Have you thought about how you conceptualize your internal experience, or the language you use to describe it? I personally hadn’t given either much thought until I learned I had DID. Since then, I’ve had a long journey of learning to understand how I operate, which has required me to think deeply about how to convey my experiences to others who likely do not operate in the same way that I do.
How one chooses to explain how they operate is complex and deeply personal. As such, different people with DID may choose to convey their experiences in many different ways. While some people are extremely creative in their portrayals of how they operate, I am not someone who is inclined to portray myself in an imaginative or sensationalized way. Because of this, I’m still trying to find the language that feels most appropriate to describe my experiences.
The language one chooses is influenced by the underlying model that they use to understand what they are experiencing. My experiences with DID seem to vary greatly, and range in severity depending on if I’m experiencing a trauma trigger or not. On the severe end, when parts take over my body, it can feel like I’m being possessed and another being is controlling me. On the other end, most often switching and shifting between parts feels so natural to me that I wonder if my experiences are even different than the norm. To me, it seems that both these mundane and extraordinary experiences can be explained by the model of me switching, shifting, and being influenced by different internal compartments of memory and experience, which I call parts.
With time, I have realized that I see the world with multiple different perspectives—while I have the perspective of me as a whole person, I also see the perspectives of me as my individual parts. The perspective of me as a whole person is something I was acquainted with before my DID discovery journey began, as it is what most people experience and is thus the societal norm1. On this site, and when I discuss with others about my experiences, I typically portray myself as a singular person as it’s likely how the vast majority of people see themselves, but this language can be limiting to describe my experiences. Writing from the perspective of me as a whole, these “parts” seem to be compartments of many different aspects of my life, such as memory, perception, and identity, that I switch between to navigate through life. For the most part, I only have the perspective of one part at any given time2, and due to my degree of compartmentalization between parts, including amnesia and severely changing understandings of the world, depending on which compartment I am in I may have very different perspectives, opinions, and beliefs. By only portraying myself as a singular unified person, I may be misrepresenting aspects of my experience. But I do not feel like “multiple people”, as DID is often presented—I feel like a singular person, just not a unified one. I recognize that even if the thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs of other parts feel as though they’re “not me”, they actually are me, just a different compartmentalized version of me. How do I convey this experience accurately? One approach is to portray oneself as having multiple different people sharing a body, but that seems too separated for my experience. Is there a middle ground? Thinking and writing as if I am a system of parts, where I am a single person with a very compartmentalized internal experience, can enable me to explain experiences that simply don’t make sense from the more restrictive whole-self perspective, like changing views about a topic, lapses in memory, possession-like experiences, losing time, and even quirks like handwriting and gait changes between parts.
Since starting therapy, I’ve gradually learned to internally reference myself as a system of parts, yet I still translate that to a singular-self language when communicating my experiences as I am hesitant to externally display my internal perspective with others. I like portraying having a unified, singular-self view of life, even though it doesn’t fully reflect how I’ve learned to perceive myself. This is probably due to the fact that it makes me uncomfortable realizing others know that the way I experience myself and the world is different than the norm. When I was young, I was more in-touch with my individual parts' perspectives—I would often refer to myself in third person in conversation with others3. I eventually learned that others did not experience themselves in this way, as I was occasionally ridiculed for it. I learned to hide using this language, even though it was the most accurate language for my experiences, since it was not well received by others. Perhaps because of this, I feel the same way about using other unconventional language to describe my experiences—speaking from the perspective of individual parts, like I naturally did when I was younger, is tainted with shame due to my past experiences, and something I’m working towards getting more comfortable with when appropriate in order to become more authentically me.
While I am used to thinking in third person4, thinking about myself as a “system” is new5, and I’m still getting used to this conceptualization and the language used to describe it. On this site, I have decided to use whatever language is most appropriate for describing the particular experiences that I’m trying to convey—I don’t want to limit myself to a particular conceptualization or vocabulary set. So while I have mostly written from the perspective of a unified self thus far, this may change as I learn what language and conceptualization feels most comfortable for me.
-
I have never had an awareness of my whole life and experience at any given time. It felt like I did, but I only ever had a compartmentalized view of my life at a time. Learning about DID helped me become aware of this. ↩︎
-
Although, as I’m creating connections between parts, this is thankfully changing! ↩︎
-
This is because I have many parts who perceive my life in third person, and when those compartments are active, I naturally refer to myself in third person. ↩︎
-
This is useful for trauma survivors since it allows a detached view of self—one can perceive themselves as the observer of a situation rather than a participant in it. ↩︎
-
I didn’t know this was an option, and it didn’t come organically to me like the third-person perspective did. Now that I am more aware this is how I operate, I see that it aligns very well with my experiences. ↩︎