On my blog entry entitled What is Polyfragmented Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)?, a reader posted the following comment:
I was diagnosed with DID but have a really hard time believing it and not thinking of myself as a huge liar and fake. I don’t ‘lose time’ like I hear that some people do. Also. I do have memories of bad things that happened when I was a kid, just not a lot, you know, only a few memories from when I was a kid. But it is not like it is all just a big nothing. I think I have fragments, but maybe not polyfragemnted cause I dont think there are that many of them. But then, who knows really…Anyway. how much time do you have to lose, and/or how much memory do you have to lose to have DID? I am trying to get out of the Dx really, I don’t want to believe that it is true. And sometimes when I look at it and the DSM I think, well myabe I don’t have it. But then I think some of the stuff I remember now, is only after I remembered it after working with the therapist who fired me for a long time. But then that brings up another problem, and that is of false memories. Ugh. What if I am just making this stuff up? ugh. I hate being DID. I sometimes wonder about fragments though because I feel fragmented but don’t have ‘names’ for a lot of parts, and it seems like everyones got names for parts, but I guess they could just be fragments without names. I dunno. Anywya, sorry to ramble on. ~Pax
Pax’s comment shows the conflict that many people with DID experience. In fact, the whole point of DID is to enable a child to live in conflict – to be “innocent” at school and a compliant abuse victim while being abused without ever acting on the emotions that result from living this way.
I had a difficult time believing that I had DID as well. I had no memory whatsoever of the sexual abuse. I had always remembered comparatively minor abuses and assumed I was as “f#$%ed up in the head” as I was due to them. The problem was that, if the only abuses I suffered were what I had always remembered, then it wasn’t enough to explain the severity of my aftereffects.
You might find it helpful to read through the Incest Survivors’ Aftereffects Checklist. While I was completely unaware of having DID, I would have related to a majority of the symptoms appearing on this checklist. I thought they were unrelated issues, not a profile of someone who had been severely abused.
I had always prided myself on having very clear memories from childhood, but the truth was that I only had a few crisp memories. When I actually explored my memory bank, it was mostly wiped away, including the memories of every single Christmas from birth through age 22.
At first, I thought I only had one alter part. (I actually became aware of the alter part before I became aware of the abuse. From what I have heard, that’s different from how many child abuse survivors heal.) Then there were more and more and more. Most of mine did not have names, nor did they need to. Most were fragments, holding one emotion or one memory or even only one part of a memory. I didn’t need to name them – I needed to love and accept them back into being “me.”
Re: false memory syndrome – I am not saying that it NEVER happens, but I suspect that wave of media blitz in the 1990’s was to discredit people like you and me. Some of my abusers were powerful people in the community – powerful people have the resources to sway the community. Who is the community going to believe? The VP of a Fortune 100 company or a f@#$ed up little girl who didn’t remember the abuse until she became an adult?
I periodically have readers try to discredit me, either on my blog or through email. The one question none of them have an answer to is this: “If I made this all up, am psychotic, or someone else put all of this stuff in my head, why I am getting better? Why is therapy and talking about what happened resulting in me growing into a healthier version of myself?” If I am a liar, psychotic, or someone duped by a shrink, then my emotional state should be deteriorating, not getting better. Therapy should not be working if any of those explanations are true.
The question you have to ask yourself is, “Does this fit?” For me, my life was like a jigsaw puzzle that made no sense. I had suicidal urges, OCD, an eating disorder, insomnia, nightmares & night terrors, low self-esteem, panic attacks, etc. I thought they were all separate issues. The missing piece was the child abuse. Once I had that piece of the puzzle, the rest fell into place.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
Blooming Lotus 
For me I did not find out I was a multiple I discovered not everyone else is.
I do not lose time. One of us always knows where they are it is that others do not know where they have been. The ones of us that are out may not know where we have been or what we have been doing one of us does. Could be said we all lose time.
I think it is critical to look at it from it is CPTSD/DID in that the trauma is the cause and the DID or multiplicity is the result. Deal with the cause by processing the trauma and for me the DID/multiplicity takes care of itself. That being said processing the trauma exacerbates the DID/multiplicity. So at times the processing does lead to feeling crazy and such.
For me some have names and some do not. We had some not complementary names and tried to change them. That was a wrong road.
I love the concept of well I do not care what you think I am getting better.
I know the false memory thing happens. Competent therapists now avoid that issue. They create a situation where the person can express with out being lead. I find it helpful to understand that PTSD was not really a widely used used until the 80’s and then only for combat experiences.
I am lucky in that it is intellectually impossible to deny that I am multiple. I did not do that drawing that is not my handwriting I never had that office etc.
