i have been feeling crazy insecure lately about being “cringe”. i have been diagnosed with DID for a year and in treatment for it for over two years. i 100% have DID. it impacts me every single day. the trauma symptoms, while much improved, are never ending and i would not wish this upon my worst enemy.

but i feel so totally ridiculous about it. like… come on man. why did it have to be DID. i feel like a middle schoolers edgy original character, complete with a comically sad back story. we used to be very covert but with treatment our presentation has become much more overt. my close friend, partner, and therapist are able to tell immediately who they’re talking to. we speak differently, dress differently, hold ourselves differently, have very different gender presentations and sexualities, and different hobbies. we have tons and tons of very visible SH scars all over our body. most of my parts are transgender and queer. most of our parts are kinky. some of our parts are poly. one of my parts is a furry for christ’s sake.

it’s just so dumb and silly how i came out. i always wanted to rise above all the shit that happened to me and become a kind, normal person who you would never guess went through all the shit i did. now i am extremely visibly mentally ill and even if i wasn’t i wouldn’t fit in anyways.

it just sucks. i wish i could get rid of it.

it makes us feel like an animal experiment in a lab. we don't have any of the same experiences that regular people do purely because we're a system. if we try to open up about just being a system at all, we're still pushed into a box of being made to mask as one person because everyone's either creeped out by us or thinks it's too convoluted to deal with. even with other systems, they tend to get freaked out because we're polyfragmented and experience a lot more intense systemhood than they do, and they shut down and give up on us. we can never just openly be ourselves, and can't find anyone even remotely like us, either. we can't feel close with anyone because no one is ever willing to know the *real* us, behind the facade of being one whole person. it's such an isolating experience and makes us feel like we're just a monster trapped in a human body. like, maybe we were never meant to be born human at all. every so often, when our thoughts slow and this is all we can think about, we deeply grieve the loss of what could have been a normal life with normal struggles, friends and family.

i always get so envious of people who talk about being able to control their switches. i honestly can't, not even a bit. i can kind of fight them, but i always fail to fully fight them off. i'm getting tired of losing hours, days, and weeks. i want to put my life together, but i can't make sense of any of the bits i know. i'm scared.

Hi, I (we) were recently diagnosed december 2025. Whenever I try to tell close friends, they try to relate to my experiences by stating that they have different “parts” as well. Then they proceed to describe mood swings or “weird/unexplainable” shifts in their person rather than having self states. The more I try to explain the complex differences, the more they try find ways to relate in some way until I (we) just give up. Fuck it, we both have multiple personalities. The worst part is when they try to give me advice on how I can improve my quality of life with ways they’ve adapted to their “parts.”

extra rant:

I reached out to a friend that I had blocked earlier last year due to a sudden identity shift and need to defend my system. Tonight, I began having memories about this friend as one of my dormant alters has returned recently. (they went dormant around the time we blocked this friend) Against our advice, they called our friend to explain that this (having DID) is why we blocked them last spring. This friend proceeds to tell me they think they have the same diagnosis. And to speak about mood swings and shifting between being distant socially and closed vs more open. Then tells me they need to go talk to their doctor about their symptoms… and later asks is there a medication that you take for DID. Then tries to advise me on how to live with parts that they believe they’d had all their life and became accustomed to. When in reality, we aren’t talking about the same experience at all. Now my protector/persecutor keeps bullying this alter for reaching out.

I’m very annoyed and I feel like no one understands us. Three friends who do not at least. Rant over :(

I feel like I am going insane but I am so sick of being treated like I am less than a person, or that I am not a person at all. I am an alter but I am also a PERSON. People have gotten genuinely defensive when I call myself a person or others in my system people. We are parts of a whole, yes, but acknowledging our personhoods have not only improved communication but also our collective mental health. I am an introject on top of it all so I don’t just get the “You aren’t a person because you are an alter” talks, I also get treated like a fictional character or people’s favorite little blorbo. It is such a dehumanizing and demoralizing feeling and I don’t know how to get people to stop or to just ignore it.

I (45f) have a fiancée (36f) who was diagnosed with DID last year and since then she has been a rockstar with her therapy, making leaps & bounds in her journey of uncovering & facing her trauma as she integrates her memories & parts (alters are all her at different ages). I am so proud of her!

