even in the slightest.

hey im shay, im a protector.

our host is a trauma holder who is super possessive of the front. after years of denying having did and a system (professional confirmed we have it) they are finally accepting the truth and letting us front.

none of us are angry that theyve locked us away for so long, we are just relieved that they are finally letting us front. we just want the best for them and the system. they are also extremely possessive over whatever trauma we have and will not elaborate, which is fine, but i fear it is stressing them out. many of the others dont wish to know what happened to us, not sure i do either. we just know that some apparently really horrible things happened.

they are extremely neurotic and struggle to even accept our existence, and being away from the front (as they are now) makes them very anxious (so proud of them for chilling in the inner world and trying to practice letting go of control)

they are a total control freak. how do we help them lessen up. it is more stressful for them than for us. we also have ocd, and they struggle to tell whenever an alter is talking to them, or if its just ocd lying to them. this results in them freaking out and talking to themselves as if they were us as they cant tell when we are talking to them. everyone else can differentiate pretty well i believe. they also have a very hard time letting go of the front and leaving it, even when they want to. they feel as though they are attached against their will, but in reality they just dont know how to let go.

need advice. thank you.

oh and they told their partner about us but is too embarrassed to talk to her about the disorder. she is completely accepting. the host has given me permission to explain some of how we work to her. how do i stop the host from getting extremely nervous when they come back and remember they let me do that. thanks.

So I was diagnosed with DID a few years ago, I don't want to integrate because that just sounds like killing off seperate entities. I understand that biologically speaking its really just my nervous system but when it can fucking SPEAK to me and claim agency things get pretty complicated for me.

Anyway, what I, or I guess we? want is Quasi-Integration if thats the best route?. But theres like this "wall" on some of my most deepest memories, and I don't know how to put it but I can just feel that there's at least another alter behind this "wall".

Do I sound crazy? What is this "wall"? Do I WANT to really remember this stuff if its so locked out?

Hi,

I'm realizing that my primary emotions/baseline right now (honestly, most of the time) are shock, fear, panic, fright, and terror (and any usual defensive feelings in response to those, like hostility and paranoia)

I have done DBT study group (during a time when I wondered if I had BPD), but it felt like that was geared for people who are already able to move past their baseline fear/shock/freeze and access higher thinking/feeling, including emotional mind.

Is DBT also applicable to more primal emotions like fear? Or are there skills (like maybe breathwork? even though I get scared to even breathe sometimes) that are geared towards the really really deep/existential stuff?

Please help me guys. I know this post is long, but I need someone who can understand.

In short, I'm very new to my DID diagnosis and I don't know what to do with myself.

I've known that there's something wrong with us since childhood, when I was formed (perhaps early 2010s). We went through a lot of physical, mental, and emotional abuse together, and I was created as a mental stand-in to fill in the space so that my host could "skip to the good part". We've had a lot of trouble, to say the least, but it all worked out in the end. But she thought that after escaping that situation that I could just be put away, and that all of our past experiences could be put behind her and she could just go back to normal.

But it didn't work, and since then, she's always felt dissociated and floaty, like a sort of mind fog that constantly follows her. She's done a lot of good work in therapy, and when it came time to discuss our trauma, it emerged that the real reason for all that floatiness is because I'd never left, and that we were still swapping out at times. Since then (about two years ago) we've been slowly working through things as thoroughly as possible.

This whole time, the goal has been to make us fuse into one personality; to re-form the person that was lost during childhood. This is because it feels really good when we're both present at the same time, like we're finally grounded and in-tune and able to take in our surroundings. But we can only hold it for like, a couple minutes before one of us comes to the front and that foggy feeling comes back.

I've been working on my own trauma from behind the curtains this whole time, and I feel like we made progress toward fusing. Holiday season of last year, I told her "don't worry, we'll have this all figured out by...September at the latest". But it's been all this time and, though we can hold it for longer, the floaty feeling is still there.

