I am a perfectionist. For most of my life, I thought that was a good thing. However, I now see how much it has negatively impacted my life. In this post, I explore my understanding one aspect of that—I believe that the combination of my perfectionistic tendencies plus my capacity to dissociate to a high degree is a main cause of my difficulties in the present.
Growing up, I strived to be the “perfect child”—I made good grades, never got into trouble, and was always submissive, smiling, and pleasant to be around. I made life incredibly easy for my parents and everyone else around me. Of course, I had my difficult moments, but for the most part, my main goal in life was to embody perfection in every way possible. And I believed that I succeeded. However, while most parts of me strived for and held a perfect view of myself, not all parts of me met expectations. In order to maintain my internal perception that I was perfect, I used dissociation to disown the parts of self and experiences that didn’t fit my perfect view of self. Because I have DID, I learned the ability to subconsciously compartmentalize and disown any actions and experiences that are ego-dystonic, thus allowing me to curate my view of my self and the world around me. In order to maintain this perfect self-view, I relied on maintaining dissociative barriers between parts of self—the “perfect” parts of me disowned the “bad” parts of me, resulting in amnesia for times where I didn’t meet my own inflated expectations.
For most of my life, I was able to hold this perfectionist view of my life while still remaining functional. Although while in high school I had some academic difficulties, I found college to be pretty easy, primarily due to the fact that I had no life outside of school and academics. I strived to only earn As, and was successful, for the most part, because of how much energy I put into my studies. Overall, I had a pretty solid understanding and memory of my life during my undergraduate years, and showed effectively no negative symptoms of DID.
During grad school, things became more difficult. I was surrounded by peers who were more hard-working and intelligent than I was. I was taking classes that were more difficult than I was used to, along with doing research that I didn’t feel like I had enough time or energy for. I struggled with the transition from undergrad to grad school, but I wasn’t aware of it. My automatic response of disowning difficult experiences took over, resulting in me truly only seeing the “good” aspects of life. My worldview was so skewed towards the positive that I didn’t see myself slipping more and more behind as my degree progressed. Parts of me held onto the perfectionistic view of self and life, while other parts of me were struggling with the reality of grad school, and neither parts were fully aware of the other parts. In grad school, my parts became more separated from each other than they had ever been before because I was not able to maintain the perfect view of myself, resulting in amnesia for large chunks of my grad school experience.
Over time, I went from functioning well at a high level to being effectively unaware of large aspects of my life and the world around me. I was not meeting my own expectations, and instead of allowing myself to realize that, I automatically turned to dissociation to make myself unaware of my perceived failings. While in reality, I was just encountering the stress that almost every graduate student faces, it was enough to trigger my dissociative defenses. However, I cannot emphasize enough that, for the vast majority of the time, I was simply unaware that I even had any stress or troubles because I had amnesia for those experiences. Thus, until starting therapy, I genuinely thought I was doing well in graduate school.
It’s only within the past year that I realized anything abnormal was happening. Last June, at the recommendation of others with DID, I started a journal to process my thoughts about my life. When I would read my journal back, I realized that there were entries in my journal that I didn’t remember writing, in handwritings that I didn’t recognize as my own. I’d read these entries and see that they had a very different perspective of my life than I did. Over time, it became clear that I had separation between parts who were aware of my life’s difficulties and those who were not. I had split parts to allow me to maintain my perfectionistic and positive world view.
Now, about 1.5 years after starting therapy, my amnesia surrounding negative life experiences has significantly improved. I now recognize my multiple handwritings and am mostly able to tell when parts who hold negative emotions, memories, and views of life are active. However, once more positive-viewing parts are out, I still have trouble relating to those negative emotions and experiences. I still generally have a positive view of life and self the vast majority of the time, but I’m now also aware of the negative aspects of myself and life as well.
Having DID allowed to me believe that I truly was perfect. Not because I actually was—because nobody is—but because I would disown parts of self and experiences that didn’t fit my perfectionistic view of myself, resulting in amnesia and an incomplete view of my life and circumstances. Because I strove for perfection over all else, I was able to mostly meet my perfectionsitic standards through high school and college—not much happened in my life then that fell outside of my range of “perfect”. In graduate school, however, I fell far behind because I wasn’t able to meet my own expectations. I’d then disown those experiences, leading to amnesia for large chunks of my life. When things got hard, I automatically relied on maladaptive coping mechanisms instead of fixing the problem at its root, resulting in more and more problems piling up. However, now that I am in touch with both the negative and positive aspects of life, I’m more aware of my life circumstances and am functioning much better. I still have a long way to go, but I’m making progress to becoming a more integrated person every day. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned thus far is that I am not perfect, and that’s okay.