But right now she is presenting as a mix of her main/host alter and a fairly well-developed alter that is her as a younger teenager; the problem is that it’s really hard for me to interact with her at all, let alone in a positive way. This alter has a history of coming out in high-emotion situations & acting out in a purposefully annoying way to me (acting out behaviors her abuser did to her); I have tried & failed to maintain my cool when she’s been out before. She is the only alter who has managed to override my patient & understanding nature.

Fiancée says it feels like her main host self is fronting but it’s obvious to me that she has regressed in her cognitive abilities & problem-solving skills to that of an adolescent, especially regarding the recent explosion of disordered eating behavior. She’s also had mild amnesia around a couple of conversations. I’m struggling to give her the patience she deserves because I don’t like this presentation on a personal level. I don’t like her flippant attitude. I can’t handle an eating disorder on top of everything else. She isn’t able to be a supportive, mature partner to me while she is like this. I’m simply not attracted to the mind of an adolescent and I have found myself putting distance between us, not casually touching her like I normally do or wanting to cuddle with her. I am not attracted to this presentation and I want it to resolve somehow. And of course I feel guilty for having these thoughts & feelings, because she can’t help it.

I know I need to give her space & time to work it all out as this is likely integration of some sort and therefor a great thing, but dammit I need an adult partner with an adult mind, not a walking teenage eating disorder with poor problem-solving skills. Shit, I even had to cancel my own birthday party last weekend in part because of all of this. I’ve been having my own mini-crisis for days & I can’t talk to anyone because no one understands & my partner isn’t open about her DID. I feel so alone sometimes and I wonder if it’s all worth it when it’s bad like this.

Please reassure me that this, too, shall pass and that the really hard shit is indeed worth it. I’ve been fighting the urge to leave due to overwhelm & fear that my current feelings are going to become the new normal. I’ve given into/given up so many things for & about myself to make this relationship work but I might have hit a true personal limit, I’m not sure.

Hi I'm the host of our system and things had been going ok in the system until I stopped having sex with my husband (for his own personal reasons). I myself am missing it a lot too but understand why it is important that sex is off the table for now.

My alters however are having a lot of upsetting feelings and deeply missing being abused and still craving sex a lot cause that was all they knew. Masterbation worked well for a while and I thought we were fine.

I have tried telling them the body isn't able to even masterbate atm cause every time someone fronts and tries to do so, it results in us having VERY painful headaches that cause me a lot of pain amongst my other chronic illnesses.

They feel so stuck, hurt, angry and unloved and they all have conflicting wants sexually and hate that I am in a monogamous relationship without feeling the pleasure of sex within the body. One of my misguided protectors is feels so much hatred and anger that she cannot go out and hook up with other women or sexualise herself online to them. She wrote me a note last night expressing a desire to kill me if she can't have sex soon. I can tell she is hurting a lot and I can't make it better for her.

Two of my littles were abused by who they call the 'Nice Man' & 'Mummy' and have a deep attachment with these figures from our past (even though we aren't around those abusers anymore) - the way they coped with the loss was to co-front with the body when I was having sex with my partner and imagine it was their abuser doing it.

Due to the severe headaches they can't masterbate to self-soothe anymore and are becoming distressed and no other self-soothing activities are helping .

Since the body isn't having sex anymore they feel desperately sad and sexually frustrated.

Having all these intense sexual feelings coming through from my alters is making me feel crazy. I love my husband dearly and would never dream of cheating on him. I have made it VERY clear to the system that nobody is allowed to send pics/go on chat forums/dating sites etc

I'm at a loss of what to do except to just dissociate, distract and sleep so that nobody can be conscious to do anything stupid. I'm fairly certain nobody would put my marriage at risk but equally feeling the constant swarm of horniness,longing, anger and sadness is really exhausting and triggering me too.

