[gus8706]

Hi, I am a 24 yr old male and I wish finally, for the first time, to try and explain what has happened inside my mind for the past several years. I apologize if any of this information is irrelevant but I strive to leave the irrelevant material out. I appreciate you reading this and thank you for any comments/suggestions.

I grew up in the country, strict father, loving mother. I worked very well with my hands and always enjoyed fixing things, playing sports, etc. I played basketball my entire life, and was one of the best players in my school. Throughout my high school years I had many relationships and the girl always was the one to leave. I guess I strongly attached myself to them I am unsure. After my first break up, the feeling i encountered was unlike anything I had ever felt. I hated it, I couldnt breathe, couldnt see, didnt want to make things work. I slipped into a willing depression, and it became my friend. I didnt ask for sympathy or pity, it was just nice to be quiet and have no one bother me. I have always loved being by myself, although i dont mind spending time with others or being the center of attention. This relationship break up happened numerous times, always the girl leaving. Then in my senior year, and even a year after, i dated a girl i really liked but my parents gave me an ultimatum: leave the girl or we kick you out. Three times i told my parents i would leave her, but never did. I dated her behind their backs. Then one night i decided I would be with her, I would choose her, so i packed my things, called her to tell her i was moving, then she said it was too late, she had been dating her ex for awhile while we were dating anyways, then she said goodbye. I lost it. The feeling came back, even more overwhelming. I began to start college and didnt do very well, I have the capacity to do well, i just could not apply myself like i wanted to.

I decided to take a break, and for the last 5 years i have dove into the deepest level of introspection you could imagine. From writing in notebooks, reading countless volumes of books, articles, etc. and keeping an open mind, always trying to see things in a different light, from another perspective, so i could find this one thing, this one problem in my mind, which i will now do my best to try and describe to you all.

There is, within my mind, a certain unknown entity or being or thing which clouds, disrupts and confuses and interrupts every thought i have. There are many persons in my mind and they all converse while i try to converse. I cannot speak fluently, for i feel there are too many filters on what i am trying to say. I can almost get to the idea correctly, but certainly can never describe or explain what that idea is to others. I have tried to see things from every angle so that i may come to the truest of conclusions and perhaps this is part of what causes my confusion, i am unsure. Even now i am failing at explaining my problem.

I guess i am unsure what love or other feelings are, in their truest form. I "love" my family but i do not come around. I am not a bad person, I just want to be alone. But stable and alone. But then not alone at the same time. I appreciate the things my family and others have done for me, I guess i am just being too selfish. I find in every situation, there is a level of anxiety that comes with each. I go through periods of seeing my family and friends for a brief time, then relapse into solitude for far longer. I need to speak to someone face to face, in real time, but most people talk in loops. the conversation doesnt move anywhere, its just a closed circle. But i respectfully talk with them in their "circle" because i love to listen. I dont like to talk much, but i wish more than anything someone could understand me, or my mind at least, just a little bit, so that i could converse with them and perhaps, just maybe, get one sensible thought out of my mind and into another's.

Sorry this is so long, I apologize. Any help or comments is appreciated, I didnt say all that I wanted to say, and much of what i did say isnt accurate to my disorder or whatever it is. This is just a start. Thanks everyone.

[here today]

Hi Gus ,

I can relate to the situation of having multiple “persons” in my mind. In my case it’s been diagnosed as DDNOS (Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified). It developed partly, perhaps, in response to an expectation of perfection from the older women in my family – grandmother, aunts, mother. I’ve also been diagnosed with PDNOS – not a specific personality disorder, although I probably qualified for Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder before I had a breakdown several years ago.

Multiple “persons” can be a symptom of other disorders, too, so it would probably be best to see a professional. However, I had lots of therapy off and on during my life and most of it did little good and some may have done harm. So getting information and feedback is a probably good idea, too.

I'm wondering a little about your strict father and if you ever felt like you weren't fully accepted in your family for the person you really are?

