Parts are created from trauma, not necessarily abuse

Pretty early on in my DID discovery journey, I realized that my handwriting was different depending on which part of me was writing. This was very useful information, as I had taken well-catalogued academic notes for years prior to starting therapy, so I had a solid bank of data of which I could look back on and see which parts of me were active at different times of my life.

One thing I quickly noticed was that any time I traveled to a conference, my handwriting changed. And then when I got back, my handwriting changed back to whatever was normal at that time of my life¹. Internally, this also made sense—I tend to index my life by location rather than time. In fact, in all of my notebooks' index sections, I had added a column for location, in addition to the standard page number and date. My mind likes segmenting my life based on location.

Why could this be the case? Why do I create parts when I travel? Looking back at my life story, it actually makes a lot of sense. My first several years of life involved a lot of traveling. Although I was born in the US, when I was just over 2 months old, my family moved to the Middle East for my dad’s job. As a perk of being an expat, my dad’s job paid for two vacations a year—one for rest and relaxation, and another to visit family. Because of this, by my 5th birthday, I had been to 11 different countries between 4 continents, all on separate trips.

This sounds like an incredibly fortunate childhood, and while it was, it was also very stressful for me. As an autistic person, I regulate myself by following a strict routine. As an adult, changes in plans are very dysregulating, and usually leave me in a detached dissociated state with difficulty picking up the newly created plans. I can only imagine how dysregulating it was for me as a small child to have my routine entirely upended every several months to travel to a new environment with an unknown routine. I had no option—my family chose to travel, and since within my family structure the emotional landscape was already dominated by others, I had to be an easy child and submit to whatever they wanted. This led to me dissociating and creating parts to handle the traveling for me.

This past summer, I went to my first conference while aware that I create parts this way. The night leading up to the event, I remember absolutely dreading the trip, wishing I could back out but knowing that I couldn’t. Then, when the time came, I genuinely enjoyed the conference—the right part showed up for the job. I did inevitably create a part for this trip, and this was the first part that I was self-aware I was creating. I had no control over it; instead, I observed its creation as I walked into the hotel lobby to check in. A new persona emerged, and was ready to take on whatever routine was required of me for my week-long conference that was just getting started. With that part as the dominant part, other parts came out periodically to do what was required of me, like networking, socializing, and presenting. But this newly created part was the star of the show, helping me create a solid routine I could stick to throughout the week to help keep me regulated. Then, on the last day, once again the dread came—this time, I, as the newly created part, didn’t want to change my routine back again as I was only familiar with the one I had created. However, when I arrived in my apartment after a long journey back, a different part switched in and I was so glad to be home and back again in my standard routine.

We traveled to many beautiful locations in my early childhood, and I truly appreciate all the culturally enriching experiences I acquired, which I believe to this day have helped shaped my worldview. I do, however, wish that my parents were more aware of how stressful this was for me as a child. I did not understand the significance of the locations we would visit, and felt as though I was being dragged from place to place without understanding what was going on around me. In pictures of our family vacations, it’s clear that I am dissociating—many of them show me with a blank expression with my eyes glazed over. I learned to regulate myself by dissociating, detaching from the world around me. And these repeated experiences of traveling = part creation have continued throughout my life, increasingly fragmenting my awareness when I take trips.

I believe this is a good example of how trauma, but not necessarily abuse, can lead to the formation of DID. I would not consider traveling as much as we did abuse, but it was traumatic because it was too much for me to handle at the developmental stages it occurred in. One could argue that this was neglect or negligence—that my parents weren’t attuned to my emotional needs at the time. However, it does not fit into the category of extreme abuse that is often attributed to the creation of DID. While this was not the only trauma that caused me to form DID, and many of those traumas would be considered abuse, traveling in the way that we did when I was small had a major impact on how I create parts, and is perhaps the most influential mechanism of part creation in my adult life.