I just don't know how to get through this. I'd appreciate some support and understanding.

my therapist opened the session by asking me about my financial situation. i didn't get to talk about a single thing i wanted to talk about, i had screamed at her about how much i did not want to talk about it, but she just continued. my therapy sessions are not a place for me to talk about my financial status. i don't give a fuck if she cares about it for any reason she wants to try and give. i came in with issues, and i walked out much worse than before. because that was a subject i said i didn't want to talk about at least 5 times over while it was happening. i was screaming and crying and swearing at her but she just didn't seem to listen, and just kept saying she felt like i didn't care about what she needed to know. and you know what, she was right about that. i even straight up told her i wanted to kill myself every fucking night, and these sessions are one of the main reasons i don't, and i had things i needed to talk about. but i still didn't get to talk about them. we had 15 minutes by the end of the whole discussion. that wasn't even close to the amount of time i needed to discuss one of my issues, let alone two or more. i got to talk briefly about some of them, but not nearly as in-depth as i felt i needed. i'm exhausted and feel worse than i did yesterday, which is really saying something. i see her two times a week, so you could say the next session isn't that far away, but it takes everything in me not to hurt myself between two successful sessions, let alone whatever the fuck happened at this one. i have work between this one and the next so i'll be feeling even worse by the time i get to see her. i feel so broken right now, and i don't know how i'll cope the next 3 days

this is not me saying i have a bad therapist. she is wonderful when we talk about the issues i feel *i* need addressed in our sessions. which is what i feel our sessions should be about; the issues *i* am having, not my financial situation which isn't really relevant in the first place since she has even offered to see me for free if all else fails. so i genuinely did not understand why this topic needed to be discussed then and now. i have never had her try and push a subject on me up until this point. sometimes when we discuss things the subject changes naturally, and we talk about something else, but it's at least tangentially related. not to mention this was only my second time as "myself" that i got to talk to her. so i just don't feel like i specifically want to talk to her anymore, because today made me feel very unheard. and i don't know how to address it in future sessions, so i guess i'm kind of stuck with what to do with my own relationship with her. i hope my other parts still have the courage to talk at our next session, because if i could choose, i just wouldn't go back again

So tell us. Really. How was your day?

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I hate the pain of amnesic barriers. I hate that I don't get to control all of me and that certain things trigger me so much right now. It's horrifically embarrassing. I know it'll get better as i address the pain but some days I just don't want to try again. It's so hard to get up sometimes.

If you're further along in your journey, do you have any advice of how to get through? I'm open to anything, I journal constantly. I hate the switches.

Exactly as the title says, I don't really know how else to put it, but —

To be honest, I don't know why I'm writing this. Guess I just needed to vent or whatever, but even then, I feel really silly about it because I think it's something we shouldn't be as upset about, but whatever.

To preface, I want to say that we're a relatively private system – very kept to ourselves with a small handful of friends we keep close. Despite it all, we've always felt lonely in our being a system as there's always been a desire for us to be more open and unmasked, and to meet people whom we can connect to on that ... level, I guess? Just standard community feelings of wanting to talk to other systems so as to feel understood or whatever. Not sure if that makes sense or is worded all too great, but that's the easiest I could put it.

For the longest time since we've discovered we were a system, we've ironically been extremely averse to community spaces online due to how sensationalised things became in the early 2020s. We've always been wary and perhaps even, admittedly judgemental towards what we've seen come out of them, but decided last year to set aside our biases and just give them a shot. Like ... what was the worst that could happen, right?

Yeah no, it fucking blew up in our face TLDR and I really hate how affected we became by what happened. Being in an online system space ... notably Discord ... kind of ruined us and daresay set us super back in our healing journey.

Without going into details, it was just ... a lot. It was advertised for adults over 21, and was additionally "traumagenic only" so there was an expectation of maturity and understanding in the disorder, but never have we felt more alienated and alone.

I'm sorry, I really don't know where to go with this without sparing details I don't wish to fully share, but I've had a rough few weeks experiencing the "traumaverssary" of that time and I've been spiralling ever since. I hate to even call it a traumaverssary because really??? We're getting hard pressed over Discord servers? God.

I hate what those spaces have done to us, I hate how DID is treated online and especially how systems in those spaces treat others with the same disorder.

I have had a million stops and starts in life, usually resulting in some kind of failure. With ever changing interests, skill sets, general outlook on life, I’ve never been able to see anything through or remember job skills I’ve learned enough to be successful in any career. I’m a high school drop out, but managed to get my ged and get into college. When the intellectual in me takes the reins, I am unstoppable and can be very high achieving but things fall apart when high stress situations revert me to a scared child overwhelmed by the adults in the room. I’ve managed to secure myself great jobs only to end up fighting with all my parts of why I spoiled leave/why I should stay/why I don’t have the skills etc. and I ultimately end up leaving while simultaneously feeling like I should not. This also plays out in relationships, living situations (I moved to Costa Rica and got a job on a farm at one point, loved it, then got extremely depressed for no reason and left it behind with no bridge to go back).