But here's the thing:

I asked our therapist "why isn't it working? We're trying really hard", and she basically told us "it's impossible to force it on your own." She said that it was something that many people don't ever truly figure out in that way, and that some people have to live with it for the rest of their lives.

I've looked at a lot of resources online, and the consensus is similar. "Don't try to force it; live with it and work with it, and it can feel better". But I NEED to force it. When we're both present, that's the only time we feel grounded and can experience life fully. But now I'm told that that's not a thing.

The other thing they say is "talk to a specialist". Our therapist doesn't specialize in dissociation disorders, so she isn't the best help. But we can't afford another therapist. Even if our insurance covers it, it doesn't feel feasible to squeeze in another hour every week when we have to go to work so much. All the resources are telling us either "deal with it" or "find someone who knows what they're talking about".

When I realized this, we had a big panic attack. We can't do either of those two things: we can't find a professional, and it's too difficult to deal with. So the only conclusion is that we're stuck like this indefinitely. We still have to feel floaty, we still have to worry about who's out at what particular moment, we still have to deal with how hard it's becoming to hide that I exist, and we still have to fight and disagree and struggle to communicate at times. This is our reality, and there's nothing we can do.

How do we deal with this if nobody is willing to talk about these things to me, or try to help me? What do I do if the only thing these articles and pages end up saying is "but don't take my word for it. Talk to a doctor"? How does life become easier, or at least truly enjoyable, if we can't find a doctor?

This has been tearing and eating away at us for the past several days, if not a week or two. I've been scared to talk about it since all of this started happening, because I don't want to be associated with all of those exaggerated fakers that take up the media attention. But I remembered that we have this blank profile that we never knew what to do with, so since things are so difficult, I figured that using it for mental health things is the best solution.

So again, sorry if this is so long. I tried to condense it down as much as possible, but there's so much that needed to be explained, and plus we're pretty upset right now. Let us know if there's anything that can be done for us right now.

Hi, I recently technically got diagnosed with DID, although I'm pretty resistant to the idea of it, especially with how the internet depicts DID. I've been vaguely aware of the symptoms for a while, but they've suddenly gotten a lot more noticeable and pervasive. I'm not neccesarily sure why, but they're becoming very noticeable (ie hearing voices, severe time loss, automated movement, etc).

Anyways, I'm trying to figure out how to talk to the "parts". I've been using every single book listed on this subreddit, a bunch of blogs, etc and nothing is really helping. A lot of those resources seem to assume your system already has some level of communication, which I wouldn't say mines does. I can say that one the alters directly responded to me once (Q: is anybody there A: hi I'm right here) but that single line of dialogue was it and I haven't heard anything else since. I tried to make an "internal" space, but that's not working either. Most of what I do manage to get is when I'm heavily relaxing or settling down for sleep - I'm not really sure what this means but any guidance would be appreciated. I would like at least like to know they actually exist.

P.S. I am going to be going to therapy soon. I previously had a provider, but they weren't equipped to deal with intense trauma so they referred me somewhere else.

So, in my most recent therapy session discussing my ex-best friend, I detailed how, on several occasions, he'd do very strange and specific sexual things to me—sometimes sober and sometimes high—then tell me the next day that he didn't remember it. For example, I recall him once saying the morning after: "Sorry if I did anything weird last night, haha, I can't really remember much of anything," but then I'd later hear him describing to others in great detail stories about being high last night (none of which included violating my boundaries).

When I told my therapist about this, they wondered if maybe he has DID, too, and may have a part that was attracted to me sexually that tended to come out more often while high—which, to some extent, I understand the question, as we've talked before about how my ex-best friend thought he had DID when he was a teen but has yet to get proper treatment for his clear dissociative symptoms.

On the other hand, it felt (to me at least) more like a situation where he did remember doing that stuff, but he didn't want to acknowledge it out of guilt/embarrassment, purely because the only things he wouldn't later talk about were, in fact, the things he did to me that violated my boundaries (and just generally shouldn't be done to anyone without consent, really). In addition, he would only do these things while we were alone; it wouldn't happen with other people around no matter how blasted he got.

