Three Kids in a Trench Coat

Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, is a mental health condition regarded by both by healthcare professionals and, often, many of those of us living with it, as being part of the weird stuff. Fortunately, I like weird stuff, so I’m ok with approaching the subject with a degree of, “Well, fuck it – let’s get weird and see where this goes…”

DID is an adaptation that comes about as a result of a very normal human survival response to difficult experiences very early in life: dissociation. Disconnection. Severance (great TV show btw). Disconnecting from awareness of what’s happening around you, disconnection from awareness of yourself, your feelings, your needs. When this keeps happens a lot as you grow up (because you’re being overwhelmed a lot and relief doesn’t come from the outside, and/or because separating from certain needs seems like the only way to stay in attachment with your caregivers), it can become habitual.

Your nervous system can, from a very young age, learn that the only way to stay safely in connection with those you depend on (we’re talking before the age of ~6 years old), is divide how you respond to each caregiver in some really fundamental ways, to avoid complete inner chaos and confusion from deeply conflicting experiences of what it takes to stay in attachment. Which shouldn’t be your job, at that age.

When this does happen, parts of you that would normally form an integrated whole self, instead grow up kinda ‘separate’ to one another. Like there are walls in the way. Separation between memories, sense of identity, elements of personality, that kinda thing. Less like multiple personalities, more like multiple selves, or ‘self states’ – many (if not all) of these parts have their own unique sense of, “I”. But we use ‘parts’ because, ultimately, however you look it at, we’re talking about parts of one whole person.

And once it becomes a skill you have, it can keep happening. The ball starts rolling before ~6yo, but can become how you adapt to new challenges and difficult situations as they arise, through adolescence, into adulthood. This sort of ‘compartmentalisation of aspects of the self’ becomes the norm.

Some parts might hold difficult memories (‘Exile’ parts, to use the Internal Family Systems term), away from parts that had to ‘just get on with life’ (‘Manager’ parts). Some parts make an appearance when there’s a risk of a containment breach, and the parts holding the difficult memories start getting activated. These ‘Firefighter’ parts tend to be really fast, decisive, and go nuclear right away if it means immediately reducing distress & keeping the separation in tact. There may be parts constantly scanning for potential trouble and steering clear, avoiding mines and keeping to clear waters – even if that means sticking to some very narrow channels indeed. It’s a system run by the simple instinct: survive. As re-experiencing trauma feels like a survival threat, that means keeping a lot of separation between any parts that might destabilise the others.¹

The result? Feeling like you’re not quite a real person, at a profound level, but not knowing why – and the sense that there’s dark stuff ‘over there’ – but we don’t look over there. Because when anything brings us closer to over there, weird shit happens and we can’t explain why, and often we can’t even tell what it was that happened. Best to just move on and file that under, “I don’t know exactly what happened, or why, but I know I’ll never let it happen again.” You can imagine how that goes. (“Groundhog Day”. I’ll leave it at that),

In DID, parts can be entire aspects of the self that are kept separate for a long time. There might be parts that handle going to work, parts that handle social, parts that handle triggering situations. “I remember these things, and care about these things” then something shifts inside, “I remember these [other] things, and care about these [other] things”. Some parts have this thick, “amnestic barrier” between them, unaware of ‘the others’. Some less so, but still feel separate or like they don’t quite belong to the rest of you, or like the wall is more of a fog. That all comes with a certain, “I don’t know who the fuck I am”.

That is, say, until your late 30s, when for whatever reason, the walls start to come down, the fogs start to become less dense – maybe it’s one wall coming down completely, maybe it’s cracks becoming holes in many walls at once… but once they do, and once you start getting curious… well, hold onto your butt. Shit’s about to get a whole new type of confusing.

I barely had any idea about any of this until a few years ago – sure there were signs, but they got filed under, “We don’t look at that stuff, we don’t ask questions, and we definitely don’t tell anyone”. It’s not the kind of thing other people, ‘clock’, either. It’s an adaptation that keeps trauma hidden, remember. That means hidden from yourself, and from other people. The fewer threads leading back to over there, the better. That means no ‘overt switching’, no ‘parts announcing themselves with different names or voices’. In 94% of people with DID, it’s just not apparent, even to people closest, that all this is going on.² It’s a very internal experience (or lack thereof, in some ways).

