CW: Mentions of (non-graphic, non-active) suicidal thoughts
If you come here often, you may have noticed I haven’t been posting so much the last few months.
Don’t get me wrong, I have several 80% finished posts in my drafts, on varied topics from months back, but I never felt able to finish them – and lately, I just haven’t felt like writing at all.
Why?
Well, in a nutshell, depression. A deep, deep well of depression.
For a while it was dominated by a lot of fear. Then it turned into a deep, existential loneliness & sadness. Then for a while it’s just been this numbness & sense that nothing is working, nothing is worth it, and every day has just been waiting out the clock – trying to be unconscious for as much of every day & night as possible, the rest of the time doing background maths about whether or not continuing to live is worth it.
Mostly the conclusion has been, “Absolutely not”, but doing anything about it felt like it’d be such a spike in faff that continuing to wait seemed like the only option.
Ok, that was a pretty heavy start to a post.
I don’t know if I’m out of the woods, but I’ve at least found enough spark to be interested in some things again, and that’s more than I’ve had for a while, so I’m trying to rebuild from here, day by day.
During this time, I’ve felt like one person.
Which you may think, “Hey, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t DID, by definition, a disorder? Doesn’t that mean you’re getting better?”
And well… no, apparently it’s not always a good thing. And is one of the reasons why the last “D” in DID gets thrown in the trash by many people that live with it.
Y’see, often when we’re functioning well, it often feels like we’re, “Us together”, but that’s more like “We’re in this together, and working towards some common goals (with individual parts’ specific interests being sprinkled in the rest of the time)”.
That feels very different to, “feeling like one person” – because when I feel like one person, a lot of the time it’s missing an important caveat – it’s more like, “I feel like one person… with a lot of parts missing”. It’s like a bunch of parts have locked themselves in the basement, and bolted the trapdoor – hiding away from a storm that for whatever reason they don’t feel able to weather with life as it is right now.
Which leaves the part(s) that remain with a lot of heavy lifting to do. “One Pokemon tanking all the damage”, as HealthyGamerGG on YouTube put it.
(btw, he’s not a specialist in the area, and I don’t think he’s the best resource on DID – but his analogy of a Pokemon trainer co-ordinating a team of Pokemon did make us chuckle, at least xD).
Amnesia for the good times
“State-dependent memory” is a phenomenon that pretty much all humans experience, and it’s largely dependent on emotions. Think of it like this – when you’re walking through the archives of your life experience, from the recent to the distant, we’re more likely to notice the records that are closer to how we’re feeling now.
If you walk down those archive hallways when you’re feeling happy, you’re more likely to point to memories of laughing with friends, of holidays doing fulfilling things, of working away on something that would ultimately feel satisfying and worth it. You point to those things, right past the darker memories that sit next to on the shelf, and freely and easily summon them to your hand, crack them open, and savour them – and it all feels like this is just how life is for you – and that’s a good thing.
Likewise, if you’re feeling down and depressed, particularly for any length of time, you walk down those same hallways and it’s like those happy memories are recessed back, with the darker ones standing out boldly, black spines of serious, heavy leather-bound tomes, with titles in stark red, reading things like, “Worst Fuck-up Ever”, “A Complete History of Feeling Helpless”, and “Everything You’ve Ever Lost”.
From the records that stand out to you, you make predictions about the future. If your internal world is dominated by all the good of your past, you predict that, even if you encounter a setback today, tomorrow is another day and things will probably turn out ok.
If you only notice, only re-read about all the bad from all the years so far, you predict – automatically, powerfully, that the sadness & loneliness you feel now will go on forever. You morosely pore over every grim word of every tome, nodding sadly – it all feels like this is just how life is for you… and that’s a truth that’s almost too much to bear.
That’s how these things work for pretty much everyone, and it’s how anyone can end up depressed, and anyone can experience hope – but for many people, these things just sort of naturally balance out over time. “Regression to the mean”. Emotions come and go, they don’t stay, “stuck”, not for too long – life goes on.
The thing in DID, is that often these memories are held by different parts, and so when certain parts are hibernating in the basement, these archives aren’t a continuous timeline you stroll back along… they’re separate wings of the library, wings that hold a really disproportionate number of certain types of experiences & emotions.
And it’s not just emotions – many types of trigger can signal that it’s time to assume Damage Mitigation Mode Zeta, batten down the hatches & ride out whatever situation your system appraises the current threat to be. Or conversely, that it’s go-go-go time, and everyone wants to make hay while the sun shines, because who knows how little time you’ve got until the next internal air-raid siren goes off and it’s back to nibbling the scraps of emergency rations in darkness again.
