Wanted to add to my post but editing time has past...

Cavaliers... just like having DID is individualized for each person...so is their healing path and how it feels to them... no one is going to be able to tell you how its going to feel for you.

People with DID have to meet the same diagnostic criteria but their own life, trauma's, medications, culture, what and how their internal system is set up, what their "other accompanying symptoms" are and other stuff.

let me give you an example....

for me integration was a normal process. for my culture and such integration / healing began the moment I entered a college class that required the students to do an in class activity of a short psych eval, take that to a treatment provider of our choice and go through official testing for mental disorders then enter treatment based on what the testing process found. that was the beginning of my healing from DID. with out that beginning I would not have learned about me, how dissociation was affecting me and my life and what I needed to do to take care of myself and my problems.

a friends healing path began with a traumatic accident. Her home burned down and she was in treatment for that when it was discovered she had DID so her process began differently than mine.

This friend has an alter that was the characteristics of a mountain lion. how her healing path felt to her was lots of ups and downs, violence, aggressive things she had to work through. she had this alter because she needed to be ruthless in order to survive being "sold" back and forth in a prostitution ring from being born in the prostitution ring that her mother was part of.

I did not have an alter with the characteristics of a lion. I had much calmer animalistic characters inside my alters. Which resulted in my healing path feeling much smoother than hers did for her. my alter Eagle gave me the speed and keen eyesight to be able to know when danger was coming and "take flight" so that I could get away from one of my abusers and if escape failed I could mentally "take flight" from the pain and abuse that was going on.

I had a sexual alter, this friend did not. there are many differences in my internal system than my friends so of course our healing from DID was also going to feel different.

my suggestion is to not worry so much about how it feels for others. instead notice how your own healing path feels for you. if you dont like how things are feeling for you and that things seem to getting worse if they do, then talk with your treatment providers, they can help you so that things continue to get better without feeling like things are getting worse.

healing from DID usually does not get worse or feel worse. its a situation where if a person gets triggered by something an alter takes control to handle that trigger.

like my treatment providers told me when I asked about this.... when you have no more alters taking control it means you have all that you need to handle that trigger on your own. you will know what to do and how to do it, just like any other normal person handles their triggers. he was right. though its hard and sometimes challenging,, I have in me everything I need to handle my own problems now because all the alters, everything that they were is now back together with me as one whole personality again.