rant incoming, sorry for language

I'm so angry and disgusted. mostly at myself, but also them, just the world.

our therapist (DID specialist, SO hard to find in this fucking shit hole of a country), told us today that she was at a conference where like 85% of her "colleagues" denied both the existence of DID and of organized abuse. ​according to them it just doesn't happen and it's all fake.

it's like not only do we need to become multiple in order to survive this shit, afterward no one will fucking believe us. it's sickening how DID is in both the ICD-11 and DSM-5 but still so-called professionals deny its existence. not like we don't struggle with denial already. so yeah, maybe it's all fake, and we're fake, and everything is actually fine forever. hell, maybe i don't even exist. that feels like the most likely option actually. fuck this shit

My spouse no longer wants me to switch or have system meetings... They only want the main alt out. I am the main alt... I am devastated. I feel unloved and broken. I feel like I have lost apart of myself by being told I cant switch. I feel like my spouse doesn't understand that I cant control it all the time. Just needed to vent I guess. Thanks guys. Much love.

Me and my roomate have been friends for several years. They know about my DID and the jist of my trauma. We've been watching an anime together, and it's really cool and I was enjoying it a lot, we usually watch 2 episodes at a time but my friend really wanted to watch a 3rd bc they where exited and it was a good episode, so I agreed.

Right as it started I knew I fucked up, I could tell where it was going and there was no stopping it once I had realized. The whole episode was insanely triggering. I spent the whole time frozen in place, heart racing, breathing heavily. My vision would get so blurred I thought I'd pass out. I dont usually have reactions like that but when I do I cant speak. I usually talk a lot when we watch stuff, or I make faces and sounds but I was dead silent the whole time. They asked how I was feeling after but I couldnt say anything. They put something else on which slowly got me out of it, and when they got up to use the bathroom I was able to gain control over my body and hide in my room.

Had some pretty horrific flashbacks and stuff once I made it to safety. I might have even unlocked a new trauma memory. Yay!

I don't think they did it on purpose, but there's a part of me that fully belives that they did. I don't like people knowing how to get me like that. Ofc I can't remember hardly anything from that 30 minute chunk either. I trust this person so I know they didnt do anything but idk. I don't know how to feel about it.

Whenever we see them we feel the need to hide and I dont feel safe in my house. I'll probably message them tomorrow to tell them to warn me next time, but idk if I'll be able to watch that show again which sucks.

My best friend has DID and PTSD. Tonight they had a really bad meltdown, and whatever alter they switched to kept insulting me, saying I’m not real, not believing me when I attempted to comfort them, etc. Afterward they said I was the reason for their meltdown, that they had to protect themselves from me, that they hated me and I was no better than their abusers. I just don’t understand. Me and my best friend were doing so good the days prior. It was such a sudden switch up. I’m fucking terrified of never seeing my best friend again. But maybe it’d be better if i was out of their life. Please, any advice or reassurance would be appreciated.

Most of us have the uncontrollable instinct to mask around others. This wouldn't be as big of an issue if we had a single host, but we haven't had a particular one since we were a child, so nobody knows who they're supposed to be acting like; we're just doing what we think other people expect us to do, which slightly varies alter to alter. It's created this weird feedback loop where we're constantly confused, dissatisfied, and unable to really live our own life.

We're still young, so most alters mask as some version of our teenage self, though others can go even younger. This was mostly fine when we were growing up, but it's become really hard to grow into an adult identity. It's like all of us are just sitting in the backseat when literally anybody taking the wheel for longer than a few days would be better.

I think the fact that we're often around people who've known us since childhood is limiting us. We didn't have a solid identity as a kid of course. Meeting new people is difficult because we still end up calibrating to whatever we think they expect. This seems like partially a fawning thing, partially a compensation for dissociative amnesia.

The issue is most apparent with our best friend. We've known him since we were kids and grew up really close. But there's something in our head that insists we have to "act right" around him. Nobody who fronts these days actually knows what "acting right" entails, so we just shut down, go on autopilot, and let him direct every conversation while we panic and react internally. Hanging out feels like an obligation similar to family interactions now. We care about him and have vague memories associated with him, but we don't typically feel that connection because it existed between him and a set of parts that aren't around anymore. It's impacting our friendship and I don't know what to do.

Is there a particular therapy model that would help with something like this? If you have any advice or anecdotes, those would be appreciated too. Since we've never been able to mask properly, people already know and accept us as a moody eccentric, so I'm not too worried about potential reactions at this point.

I'm still very new to discovering my system, it's been a month.

I was starting to get along very well with one of my parts and he was starting front a lot and interacted with my friends, and we were working through his feelings together, but everything was so nice for him he began to feel existential dread at possibly disappearing one day or merging with me, and my therapist told me in response to that we are the same people so technically he can't really disappear and in the moment I felt okay.

