My DID

I have different alters for different things. I once used to dissociate and lose time a lot, but I never really thought it was odd until years later. I do recall dissociating/losing time since childhood though. I did think it was normal at the time. I now know it wasn't.

I have had different therapies over the years for DID. Prior to that, I was misdiagnosed. Thankfully, my diagnosis has been consistent. I've only found one other veteran with DID. There are a few veterans who have PTSD with dissociation though.

There's usually a spokesperson for the alters, and I tend to switch with the spokesperson. The spokesperson can speak for the littles, etc.

But when we're alone, or when we're just dealing with life, we will switch and there will be no need for announcements of who is out. The alters will just come out to handle tasks that are sometimes triggering or too emotional. Expressing emotions was nearly forbidden growing up, so it comes as no surprise that I have alters for that.

My alters recall many of the trauma memories that I only have bits and pieces of. Some of my memories are my own, whereas others are blended with images of the alters taking over or something to that effect. Other memories are confusing, and sometimes there aren't any memories per se, but rather just body parts or images of an object with some gloomy emotion attached to that memory of the object.

I don't really try to piece the puzzle together like some people have done in the past. I would like to do narrative therapy one day, but I'm not ready for that. I do that once in a while, however, but only when I feel safe to do so. My alters will sometimes write my T an email. It's mostly from the spokesperson though, but she doesn't know that. The spokesperson does write on behalf of the alters, especially the littles.

There are occasions when the actual alters will come out and speak to my T. And my T will know who they are. It's eerie how she guesses correctly most of the time. There are times when she guesses incorrectly, especially when it is just me feeling strong emotions similar to an alter. I suppose that means integration - when I feel what the alters feel.

I try to believe and accept that what the alters went through happened to me and the totality of fragmented, shattered me. But in my existential world, in my mind, that is, I still see those as what the alters went through - not me. I can have "empathy" for the alters and nightmares about the alters, but it's hard for me to truly believe that certain things happened to me. Perhaps those were from the eyes of a child, where thing are true, but they can be described in childish ways. Or perhaps those things really did happen to me, only, I can't remember them as me fully - only bits and pieces.

Perhaps the bits and pieces of what I do recall happening to me are clues into what happened right before an alter took over. I never really connected those dots until I had two rounds at a trauma treatment center that helped me with that. There were no suggestions or iatrogenic effects or culture-bound syndromes, like skeptics or proponents of false memories (Loftus) would say. Rather, at the time, I had no knowledge of psychology, and I had no knowledge of DID at all. I only knew that I was "going crazy" and dealt with postpartum depression right before I placed my daughter for adoption. I saw all these images that I saw years before I was pregnant, and what scared me was those images would return. I found a loving family to adopt my daughter so she didn't suffer with me. My daughter is now 19 and in college. I'm so proud of her.

Years later, I was able get treatment for DID. The pastor of my church at the time helped me when I was homeless and dealing with a bunch of things. She gave me money to fly to a trauma treatment center. She was aware of DID, and she knew me for about 2 years. She stopped counseling me pastorally, which didn't help when my alters at the time were triggered by spiritual stuff, but she always knew that I needed more help. She was the one who suspected DID, since she was trained in trauma, though not a licensed psychologist. Sure enough, I was diagnosed with DID. I left the church eventually, in particular because the trauma triggers were too much to bear.

I received spiritual healing and a bunch of other great coping tools (including art-based coping skills, guided imagery, psychodrama, relapse prevention, and more) at the hospital. They helped me journal with my alters, and they helped me process through some of the traumas that I could remember and that some of the alters could remember. It was the start of something good, and it helped me to feel more alive and grounded. I learned that I didn't need to be part of an institution in order to feel spiritual. I learned that I could heal from spiritual abuse and more by finding self-care ways of connecting with nature or safe objects. I could believe in any higher power I wanted, or I could simply believe in the simplistic beauty of nature. It was whatever I wanted to believe life was for me, and that felt really freeing and healing. It helped me feel safe amid many harms that occurred in the past. I wasn't censored for my experiences of spiritual abuse, so I was able to freely share my experiences and my alters' experiences in group and in private individual sessions with my T. We had daily therapy, in addition to daily modules we attended.

