October 2024
One of the ways I like to think about my dissociative experiences is through the concepts of internal reality and external reality. I think of external reality as being the objective aspects of one’s external environment, including physical surroundings, social interactions, and events. On the other hand, I think of internal reality as being one’s subjective internal experience, which includes one’s thoughts, memories, and emotions. One’s center of focus is usually balanced between their internal and external realities—they are aware of and are able to interact with their external reality while simultaneously being able to perceive and connect with their internal reality.
conceptualization DID narrative reality symptoms
4 minutes
June 2024
DID is (mostly) a culture-bound disorder
It’s been nearly 2.5 years since I first started my DID self discovery journey, and in that time I’ve gained massive amounts of insight into how my early childhood experiences have shaped my way of experiencing the world. Before I gained this insight, however, came confusion. Specifically, I truly didn’t understand how this fantastical-sounding diagnosis of DID that had been given to me by multiple mental health professionals applied to me and my experiences.
conceptualization culture DID Hacking identity looping kinds
3 minutes
December 2023
The sensationalized conceptualization of DID
When a DID diagnosis was first put on the table for me, I thought there was no way that I could have this disorder. It sounds, quite frankly, fantastical. There is a common narrative of one having “multiple people living in the same body” which dominates the representation of this disorder online, in the media, and even in most therapeutic spaces. In reality, that is only one conceptualization of this disorder, and is not what I personally subscribe to.
autism conceptualization culture DID identity language narrative
15 minutes
September 2023
One’s early childhood experiences can majorly influence how they perceive the word. Because I experienced repeated trauma in my early years, my brain wired with the knowledge that the world around me was not safe and my experiences were not in my control. In order to cope with this, I learned to escape my external reality by curating my own internal reality—I created a world that only I could control, which was only limited by my own imagination.
conceptualization DID narrative symptoms
5 minutes
August 2023
Learning about my system with data
Life is moving very rapidly right now. I wrote the previous post (Waking up to the present) six weeks ago, shortly after I had split a new cluster of parts. Then, three weeks ago, I split a whole new cluster of parts. Both six weeks ago and three weeks ago I had very distinct changes in my behavioral patterns and how I operate. I have two very distinct “jumps” in my continuity of memory both three and six weeks ago.
conceptualization cycle data DID polyfragmented symptoms
5 minutes
April 2023
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.
conceptualization DID language
6 minutes