So when the walls start coming down – is that it? Why write about this now, doesn’t this mean it’s over? Well… no. The walls were never really walls, that’s just a metaphor. There were parts that were separate. Now those parts are starting to get to know one another. And they don’t always know how to do that. Think of it as – a team with no leader, and the members of the team are all working away, doing things to meet the team needs that they’re in charge of, but doing so in isolation means they sometimes pull in different directions & unknowingly make it harder for everyone else to do their jobs.

To some extent there’s an aspect of this conflict going on for everyone – “I should go to the gym because I want to be fitter” but “I had a shit day so I want to go home and eat takeout”. It’s like that. Sort of. Just… with more tangles & layers, less awareness, and sometimes you get kicked out of the driver’s seat while you watch, or take a sort of waking nap, until your your body is finished doing one thing or the other. And the disagreements tend to be more rooted in trauma – a lot of everyday inner conflicts are actually entirely manageable (a lot of people with DID are often very high-achieving). But otherwise, you get the picture.

Regardless, those newly intermingling parts are like a team that arrived for re-orientation but there’s no-one around to run the show. Those parts now need a leader. Someone to give a sense of direction and purpose. They need a… oh, shit… is this where I’m supposed to come in?

That’s kinda where I’m at right now, to be honest.

Because talking about ‘parts’ is language that’s used to be less confusing than something like, ‘alters’ which implies, ‘alternate identity’ – I am this or that, but not both. That certainly can be what it feels like. A ‘part’ (in a DID sense, at least) is experienced more like a self. Out of multiple selves. And knowing ‘the others’ exist, doesn’t mean that your sense of self is lessened. You just know that there are others.

So finding a more centred place of ‘self’ from which to lead is a heck of a confusing thing. “Just be yourself!” people say.

“Which one?!” We say.

There’s that, “we”. Y’see – multiple parts can be present at the same time. And that’s what we’re working on. Co-consciousness, it’s sometimes called. Experiencing what it’s like to be, not alternate identities, but teammates working together at the same time. Building up a sense of, “Us, together”. That’s how internal communication starts, and you get this weird, wider ‘sense of self’ thing building up. ‘We’ often becomes ‘I’ again, but with a whole new meaning (geddit?). It’s not ‘getting rid’ of anyone. Quite the opposite. It’s having a nurturing instinct inside, creating & holding space at the table – making sure there’s room for everyone, and that no-one goes hungry (even if we don’t all eat at the same time every day).

I know it. I’ve felt it. But big upsets and hard knocks can send you backwards, parts go back to their old ways of coping. Those ways of coping don’t always work so well these days though, knowing what we know now, feeling what we’ve felt. Trying to stay separate now leaves an absence, and it’s different to before. Instead of wondering what this mysterious gap is, you already know. It’s the feeling of missing yourself, and of missing the people you love, that so many of those old ways of coping keep you distant from.

So, we pick ourselves up, and we keep trying. Step by step. Work we’ve done isn’t lost, just temporarily misplaced, until we find one another again.

Work in progress.

—-

1 I’m using Internal Family Systems (IFS) language here, but just be aware that IFS is kinda designed to be applicable to anyone with difficult memories and mental health struggles of almost all stripes. ‘Everyone has parts’. And anyone can have memories that are ‘too painful’ to go back to, firefighters that soothe when anything risks triggering them, and managers that have complicated relationships with trying to live normal life while steering clear of the mines.

It’s kind of a question of degrees, number and ‘breadth’ of parts, level of separation, and presence or otherwise of a ‘central concept of self’. Also the terms ‘exile, manager, firefighter’, don’t always really work for DID parts, which are often each more like their own separate subsystem, with their own exiles, managers and firefighters (hence more like a self unto themselves). Which is why IFS for DID needs some major adjustment to be helpful (it is worthwhile though, with these adjustments, in my experience). See Trauma & Dissociation Informed Internal Family Systems, by Joanne Twombly for a much better summary of the similarities and differences.

2 International Society For The Study of Trauma & Dissociation. Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. 2011 Feb 28;12(2):115–87.