After about 4 total months of inpatient trauma treatment (2 months one time and 2 months another time), I had most of the tools to move forward in life. I had to find a new T that treated dissociation, which was challenging to do. Skeptics consider dissociation to be some other diagnosis, which can lead to the wrong treatment, iatrogenic effects, and misdiagnoses. Others weren't trained but did their best at using whatever skills they could teach me, such as with CBT. But I needed a safe place to process trauma with my alters. And I needed to be able to do it in bits and pieces, not super fast like most PTSD treatments.

The great thing about having good therapy now is that my current T will sometimes ask if we're all listening. She doesn't just ask for one alter or another, but she includes us all. And she believes us. When we would say that other Ts didn't believe in DID, she replied, "DID is not a religion; it's not something you just believe or don't. It's a true diagnosis." - Or something to that effect. She then would say that she believed me.

She would always speak to me, too. But she'd leave room for any alters - including the angry ones - to speak. More often than not, a spokesperson would speak, but then sometimes the real alter would come forward.

Sometimes we would process trauma, and other times she would just know that I'm not ready for it, even though some of the alters are. She'd listen to the alters when I would lose time, and my alters would feel better, which helped me to feel better, even though I wasn't always coconscious, or even though I would be in and out while trying to hear.

Other times, I would just talk about how I processed my symptoms with the alters, such as grounding with the alters present, or finding safe things to calm my nerves when I was feeling triggered by something.

I can relate a lot to Robert B. Oxnam, the author of "A Fractured Mind." That's the only book I read, which was suggested by a previous T a long time ago. That's about as close to the DID I experience, though I have more alters than he does. I found his life fascinating because he held such a prominent role, despite him having parts. I think he did mention somewhere recently that when he was diagnosed with DID, he stopped working. But he's one of my personal heroes.

I wish I could just say that all the alters' traumas happened to me, but I truly can't feel or see that wholly. It still feels like I'm triggered by my alters, but I have "empathy" for them when I feel what they feel sometimes. But I do know the bits and pieces of memories that preceded what the alters experienced, and so that lets me know that bad stuff did happen to me. And even my half-siblings (who didn't grow up with me, but grew up with our dad and a different mom, long before I was born) had similar experiences as me. One of our sisters passed away, and some of us think that she had what I have - DID. The rest of them have CPTSD. My full sister and I are estranged, but she acknowledges some of the traumas, which coincide with both the bits and pieces I remember and the stuff my alters remember. That lets me know that what happened to my alters may be described differently than what I would have described had I been conscious, but nonetheless happened to me. It took me years to process the grief, depression, shock, and panic of that.

I don't have as many panic attacks anymore. I also don't lose as much time as I did. If I do lose time, it's just minutes - not hours or days or weeks.

But the more I become aware, the more PTSD symptoms I experience, and the scarier life is.

My newfound OCD symptoms occurred during this pandemic. There's a person with the same name as me, but she goes by #2, who is more obsessive-compulsive than I am. I try to heal from OCD, but she's adamant on protecting all of us from harm, and protecting others as well. She's super duper afraid of contamination, and she never wants to leave the apartment. But the rest of us - alters and myself - need to get out and walk sometime. Still, I feel what she feels.

Overall, my T has observed that I struggle with expressing emotions, as well as feeling them. She's correct. That's an observation that I had overlooked all these years. I do recall that I'd get punished or threatened if I showed emotion growing up. And I held positions where showing emotion was frowned upon. So I got used to stuffing it all in. What made things really tough was when I would feel the emotions on the inside but be incapable of expressing them on the outside. My actions would show the emotions more than my feelings would, such as words, switching with alters, body movements or gestures, etc. I'd tense up a lot, too.

There are times when I would just cry and cry and cry, and it would feel like the pain would never end. That's what I fear happening, too, when I do actually express emotions. I feel safest expressing them with a trusted T than by myself though. And I have used the crisis line whenever I do feel strong emotions that I can't contain - like crying. That helps when I can't contact my T or when I don't have therapy.

I do what I can to keep safe. Last year I struggled with suicidal ideation, but this year it's more like a quick thought. I used to wake up feeling suicidal, but my T sending me good-morning emails every once in a while for about a year or more now has truly helped me to not have those feelings first thing in the morning. It was also something nice to look forward to on business days. Now she sends those emails less frequently, but I'm actually okay with that. I'm learning to feel better more now without the added reinforcements. It was great that she had those reinforcements during the darkest times of my life. Losing a friend to covid in 2020 really freaked me out. I knew him from over 20 years ago, and I could literally envision his traumatic end in the ER at the VA in Texas. He even published a video right before he died, and he tried to be brave and strong at the time, but he still lost to the virus. He was well loved by many, and his wife survived. She's still struggling.

