Ananke Ruadh
Formerly known as Ananke Zaresh
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2021
- Messages
- 1,260
- Pronouns
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- They - Them
- Thread starter
- #21
Week Four: Living with DID & Finding Treatment
This week's topic; and wildly late eesh; couldn't have come at a better time for me. Living with DID is an often frustrating, alienating, and sometimes dehumanizing experience; especially for those of us with larger systems, or with dysregulated, destabilized systems. While therapy can lay excellent groundwork for a more stable foundation, provide coping skills, and help a system unlearn toxic, or no longer helpful coping strategies, it is unfortunately not a cure-all. Upheaval in a system's personal life; whether it comes from changes at work, relationship stress, an unstable living environment, or other similar factors; is likely to cause some degree of destabilization, and due to DID/OSDD coming from trauma, there is unfortunately no "cure." Only treatment, and the understanding that this difficulty is ours to own and deal with accordingly.
For me, the destabilization that comes from relationship stress, upheaval in my living environment, and similar issues, what would be the "background radiation of life" for someone without this disorder, causes increased cognition difficulty, auditory processing issues, a loss of mental acuity, and increased executive dysfunction for me. (Which as someone who also has ADHD, isn't a particularly winning combination. /hj 😅) This level of destabilization unfortunately tends to come with what we call "rapid switching" as our system looks for someone competent and comfortable enough to take over.
Rapid Switching refers to a particular phenomenon within DID where Alters/Headmates take the front and control the body, but only for a short period of time.
It might simply look like the system's body is sitting quietly, reading or staring off into space- or it could look like erratic behavior. Starting a task and leaving it undone to go do something else the moment a new Alter decides this isn't helpful and something else would be; leaving a trail across the apartment of half-done chores or personal care tasks. (It can also look quite a bit like a ADHD state of executive dysfunction, so if you have both, your psychiatrist will probably say "you've got ADHD" before they say "Hey, have you considered DID?")
This week, the level of destabilization and breaking our normal routine has led not only to rapid switching, but a complete switch in who is front facing; the act of being "the front" ie the Alter folk are talking to at any given time (different than being The Host: the Alter/Headmate who Fronts most often). Due to the blending; multiple Alters/Headmates being present and co-conscious at the same time; even I don't know who I am right now! 😅 So, due to the confusion and the destabilization, we're going to take this theme and run with it, just drawing on our own personal experiences of DID and dissociation, instead of broad science. We're hoping this will also help "humanize" this disorder a bit more for the TVN community, so as always please feel free to ask questions if you have them!
To start with, there's the video that @Cattrin al'Modrah posted above about what it's like having "tantruming children in your head" so let's talk
Living with Headmates/Living with Being a Headmate
It can be a strange experience, coming to terms with not being alone in your own head. It can be an equally disorienting experience to find yourself looking out of eyes not your own, at a height you're unaccustomed to, in a body that feels like the antithesis of everything you know to be true. I have a wonderful headmate who is a Maternal Introject; the idealization of the mother we never got; but she stands at a full five inches shorter than I do, her body is shaped differently to mine, and our idea of what constitutes "appropriate clothing" couldn't be further from each other. I know she's around when I start looking for an apron in the kitchen, consider making more food from scratch, and start reaching for the three 1950s house dresses we keep in the closet just for her.
Her purpose within the system is to make sure we're properly fed & hydrated, we're taking good care of the body we all have to share, and that we're being kind to ourselves while we do. She's also fairly likely to be present in medical situations, given how much medical trauma we've undergone, even if our pain controller Jareth is around to do his job. (pain controller isn't a broad system term, but we use it to mean the person who handles physical pain best, enjoys piercings and tattoos, and is more comfortable doing the necessary blood draws for our autoimmune conditions.) She takes care of the emotional issue and the stress being around medical things or in pain causes, and Jareth takes care of the physical parts by helping to dampen our experience of the pain.
There are many of these sorts of symbiotic relationships within not just our system, but systems in general. Particularly in those with more than 5 headmates. I bet if you take another look at the System Mapping section from Week Two, I bet you could come up with a few yourselves!
For the most part though, once we got over about 15 consistently fronting Headmates, we started getting a bit lost when loved ones asked us "who's out right now?" The initial fogginess of having to get used to a physical body instead of just floating around the headspace is an odd experience at the best of times. Add in some work stress or pertinent relationship issue we're trying to solve, a deadline on the calendar and some looming appointment no one wants to attend and sliding into the role of Front can be a difficult thing. So while on the outside it might look like we're spacey, avoiding eye-contact, and struggling to find the words; internally we're trying to force our internal form to match the body enough that we can pilot effectively.
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Imagine for a moment, if you would, floating in a quiet calm blackness. It's the perfect temperature, you're in the safe comfy place between awake and asleep, and you can distantly hear voices. A pleasant conversation. You could be content to stay like this for hours, only vaguely aware of the world beyond your sight and your touch, just drifting cozily like you're wrapped in a warm blanketing fog. And then, someone says your name in just the right inflection, the perfect pronunciation, and you know immediately where the dark place ends and you begins are you're suddenly quite conscious and awake and there's a body wrapped around your idea of yourself that.... doesn't fit.
You are as you have always been, and the body you find yourself in is only 5'5", rather soft and round, covered in tattoos you don't remember getting, and the glasses you can feel on your nose are not something you'd ever choose for yourself.
