[veniamviam]

i’m not diagnosed with any dissociative things on an official count, but i know i dissociate and ive been diagnosed with (among other things) c-ptsd and i deal with everything that entails. so denial was a big, easy thing for a long time i guess. but it’s become suddenly something i can’t keep ignoring, and somehow it’s made me feel more alone than ever. (i tried talking to my psychiatrist and he recommended a psychologist, but i chickened our.)

mike is the first one i became aware of. as a grounding technique for dissociation i had started to state basic facts about me and when i “woke up” somewhere and was a little confused about it, usually in the back of walmart by the fish, my responses were “mike” and “twenty” (my name isn’t mike, and i’m 22). i think mike might be short for mickey, because there’s a weird bad tight feeling in my stomach whenever i mentally refer to him as michael, and i think it was him who put our town of salem name to be mickey (last name). i think he’s the one who’s been taking care of me since i was a child (“i’m an adult and i’ve been an adult since i was twelve” is probably mike’s doing, not mine). he’s good at handling stress, or at least braver than me.

there’s a quiet one too, who i think holds most of my pre-twelve memories. a lot of what caused my c-ptsd happened when i was 6-11, so it’d make sense for them to be around that age. i think we wrote to each other on scrap paper at work the other day, when they were scared after a coworker yelled at me/us—mike offered to talk to our manager in the morning as it’s the first time she’ll be in since the coworker yelled at me.

this morning i “met” johnny—he might be the quiet one. i’m not sure. his handwriting was very similar, and it seemed like he really struggled to write, but i honestly don’t know. i just had a sudden thought of “hi, johnny,” and then we wrote on paper for a few seconds. nothing much, mostly me writing, but. enough for me to say hi, at least.

i’ve heard of people being able to “see” their alters, or rooms within their heads where the alters live, but i have aphantasia and can’t see things like that in any situation. i also haven’t heard anything, unless it was mike who said hi to johnny this morning (which is very possible). mike offered to talk to my boss by way of an app called “whatsfake” (which is like kik but you control both sides? if that makes sense?) where i’d been writing to them in hopes that they would say anything, and then shortly after the quiet one who might be johnny expressed their fear of my coworker, but that’s the extent of our communication.

so basically i might be one of three or four people, and i feel very alone about it. i feel guilty because i don’t want to seem like i’m shunning them, but also i don’t know how to do… anything. i’ve started trying to talk to someone on betterhelp, but he’s only responded once and i don’t know that he’ll have any advice for me because this isn’t exactly common. i’m scared that i’m just delusional, and i’m scared that i’m not. i don’t know what’s going on, and i want to be able to talk to the others and hear what they have to say and learn about them and be less scared right now.

i feel so lost.
-t

[Solnutty]

Well, I certainly don’t think you’re delusional. I have DID and I relate to a whole it of this. The first one of mine who started talking to me really freaked me out. Of course he’d been talking to me for years but I just thought everybody experienced internal voices. The second one, a little boy named Ash, started writing notes to me. It was very strange because he wrote everything backwards in red pen. Now I know them better and we cooperate a lot. I have quite an interesting family of persons in my head. They sometimes come out and do their own thing, but at least we communicate about things.
Personally I think you’re on the right track and your attempts to communicate are good. It also sounds like you can sense them a bit.
In my experience, it was less scary to think I was somehow making it all up, because if they weren’t real enduring parts of me then there was a whole lot of stuff I didn’t have to deal with. One of my insiders wrote in our journal that it’s amazing how much credit I give to my own will and imagination, as if I’m even capable of making these things happen somehow.
There are lots of people who share similar experiences. You don’t have to be all alone in this. I have found a lot of comfort and insight from the people of this forum.

your post made me think of this video. hoe its helpful.
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https...1AOFWKtDrq3-1k

[dlantern]

I'm moreso relating in terms of movies and music. On Netflix, there is a movie called "For your eyes", just add some of the commentating reading and it is comparable to a DID film... Later on, I began seein the inner world it is quite an accomplishment for therapy at this level.