I'm creating this thread here to describe my DID world one small step at a time. I share this in emails with my T, but I need to just let some things out and process here. Some of my stuff may come with trigger warnings, so I will try to be cognizant about that and the PTSD that tends to come along with DID.
My mother retrospectively told me that I was a "peculiar child." She said those exact words were what the doctor told her I was when I was two years old. I can only remember as far back as age 3, but I do have a baby in our system. The baby is very shielded and protected by at least one caregiver - maybe more - and a maze with many protectors that surrounds it. So, those are two inner lands so far.
I don't remember a concurrent flow of my childhood, but I do recall bits and pieces. I did lose time in preschool, kindergarten, and throughout my life, really. I had no idea it was "losing time" because I grew up with this, so I thought it was "normal."
I had an imaginary friend when I was 3. She helped me deal with things. She's never went away. But there's another alter who is 12 years old with her same name. They aren't the same person, but they both have the same name.
I had no idea they existed as alters all this time. I just thought that my imaginary friend stood by me for my entire life, and that the others inside my inside world were like imaginary friends - only, they were in the forms of voices and thoughts about "strangers" at the time, since I had no idea they were alters that were behind my losing time (i.e., dissociating).
I was constantly stressed out as a child. Life was chaotic in my home.
And so here is one of many of my traumatic memories pieced together - by therapy for DID - that I can finally recall, with the help of a few alters inside. This is also the beginning of my story, though there are additional memories that happened in between, which I'll eventually write out in this thread. I need some place to process all this. I'll also copy and paste this in an email to my therapist.
Possible trigger:
Constantly screaming, my father was unpredictable. My mother played the victim role really well, too, only, I felt bad for her. I loved them both, but it was tough growing up in that environment. My father would say racial slurs about some people who weren't white like him, and my Asian mother would just take the abuse. There were also painful things that were said about me, and I was also abused. But like intimate partner violence, I was a child who experienced some apologies and periods of kindness from my parents. It didn't last long though.
I always thought that my blacking out and losing time was due to my way of coping with the screaming and my painful, chaotic life at home. I thought this was just "normal," and I thought that I could never tell anyone what was going on. Threats were normal in our household - so normal that I thought it was just part of parenting and what kids go through.
Flash forward to my preteen years, this is when my first clue to having alters began. I switched schools a lot, so I lost track of the number of elementary, kindergarten, and preschools I had attended. I do know that I attended two Jr. High Schools and three High Schools. Making friends was short-lived, due to our frequent moves. I learned quickly to not form attachments. Ghosting became a thing before the word was socially invented.
One of my friends during this time kept calling me by a different name. But she, too, would call herself by a different name. Initially, I thought we were bonding over similar traumas that we had experienced from our families. I felt connected with someone for the first time in my life, and I really loved her. I didn't understand my feelings, as I'm a cisgender female. She didn't have feelings for me like that, but I think she accepted me the way I was. We both admitted to one another that we were sexually abused by certain family members. And we would both lie to our parents about staying the night at one another's homes, just so that we could hang out together. We frightened our parents a lot.
On the nights we went out, we'd use our "made-up names." The problem is, I dissociated so much that I couldn't keep up with my friend telling me about things that I couldn't recall. She's always ask me (well, actually, it was my alter, but I didn't know it was an alter at the time), "You don't remember?" I knew then that something was really off with me, and that my name meant something vastly different than her name. Still, we could have both been dissociators and not have realized it.
I felt like I finally found a friend I could connect with on a deep level! We still had our arguments, and there were some not-so-healthy things that arose from that friendship, such as ditching school. But she also encouraged me to do well in schoolwork, so I did. I found a teacher who cared, but I dared not say a word to her. Instead, the teacher just guessed that I came from a troubled home. I was failing my courses, so she offered to tutor me. My friend at the time thought that was great, though it temporarily pushed us apart.
I started having similar feelings for my teacher that I had for my friend. I didn't tell my teacher that, but I just knew it felt similar. I didn't know what that meant. I feared at the young age of 12-going-on-13 that I was a lesbian. But I didn't know if that's what I wanted or liked. I liked boys, too. But I also loved the idea of "Starman," a television show I used to watch when I was younger - probably around 10, though I can't remember fully. The television show was about a boy who was half, like me, only, his half wasn't a race but rather being half-extraterrestrial. I thought to myself, I could fall in love with a boy like that - with an extraterrestrial. I think it was then that I knew I was pansexual.
The problem is, I hated the "icky" feelings I'd get from my having experienced sexual abuse. I also felt like I was having out-of-body experiences all the time when I was very young (age of 3) and throughout my life after that. I never told anyone about that until years later.
I kept living life as though there were multiple dreams and multiple thoughts, dimensions, and angles to my life. I had no idea that this was all part of dissociating, a connection between my lost time and alters. It was just a weird feeling I got.
When my grades improved, I started spending more time with my friend. We called one another "best friends." I felt really special at that time. I wanted to do more at the time, since I got my grades up and was feeling a little better. I also got sick of being impoverished and wearing thrift-store clothing. So, I convinced my parents to allow me to be an underage worker. I earned money, but boy did my parents pay the taxes on it. My parents allowed me to keep all of my earnings, which was nice. They never told me how to budget, however, which wasn't so nice. My father was both strict and loose as a parent, and he was also confusing. My mother rarely spent time with me, and so I felt distant from her my entire life. I loved them both, despite the abuse I suffered from both of them at times. I was so confused about that, and I was so hurt many times, but I couldn't remember why. I figured, if I got a job, I'd get out of the house, feel better about myself, perhaps make my parents proud, and then hear less screaming. I realized then that I was blaming myself for my parents' behaviors. Nothing changed, no matter what I did.