How disorienting might that be? How odd and strange, to assume your height is different only to stumble the moment you try to walk or leave the chair you're sitting in now because well... no your legs are a bit shorter than you thought and your shoulders narrower- a multitude of differences to get used to in the space of a moment. And to make it all look natural, as though nothing at all were wrong!
DID is a covert disorder by nature; it's purpose is to provide the brain a new pilot to navigate dangerous environments as subtly as possible so no one suspects; not even the host (until confronted with the reality of things). A switch; one Alter/Headmate switching places in the Front position; can be as simple as a hand twitch. A yawn. A blink. A turn of the head and a shrug as the new Alter tries to assimilate to the body- And yet, behind the scenes... a form of controlled chaos.
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Each distinct Headmate can have preferences for clothing, aesthetics, food, drinks, manners of speaking, gestures, even preferred postures. The more comfortable a system becomes in its systemhood, the more these preferences begin to come out around others. It might become quite easy for someone familiar with a system to know who is fronting due to vocal changes or an accent becoming more frequent. We Always know when Damien is around, because he has a Midwestern drawl that he can't quite keep concealed all the time. Meanwhile Jareth tends towards playful insults and quips that are more accurate to his personality (clove cigarette smoking college goth years spawned him, and it shows.)
When it goes well, it goes swimmingly. Each part moving in harmony, taking care of each other, like a giant friend-group or family whose sole purpose is to protect the house they share and make sure it runs together perfectly.... When it goes wrong, though... yes, it does tend to feel quite a bit like tantruming children screaming in your head. Sometimes for hours, sometimes days- it depends on the root cause.
Due to this, systems tend to be more hyper-aware of themselves and their surroundings. They can be sensory-seeking; using stimming or textures or food to relax themselves; or they can be reclusive when things begin to upset their delicate balance. Some systems are well known for understanding load bearing behaviors; the things in life that support the balance & keep things stable, like an hour walk to work to calm the mind instead of a half-hour stressful commute by car; and work to keep as many of them in play as possible to maintain their stability.
But just like Singlets; affectionate term for those without DID; those with DID tend to take responsibility for their collective actions, their needs, and their responses to outside stimuli. And while systems might have different or more exactly support needs from those around them who are willing to take on that role, we understand that we share the society we live in, life isn't just about us and managing our traumas. We just share a body as well as social space.
Which leads us to the second half of this week,
What Is Treatment Like?
For years it was considered best practice to encourage systems to fuse; become as close to a singlet as possible by fusing into less and less distinct Alters. This was done through various means, but the most common were therapy, electroshock, and hypnosis. These days however, current science encourages systems to only fuse if they are comfortable with it, and instead to pursue integration; lowering amnesiac barriers, sharing memories, and becoming less distinct individuals. The middle ground to these two options is something called Functional Multiplicity: a combination of fusing fragments and less-distinct Alters, lowering amnesiac barriers, sharing memories, and agreeing upon system roles so that the system may work more cohesively and effectively with the lowest possible amount of dysregulation.
It is also important to note that, despite Final Fusion; fusing all Alters into a single cohesive identity; still being a goal for many systems, a significant stress, new trauma, or similar occurrence can break this fusion and re-split the system or cause new alters to split from the fused identity and start the process over again. This is a risk some are willing to take, but after going through stress fusion; in this case, total rejection of Alters/Headmates and determination to act as a singlet by forcing all Alters into dormancy and/or fusion; multiple times where the next big trauma split everything apart again and the amount of familiar headmates we've lost to it... to us, fusion feels more like death than safety. More like loss of autonomy and agency than comfort. A system without this history may feel quite different! In so many ways, DID is a highly individualized experience.
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So due to these realities, and the science currently available, best practice is considered to be helping a System; and whatever individual Alters feel comfortable engaging with the therapist; to accept the trauma that happened, process those memories, and find ways of coping with their lived reality. This commonly takes years; not only to create a rapport with the therapist and the concept of therapy altogether; but to sift through highly compartmentalized trauma and find ways of meeting the members of a system where they are.
Inner Family System talk therapy has helped us immensely, and when undergone with a trauma-informed specialist, can provide a framework that even someone not familiar with DID might better understand. Even if you don't "get" the concept of Headmates, most people can understand needing to reparent a traumatized Inner Child to better heal old emotional wounds. It might be easier to conceptualize the angry Inner Teen whose autonomy was ignored, and their need now to find healthy ways of rebelling and exercising that autonomy than it might a distinct and separate Alter going through the same things.
Other systems might prefer EMDR; Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing; which I honestly don't know a lot about other than it should not be undergone lightly nor with a therapist you don't trust due to potential issues. Someone else might have a better handle on it and be willing to answer questions!
Regardless of the specifics, a trauma-informed therapist with a background in dissociation can help significantly. Just being able to talk to a professional who can help you sit with the emotions that recalling trauma brings up, the broken relationships that might be struggling to be rebuilt, and give direction on ways to process it all can be the difference between struggling with this burden alone, and finding some measure of relief. While there are definitely still stigmas surrounding PTSD in general, and DID/OSDD specifically, if you are afraid you might be experiencing dissociation and/or multiplicity, there are ways of keeping this diagnosis off your paperwork if you have an understanding therapist. If you or someone you know is struggling, there are mental health professionals willing to provide you accurate and compassionate care. You don't need to struggle alone... whether that's alone as a system, or alone as a singlet.
Help is out there. You are not alone, and there are so many communities of people going through the same struggle. Don't be afraid to reach out.