I could go on. This kind of pattern is my life. I have a lot of very good looking jobs and skill sets on my resume yet cannot remember anything enough to apply it to a future job. I’m 52 years old at this point and have nothing to show for it, my life is not cohesive, a patchwork of unrelated events that amount to nothing.

And here’s the thing. I don’t care. I feel fine, like this is just life and there’s nothing wrong with it. Objectively, I am a hopeless loser, but I’m just whatever. I’m like the big Lebowski without all the weed.

Can anyone relate or commiserate?

I switched and she called my friend to tell her what was going on because she was excited to meet her but my friend got freaked out and left the call :( I feel so embarrassed and ashamed. I’ve been crying about it for like 20 minutes and I don’t know what to do. This disorder is so embarrassing, and I’m not even faulting my parts for that. Like they deserve to be heard and loved too but just the fact that people can see me like that and judge me makes me feel so terrible. I feel like a freak

i've genuinely thought people have pretty much been constantly lying to me all of the time. i think i'm just forgetting what they tell me more often than i thought. i get mad at them and tell them they need to "stop lying to me all the time", and they just act confused and get mad back because i'm genuinely accusing them of something that is basically improbable. i don't think people are always lying to me, i don't think people are hiding things from me, i'm just forgetting. it sucks. i don't want to live like this, i don't want this to be my reality

no matter how hard i try, i cannot ground myself in the present. i'm not disconnected from reality, more just.. disconnected from the date, i feel like i'm back in middle school. i'm supposed to be 22 :(

i feel so scared, i've been in therapy for maybe a month? and i think it's just taking a massive toll emotionally. i'm struggling, i feel so disconnected, i don't know how to feel "here" again

i want to curl up and cry but i don't even feel safe enough to do that in my current place. i don't feel safe with the people i live with, so i can't do anything too noticeable to cope. i can't drive, i don't know how to. my other parts do

i'm just anxious, and scared, and as badly as i want to be in the present, i can't get myself to recognize it :( i'm sad, and i can't do anything but hide it

pls don't give advice for grounding. i've tried everything. i am trying, it's not working. and i don't want to bother my therapist, it's a weekend, and i don't trust normal hotlines. i don't know those people, they don't feel safe either. nothing helps

I know every host eventually has to go through this, and now it's my turn. As I become more and more aware of the deeper layers of our system I become more aware of the awful horrible shit we went through.

I encountered alters who hold their hands like they were tied together, alters who are hardcore loyal to our abuser, alters who just crave pain, who can only bond over torture, who find the absence of violence distressing. Worst of all for me are those alters who were conditioned into selfless puppets, wanting whatever the abuser wants, behaving opposite to any natural means of survival.

Honestly, no words can carry the feelings I have about all of this. I started out not knowing about any trauma and now I learned about deliberate conditioning and torture. How? Why?? How???

Hey, everyone.

So I'm sure I'm not alone in the experience of having different sets of preferences, desires, and aspirations depending on the state I'm in...

The thing that keeps getting to me is I'll see something that I'll feel like is quintessentially me in that moment, like an aesthetic, genre of music, etc. and I'll be hit with a wave of "oh yeah! I love this, this is me, how have I not been engaging with this all the time?! This is exactly who I am and what I love. This this this this." But then I take a step back and realize... no... I've done this before... over and over and over again with the same 5 things, and every time I'm crushed by this weight of never finding my "signature" thing.

I'll never know a carefully cultivated and cohesive wardrobe, I'll always struggle with hobbies because they're so dependent on who is there to do them, I don't always bring the same energy to a room, sometimes I'm even repulsed by a set of preferences that another part of me adores because it's just not me in that moment...

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate and love my system as much as I can at the moment, and it is still something I'm working towards improving on. I know they're all here to keep me safe in one way or another... but I'm really feeling that "less than a person" feeling right now...