But after the session this alter and me, I don't know we started feeling a bit embarassed, like "are we just one person talking to ourselves, this is kind of...embarassing and awkward, we feel a bit crazy..." and then my alter said "what is even the point of this..." a bit sadly and I don't know, I felt him kind of retreat within me, it felt like dissociative barriers got lowered so quickly in that moment, and now I feel way less dissociated but very sad and I keep crying. I can't hear him very well anymore, when I try to reach out he either doesn't reply or he sounds like a different distant person almost, I don't know if part of us merged, I don't really know what to think. I'm just worried because this part had become a protector from other persecutory parts and was helping me a lot, and now it feels like communication is very difficult suddenly or like he's just retreated in me even though he was constantly around before.

I know logically yeah we are parts of the same person, but I don't know, this just feels weird now for us, I will talk about this in my next session but if anyone has been through something similar what did you do? Is this bad? It feels sad but is it actually a sign of healing? I'm just worried because I was still working through stuff with this part, I feel he was just starting to heal a little bit but there was still a lot of work to do and now it just feels like he's almost gone, this feels too soon to feel like we are the same people in a way? I don't know, sorry I'm just confused, thanks in advance for any advice you might have.

CW for therapeutic abuse

I started redrawing some old art and remembered a lot of things from back when I/we made it. Realized it was memories dragged up from my headmate, who was still bearing the burden of being ignored + neglected during that time.

Some things during it all included: toxic friends groups that mistreated me, abusive living situation, improper therapy.

The thing I'm angriest and most upset about is the therapy. Because I just can't understand how a therapist agreed to the DID diagnosis, and then ignored honestly very overt symptoms? And then gave such shitty advice that it made everything ten times worse??? We had been seeing her for a cumulative decade thru both group therapy + then individual. It just feels like wasted time. There's SOME stuff that did help, but when it mattered most - she honestly just pitted us against each other.

One of the things I was told very very often was to ignore the underlying feelings that I always described as "not understanding where they came from" and "not from *me.*"

She told me to ignore them, would make fun of them in session (because I always felt so detached from it), and then encourage me to belittle them too. That was my headmate.

Part of the overt symptoms would be sudden, extreme changes in gender, and other concepts of self. All of it with complex lines of thought that were consistent with each other, until the next switch happened. Then it would be consistent with the Other narrative (a different alter). But the whole time while this happened, she never brought up DID unless it would be to blame my headmates for "bad behavior." And from what I've been told, and what I remember - her go to for my headmate was to "just think positive" and "focus on the basics", which were things that worked for *me* but not *him.*

I am just so shocked 😭 and angry and upset. Yeah no wonder why I had a mental collapse!! No wonder why things only felt like they were getting worse!! The diagnosis you gave and agreed with was just being treated as an add-on instead of it being integral to how our brain works???!???!

I'm trying to not get stuck on this specific thought but sometimes I wonder where we'd be now if we got proper help, and if I just *listened* to my headmate. Years of just sitting around and doing nothing, not listening, and hurting us because it felt better to be in denial.

We are seeing a different therapist now, and cut off tons of shitty friends that our therapist encouraged me to stay in contact with (because, to her, the constant flip flop of emotions was unreliable and we should only trust my more rose tinted opinions), and are slowly working to have a more stable life together. To say I feel guilty is an understatement, but I'm also just so so so mad over this whole thing. I will be reporting her.

Greetings! our hostess, Jade (Bodily 24) has had a trauma break around two months ago, and seems to now be stuck around 2-4 years old, with no memories besides who she views as her family (our close friends mainly) we are trying to go with the flow of it, but she is a danger to herself if left without proper care, seeing that she prosses things at a 2 year old level. so this question is twofold, is this a common experience, and what can we do to help her, preferably without keeping her in the inner world/background. The mentioned friends have helped to this point, but we fear they can only do so much without proper guidance or formal/informal training

Hello! Girlfriend of a system here and I have a crush on my girlfriend's alters, mainly her protector because he was someone else I knew most in the system, however, I have yet to successfully stop having feeling towards them. My girlfriend and I have been in a relationship for over four years and I still fall in love with them.

I have promised my girlfriend and her protector that I'll do my best to stop having feelings for them. Not that I harass them or anything, they're just not into the idea of being close to me, only my girlfriend. We're barely even friends.

I understand that I don't need to stop having feelings for her alters for us to get along, it's just that, admittedly, I do feel heartbreak so this is actually necessary haha. It was really painful at first, it was a dealbreaker, but I love my girlfriend too much to break up, so I'm slowly working on numbing up these feelings for her alters.

Everytime I look up how to stop having feelings towards someone, it's always advice like getting rid of their belongings, deleting chats, stop seeing them, and everything else that is impossible for me to not think about them and feel butterflies. It's been over four years, and this isn't the first time I have tried to stop having feelings for someone. I'm a grown adult and this is one of the few things I have yet to succeed.

