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
My experience taking naltrexone, an opioid antagonist
Before my dissociative symptoms intensified around 2019, I was actively engaged in life as a prolific student and researcher. But once my dissociative symptoms started flaring up in my adult life, I became dysfunctional and struggled to understand or engage in the external world. It’s taken me long time to mostly get back on my feet where I am today, but I can now definitely say that, along with therapy, naltrexone has enabled me to properly engage with and advance in life again.
data DID medication naltrexone
19 minutes
September 2024
I am a critic of the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. Although I accept that I have the underlying disorder that the label of DID is attempting to describe, I strongly disagree with how the disorder is understood, conceptualized, and portrayed. It took me a long time to accept this, and I was very confused by what DID was and how it presents for over a year after my diagnosis. It was only once I realized that I am experiencing the exact same things that others who present their disorder as being more florid are experiencing, I’m just interpreting and portraying my experiences differently did this diagnosis make sense to me—I am not someone who is dramatic or easily influenced by culture, yet culture greatly influences how DID presents.
culture DID dynamic nominalism Hacking identity looping kinds philosophy
10 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
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
March 2024
Falling in love with math again
In the fall of 2018, I began my PhD program with noble intentions—I had just completed my undergraduate degree and had become captivated by academic exploration and research. I saw no future path for me other than pursuing a PhD in my chosen field and decided to dedicate my life to a career in technical research. Since then, things have changed substantially. A lot of factors were thrown into my graduate school experience that I could not have predicted, including my advisor temporarily leaving my institution, a global pandemic, and perhaps most impactfully, my dissociative disorder, which I had unknowingly been managing mostly effectively up until that point in life, caused me to nearly decompose.
6 minutes
January 2024
Transgenerational food insecurity
On this site, I have frequently mentioned that I have cyclical patterns of internal experience and subsequent behavior due to my presentation of DID. It took me quite a while to realize this as I had not seen this presentation documented anywhere in the academic literature, although I now know that other people with polyfragmented DID also experience this phenomenon. Once I realized this was how I operate, my understanding of my internal experience grew substantially as it provided a framework for which I could apply my experiences to.
cycle DID food intergenerational narrative trauma
6 minutes
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
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
October 2023
This is as much of a question for you as it is for me1. How am I doing? Really, I feel fine. Good, even. And that is the problem. It’s hard for me to conceive that I am having any difficulties in my life right now, or that I could be considered “mentally ill”. And for large swaths of time, depending on which part of the cycle I am in, I’m genuinely not aware that my external life is actually falling apart.
4 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
July 2023
Over the past several weeks, I have had a lot of change in my system structure. This often happens to me in times of stress, as I discussed in How DID affects my work. This rearrangement of my system usually comes with a new routine, a new set of handwritings, and a new outlook on life. It’s almost like a rebirth—a new attempt to take control of my life, every time with a slightly different strategy.
3 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
On the bookcase In the corner of the room Quiet Watching Just as I should be A shut eye doll All dressed up Florals and lace No motive No voice Only eyes And a painted on smile Controlled Coddled and pampered Maneuvered and manipulated It’s for my worst It’s for my best I am a shut eye doll Sitting quiet Sitting still Feeling unheard Feeling unreal Detach Feeling nothing Under her watch
1 minute
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
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
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
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.
autism DID mechanism narrative trauma
5 minutes
… it’s about childhood trauma. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) can be thought of as a coping mechanism one may develop when they experience repeated trauma in early childhood. It is arguably one of the most misunderstood and controversial mental health conditions, perhaps because it’s been repeatedly sensationalized in the media. Or, maybe because the name and clinical description of the disorder implies that it’s about having multiple identities or personality states.
6 minutes