I have a funny one and an example of how my reality can be misconstrued as denial. I was at a petting zoo and a girl took a photo of me. She said that she hoped a photo came out as I was kissing a cow. I told her I did not kiss any cow. The photo did come out and there my body was kissing a cow. I looked at the photo and said that is not me. I was not in denial that was not me. I did not deny that was my body. It was not me. That was Mikie who has integrated so now I kissed that cow.
It is about how you define person. As we did not share experiences we were different people that could become one.
We always took responsibility for our actions. That we shared. In is my believe that some people have external companions which is a way for the person to do what is socially unacceptable. That to me is not multiplicity. They have a memory of the action. When they say “I did not do that.” they are lying.
I am poly-fragmented, as well. At least, I think that’s what it’s called, when you have more than 100 alters?
I, too, realized that I was multiple before I remembered any abuse. No therapist told me, I figured it out on my own. I was confused, because I had all the symptoms of DID–it was the only thing that fit–and yet, I kept reading that you had to have suffered horrific abuse as a child. I knew about some mild abuse, but nothing that should have caused DID. Then I started having flashbacks. Through the flashbacks, I was able to piece together what kind of abuse it was and who the perpetrators were.
There are still many instances of abuse that I haven’t fully remembered, particularly with other abusers. It seems like, once I became a victim, perverts crawled out of the woodwork to take advantage of me. In addition to the ritual abuse, I know of at least five other people who sexually abused me. I only remember flashes, glimpses that tell me who they were. Perhaps someday I’ll remember more.
Despite the fact that the DID Sourcebook is like a guide to my life, and despite the fact that I took a long, complex test at my therapist’s office that says without a doubt I have DID and am not faking it for attention, I still have periods where I feel like it’s not true. That I’m making it all up. That I’m wrong. That I imagined the abuse and none of it really happened. When that happens, I try to re-read a few books on DID, to remind myself of why I came to that conclusion in the first place. These symptoms fit us as if the book was written by someone spying on our life. There’s no other explanation! We have DID, and we’re poly-fragmented.
But we’re healing. Right now, we’re not even in therapy. We’ve had several breakthroughs and we’re in a much better place than we were five years ago.
I can totally relate to what Midge said here. I too was aware of most of the symptoms of DID before I was aware of my trauma. In fact I was aware of my parts years before I’d ever seen a therapist. I wasn’t aware of time loss till a year ago, and this may be helpful to the original commenter: you may lose time without knowing it, because you fill in the blanks with your imagination. DID is there to help you remain functional, so it is quite possible that your mind hides the time loss from you.
As for how horrible abuse has to be for DID to develop, I disagree with what most people say, and feel that it is not the abuse itself, but the sense of being extremely overwhelmed, that creates DID. Each individual has a different sensitivity to this. I for one still do not remember horrid abuse, but I am autistic and blind and was a premature baby, which probably caused me to have attachment issues without the relatively “mild” abuse I suffered already. These things also probably made me more sensitive to trauma, including non-abuse trauma (medical trauma and such), and this could’ve caused me to develop DID without extreme abuse. Of course it is still possible that some memories are hidden, but it is also possible to have developed DID from “milder” abuse if you are sensitive to it. This my therapist and the research I have done agree with.
I do not know if this helps. I have parts that are not multiple. When they are our I function as one person. They are aware that others of us do not function as one intellectually. One of us will tell our therapist. “I am not one of the ones that is multiple.” Usually followed by “I have no idea what I am doing here.” Smile
We most often experience more than one of us being present and do not have a host rather many hosts.
We have often wondered if there are more trauma victims like us and the “host” is really the one that deals with the therapist most of the time. The therapist observes one being out most of the time and therefore that one is labeled a host. The therapist “sees” the one that deals with them and then “sees” another one out so “sees” a switch from one to the other.
I do not know if my therapist can sense or “see” more than one of us at a time. Sometimes one of us will say something like. One of us is keeping us amused and she will say “I can tell.”
We have often walked into therapy and said “You do not know who I am and I have no idea who you are. I have heard of you and know some things. Word on the street is you are OK. I will see.” That sort of thing.
Sometimes we have said “I have no idea who I am.”
We are “arranged” more by season than anything else. A reptilian brains thing we expect.
thank you for this post, Faith
Sometimes I think “maybe these things didn’t happen, maybe thing’s were ‘normal'”. I recognise that that is because a part of me is just saddened by what happened and quietly wishes it hadn’t. That’s in opposition to the rest of me which is glad of the validation and explanation for my symptoms, not glad it happened, obviously. This part is just grieving I think. I sit with that feeling, and it passes soon enough. It’s just like a voice inside that needs to be heard and understood. It’s main feeling these days is a kind of distant, philosophical sadness that any child should experience such things; I think it used to be different, but I can’t really remember.