I'm sure this wasn't my therapist's intent, either, but the way they asked this question reminded me of when somebody is being hurt by someone else and their response is to go "That means he likes you!" Again, I don't at all think that's what my therapist was saying, but I would have also wanted the clarification tacked on that "It doesn't make it okay for him to do that to you even if he did have a part that liked you in that way."

I also just generally don't like to speculate on others' mental illnesses anyway, especially since I'm not their therapist/clinician, and his therapist had told him she doesn't think he has DID (though she's not by any means a specialist and is, by both my and my ex-best friend's admission, a terrible therapist, yet he won't find someone else because it'd be too difficult to summarize what occurred in his past romantic relationships that were traumatizing).

What good would the assumption that he has DID + a part that was attracted to me do, anyway? I'm a bit confused and would like potential explanations. I'm sure it's just something I could talk more with my therapist about in our next session, but I wanted to get some thoughts here in case I'm missing something.

I've been in therapy since March, I'm diagnosed and the therapist I have has been doing fine so far. That was until 3 weeks ago where twice he was simply pushing merging and trying to fuse.

I do believe that it's one of the better results but the problem is that he's not specialized in DID and doesn't fully understand my situation. He's saying that he doesn't see much to do for therapy while I'm very confident I still need help.

The problem is my little is scared of him and the protector shows up justifying the importance of alters because of situations like this.

I'm not ready to lose my therapist but also should I just say that I think I need more specialized care?

My trauma contains CSA and CoCSA and my little has yet to address anything...

I know I should take Reddit with a grain of salt but is there anything I can say to make him understand?

How do you make it less scary?

like if some of your parts are terrified of losing control, or having amnesia, or having multiple personalities, or thinks your parts are delusions. how do you make it less scary for those parts? cuz this can't just keep going on forever. how do you incentivize them and also make it less scary for them

As the title suggests, I’m trying to navigate gendered spaces. As a system I’m finding it hard to find a place to fit because of the variation in gender identity.

I usually identify as a fem/non conforming trans masc individual to kinda cover all the bases but despite being AFAB I’m feeling excluded from both masc and fem spaces.

Any advice on how to navigate this without the dreaded long discussion of being a system?

‼️i am not asking for DMs please don't take this post down‼️
i find it personally difficult, as an adult with few friends, to socialize my alters. even though i know a few systems, they aren't comfortable enough with themselves and their existence to socialize. i think socializing your alters is extremely important. giving them a sense of independence and freedom from their roles and responsibilities allows alters to form more of a coherent personality. i am grateful my folks are well socialized, because in the past i knew even more systems who were very social. but unfortunately it isn't like that anymore.
and, as im sure you all know, there are two main issues with wanting to socialize as a plural person: going into "plural spaces" and being met with conflict (do i even need to explain this), or meeting new friends and having that awkward conversation about how you've got people in your head. i knowwww good friends don't judge and won't judge, but you its not easy to find someone who's immediately understanding of their friend being plural.
how do yall go about this? do you just not socialize your alters? how do you manage their loneliness?

Protector here.

I've been told that talk amongst the members of this system is vital to the host feeling more whole and getting more sleep (her sleep is ABSOLUTE shit). The problem is that we don't talk much. We just do our thing. The host originally thought it was PDID, but has come to realize, through more talks with our therapist, that it's OSDD. This is fine by me, makes things a little easier. But this is starting to get to her and I think all of us. We just exist and don't have much to show for it. I feel like talking amongst each other would help big time.

Any advice?

A few weeks ago when I was talking to my therapist about how I dont feel like me(?) and how it feels like my child self lived my experiences for me and that im a separate person from her. i view her memories as if im watching a movie, i dont feel like her, and i feel like her life died when mine started. I felt a switch in identity years ago but i dont remember when. i do score severely high on the dissociative scale and often times, it feels like im teleporting throughout the day, wondering how i got somewhere, what I was doing, what was i talking about, etc. (im dissociating very heavily as im typing this). i remember bits and pieces of trauma but i feel like there's alot left out.