Whatever your situation, this website is a good place to write about yourself and what concerns you. I hope that you will feel free to be yourself in what you write here and don't worry about your writing being too long or irrelevant. Like you said, it's a start. And really -- starting without knowing exactly where things will go is kind of fun, I think!

Wishing you the best of luck.

[Girl_Interrupted]

Having multiple persons is also a BPD thing.

I feel like I have several characters inside my head, and I feel like a different person each day or hour or whatever. There's all this chatter/characters in my head, one voice laughing at someone's pain, but the other voice feeling sorry for the person, and other voice not giving a hoot, and so on.

It's a common symptom, because they always ask me if I experience this when I have to fill in this form and give it back, to check up on my progress throughout DBT.

I don't know if you have a Personality Disorder, or what answer you're looking for, but look up the criteria for BPD, or as above, DDNOS.
These are probably the most closest to what you've described.

Schizophrenia doesn't sound very likely, as you've tagged.
It sounds like you've got a lot of chatter in your head, more so than voices, which is what I get ALLLLLLL the time.
Schizophrenia is more so voices, than chatter.

Anyways, TL;DR, BPD might be a possibility, more likely than the DDNOS, since you mention unstable relationships, deep depression, the chatter in your head etc.

You could even be PDNOS like the person above, but unless your life is disordered from your mental health, I wouldn't bother too much about trying to get a PD diagnosis. It's like putting "murderer" on your medical file.

[gus8706]

Thank you

To answer your question, having a strict father who demanded perfection (grades, sports, etc.) might have had an effect on me, Im not sure. But as far as allowing me to be who I am? I really am unsure how to answer that. I dont want to be cliche and say 'I dont know who i am' but I really dont, even though I believe what we do makes us who we 'are'. I never knew what I really wanted, and what I sometimes wanted seemed to change like the wind. I love music, said i would devote my life to it, did, then things changed. The same thing happened about art, game design, and many other interests. I dont know how to answer the question "what do you want?" and it bothers me. I want to be sure of who I am and have a passion that doesnt falter and one I can devote my life to willingly. Any ideas? Thanks.

[Girl_Interrupted]

To be honest, you haven't given us much detail into the symptoms that bother you.

I don't think your life is disordered from everything that you've mentioned, apart from the head chatter.

[here today]

I can definitely relate to not knowing who I was or knowing what I wanted. That led to a kind of amorphous state of affairs so that it was difficult to say what symptoms were bothering me. Who, or where, was the “me” that was bothered?

In the new DSM-5, a significant impairment in identity will be one of the criteria for a general diagnosis of personality disorder. But I agree with Girl_Interrupted. A diagnosis of a personality disorder doesn’t necessarily help you get help. It may be a good idea to keep it in the back of your mind, though, and if you decide to look for a counselor look for someone who isn’t put off by PD’s.

Would you like to me to describe some of the things that are helping me to get over my long-term issues, finally (I hope)?

[småstar]

Originally Posted by here today

I can definitely relate to not knowing who I was or knowing what I wanted. That led to a kind of amorphous state of affairs so that it was difficult to say what symptoms were bothering me. Who, or where, was the “me” that was bothered?
[FONT=Arial]

hello! I'm feeling same way, feeling confused, lost about what i'm thinking of things and me myself. confused about what is what.. Between all the personalityes of me i'm confused who acyually i am

Would you share with us what helps you when you're experiencing this.?

[here today]

This is a little long. My story isn't quite ready yet for a "Personality Disorders Success Stories" subforum but maybe someday . . .

For me, I had shut down or disconnected from lots of my feeling by the time I was 6. I tried always to be good and follow the rules and keep a watch for signs that my mother was getting irritated and might lash out at me.