My understanding of false memory is that it’s 1. been falsely promoted for reasons I won’t go into here and 2. only really a risk in cases of incompetant *hypno*therapy. I know the second may not always be the case. Anyway, Faith’s point about progress made is, I think, the best one. Genuine results don’t lie.
No, not quite in opposition to the rest of me, more complementary. 🙂
Here’s a resource I found validating, a university study of lists of corroborated cases of recovered memories. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/Recovmem/ Sometime after I found this, I also found physical scarring from a traumatic incident from early childhood I’d remembered as an adult. False memory syndrome is not a real thing. It’s not medically recognized, just created to discredit us.
I should have been clear that the false memory theory is not scientifically valid. I was just being realistic in that much like a confession can be coerced there were cases of over zealous therapist leading children.
I find that accepting that recovering memories is complex to be best and that healing is what is important.,
I am well aware of the people who fight to keep those that are abused discredited.
Faith,
What a process it is~ and seemingly quite a bit different for each person with strong parallels. I wish I had a sister like you do to confirm my suspicions… I know a little about my friends bro abusing me, but I know there is more… But the one I am most suspicious of is sort of idolized, so although I’ve hinted about it, I quit when I hit the brick wall.
I hate all this false memory crap. I think if you have something in your mind, whether it happened or someone told you it did, it’s still messed up and the person needs help to find their way out…. questioning someone coming forward for help or assurance is ludicrous and cruel. Unless there is court case involved, then I guess there has to be a devil’s advocate (so to speak). As a mom, I take everything my son tells me seriously, and would not think twice about confronting anyone who he said was not treating him well.
Sigh, I don’t know what any of this has to do with this post, but after reading it, this is what came out~! Anyway, thanks for sharing. As always, it’s a pleasure to read your writing and you have provided a lot of food for thought.
Peace,
m
Pax,
I too did not recognize that I lost time. My brain was very adept to filling in the blanks so that I did not see the lost time. For instance: I believed for decades that I was sick a lot during my 11th grade year of high school, I was sick every month for 2 weeks with tonsilitis for the whole year. When I would come back to school I was always amazed that no one wanted a note and I didn’t have any work to make up. It was a very large school and I figured that the staff was not on top of things. I made A’s and B’s that year.
It wasn’t until I started examining those memories and realized that it didn’t make sense….there is no way I would’ve passed that year if I had only attended for half the year and never made up missed work. I was in fact sick only once during that year, my brain just did not allow me to connect the dots until I was ready. I now know that I was in fact in school but another part of me took over often that year due to abusive circumstances.
So sometimes, “lost time” isn’t as apparent as we might think. Also, I’ve recently discovered that some of my lost time over the years has been in fragments of what I call “lost emotion or connectivity”. What this means to me is that some of what is blank and is lost or missing isn’t so much time but rather connectedness and emotions. I may remember the event, sort of like seeing a movie, but I have no memory of how I felt or how others felt during that event.
Hope this helps, it’s taken me years now to finally accept my dx of DID because I didn’t fit very well into my perception of the criteria. My therapist, however, has never had difficulty recognizing DID in me.
barbi
Hi, this is Pax. Thanks so much for your post faith, and to everyone for all the responses! I think it is amazing that there is a possibility that through doing this therapy work, that I might get some of my lost childhood memories back. Because, when you mentioned not having remembered christmas since you were a kid, it kind of struck me that I don’t remembre christmas either. I mean, I remember seeing a picture of a christmas once, oh and I do remember one christmas when I was a teenager, but I definitley can’t remember more than that. I don’t know if ‘normal’ people remember their christmas and birthdays though. But, yeah my past is pretty much lost in a fog to me. I just chalk it up to a really bad memory. It would be nice to think that if I do this work that maybe, well maybe, I could patch memories back together again and have some continuity to my past. Is this what happened to you? I mean, I am sure that my memories would be riddle with the details of the abuse which I know went on for most of my childhood, but still, to have a clearer picture of my childhood, who knows, maybe there will be something good in there?
I like what you said, Faith, about if it wasn’t true, then why would you be getting better with therapy, and not worse. I guess you are right, that is the thing, if it’s what we have to do to get better, then obviously something is going on. So, if we get better with DID treatment then isn’t that the main thing? Cause right now I am pretty messed up. lol.
The funny thing about me, is that people are always thinking that I don’t have emotions. In fact, my parents I remember used to yell at me about that. Cause I would never respond emotionally to anything. I was just a blank wall. Still am I guess. Never really show emotion. I FEEL it, inside, and sometimes I Think I am showing it, but in the end, it still turns out that no one can tell. It’s just easier to not show emotion I guess. I am hardened. There is something inside of me that I am protecting. A fragile thing.