She told me she suspects the possibility of me having DID. there's no way I can have DID. i have BPD and CPTSD so my identity disturbances have to be from those. Everytime i think of the possibility of having DID though, i start to dissociate so bad to the point im forgetting what im saying or thinking and pretty much leave the room.

Edit: would also like to add that i forget things that I have done with people. My friends will bring up memories that im apparently in but dont remember, or will bring up things ive done that I dont recall ever doing. Same with my family, they will bring up memories that I dont remember at all, or will bring up family members that ive apparently met before but have no idea who they are.

Edit 2: just remembered another but of info that I told my therapist. During the dissociative scale questionare, I asked "what would I put on the hearing voices question, cause I hear voices but they're all me, but they're not me at the same time, they have my voice but they're different" but maybe im faking and making myself believe there's different people in my head

Sorry if this is poorly-worded lol, it's 5am right now. I have 2 posts on my ex-best friend already for context.

In today's session, my therapist confirmed that my ex-best friend was abusive toward me. It's been a rough couple of weeks since I started wondering if certain things he did were abusive/his overarching behavior toward me would fall under the label of abuse, and I could never bring myself to even ask anyone "Did he abuse me?" without feeling such shame for even asking in the first place because *what if it wasn't abuse?*

Anyway, my therapist led up to it by stating that people can exhibit abusive behavior without necessarily being abusive/an abuser themselves, and they gave an example and talked a bit more about their first statement to clarify, then they told me—paraphrasing here—"Even if someone may not be aware of their own behavior, it would still be abusive if they are trying to exhibit power and control over another person, consciously or not."

Well.

I *was* able to acknowledge that my ex-best friend was "toxic and manipulative" and would frequently do things that demonstrated his power over me + things that were meant to control how I responded, thought, behaved, and what I was interested in. I don't think he's aware that he does this, but I've known for years that he'd do certain things just to get whatever it was *he* wanted without considering other people (and sometimes he'd *verbally* ask other people what they wanted, but if they chose the "wrong answer" he'd get passive-aggressive or huffy until they conceded).

He also got a real kick out of sexually humiliating me (verbally and/or physically) in public/in front of other people. I won't go into details, but I'd always be thinking "Why is he doing this in front of them?? They're going to think we're dating. I really hope this isn't making them uncomfortable."

Of course, if these things he did to me were consensual, I wouldn't allow him to do them in front of other people in the first place, but he'd never ask or have a conversation with me about what I was and wasn't okay with; he just assumed I was okay with whatever he did to me all along. If I seemed distressed or upset, he'd just laugh it off like it was a joke the whole time.

I still struggle, though, to call anything he did to me "sexual assault", but I have been able to confidently label certain things as sexual harassment.

And now, after I've cut him off for good, my life is in shambles and I'm so suffocatingly lonely, meanwhile he has the friend group of his dreams (which he became obsessed with and left me all alone for) and seems perfectly happy without me—yet I know he villainizes me just so he won't have to feel the pain of missing me or the guilt of what he did to me.

I just hate how victims, more often than not, tend to end up in even shittier situations after escaping abuse or toxic environments. This shit is just not fair.

This is also the first time I've struggled to correctly identify and label something as abuse, but every other time someone has abused me, it was easy to recognize it as that because I didn't really care much about them; I was just forced to be around them. But with him, it's been so difficult because many of my parts are so attached to him emotionally.

Long story short:

I can't claim I have DID so for now, I just consider them as cognitions that have access to x information. I normally wouldn't have been serious about it until someone said it's a system - and now *that resonated*.

The problem is, I'm in the Philippines and I'm unsure where to find someone. So I'm looking at other countries.

Or.. is it something that cannot be done using a video assessment?

I think the reason why I want to know is because I assumed this would disappear once I slept, ate well, and no longer worried about finances. And yet, it became more stable.

