A curated series of posts

Navigating the narrative

Interrogating the stories we tell about dissociation

This series analyzes the dominant narratives used to frame dissociative identity disorder—within clinical discourse, popular culture, and online communities. It explores how language, metaphor, and repetition shape what is seen as valid experience, legitimate identity, or clinical truth.

Posts in this series

“If you have alters, you have trauma”: a causal collapse This post examines how the popular use of the term “alter” has shifted from clinical metaphor to cultural identity, and how cultural narratives around trauma and dissociation can lead people to retroactively construct trauma narratives that don’t reflect their actual internal structure.

Coming soon in this series

  • "Is this valid?" and the crisis of conceptual overidentification
  • "People reject DID because they can't face child abuse": a misleading claim
  • "There are others inside me!": a poetic, not pathological, truuth

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