So where do we go from here?

The more I've been thinking about it, the more I've come to the conclusion that it might be best for me to answer some common misconceptions about DID. It feels lame, but there ya go. It's sometimes hard to realize that most people really don't have a clue about what DID is, and those who do probably don't understand it at all beyond a confused sort of basic concept. I hate Q&As, though, so I'm going to kind of do this as a cohesive entry, just sort of answering unasked questions.

I'm not demon possessed. For one thing, my alters aren't tormentors - at least, no more than any people can be when they feel like being irritating, and that's only some of the time. They don't suggest that I do things, they don't make me miserable, they don't urge me to behave badly or whatever. One important thing to note, too, is that I don't perceive my alters as coming from somewhere else, some outside source - they're as much a part of my body and mind as I am, and have been for pretty much as long as I can remember. For me, being alone in my head, having only one set of thoughts, is as weird a concept as the idea of having more than one person is to you.

Also, to say that DID is a therapy-induced phenomena is just bullshit. Pardon my French, but there it is. If nothing else, I've known about my alters long before I had a term for what they were called, years and years before I ever started therapy or took a psychology course or in any way knew what DID even was. The best way I've thought to describe it is that when I talk to myself, my selves talk back. It's always been that way. I don't even have to be a part of the conversation; there have always been other people there chatting away. (Yes. It can be extremely distracting.) I guess it's like being in a chat room, to a certain extent.

I first remember being distinctly aware of alters when I was about thirteen. Still though, as with most people with DID, thirteen is about when I first start having any memories of my childhood... I know that the whole reason I started keeping a daily journal when I was eleven was because I was so freaked out that I often couldn't remember what had happened to me the day before. (This is called dissociative amnesia - the reason I don't have memories of some things is that other alters were 'fronting' and therefore are the ones who experienced the events. Those times when I've been blanked out and unaware of what was going on because someone else was fronting are called dissociative fugues.) It's incredibly interesting to look over some of my earliest journals, especially... There are several very distinct handwriting patterns, one for each person who was writing. We're not even all right-handed.

Contrary to media portrayals, very few multiples have just two personalities. I certainly don't. If you want to get technical and statistical, the average number you'll see in most authoritative sources is actually sixteen alters; or seventeen people, altogether. The main person is usually called the 'host'. We have all agreed that every single one of us HATES that term. It makes it sound like we're freaking parasites or something, perpetuating that idea that DID is demon possession. We've had a hard time thinking of some better term, though. We tossed around the idea of saying the 'original' for a while, but that's not accurate, either... Often the person who is out most in adult life was NOT the original person. We've loosely decided to call Tina the front-runner, but Crystal doesn't like that term and not everyone agrees... For lack of a better one, it works.

Everybody has a name. Probably you'll know most, maybe all of them, eventually... Some of us are really shy. Most are younger than Tina, a couple are older, a couple are the same age. Some get older as the body does, some don't; some have ages that fluctuate depending on the day and how they're feeling. Everybody picked their own names, but we kinda more just felt like they were supposed to be our names... They were just the names that felt most right. They fit best.

The alters DON'T all have specific 'jobs'. Nobody's specifically the angry alter, the sad alter, the dangerous alter, the sex alter. Yes, some could sort of be classed into things... But no more than you, based on your personality, could be classified an angry person or a happy person or a playful person. You're not always happy all the time and it isn't your JOB to be happy. Make sense?

Sometimes, when the system is having a really really hard time functioning because of depression or whatever, we do have specific alters with specific tasks. They come and go, though, and don't have names. They're not full-fledged people, just jobs. That's all they exist for - somebody to make sure the laundry gets done or the bills get paid or whatever, like robots. They're called fragments, or splinter personalities: we just call them frags. Like I said, though, they don't always exist. In an ideal world, we're able to function well enough that we can be responsible for our own things. When times get really tough, though, they are certainly helpful. Wouldn't everybody like a robot who always made sure the dishes got done? :-P

The reason DID is still a disorder is that it can be pretty damned hard to get everyone to cooperate and function well together. You've seen reality TV shows, where a bunch of people get tossed into a house, told to live together, share common goals, whatever... Imagine they were all tossed into the same body. And that they all had some sort of psychological disorder before that happened.