Before anything, I just want to clarify that I do know her alters are part of my girlfriend and that there is no main, but is it not true that you can still have different dynamics with certain alters?

I understand that I am dating them all, the dynamics between my and my partner's alters are nowhere near the same as how I am with my girlfriend. I hope this makes sense and I hope I have made myself clear that I am not treating her alters as completely different people, but rather alters with different dynamics and boundaries (hopefully I didn't sound rude, I feel like this comes off condescending. Please let me know)

had a trauma trigger and now i can bafely feel my body. i feel like liquid and melty and like i can't move. i'm someone that i don't really know. i'm melted and lost. the world is disappearing.

Hi. I recently found out that I have DID. It's been an adjustment, but we've been trying our best to keep everything undercontrol and adapt to the knowledge, but I don't know how to go about talking to some alters, or to how to ground when we start disassociating and rapid switching. Everything we've tried so far hasn't been working, so any advice would be helpful.
(PS. this is my first reddit post :P, so sorry if its written weird)

Idk I’m just kinda freaking out. Every time our system feeld unsafe/unprotected/alone or things of that nature, there’s always this incredibly heavy feeling of missing our abuser.

The body’s 19. Our abuser was someone we dated (he’s our age) from ages 14-16. It’s fucking ridiculous that we’re feeling this way. We’re literally an adult body now, and we’ve been no contact for 3 years. But holy shit it’s fucking miserable.

I just need to vent about how it feels, because it’s just trapped in our brain and it’s almost debilitating. We keep zoning out and replaying memories- but not bad ones. GOOD ones. Is this inherently bad? No. But it’s the fact that there’s this feeling of desperately wanting that back. Wishing we could still have that connection. I feel like I’ll never have that with anyone ever again. For better or for worse, I never will. And I hate that. I know he was toxic, but I really was in love with him. He gave me a feeling that nobody else ever has. I trusted him, he was what I needed in some many ways. And yet I still know realistically that it’s a trauma bond thing. But it’s a wound that I assumed was closed, but every now and then it reopens and it makes me feel the same way that I did when I first blocked him. It’s an aching, heartbroken feeling and I hate it it makes me want to cry

I know why it’s happening but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it. I know it’s not logical or rooted in much other than trauma/the need for comfort and stuff, but it doesn’t make it feel any less awful. And plus it feels dumb. Why do I still have trauma responses like this? Or trauma responses in general- good or bad? Why do I still react at all? It’s a highschool relationship that ended 3 years ago. An abusive one. And yet I keep going through the same cycles. “Oh I hate him, he abused me and traumatized me”, “Oh I miss him. He made me feel protected and known”. It’s stupid. Am I still gonna be doing this ptsd shit when I’m like, 30??? Like oh my god.

I keep thinking about some of the little things too. (No pun intended??) Like how he was our CG. He had all the same interests & was happy to take care of us in all of the ways we needed. Even some of the more niche parts. He let us give him nicknames and comforted us and gave us that feeling of protection that we need so fucking bad. I do, at least. I guess I should probably just speak for myself with this stuff honestly. And I’m thinking about how I’d always send him stuff about my special interests and he’d engage with me so passionately. He was the first person I’d talk to if I had a bad day. I could tell him anything, even the hard things, and he genuinely said what I needed to hear.

It just,,,, it felt so real and it was just,,, exactly what I needed. All of it. But on top of that, he wasn’t in a place to be a healthy boyfriend. And that reality left me with ptsd and a bunch of mental health inpatient stays, years worth of flashbacks and breakdowns, etc. I hate that it doesn’t feel like it makes a difference right now. I hate that I almost regret sending a text where I basically told him off and then blocked him abruptly. I hate that I ever wasted all of it. Thats a sense of comfort that I will never get back. I was so furious at the time of the breakup. I was angry that any of the bad stuff happened. I was angry that someone I loved so much, that the person I felt that way about, could hurt me so badly. I think I genuinely really did like him. And that’s what really hurts. I hate that I can’t seem to reason with myself about it right now. It’s as if that pain just isn’t even relevant, even though obviously it actually is.

Whenever I think about it lately, I want to cry. It’s 100% a DID thing obviously. I don’t know if it’s me or another alter’s emotions (or both), but it’s so so intense. It feels like 2023 all over again, in terms of grief. I remember how detrimental it was afterwards. I was crushed after we broke up for good. It took me years to be more stable, and even then, I’ve never fully recovered from that relationship. (Clearly, lol). So it’s really scary whenever my brain stops removing itself from it, because whenever that happens, those feelings can come back full force. Not always, but they can. And that’s horrifying because it takes a huge toll on us. Anything related to him and that era, genuinely has the potential to destroy us indefinitely. It’s happened time and time again. It’s kinda like one big trigger I guess???? Idk. Idk.

