Okay. This is gonna be a long one.
Trigger warnings for sexual abuse among some other things up ahead.

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For starters, I am a victim of childhood sexual abuse. Around the age of six or seven, I was raped repeatedly by a family friend over the course of a few months.

I've also been abused emotionally throughout my lifetime, causing me to suffer intense abandonment issues. I've been told too many times for me to count that people truly cared about me, only for them to turn around and reveal that they'd been lying to me or for them to leave me when I needed them most.

I've been diagnosed with PTSD for the childhood sexual abuse, but I'm certain I've been traumatized by the repeated abandonment as well.

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Now that my history of abuse is out of the way, I can get onto where the dissociative symptoms started.

I think the first time I noticed anything close to an alter appearing was around my eighth grade year.

Now, I don't call them alters necessarily, because they're not quite like an alter at all, though they do share some traits. I'll explain in more detail later.

But, at the beginning of my eighth grade year, I began experiencing violent thoughts. Most often the thoughts were of desires to hurt or kill other students, and they were extremely strong feelings. At first, it would seem like these feelings were my own, but, that didn't feel quite right. There was this slight feeling that they didn't quite belong to me.

This was when I started drawing pictures of Lily. Lily was a character that I had made up, as someone of an artistic nature often does. I drew her often and she was pretty much a manifestation of these thoughts I was having.

Then, along with those violent thoughts, I began to feel another presence. I could visualize Lily in my mind, and it felt like those thoughts were coming directly from her. This is where it started to feel almost like she was an alter, but not quite. We shared a consciousness and never had any loss of memories, but it felt like Lily had control.

It's difficult to explain the exact feeling, but it's almost as though Lily's thoughts were replacing my own. We were separate, yet the same person. The only way I can describe it is as if Lily was acting through me. I was still myself, but acting on Lily's thoughts.

I never actually acted on her violence, but I would often find my mannerisms and choice of words were a reflection of how Lily would speak and act, rather than how I would. I often felt really badly about something I said when Lily was "in control".

Lily disappeared for a long time. Maybe around a year or so? The feelings came back, and so did Lily, but in the following months, so did some other feelings. They didn't have names, but they were definitely other entities like Lily. I would find myself acting in different ways with different mannerisms and speech patterns, but still feel mostly like myself. It didn't really bother me, though, because I hardly noticed it, aside from Lily.

A couple years after that, and many of the others disappeared, Lily still remaining. But, different ones appeared, but this time, they were more complete, with names and faces. I've cycled through over thirty that I've counted that have appeared and disappeared in the last couple years. Too many to name, and if I'm being honest, many of them I don't quite remember. Though, most of them seemed to be personalities based off of fictional characters.

But with these new ones, I began to become more aware of Lily and what she possibly might be, as well as the others. Though, the others didn't appear until I'd done some digging to figure out what Lily was. It feels to me like my mind might have made them up, considering they didn't all begin appearing and disappearing until after I started looking into dissociative disorders.

But, they all had their own likes and dislikes, mannerisms, speech patterns, moods and feelings. Some even had different ways of writing. I remember one named Frasier preferred to write only in cursive.

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Since starting anti-psychotic medication, my mind has grown very quiet. Sometimes I think I feel the presence of another one of them, but I'm not really sure. I really miss the company of them, but at the same time, I did have quite a few violent ones that would rather have me dead.

I just want to know if anyone has had similar entities like these or if maybe I could be making this all up in my head? Or maybe they were just voices inside my head? I have been diagnosed with depression with psychotic features. I'm just very lost and confused about all of this. I'd just like some secondary opinions from those who might experience something similar.