In particular, DID can be dangerous when one or more alters are suicidal. One of ours in particular has had lots of serious bouts of suicidality. She understands that killing herself kills everybody, but when she is really depressed she tends to be convinced that it would be something of a mercy killing. That even though not all the alters want to die, they'd still be better off in the long run if they did. Similarly, when one of the non-recovery oriented anorexic alters wants to fast, or an alter wants to cut, or one of the young ones gets frightened and hides somewhere without warning, that can put everyone in jeopardy.

Some people believe the goal of therapy should be integration; all alters merging into one cohesive person. We solidly disagree. To us, that feels like murder. A lot of multiples feel that way about integration... Why sacrifice the lives of beautiful and unique people because some cultural idea of normal says there should only be one mind in one brain? Having more than one person in a body is not necessarily harmful. Often, it can be beneficial. Our goal in therapy is to have a working, cooperating sort of family system.

I think that's about all for now? It seems like we're running out of things to say, so I guess it'll have to do. If you haven't yet, I encourage you to look at some of the links we posted... They really are good. The Significant Other's Guide is helpful for anyone who knows an alter, not just SOs.

Multiple Confessions

It's so hard to write when your hands are shaking...

Perhaps as long as the science of psychology has been around, people have prescribed art and writing assignments as ways of healing damaged minds. I've always used my writing to help me cope with painful emotional and mental difficulties that have come up throughout my life. Especially lately, as I've been preparing to re-enter therapy for real and seriously this time, I've been increasingly aware of the fact that I can neither be fair to you, as readers, nor fair to myself without being completely honest in this blog.

It isn't fair to YOU because you've come to read a truthful, raw, sincere blog. It isn't fair not to give you the complete picture, to skate over aspects of my life which I'm too frightened to discuss. For one thing, it may well leave you lost since you'll only be getting fractured glimpses. Beyond that this incomplete, bullet-style relation is boring, if nothing else. It's all the reasons for which I hate abridged books... and yet that's what I'm doing to my blog, for fear of the consequences of honesty.

Granted, whoever first said honesty was the best policy must have led a pretty damned sheltered existence at best. Complete honesty is only an occasionally wise move, subject to factors variable and diverse as the audience and the weather. I'm not endorsing a life lived entirely in lies, but discretionary disclosure and carefully tainted perspectives can still get you out of a hell of a lot of trouble. How many thousands of people would have survived over the years had they only told a small lie when pressed by the man with the sword?

So now you see a bit of the dilemma I face. Honesty for the sake of true, quality writing? Honesty for the sake of my recovery?

Lies for the sake of face, humiliation, security, friends...family?

As I've known since the first of my livejournals to this, my most recent and current blog, there are more than faceless strangers reading the words I type. Even through those periods in my life when I've tried to hide my words, I knew that if someone really wanted to, they'd find a way to read them (and often did). I'm sure of many who read this and suspect many more, ranging from lovers to best friends to siblings and parents, uncles and aunts and therapists, cousins, former teachers, coworkers, casual acquaintances, schoolmates, god knows whom else. That's a whole lot of an audience. I've now way of knowing if they read daily or when the fancy hits them, if they care about me as a person or find this an interesting read. I've had people find my blog by googling random subjects or being referred from and recommended by well-known sites.

...All that makes this blog seem a lot more impressive than it is, and the stakes much higher than they are.

In the end it boils down to me being aware that the confession I want to make is controversial even in some of the best of academic and psychiatric circles. Media portrayals, which adore any slightly comical, novel idea, love to misconstrue the realities of it to fit into their needs, to the detriment of anyone trying to come out about their situation. Popular opinion loves to snatch quickly at what they understand, add a liberal helping of speculation, a portion of doubt and ridicule, and a heaping of false facts and gossip to everything they hear and see.

All these things said, I wish to discuss a couple more disclaimers before continuing.

To my friends: please comment with your support, but don't do so without being informed. While this is an entry about something I'm frightened to reveal, I'm actually quite happy with it in many ways. It's not nearly as shameful as outsiders think. It's complicated, yes, and can be quite embarrassing, awkward, even dangerous, but this is neither a death sentence nor a mark of disability. Just an aspect of who I am.