Sometimes you can get stuck in one part’s wing and all you’re surrounded by is all the happy, excited, hopeful… or all the sad and lonely, or hopeless and afraid. It’s not that the other records are recessed and dim next to the bold & attention-grabbing ones… it’s that they aren’t here in this part of the library at all.
Your princess is in another castle.
Not that you were even looking for her…
… because you forgot she ever existed to begin with.
The movement of parts and co-morbidity
I wanted to write about all of this after watching the latest CTAD clinic video about co-morbidity – specifically on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It got me thinking about how the movement of parts can end up looking like pretty much anything else in the DSM when you don’t have perspective and other people in your life mirroring more of your “whole self”, or personality as a whole, back to you.
A couple of years ago, I asked my therapist (who specialises in trauma & dissociation) if he thought I had BPD (while we were already working together on DID) and he laughed (kindly), shook his head and said, “No, but clearly something has got you thinking that, so why don’t we use the session to talk about it…” and by the end of the hour I was like, “Ohhhhh….. yeah no you’re totally right, I don’t know how I ever thought that fit…”
It actually helped me put together a lot of the pieces of how much amnesia I’d been having at the time for all the sessions where we’d been talking about so much stuff that categorically didn’t fit the BPD mould (turns out I’m pretty much the opposite of a BPD / emotionally unstable presentation overall) – but that at that point in time, I could only see & remember the similarities with what I’d been learning about BPD from online resources that month or so.
(I mentioned this to Mike in the comments of the video above, and he agreed that it’s a conversation he’s had many times, with many people in the 20 years he’s been specialising in complex dissociation).
For example, with “Identity disturbance” in BPD v DID – the way I’ve always thought about it (rightly or wrongly) is that in BPD it often sounds more like, “I don’t have a strong internal sense of self”, whereas in DID it’s more like, “I have strong sense of self”… “And I have a strong (but very different) sense of self too!”… “Hey, me too!” “And me!” xD (which of course has a whole different set of benefits and challenges by comparison).
That’s been my personal experience of DID, at any rate, and there are similar distinctions across all of the diagnosis – once you get into the details, BPD and DID turn out to be remarkably different conditions – despite BPD being the most common misdiagnosis.
It’s why advocating for screening for both is important if you find yourself dealing with secondary care trauma services – they will try and put you in the BPD category as soon as you mention the words, “self-harm”, “suicidal”, or “angry”. And while BPD-targeted therapies like Dialectical Behaviour Therapy absolutely can have a place in DID work, a therapist / MH team that only works with the person that first shows up to therapy is likely to miss an awful lot that will result in a system resuming normal operations when they’re not in the therapist’s office – which can include a lot of the things you’re really struggling with.
So, much like “chronic” depression, that was another, very different example of when certain parts are taking a break, it can look from your perspective like you’re struggle is with being a certain type of person – but when those other parts wake up and come forward, you realise that as a person, the way you move through the world is completely different to when you’re operating from only one chunk of your memory & sense of self.
Why care – aren’t conditions just labels?
This matters, because it affects how you approach getting out of some of these holes you may find yourself in.
It can happen with any of the personality disorders, or pretty much anything else in the DSM. Another week, I had a similar conversation about narcissism, another week autism, another schizophrenia, depression, OCD, ADHD, SUD… all raised by me, and tall taken by my therapist in his stride as part of the process of working with dissociation. It’s a rodeo he’s clearly been on many times, and he calmly always brought it back to trying to find a healthy, more integrated way of working together inside & approaching life from where we are now.
There’s obviously a degree of, “health anxiety” and feeling like I need to label myself as broken in there, addressing which is all part of the underlying trauma processing & present day teamwork.
While some of these are genuine, “co-morbidities”, I think with DID, the whole approprach of the DSM just becomes kind of a joke because labelling yourself at all becomes this never ending exercise in trying to treat parts, and teams of parts, like we’re all one person – when we just don’t fit that mould.
We can get that way with “positive” labels too… e.g. “I am an artist” makes total sense for some of my parts to say – I mean gods damn, one of them has always been talented, and is getting really good lately – but I’m still limited to dodgy looking stick-people if I try to draw anything, rendering the label kind of a joke, y’know?
It’s why, no matter how many times the doubt returns, and you start thinking, “I just made all this DID stuff up, and I’m just a depressed fuck-up with a shitty personality looking for an out”, we keep coming back to doing to the DID work; checking in with each other, writing to each other, giving each other time and space, even just a little, for things that may not seem interesting to you, but that you know someone else inside needs… because no, you didn’t imagine it all, your life so far hasn’t been a dream.
Working together just works – and that’s all that matters.
None of us are built to go through this world alone.
Other people are so important.
But sooner or later, we always come back to us, too.
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