@stahrgeyzer - ((((safe hugs)))) - I'm so sorry you are struggling with dissociation really badly. Psychiatrists only fix symptoms, so they don't tend to get at the etiology (cause) of the symptoms. They can only offer medications for your symptoms. Dissociation remains controversial among both the psychiatric (MD) and psychological (including social work and LPC) communities. It's therefore very difficult to find adequate treatment for dissociation and related trauma. It's hard enough to find a trauma specialist, but even that much harder to find a trauma-and-dissociation therapist. Still, they exist, and hopefully the advancements in training and higher education will provide adequate training for those on the trauma-track.

Meanwhile, you could also look into self-help books and consider perhaps having a chat scheduled online here for just us dissociators. Maybe we can create a monthly Dissociation Chat, and see how that goes. Perhaps we can all try to find a workbook and work on that together. We can then report back to our therapists and/or psychiatrists, if we have one, and continue to make progress together.

I've never worked through a dissociation-based workbook before. But I think that might be safer than a PTSD-based workbook. I'm not ready for the PTSD workbooks, as many chapters tend to be triggering. I think that's where our dissociation comes in.

Anyways, what would you say to that?

Meanwhile, have you tried journaling with your various alters? What helped me when I struggled with alter-based/DID-based dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization coexisting altogether was being in a trauma treatment hospital, learning at first to write in a journal to my alters and then have them write back, understand the D. Haddock book on dissociation and what it means, and learn to use internal family systems (IFS) coping to communicate in writing and perhaps in "our head" or in the "inside world" with our alters. We can make decisions together, figure out what is safe and what's not, and figure out what is freaking us out about this or that. We do that more and more now - without the journal, but it took the journal for us to learn how to be more coconscious and less dissociative (losing time, feeling like the world isn't real, and feeling like we're not real in the world). We still have moments where we'd lose time or dissociate via derealization or depersonalization, but it's less often. We are more coconscious and manage our dissociation by being more grounded and present.

Grounding techniques sometimes work for those without DID but only PTSD, and then again, sometimes they don't when the trauma trigger is too high.

Perhaps you are unaware of what is triggering you to feel this way, and why these feelings come and go.

If you ask inside via writing in a journal for starters, you can simply write: Hello inside people/alters. Do you know why we're feeling these feelings, and why the world seems so scary that it doesn't look real right now? You can wait on an alter to answer that question in the journal. Give it time, and that alter or another spokesperson for that alter will write back to you. It may freak you out at first to see an alter write back, but that alter will. Eventually, you'll work with the alters to figure out what is scaring them, which then affects you. Where it gets tricky is they may not want to tell you what the trauma is, since it may trigger you. They are essentially protecting you.

In essence, our brains are protecting us from remembering and possibly reliving the traumas, and we subconsciously don't want to remember. So that's what's going on in our brains, and why our brains automatically dissociate. But healing from this isn't just a choice. Healing is learning to be coconscious with our alters and to work together to identify triggers and learn how to ground ourselves together. We can find safe spaces, safe things, and validation that we're in a world that is relatively safe and that accepts us as real people, even if they only know that "the body" or "the host person" exists. It's okay, because we all share in part with the body/host person.

We hope that makes sense. You're not alone in this struggle. Don't give up on finding a good T, and don't give up on trying to work things out with your system. You got this!