They are closer to my sister than to me, so I just stay distal.

This pandemic has brought about more alters taking over, but I'm more coconscious now. I'm also more aware of the traumas that have happened to me, and how and why the pandemic brings up those traumas for me. My T allows me to pace my trauma processing, so we can go at a very slow pace.

I eventually want to do some transition ritual to move past each and every trauma, like I've heard others with only PTSD doing, but I'm so not there yet.

I could never really handle trauma groups, except for a short time.

I was in a military sexual trauma group a few times. The first two attempts at different facilities lasted only 2 visits for me before I quit. The last one was offered online, and I lasted a couple of months before I quit. Turns out, the workbook we had was triggering and invalidating to most at a certain chapter that seemed more victim-blaming/shaming for military veterans, so the piloted VA program said we could discard the book and work on other safe things. I had already left the group, but not before making two very special friends. One of my friends knows I have DID, but the other one doesn't really. I announced it during our confidential group, but most people didn't know what it was, so they kind of just ignored it. I was kind of relieved about that. It's hard to explain what it is. The social worker running the group understood though. And much of what I and two of my alters had experienced were similar to the others in the group. Sometimes I was brave enough to speak out, which helped the others share their experiences after me. I thought that was kind of cool that others in the group thought that I was helping, even though I was kind of just venting a lot.

I was afraid of the VA for the longest time because I thought what happened to me in the military could easily happen to me at a VA facility - or worse, that I'd run into one of two of the perpetrators. The good news is that a different perpetrator of the night of MST that happened to me and another military servicewoman was sent to the brig, so there was justice for that. The sad part about that story is that the wife of the perpetrator apologized to the entire platoon of women. She was there to help me when I had a pelvic stress fracture and tried to shower with crutches. I couldn't really walk, and I was in pain trying to stand up or sit down. I was on bedrest for about 6 months. I was honorably discharged later on. My pelvic bone never fully healed correctly, and I have a leg-length discrepancy that a civilian doctor found on my x-ray, when I complained of hip pain and leg pain. I still have pain to this day.

I initially joined the military to be "tough" and to "fight the bad guys" and to "prove that I'm a good American." I was born and raised here, as were my parents. But growing up with racial trauma from my own father led me to feel very self-conscious, with low self-esteem and all. Growing up with multiple abuses probably brought about my alters, but I didn't know I had alters at the time I enlisted. Instead, I just thought that losing time was "normal." The bits and pieces of trauma memories remained bits and pieces, but they were strong enough to bring out the desire to protect and serve in me. I also thought that the military would be very far from any of the childhood sexual abuse that I had experienced. I wanted to be more than that, and very different and able to defend myself and this country. The problem is, I was betrayed yet again, and both myself and another servicewoman were sexually assaulted.

I couldn't remember the full details, and I didn't know I had an alter who could - an alter named Julia. My T helped Julia, but it's more than 25 years since I was in the service. Back in the service, I just kept losing time. There were times that I shot expert on the rifle range, and I can't even remember those times. There were other times that I got sick and kept throwing up my food or just not eating, which alarmed my superiors. They didn't want me to go to Sick Bay or Psych. They wanted me to just report my physical injuries. So I followed their orders, as they were trying to protect me in their own way. But the threats of secrecy about MST were there, and that brought up a lot of childhood traumas for me. I felt like such a wimp and coward at that point, and I was terrified of everything and everyone. I left there feeling worse than when I went in, and I was broken - physically and mentally.

I tried to work, but I kept quitting many jobs.

I eventually went on disability in my 30s. And it was just a few years ago, in my mid-40s, when I finally had the courage to go to the VA.

My record at the VA shows DID as one of the diagnoses. The DID is NOT service-connected, but my PTSD is. My pelvic stress fracture, CFS/ME, and IBS are also service-connected. I'm grateful for all the help I'm getting now, because there are many things that the VA offers that civilian doctors just don't, including the Vet Center and the Veterans Crisis Line. All of those helped me through this pandemic and prior.

I still switch, but it's not that obvious to an untrained eye. My T knows when I switch now, or when an alter is nearby and coconscious with me. I'm grateful for being accepted for all of me, not just the "frontal" or "host" me. I'm grateful for having a T who is willing to help treat my dissociation and OCD and many other things.