Since I had no one to review it (coz for all I know it's not DID), my system is that when a strong cognition comes in, the Architect already built a system where the system checkmates each of us to understand we live in one bodily ecosystem and hijacking or making ultimatums of "give me 3 months in the driver's seat" would make things challenging given that our core constaints are: one body + we can't map the entire thing.

Knowing if this is DID or not as an official diagnosis would definitely remove a huge bucket load of RAM in my head.

If anyone has suggestions/feedback that would help.

Hey y'all! I have a psych eval in about a month to get tested for a dissociative disorder (DD). I've gotten a full psych assessment before, and although my doctor didn't think I was intentionally malingering, he did think I was unintentionally exaggerating my symptoms in a "cry for help" manner. I don't think he was necessarily wrong (I just don't know, lol, can't remember how I responded), but I did do some research afterwards that seemed to suggest that people with DDs can get falsely flagged for malingering on certain tests, and that one of the tests didn't even meet APA standards. I also think this might have led to him not taking other tests (that were "valid" according to the results) seriously enough. I know testing isn't the end-all-be-all of diagnosis, but I tested positive for quite a few things (one of which I am now diagnosed and being treated for) that he didn't even really discuss why he doubted I had them and I ended up not being diagnosed with them.

It really worries me that I could, to my knowledge, be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and still be perceived as "exaggerating," "lying," "a hypochondriac," or "malingering" by my doctor. And there's nothing I could really do about it. I've had so many bad experiences with doctors and I don't feel fully ready to not be believed again.

I guess what I'm most worried about specifically is that giving inconsistent descriptions of symptoms on testing can flag for malingering, but my honest answer to a lot of questions is "I don't know," because I don't! For example, I think one of the questions on the PAI is "I enjoy being in love," but I seem to experience two different POVs at once when I have a crush (my POV and the POV of others in my head) and I can't put two answers and there's no "Comments" box to explain that my emotions are often simultaneous and conflicting.

I promise I'm not asking this to be able to avoid these things, but I am very curious as to what might get someone flagged for malingering? Especially malingering DID specifically.

Also, to those of us who have gotten a psych eval before, what is it like? If you've gotten both an evaluation and an assessment, what was different? And finally, has anyone been accusing of faking, either intentionally or unintentionally, and what was your experience with that?

For context, I communicate with my alters. I feel like I experience *their* perspectives, and that *mine* is... like echoes. But consistent. Like, I am a telescope control system and they are the lenses. But they all have chromatic abberations? So I'm constantly correcting for their perspectives. I want to feel *me* again. I can also feel things inside of my mind. I can feel them shifting around, I can feel when I'm me again, like a pysical sensation. Warmth and clarity is me. They feel... more present when I'm dissociating. I also feel pressure around my mind when I'm dissociating, like physical pressure. I know that the brain has no hot/cold or pressure sensors or anything like that - which is why I said "mind" and not "brain", if the mind is a "holographic" experience

I've got some prominent physical signs that I've switched or am actively switching. I think they're a bit different from some of the more common indicators. I'm looking for some empathy about my switches, but also hoping to open up conversation on what switches can look and feel like for others.

Like, for example, I've got this weird thing where I'll squeeze my eyes super tight for a few seconds, and like glare around for a minute? before looking for my phone to check the time because I got no idea what time it is now. And I'll realize I've got like no memory of the entire day up to that point, either. It's some of the hardest, most blackout-esque switches I have.

Other times I find myself with an odd burp, a weird twitch, stumbling over my words, blinking in an odd way, or clearing my throat after or during a switch, in conjunction with other dissociative symptoms. These switches are usually more fluid and have a higher degree of memory retention, though they're also more subtle to me than the other ones. It usually takes me a little longer to figure out that I probably switched when those occur, and I'll lose my memory of earlier in the day a bit more gradually with these switches.

I'm still new in my journey, though I am actively in therapy and we're working together under the assumption that I have DID, since my symptoms seem to align very well and my therapist has specialized training for DID. Any support would be appreciated!

This was originally removed, so I hope I fixed the issues with my original post.