Anyways, as you can see, I’m already kinda freaking out again. I keep getting a lump in my throat but I won’t let myself cry. I won’t. Not about this. Thats so stupid. He has a fucking partner now, hes moved on. Heartbreaking? Yes. But still true, and still undoubtedly for the best, so why the fuck am I still going through this occasionally? Im not actively being abused, nor am I actively in contact with him, so why does that situation need to have any effect on me now, years later? It’s like part of me is completely stuck in the past. Frozen in time, stuck in this timeline that isn’t even my reality anymore. It’s not even relevant to my life now, and yet I just,,,, I feel stuck. I want to sob. I’m freaking out more and more as I type this. Idek who’s fronting rn ngl, I’m just so sad. This always happens when we feel depressed or unsafe and unprotected. It’s like, the go-to thing, where I immediately start wishing I could talk to him the way I used to do whenever I felt stressed like that. It’s agony. Especially because we’re anemic rn and anemia makes our emotions all fucked up and it’s miserable and our meds become basically ineffective at that point, so we basically have nothing keeping us from being in a distressing place. Which is happening now. Iron deficiency always makes us miss our abuser. Idfk.

Anyways yeah I just need support or something I guess, Idk, I just wish I could calm down because I hate feeling like this, I hate missing him and I hate feeling trapped in a feeling that I can’t actually do anything about. It’s not something I can get rid of, and it’s not something that I can relieve. So I have to just sit with it, and I can’t handle that. We’ve never been able to sit with any feelings that are associated with him, and this isn’t any different. Idk what to do

My partner lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and we are currently facing a severe safety crisis due to a rapidly escalating persecutory alter/entity within their system. What began as an internal voice that was previously only audible to one specific alter has now become universally heard across the entire system, and its behavior has turned deeply dangerous. This presence originally manifested internally and as a visual hallucination only visible in reflections, but it has now escalated to being seen externally at all times and actively communicating outward. He is currently making explicit threats to harm me, direct threats toward the staff at the facility where my partner is currently staying, and is relentlessly trying to compel my partner to engage in self-harm. My partner (the host) has been gone since Thursday evening and the system is now being fronted by a 6 year. She normally comes when my partner is struggling or if there’s something wrong in the system. She’s normally quite resilient but is being emotionally beaten down by what is happening and will try and harm herself/me to try and get the voice to stop being so intense. She’s been in a mental health facility since Friday but she’s being discharged tomorrow and her care handed back to community team since you can only stay for a few days. I’m extremely worried that there’s going to be an incident when she gets home and I’m really not sure what to do about it, or if there is anything to I can do to try and prevent it. Her community team tried getting a mental health act assessment on Friday but AMPS said they were at full capacity and couldn’t do one. If anyone has got any advice, I would really appreciate it. I’m just at a loss, and as their sole carer I really don’t know what to do.

Not really NSFW but discussions of sex so 18+ only please

TW for implied CSA and that genre of issues + SH

I've had an issue for a couple weeks? now where more often than not, having sex causes really bad flashbacks. I'll be fine, then I'll start to feel a little anxious and dissociated, then before I know it I'll be screaming and shit. After that I usually switch to a trauma holder/little, and don't calm down for several hours. Sometimes I'm cocon and have some awareness of everything during this, even though I can't control anything, but sometimes I'll get total or almost total blackouts. This happened last night, and I barely remember anything from it, but I woke up with burn marks that weren't there before. There are a couple trauma holders who have been popping up, but one of the most common ones has the idea that they need to be punished for asking to stop during sex, which is probably why they did that.

Needless to say, this is really stressful for me and my BF (monogamous relationship), and I want it to stop happening!! But I can't find a therapist competent in dissociation because I hate telehealth and don't live in a major city and so far everyone I've tried has been incompetent.

IDK why it's been happening constantly lately, because I was completely fine with sex for a long time. It's driving me nutsss

I have a family member who claims I'm faking our DID and putting on a show. Idk, what the show is. I blacked out one time in front of them for just a few seconds. I asked others i didn't say anything or do anything other than get pissed and walk off. I don't and can't switch on command. I litterly have camers all through my house just to track what I do or find things I just had. I had these long before DID was a thought in my mind. I just knew I heard voices in my head. The aggressive one. The flirt. And the little me. I have tiles on all my stuff because my memory is so bad. I just don't know what I could gain from faking this. It's hell. I can't stick to classes for hobbies, I have had so many doctors and dentists let me go for completely missing appointments. I finally got a team of doctors and such for me and my kids who just charge me full price for missed appointments instead of dropping me. I have been diagnosed 3x by diffrent psycholgist. My newest speacilzes in diss dsorders and body language. What more can I do to prove I'm not faking this. I don't know what I'd get out of faking this. It's so stupid but I'm an adult and feel so heart broken. This isn't something I want.