The Name Game

Hello all,

If you don't know yet, I'm new to this whole DID thing. Well, I had a question about the naming of alters. All of mine seem to not have names, and most seem to answer to my name. During therapy today I was hypnotized and my T asked my alter her name. My alter said she didn't have a name but wanted one. After the session she spoke in my head and asked to be called Abigail.

I'm just wondering if this is normal. How did your alters get their names? Did you name them, or did they name themselves? Or did they just surface in your mind with names already? I'm having a hard time deciding how much of this is real, and how much of this is in my imagination. Should I start referring to my alter by Abigail?

Any thoughts or stories about naming your alters would be most helpful. This is all new to me and feels hard to believe. It seems so unreal, yet I know it's happening.

Abigail is a nice name hun. It seems like the names just come to me. I ask "what's your name?" And wait for them to tell me. The fuller personalities have their names. Some of the more timid ones we work it out by collaboration, but for the most part it's told to me. Of course I asked them if we can start calling them by their job name to help relieve the confusion of cross referencing name to a job, most of them agreed. Only the littles and teens have to have names because they don't exactly work.

For me to decide if it's my imagination or not, I've noticed that imagination takes personal effort and I feel like I'm in fantasyland, but everyone seems to be conscience of it and everyone's a critic and voices their opinion.

My alters tell me they appreciate me treating them like people, because they are. So for the littles, I try to keep a clean mind. All this is actually going to make me a really nice person if you was to think about it!

Some of the alters in my system were very secretive about names and didn't like anyone to know them (including other alters). Some of those would also be very secretive about themselves, and some would pretend to be other alters (kind of hiding behind them). Others were very outspoken about their names and separate self-identity. A couple of young alters didn't have a name at all and were glad to be gifted with one. Some fragment parts didn't have a name and didn't require one. So there were lots of different scenarios in our system.
Whatever each individual alters feeling was about having / not-having or owning / hiding a name, it always eventually made sense as to why that was when understood in the context of their individual experiences and history.