Because I didn’t actually feel my feelings, they didn’t disturb my awareness and I could do my schoolwork and, later, technical work in the computer field. I did have an eating disorder as a teenager but got over that when it became clear to my logic that continuing to lose weight would lead to a “dead” end. Then I started overeating until I became very overweight. I had few friends but functioned OK socially in school and at work by following the social rules of politeness, etc.

By early adulthood I had a chronic mild depression. I went to therapy because that was the “right” thing to do for depression. It was like putting a bandaid and maybe some antibiotic on an infection on the skin that really welled up from something deep beneath the surface. Therapists would ask me what I felt and I would think about what the logical feeling would be for someone in my situation and say that.

By my late 30s I was married to someone with a somewhat similar personality and we had two children. The family life was pretty good, I thought, but I had some doubts about myself as a parent. I was also getting more and more dissatisfied with my life and me and what I was going to do with myself for the rest of my life in general.

This is where the amorphous sense of discontent and confusion was most pronounced. I went to therapy but, again, I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, so I only went once a month. I didn’t know of anything horribly wrong, so I went to a master’s level counselor who specialized in families. One month I showed up at my appointment and the therapist looked horrified and embarrassed, not happy to see me at all. Turns out she had booked somebody else for the same time slot. I immediately “knew” that I was the one who had to leave, even though I had arrived first. She offered me an appointment for the next day and I came back. She had another client and so was late. I went in, enraged, but holding it all together. I told her about my rage and she laughed nervously. I threw my keys on her sofa, picked them back up again, and stormed out, saying “You’re just like all the others.”

Now that was a pretty serious “something wrong” I thought, so I went looking for a therapist with some better credentials and recommendations. But I didn’t like her a whole lot. So I left after about 8 months. She had diagnosed me with DDNOS, but I didn’t understand the diagnosis and the way she was trying to treat it – trying to get me to identify parts of myself that I couldn’t see clearly myself -- didn’t seem to make much sense. Eventually she said in a strange, kind of surprised and maybe demanding voice, “Who’s not coming to therapy?” Well, I didn’t like that much. And the part of me that (I now know) wasn’t coming to therapy wasn’t about to tell her either!!

I went to other therapists, none of whom diagnosed DDNOS. I did some research and thought that probably I had a personality disorder, most likely Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. But there was no therapy available at the time that could effectively treat that disorder. So people treated me for depression or adjustment disorder or whatever.

Eventually two years ago I decided that maybe DDNOS was something to reconsider and I got to a therapist who specializes in dissociative disorders. Thanks be to God, it seems like a miracle.

Bottom line, when you have disconnected parts of yourself it is important for you to have a therapist, or other social support system, who accepts them all and it’s necessary for you to learn to tolerate them and accept them, too. It’s tough, no doubt about it. But it can be done.

I couldn’t have done it without therapy. But I hope that maybe someday there will be a guidebook for people with these disorders so that maybe they can help themselves.

Now that I have most of my feelings I know who I am better. I’m not at all sure that person is socially acceptable sometimes, though. When I’m feeling an “unacceptable” feeling that used to be disconnected, then I’m sometimes afraid that I’m unacceptable even if I’m not behaving in an unacceptable way. I can’t quite tell the difference yet. This is very tough stuff, too. I don’t like being rejected and I don’t want to hurt other people, either.

I had to come completely unglued, and then really felt the mental warfare, before I found help, before I could tell anybody what I wanted help with. Doesn’t have to be that way, though, I don’t think, if people get better information about dissociation early in the treatment process. When I have good information, the rational part of me can help in the process.

Social support has also been very important for me. Many folks with personality disorders find personal relationships, including or especially those with family, difficult. I’ve been very lucky to have a good in-person support group for 10 years. For anybody reading this who is just starting out in the process, though, psych central is great, too.

Lastly, general therapists themselves need better education in how to recognize a dissociative or personality disorder. And to carefully consider whether or not they have the training to help the person. We can come off really like jerks sometimes and if the therapist thinks that's ALL we are -- well that's actually very incompetent and judgmental and, sadly, very hurtful to the client.