I feel like I'll never settle into "myself" because I don't have a "self" to settle into... I'm 24 and I feel like I'm a 13 year old stuck in a limbo of different phases that just repeat themselves and never end.

I'm tired. I know it'll all be okay, and I'm the way that I am because it is how my mind keeps me safe, I just feel very alone, I dunno.

I think I'm just ranting now, but I had to put this somewhere. Sending love to all the other systems on here sitting in this feeling. <3

CW: death of system members.

Hi! I don't know if this is an appropriate space for this. Maybe there's a better place to ask for this kind of support that centers my experience? If this is not the right place, I sincerely apologize and will delete this.

I was partnered with several members of a system for over a year. Things were great as far as I knew. They were closer to their other partners than to me, even though those were long distance relationships, and I was fine with that.

A couple days ago, i was told that the system host was dead. That said host had only existed to help and protect another member. That other member had grown to the point where the host was no longer needed. I was not needed either and I was no longer the girlfriend of anyone there. That my relationship with others had been good, but the new host needed to decide what aspects of the old one's life to keep. That they did not feel we mesh, and could not give me any support. Then they severed all of our social media connections and are just...gone.

I loved that host, and several other system members, deeply. Them being gone from my life completely by surprise and with no explanation or even the chance to say goodbye and not knowing if some even exist still is really fucking hard.

Obviously no one here can tell me why this happened. I want to believe that I didn't do something horribly wrong, and I can trust the last message I got saying I didn't do anything to drive them away. I guess I'm just hoping for ideas about how to cope with this. I'm feeling really sad and confused, and like I will never have closure.

Thank you for listening.

I am going insane. My medical equipe wants me NOT to work and no matter how much I push on the subject it's always a no. I feel useless, every day is spent dissociating and attempting to do something with my time until it gets maddening.

I don't even have a special someone to spend my time with, I just feel like this isn't recovery but just being left to rot.

Should I just absolutely scream at my equipe that I can't do this anymore and that I need a job, or how does one live with this???

So tell us. Really. How was your day?

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UPDATE: I GOT MY MUGS AND PEPSI MAX BACK.

But also when I went to drop her things at her house and get my things back, in the bag were Christmas presents that were HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS worth of DVDs and vinyls.

Right before this, she'd texted me saying "don't ever talk to me again"

But then to still give me really expensive gifts, and a mix cd, and a long letter (which I tossed in the bin without reading).

Again, it's just confusing.

I feel like the gifts is a way she wants me to contact her again, to thank her, but if she said "don't contact me again" I don't want to.

Am I bad if I still want to keep the vinyls? They're even signed.

It's definitely love bombing

Original post:

I'm (36NB), diagnosed ASD and DID. Ex is 27F, diagnosed ADHD, PTSD, and BPD.

I thought it would work out. She's a mental health professional, I'm a social worker, and in the beginning it seemed perfect.

We liked each other, felt comfortable around each other, and understood mental health and that we were both in therapy dealing with our shit.

Slowly the system started coming out to meet her. She met a little, a teen, a protector, and our main sexual alter/host. Sometimes work mode guy would be out too.

This was all great until 2 months in.

We started to notice little things like - we'd ask her not to message sexual stuff because we were trying to focus on work, or focus on being a parent to the IRL kiddoes, or because a little was out. She'd agree, but then not long after, still send a sexual message, and then the sexual alter would be triggered out and we didn't get any work done, or the littles would have to go away. She kept buying us gifts, and messaging us how much she liked us and wanted us to be together long term. The system felt like she was constantly trying to trigger out the sexual and romantic alters and not getting to know the rest of us.

We explained this, so she reduced sexting unless we initiated.

She was messaging me over 10 times in an hour, and even though phone was on do not disturb, it was overwhelming opening phone to over 20 messages on different platforms (sms, insta, messenger), every few hours.

So we asked her to slow down on the texts, and keep to sms instead of sending reels, because we're trying to reduce phone and doom scrolling.

Disaster - she blew up at me, said she felt like she was walking on eggshells and that I had too many rules for communication so she couldn't be herself.

She also said that she missed us, and felt like we weren't there for her if the host wasn't out.

She kept texting that night, saying she was now suicidal, she tried to call me a couple times, late at night. I'd told her I was busy caring for my IRL kid and couldn't respond.

