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
April 2024
The two most dominant emotions that dictate my experience of the world are fear and shame. Upon processing this realization, I’ve come to the conclusion that while these two emotions may seem to be unrelated at first thought, they are actually quite intertwined in my internal landscape. Fear and shame are both uncomfortable emotions that signal a high degree of alarm—one needs to enact change to alleviate them. However, these two internal alarms are triggered by and about opposite circumstances.
DID fear narrative shame symptoms
4 minutes
January 2024
About three months into starting therapy, my therapist asked me a seemingly innocuous question: Does your handwriting ever change? This was something I had never thought about before. I replied by saying that while my handwriting was inconsistent, it was normal. She then asked me another question: Does your handwriting seem to change with mood? This question caught me so off guard that it plunged me into an acute dissociative state, rendering me confused and nearly unresponsive for the next several minutes.
academia DID handwriting symptoms
7 minutes
September 2023
Do other people experience DID in the same way as me?
There seems to be a dominant representation of DID in online discourse. Mostly, it seems as though people represent themselves as having a handful of well-defined parts, each with distinct names, ages, and characteristics. Perhaps because I am polyfragmented, I experience something very different, and do not relate to the vast majority of the experiences that other people present themselves as having online. Last month, I posted to the DID subreddit to see if anyone related to my experiences:
cycle DID narrative polyfragmented reddit symptoms
5 minutes
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
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
When I began therapy for DID in January 2022, I had no idea how much my life had already spiraled out of control. Over the course of several years, I had gone from being a high-achieving student at the top of my class to being effectively unable to work because I was so triggered by the world around me. However, because of my severe internal compartmentalization, I was unaware of my dysfunction—I had no idea anything abnormal was happening, and, for the most part, thought I was still the successful student I previously was.
academia cycle DID handwriting narrative polyfragmented symptoms
6 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
One impactful but not immediately obvious symptom of DID for me is that I do not seem to have a continuous internal sense of time—my awareness of my life is shuffled. Because of this, I may have a hard time differentiating what happened yesterday versus what happened last week or last month, or struggle with remembering if, for example, I have leftovers in my fridge now or if that was from weeks ago.
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
I was initially hesitant to write about anger, as it’s an emotion I am not used to feeling1. How could I write about something I know nothing about? But I now realize that the absence of anger in my life is significant in itself, and is indicative of how I operate. Anger is an emotion that I am simultaneously very sensitive to, yet not at all familar with—I am incredibly sensitive to the external display of anger in others, yet not at all familiar with how it feels internally.
anger DID narrative symptoms trauma
3 minutes
Why do I call myself “polyfragmented”?
The word I like best to describe my flavor of DID is polyfragmented. Polyfragmented is most commonly referred to to mean someone who has a lot of parts and/or splits parts in a complex manner. I believe I exhibit both. In a more traditional case of DID, it is my understanding that a person has a relatively small number parts that are more well defined. They only have a few compartments of memory, thus allowing them to spend more time in each compartment, so each compartment has more time to develop a distinct way of being.
autism DID polyfragmented reddit symptoms
6 minutes
When I was 12, I stopped feeling anxiety. Prior to that, I was a child ravished by anxiety. Then, one day, it stopped1. And I have never experienced anxiety in the same way since. I now understand that anxiety is one of the experiences that I dissociated away—it’s a state that I did not enjoy experiencing, so I learned how to compartmentalize it and push it out of my awareness. This doesn’t mean I do not experience anxiety; rather, it means that when I do, I am so detached from it that I do not experience all aspects of it.
anxiety DID narrative symptoms
3 minutes
I have always been nerdy. From a young age, I immersed myself in academic work, as I enjoyed learning and the strict routine that school provided for me. I also had an intense need to perform well—my perfectionistic tendencies dominated my life as a child. While I often did perform well academically, there were times where I performed markedly poorly on assessments, so far outside the norm of what would have ordinarily be expected of me, despite preparing and knowing the material.
academia DID narrative perfectionism symptoms
4 minutes