when ever my alters would start doing a new negative behavior my therapist and I would trace back to when that new negative behavior started.. and then that would tell us why its happening and how to stop it.

example ...yrs ago everything was going ok, I was in a relationship with a wonderful woman, and I was happy. this woman and I moved in together. suddenly something new started happening.. my partner kept finding me in the kitchen cutting. she didnt know I had DID and that I was most likely an alter. she would wake up, find I wasnt in bed and look for me and there I would be. She thought I was sleep walking and would take the knife away, lead me back to bed telling me everything was ok, bandage me then stay awake all night watching to make sure I wouldnt sleep walk again. the next morning she would tell me what happened.

Before this had happened I had been a self injurer so first we approached the issue from that angle and through back tracking we discovered it was only happening after this woman and I had been intimate..

what we discovered was that one of my alters was of the religious faith that is against same sex relationships on the intimate level. this woman and I had had intimate moments but they were few and far between. moving in together meant the frequency was naturally going to be increased. This alter was trying to punish me and break up the relationship before her higher power struck her down.

After my therapist and I discovered the reason behind the new destructive behavior, I talked with this woman and explained the situation.. I was DID, what DID was, how it affects me and that I had a negative type alter that was trying to harm me because of a religious issue against same sex intimacy. we went back to the non sexual forms of expressing love. to see if it was just the sex or the moving in together was the cause..the self injuring in the night stopped. from then on we took things at a slower rate. we added rules and a safe word to our sexual intimacy before we added sex back into the relationship, and we never had this problem again.

my point is that when new negative behaviors happen whether its an alter or the host or even with a normal person, adult or child that usually means something recently happened to make the person upset, uncomfortable and feeling like they have to harm or kill their self. find that activating event and taking steps to fix that activating event makes it so that the person no longer needs to self injure.

talk with your treatment providers, they can help you discover why this alter is suddenly self injuring, and help you and this alter stop doing harm to you.