Hello.

As Ive said before I am not a doc. I am someone who lived with DID for most of my life. I am now whole and hopefully, integrated. I continue to make myself stronger in my sense of self by practicing good habits and staying away from people in my family who I know are not good for me to be around.

It is my personal belief that for those of us who are DID we reacted in a way similar to automatic self hypnosis when we dissociated and kept from feeling the terror and threat of the trauma which we were in fact experiencing. We detached form the feelings and expereince via hypnosis.
I noticed late in my therapy that it is /was always in my eyes and sight focus that I first reacted to a trauma and association related to trauma. My eyes' fixed' and I fell under, nodded off and dropped down into a lower layer of consciousness. I think that yes, this was self induced hypnosis. I also think that this originally saved me from experiencing and feeling an unbearable trauma. Self hypnosis likely became a defense mechanism that was there for me in other times when the pain or threat was too great for my head to handle.

I also think that with DID two things are common and shared among the functions/alters/others : one thing is our body is used by all and the other common thing is that we all share and have access to the same unconscious. Body memory will be present no matter whose expereinces left the impression. This can be a teaching tool to use for connecting with a dissociated memory /expereince. Also, in addition to my body remembering , segments of my life frequently were avaliable to me via dreams and nightmares which are also functions of the unconscious. Sometimes in my dream state I was actually there back in those moments and expereinces which intially were cut off from my wide awake awareness.

I think that these things can be used as tools in therapy for DID. Also, there was a function of me that presented herself to me early on and who via hand written notes (automatic writing I guess you would call it) watched over me and encouraged me and even let me know there were others beside myself, that I was not alone. This function was the one who stood behind all the rest and who knew about us and what was going on. My doc referred to her as the executive function.