My advice is to not get caught up in the latest lingo. The DID language has changed quite a bit since 1990 when I was diagnosed and it will continue to change. Describe your inner process in your own words with your own understanding of how you function in the world. It's a more powerful expression of how you see yourself, your experience, and the disorder. If your therapist wants to attach psych jargon to your process, that's fine. However, the words don't change or validate your inner experience. I think they just get in the way of clarity. The less we see ourselves as a collection of jargon, the easier we can relate to ourselves as unique individuals with our own unique coping strategies.

I've dealt with DID since I was four. I understood time did funny things when I was in kindergarten. Living in a situation where I was surrounded by schizophrenics, I also learned that reality was unpredictable as well. I went through treatment never using the term "protector", "critic", "fragment", "alter" ...etc. I shared my head with 7 other people who had names, ages, and unique sets of memories, skills, and deficits. It was my description of my inner process that helped me relate to myself. It was intuitive. I never jargoned up. I learned to understand what was going on inside me in an evolutionary way. I'm sure the hospital where I was admitted for a year and my psychologist had their own terms, but they always used my understanding rather than lingo when treating me. They were right. Imposing yet another kind of reality onto me would have been destructive.