Three Kids in a Trench Coat

I just watched Thunderbolts*, and straight after, the Cinema Therapy episode on it. I highly recommend both.

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Jono & Alan don’t really know what to make, diagnostically, of one of the main characters, Bob, but it seems like a mix of bipolar & C-PTSD with a healthy side of dissociation (there’s a good overview of ‘bipolar dissociation’ here¹). The big big mood swings of bipolar aren’t super familiar to me. But the compartmentalised emotions, the fuzzy memories between them. The deep, deep void of loneliness & shame, that you don’t know how to fill, and look for the answers at the bottom of bottle after bottle, of booze, of pills. “You always make everything worse”. That’s familiar.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) arises in response to early life complex trauma, and the accommodations we make for it when it remains unhealed in our systems.

The word ‘trauma’ simply means, ‘wound’. The ‘complex’ is a neat way of saying, “there’s been so much of it, for so long, half the time you can’t tell the wounds from what’s going on around you”. That’s not a clinical definition. That’s my interpretation of it.

Essentially the roots are in attachment wounds and aspects of emotional neglect, whether or not they include violence, abuse and/or ‘betrayal’. What happens to a person who’s suffered through this? They’re burdened with feelings that shouldn’t be theirs to carry. Those feelings almost always include:

Shame

and

Loneliness.

Sometimes the whole, “DID” label / self-concept can be unhelpful because you start focusing on the divisions, the gaps; ideas like, ‘alters’, ‘switching’, ‘amnesia’. It can be easy to lose sight of the simple fact: Those are all survival adaptations; dissociation is not a dirty word, and plurality is actually kinda rad – it’s the trauma we need to heal

What Thunderbolts* does such a good job of portraying, and what Jono & Alan pick up on in the CT episode, are talking about what’s really needed for healing to happen. How no-one can contain all that by themselves. How we need to let it out, be seen and held by others, even when we’re not at our shiniest. How when you’re hurting from so many wounds you can’t see a way out – you don’t need people to know what the right thing to say is.

You just need to not go through it alone.

‘Shadow work’ is a fancy way of saying, ‘Learning to embrace all parts of yourself, even the parts you’re ashamed of. And being vulnerable enough around other people to let them show you that – even when they know all of you? They will still love you, too.’

No-one is an island, no matter how deeply you feel that to be true. We need each other to heal, together, and to live lives that are worth a damn to us. We need each other.

It’s a great film, and a great episode of CT. You should check both out.

Take care of yourselves,

Riley & fam❤️

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1. The CTAD Clinic. Very few people have heard of Bipolar Dissociation – what is it? [Internet]. 2024 [cited 2025 Oct 11]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0ZWZ-fOXyc