I don’t know about switching that much. I mean I have workedwith a therapist for a couple of years just on what I remember and then new things coming up, but not much on the DID and integration and identifying alters and such. But he did dx me as DID. I guess we were just too busy dealing with the onslaught of memories. I can’t tell when I switch. I just know that it is hard to remember what has happened to me from hour to hour, day to day, etc. etc. I guess though, it might be normal not to realize or understand or to know that you are switching or that you do switch? But I dont know really. I just know my life doesn’t have very much continuity. And referring to the no emotion thing I was talking about before, I think that people can’t tell if I switch, because we just don’t show emotion. It is something that is just locked down. Except of course, for the times when there is emotion shown, but that feels pretty foreign to me and I don’t really connect to it much. Hmm, maybe that is an example of me switching or something. I don’t know, I haven’t got it all figured out. It is confusing, very confusing and it seems like things are true, then not true for other things, nothing is just one way, there are all these exceptions to everything. And, if that weren’t bad enough, everything is constantly slipping away into the darkness.
You all have given me hope! I am really hoping now that if I do this work, I will be able to actually remember some of my life. Is that what has happened with you all? Also, of course, I would like to not be such a basket case. Doing the whole acting out, self injury, depression, suicidal, terrified of people, can’t keep a job, nightmares, flashbacks, etc. thing, is getting kind of old and would like to have a more ‘normal’ life.
I am also glad to hear some positive opinions when it comes to the false memories issues. That is one that really bothers me a lot. I never had a therapist suggest anything to me, but from somewhere out of my head I have remembered a lot of pretty insane things happening to me, and wonder sometimes if maybe just saw a bunch of really strange movies when I was a wee kid. 😦 who knows right? No way to tell. But the memories bother me, a lot, so I guess you guys are right, I just have to get them out and deal with them, true or not. I have to accept them, or I will never get past them…
Sorry to have rambled on so long…
~Pax
Hey Pax,
You would be surprised at the programming that can be done on children by their abusers. Faith has older posts about how some abusers even go so far as to tell a child that sex is called something else…. I’m not sure if phrases or words are used exactly, but it’s all in an attempt to cover their ass should the child decide at any point to tell. I don’t know if I’m explaining this right, but Faith will know what I mean. There are all sorts of tricks abusers use to make you think you are crazy, or more importantly to make others think you are crazy….. and therefore not believe you.
You are not crazy…. just try to take things as they come and don’t judge yourself harshly. Save that for the person/people who earned it.
Peace and healing,
mis
Hi, Pax.
My memories were mostly linear after we moved (when I was 11) and the ongoing severe abuse stopped. I do have memory gaps after that, but it’s only when abuse happened again. As long as no abuse was present or fear of abuse (such as at holidays with my mother), for the most part my memories were linear in adulthood.
I have recovered a ton of bad memories, but with them have also come good ones. I have recovered a very crisp memory from childhood about the “perfect lazy day,” playing in the grass and enjoying being alive. Gems like that help make recovering the bad stuff worth it.
I am glad you are talking about. Keep talking! :0)
– Faith
I still wonder if I have DID but I have wondered if I had other things in the past that have been confirmed that I do not have. (I used to think I had narcissism but I was seeing myself as the narcissist instead of my parents. I guess that was a coping mechanism.) One thing that I do is I’ll think something like, “I should move this piece of furniture there.” Then, I’ll think, “Yea, I think so too.” I’m not sure if that means anything.
Coming to terms with a diagnisis of DID is difficult for most everyone. I can identify a lot with the writier of that comment you shared. I, too, had some memories of abuse/trauma, though some of the deeper relational traumas I had were hidden. I literally could not see some of it, and when I later could, there was no doubt with me that those things happened because the memories were so clear and as if they were always there, but I had forgotten them only to remember them again. The hardest part for me was seeing with clarity thatthe things that happened to me were abuse. That seems ridiculous to me now, but I just couldn’t see it. Defenses in action.
I have written some posts on my blog that may be helpful for anyone struggling with the same issues as the writer of the comment, but I do not want to place the links on someone else’s blog, but ifyou are interested, you could visit. Yblog, and click on the “Email Me” link in the top left, tell me what you’re looking for, and I’ll send you the links to that posts.
Lothlorien
Hi, Lothlorien.
Feel free to post the links. :0) They might not publish right away because comments with links are frequently filtered to my moderator queue, but I’ll publish them the next time I check in. :0)
– Faith
wow I am all but 2 of that list-not afraid of dark anymore and mirrors.