June 2023
I’m not perfect, and that’s okay
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.
academia amnesia DID narrative perfectionism symptoms
6 minutes
What does it feel like when a trauma-holding part takes control?
I switch a lot on a daily basis, probably because I am polyfragmented. The vast majority of the time, however, I’m switching between parts who are familiar with one-another, so this kind of switching is smooth, with only a small blip in my conscious awareness. I typically call this kind of switching shifting, because, although I am changing between parts, it isn’t jarring and I don’t feel like I have a loss of control—I am able to hold a conversation and mostly remember my train of thought while shifting between parts.
amnesia DID polyfragmented symptoms
6 minutes
May 2023
Disowning different parts of self
One impactful symptom of DID that I struggle with is amnesia, which is significant enough for me that it impacts my daily functioning and severely affects my awareness of my life history. I not only have difficulty constructing a functional narrative of my past, but I also often struggle with day-to-day amnesia. The puzzling part of this all is that I seem to have gaps in awareness for things that are not at all trauma related.
3 minutes
April 2023
While I do experience what one could call “dissociative episodes” where a trauma-holding part takes full control of our body for a period of time, most of the time I experience momentary episodes of dissociation, where a part only takes control of our body for a few seconds at the maximum. However, these can still be difficult and disrupting to my daily life. These types of episodes are quite common for me—they occur several times a day, often clustered together in time.
3 minutes
March 2023
DID is very much internal disorder. That is, unless I tell you that I have it, you wouldn’t know1. One of the ways DID affects my internal experience is that I have significant gaps in my memory, both of my past childhood, and of my present adulthood. But amnesia is tricky—I don’t know what I don’t remember, so most of the time I don’t realize I’ve forgotten anything. I believe I experience amnesia in a few ways.
amnesia DID narrative symptoms
4 minutes
The parts I don’t know about still have control
Imagine if, without your awareness, your deepest, most repressed thoughts and feelings were displayed for the world to see. With how my DID presents, this is something that occurs quite frequently for me. Because much of my most difficult emotions are separated from the core me, I am usually unaware of them until they surface and they’re in the forefront of my awareness. Then, after they are over, I may forget that these dissociative episodes ever happened.
amnesia DID narrative symptoms
4 minutes