To my family: you are the biggest reason I've hesitated; not gonna lie. Your religious views in particular make this an especially complicated thing to discuss because as much as you learn and are willing to research, many churches remain way behind the times on psychiatric issues, leaving you in an unfortunate position of being subtly or blatantly misinformed and not aware of it. I ask you now to show me the respect of not talking to me about this until I give you the okay. I encourage you to learn more; if you want, I'm happy to recommend books and websites and Crystal probably can show you even more resources than I can. But please, don't send me a long letter/email/phone call telling me you're praying for me and recommending resources of your own and encouraging me to talk to a pastor and that you understand/have answers etc, etc. Please don't be offended, but I don't want your resources. This is something I've been aware of for years, and I've done tons of research on my own. I've talked to doctors with specialties and degrees you probably don't know exist. Especially when I lived in DC I went to institutes with 'National' in front of the title to make sure I could get the best care possible.

...God, that makes it sound like I'm dying! Okay. Before I go any farther and make you think I've got some rare, bizarre brain dementia or fungus or am infested by sentient, parasitic slugs (Animorphs, anyone?), let me state first and foremost that aside from any previously mentioned health issues, I am fine. There is NOTHING organically or physiologically or otherwise physically wrong with me. This is completely mental, and even then I hesitate to use the common nomenclature 'disorder'.

My name is Tina Malament. I'm twenty-almost-one years old. I'm a waitress. I have major depressive disorder, anorexia nervosa, obsessive compulsive tendencies, various other diagnoses....

And dissociative identity disorder.

Commonly misinformed, many people call it multiple personality disorder (which is an outdated term).

I don't have a good side and an evil side. (Please do me the courtesy of not relegating me to a coin or a comic book villain!) I'm not demon possessed. I'm not bipolar, I don't alternate between highs and lows born from a chemical imballance.

To clarify on my pet peeve, I DON'T HAVE F-ING SCHIZOPHRENIA! I don't hear voices the way you might think; I don't have a false perception of reality or hallucinations or a savior complex. Dissociative Identity Disorder (hereby: DID) is often portrayed/labelled in mass media events as schizophrenia. See also: Heroes, Me, Myself, and Irene, Fight Club, etc. Some of those have elements of DID which are pretty accurate.... Others are completely bullshit off the mark. (Actually, I really liked a lot of the way it was portrayed in Heroes, beyond the artistic licenses taken... The way she looked when switching personalities and the way she described the amnesia are pretty good. Fight Club, on the other hand, sucked. Great movie, but sucked.)

If you've seen/read Sybill, you should know that I have no desire to be hypnotized and integrated. It would probably not help, for one thing. That book, while seen as a sort of media authority on DID, is roughly fifty years out of date when it comes to the actual assessment and treatment of the disorder.

Yes, I have more than one 'personality part'. They're called alters. Yes, they have names, genders, age ranges, complete memories and life histories and very diverse opinions on life, the universe, and everything. Some of them often appear more harmful than others; some are sweet, some tend to be very angry, some exist for very specific purposes and can seem simplistic because of this. Many are good at things which I'm bad at, or vice versa. We have different opinions about freaking everything, speak differently, have different typing and spelling errors, different tastes in foods, even different health problems. We hold our body differently depending on who's out. We like different clothes and colors and activities.

Probably you'll get introduced to everybody as they see fit. Several have already written the entries in this blog; you may or may not have noticed when writing styles shift, vocabularies and sentence styles vary. Maybe you'll notice now that you're looking for it; who knows. Maybe when you expect someone to be a single, cohesive person it's harder to realize when they aren't.

I think we're going to cut it off now. That's probably enough to think about for one day, right?

Here are a couple of websites for you to look at since we barely covered the basics of what DID is... We've been over it so many times with so many people that it gets really tiresome to discuss after a while, particularly when there are so many valuable resources on the internet!
--->Merck - fairly awesome for overview purposes, except for the treatment goals part.
--->Religious perspectives and misperceptions answered. Sort of.
--->Surprisingly good FAQ section on a random AOL-sponsored information site.
--->The Significant Others' Guide to coping with DID

Oh yeah, one final thing... Please, please, do me a personal favor and DO NOT go to wikipedia for information about this. Their entry on the subject was so inflammatory and ill-informed that it made me write a nasty letter to wikipedia about it and create an account so that I could try to go in and edit the entry. (Which I never got done, but still, I worked on it. The entry is so riddled with error that it needs to be completely rewritten and we haven't had the energy for it.)

Shannon, thank you for all the support you've given us since we told you. Probably if you hadn't taken the news so well we wouldn't be able to come out here and now... (Are you proud?)

Readers... We now humbly await your thoughts.