I still worked as hard as I could, and I bought new clothes. My best friend and I would go shopping and sometimes ditch to go on outings during the daytime. I tried to keep my grades at least average while we did this. We even went out to nightclubs once in a while. We learned to drink alcohol at a very young age because my best friend's uncle took us out. I had no idea how much of a pervert her uncle was to both me and her. We both had that in common - perverted, pedophilic uncles (only, my one was very scary and threatening, whereas her one was kind and giving). Her uncle would drive us around all over the place and introduce us to different men. Without going into much detail, my alters took over to handle all that - or at least most of it, since I could barely recall my memories of that time we were probably trafficked and/or exploited without knowing it.
I'd still work and go to school like normal, but I lived the life of an older teen, despite my being only 13 years old at the time.
My best friend and I had an argument over a boy, I think. I became close to her boyfriend, who was in his 20s (my best friend was just barely turning 15 when I was still 13). I didn't know that was wrong at the time, and neither did she. We both thought her boyfriend was really nice, but she kept cheating on him. He wasn't the type to harm her physically, though he was sick enough to date a minor. And his family allowed it, so they were just as sick. Anyway, I became friends with both of them as they were dating, and then she kept hurting his feelings. I don't know why I defended him, but that caused a riff in my relationship with my best friend. My best friend broke up with him and me as her best friend. So I stopped talking with both of them.
There was also a third friend in the circle, who probably fought for more attention from my best friend. We all tried to consider one another as a trio of best female friends, but I knew that my friendship with my best friend was growing apart. So I just let my best friend spend time with her new best friend. The problem was that I think the new best friend knew some pretty dangerous guys or nightclubs or both.
A few months after not speaking with my friends - not one of them, they called me out of the blue to invite me to hang out with them at a new nightclub. They knew how to drive without a driver's license, and they invited me to ride in their new truck with them. I had to work that night, so I declined. I was also periodically seeing and talking with my former best friend's ex-boyfriend, who wound up helping my father and his worsening conditions. My father hired my former best friend's now ex-boyfriend to live with us and help him out. I thought it was weird how my father just allowed us to sleep together in the same room, but we grew a friendship out of that. He also cautioned me not to go out that night with his ex and her new best friend. He said that it didn't seem genuine, or that something was up.
So I went to work as usual.
About three days later, I received a visit from my former best friend's half-sister. She announced to me and my family and my former best friend's ex that she was murdered. She was shot in the chest by a man who followed her and her best friend home. Her best friend, I later found out, was pregnant, knew the man who followed them from the nightclub, and allowed her to live. Out of fear for her life and safety, her best friend who survived that never said who did it. The newspapers put the story in the paper. It didn't make national news, but it did make a very brief local news story. Once in a while, I'll go back and find that story and read it - sobbing. The alter who spent time with her was never the same from then. It became impossible for any of us in our system to get close to anyone else.
And that's where our childhood memories stood out the most, though there were other traumas within my family and by that former best friend's ex who became out boyfriend after she was murdered. That whole scenario was twisted. I don't know how my father allowed this, but he and my mother did. My parents didn't know anything about what happened to my former best friend, but I had always felt that I would have been murdered had I gone out that night.
During this time, I was in shock and just simply couldn't believe this was happening. Her funeral would have been the first funeral I had ever attended. All the gross men that were involved with us were there. It was sick. It was like a "mafia" of sorts. That's how this whole ordeal felt.
I still had no idea that this was far from normal. I honestly thought that this was the kind of life that city kids go through. I had no idea that we were so abused from so many different people. Attending her funeral was a huge eye-opener.
And yet, I still didn't realize that my worsening blackouts - lost time - were abnormal. I just thought that was about me feeling grief and loss. I had no idea it was me experiencing the worst emotional pain ever.
Anyway, that's just one of many traumatic stories I can remember, with the help of a few alters inside, including the one whose name was called only by my now late best friend. I never had a best friend after that. Ever.
I want a best friend some day, but I kept thinking that I'm cursed. I kept thinking that everything bad was my fault, even though I wasn't there with her. I also kept thinking that maybe we could have fought the guy off or something, that maybe my best friend would still be alive today. That's all magical thinking - all distorted.
Anyway, years later, I learned that the voices and images of other people inside my head were alters. I learned that all the traumas compacted on top of one another throughout my life were making my dissociation worse and yet more visible to me. The amnesiac barriers were thinning, and so I could see glimpses of what some of the alters were seeing and experiencing with each and every trauma anniversary. This is just one of many painful trauma anniversaries that my alters and I experience.
And looking back, just to be able to write this here meant that the therapy helped somewhat. Although, I'd rather not know anything, to be honest. Part of me wants to go back and lose time again. It was painful to process this the first time I was diagnosed with DID and learned how to be co-conscious with the others. It remains painful to discuss, but at least I can discuss it more fully now. Before, it just seemed like pieces in a horror story, or from a horrific nightmare that made no sense.
I'll probably process more traumatic memories here. I just wanted to start with this one for some reason. I kind of know the reasons, but my arms are hurting from typing, so I need to stop here and just rest. It's also very emotionally taxing, too.
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