A Story About My Friend with DID

Trigger Warning? Not sure but just be a little wary.

Just a forewarning, I don't have a disassociative disorder, just someone really close to me has it and throughout the past years I have been working with her daily and I figure I have a long story to share and if others with DID can glean anything from my story then it's well worth it.

To start, I was 15-16 at the time when I first met this girl, I'll call her M, so M and I really hit it off and we started to date, she was a couple years older than me. A few months into us dating she told me that a while ago she was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, sometimes she would fall asleep and wake up in class, she's blacked out before, she wakes up and things are moved around in her room, she doesn't really know what is happening. And I'd barely done any research on DID at this point so I began figuring out what to do. I figure, these personalities within her are people, and in all honesty they probably have a lot of their own problems, especially since their life is so different. So first I advised M to put a note in a place that is bound to be used, in this case it was a shoe, the next day the note was splayed out on M's desk, no response on it. So that clarified to me that there was another personality, I began to address the issues within M's life, letting her talk to me about it and then advising her in ways to try and help herself such as imagining the situation she was in and then what would have been the perfect thing to say to her or for someone to do for her in that moment. M was also in a lot of toxic relationships especially with people online, I told her of their toxicity and soon she recognized it and she stop hanging around all those "friends" that would use her. Well eventually another one of M's alters came out, this alter didn't have emotions, she was sadistic, she was also an administrator type of personality, she talked to me because she said I was the first person she found interesting and so I began to talk to her, it was difficult to maneuver a conversation with this new personality that didn't have any kind of name, she had a God complex and saw herself as above all humans. I entertained her because I wanted her to come back to talk to me in the future, I kind of competetively spoke with her trying to run her into paradoxes in her manner of thinking, I told M to go speak to her school psychologist and then I told this new personality to speak to this therapist to try and figure things out. Well after a few months of this with the therapist and I kind of working a bit together, he can only see her so often and so I tried to give her continuous support to try to help out.

This brings us to a kind of second phase of things. It turns out that this other personality had locked all of her emotions away, she turned herself into a psychopath so that she could deal with her previous trauma. All of her emotions came back in what she described as a "tornado." She didn't know what emotions she was experiencing since just the whole idea of emotions was new to her. Well I thought about it and what she seemed to need was affection and to feel understood and so I provided that as well. I then learned that she had trapped the others as well, considering them dangerous, and she had kind of trapped two others into memories. She did not know anything about the other personalities, just that they seemed dangerous and so while I helped her cope with having feelings I had her explore these other personalities. At the same time I was helping M try to figure stuff out, I got her to figure out how to project a board in her mind where all of the alters could write to one another, the personality that had just gained emotions could also make M recall memories and so I had her recall memories of music and it would serve as a kind of MP3 player internally. All along the way I reinforced the idea that all of them were a family, they were all sisters, and I reinforced the idea of a family bond which worked to great effect. As the still unnamed alter was exploring the other personalities she found that two of them were entangled with one another with one constantly tormenting another. One of them was a little girl, 6 years old, I had her seperated from her tormentor and M quickly took a motherly and loving role with her, she called me her dad she also didn't have a name yet. The personality that had been tormenting her claimed to be a man, had a bit of a superiority complex going on as well, she was kept contained but was very aggravated. Around this time I also realized M didn't allow herself to feel the emotion of anger, she turned it on herself and commited self-harm, and so I told her that I was going to anger her since anger is a part of life and we needed to work it out together even if she hurts me and to just focus it all on me. And so I managed to anger her and unleashed a sea of internalized hatred that lasted a long time but ended with me holding her. Some time later I spoke to this aggravated personality, she said just wanted to commit suicide and take everyone with her and claimed she knew a way to seize control.
It is worth noting that the alters/personalities very rarely seized control simply because of trauma or stress, control was tightly controlled by the administrator personality and I had them make an orderly schedule. Likewise it is worth mentioning that the administrator personality could internally connect the personalities so that they can talk to each other as they please without being at the conscious level.
Anyway it turns out that the way she was going to seize control is by manipulating the pool of anger but I had just let that out of Michelle and so I gained the respect of this aggravated personality, and I talked to her and she claimed to be a man solely because men were strong and she was strong in her words, soon enough though she agreed she was a woman. At around this time I offered to name these personalities as they never had any names, I spent a week figuring it out and it has been several years and they still say they love their names. Isabel was the little one, Elise was the aggravated one, and Victoria was the administrator.
So now I had them all talking to one another, I had M coping with her PTSD and guilt, as well as her anxiety and depression. Elise could manipulate dreams, Victoria had a perfect memory and a vast array of internal abilities, Isabel was just really adorable. Things generally seemed to be working, as with most families problems do tend to arise, for instance Elise just lets her feelings out as she gets them, so I had to speak with M, Victoria, and Elise about this and tell them about Elise and make sure they all understand each other and know that they are understood and are all very important. It took about 3 years to reach that point but this was every day for three years working things out and thousands of hours of my own research just solely dedicated to it. M now had a wide array of good friends, she was happy, she had a family for the first time in her life although it was within her, her life in every way was drastically changed for the better. This is also the time that I told Victoria to go see about these buried personalities, they weren't dead they were more just deeply hidden in memories. The one personality she managed to find was a sociopath, I thought about it, her "reincarnation" was essentially up to me, I decided that even though she has no feelings, it may be an unimaginable torment to be stuck not existing and so I had her brought to consciousness, and yes she is creepy but she likes living far more than what she had before and her name was Camille. So now M who was really just entirely alone, also now had Camille, Victoria, Elise, and Isabel there and they were just a family, they have family game night once per week, they all talk to one another regularly, they all have their schedule time slots. They all seem to benefit one another.
And really that is most of my story on this, I'm not sure if it will help anyone but hopefully if people don't realize it they can understand that even if you share the same body or if you feel misunderstood by the others, well, you are still just one big family when it comes down to it and all of you are important and all of you serve a greater purpose to one another and it is through embracing our understanding of one another and understanding that all of us serve a greater purpose that multiple personalities, which may seem like a curse to some, really becomes a great blessing. M has a family that she never had, she doesn't ever feel alone, she always has someone to talk to, she has people in her life that make her want to achieve and that help her achieve more and together they can really overcome any obstacle. Thank you if you reached this far, PM me if you maybe have more questions about this story or more details you'd like explained. And have a really wonderful day and know that you are cared about by at least one person named Atronach.