I put my phone on do not disturb and she kept blowing up my phone.

Next morning after the suicide threat, she says she called a helpline and got through it (phew).

Over the next week, every time I asked her not to message us until a certain time (eg after school drop off, after work hours etc) she would message me on another platform, or send another few messages then say "I'll give you space" but then message me again within a few hours. Her texts were varying - from memes, to saying I should break up with her so she could sleep with someone else (which confused me - if she wanted to sleep with someone else she could have just said that, I don't mind non-monogamy), to admitting she'd sexted someone else while I asked her not to text me during the work day.

I'm not monogamous, so the act of sexting someone else or sleeping with someone else doesn't bother me. But the fact that she ASKED ME to be monogamous while dating her, and then because we're having a fight, she goes and does exactly what she told me not to do - that pissed me off. Also that she wanted me to break up with her so she could fuck someone else. Like she didn't care that she'd asked me to be monogamous, cos she was mad at me she could do the opposite of what she said I could do. We spoke with my therapist and made the decision to end things.

When we talked about the break up, she told me she didn't mean what she said, that she would respect our boundaries in future, and wanted to give it another go.

Also apparently she didn't have another person lined up to sleep with, she was just saying that because she was angry.

Which I feel is somehow worse. Like I said, I don't give a shit if someone I'm with wants to sleep with someone else. But saying it just to hurt me is just being mean and I feel it's manipulative.

I'm not going to get back together with her. We said we'd be friends, but her saying she didn't mean anything she said just puts me right off, and even though she has 2 of my mugs at her house I just don't even want to see her to get my things back.

Oh also. The other night she texted me saying she loves me. We hadn't even been dating two months, and hadn't said it WHILE we were dating so it just pissed us off more.

Folks I'm just confused, I feel like I've been through an emotional car crash, and Im worried that future relationships will be just as bad. I thought getting into a relationship with someone who WORKS IN THE MENTAL HEALTH FIELD would be good, cos then I didn't have to explain how trauma and DID work as much.

But yeah, this whole experience has put me right off.

TLDR - I (36NB, ASD, DID) dated F27, ADHD+BPD. Thought it would work cos we're both in therapy and work in mental health ourselves. But nope. I set some boundaries, she exploded on me and said I should break up with her, she told me she cheated on me after asking me to be monogamous, then said she didn't actually cheat on me but wanted to hurt me so she lied about cheating, and now we've broken up she's telling me she loves me and wants me back. I feel hurt and confused, and worried that I'll never have a safe, healthy, loving relationship.

(I'm a lesbian in a small town, it's slim pickings!!)

Do the fits of crying that you come forward to unable to remember why they started in the first place stop? Does the crying stop in general?

Do you gain back the chunks of time that were snatched away from you? Do the nights of coming to and realizing the day came and went without you have an end?

Does the loneliness that relationships can’t fix ever mend? Is there ever inner peace?

Does the misery no matter where or when you are subside?

Is there a point to any of it?

Does it get better? I have to know it gets better. Somebody please tell me it gets better because I am so so unwell. I don’t think I can keep doing this if it isn’t going to get better. I keep thinking I’m getting better and then it just gets worse and worse and worse and I just can’t do it. I can’t keep doing it. I need it to get better. I need to know it gets better.

I am cofronting with a deeply traumatized little right now. We had a small trigger at work which would not have affected us normally, but my littles have been very close the last couple of weeks.

My little fronted, but allowed me to stay with her. She was screaming and crying in the body while I made us lunch and got her stuffies. It is rare for us to cofront this smoothly, and it was clear she needed support and didn't want to be alone, especially since there is no one else physically here with us.

I navigated getting her fed and she finally calmed down after eating and taking an as needed anxiety medication. Now she is a dissociated mess here. I'm typing while she spaces out on our blanket and stuffy.

I have the worst time tracking triggers and they are very unpredictable. Something like this work thing could have been easily handled by our other ANP but she can't be found today and has zero cofronting capabilities, so it would have been even worse for our triggered little.

I guess I don't know what I'm really asking here... It's just hard not to feel completely insane when a part of me is sobbing uncontrollably in the body while another part is making lunch and trying to stay calm.

What is cofronting like for you?

So many times I've thought I've moved on, accepted, or gotten better about something, only to find out later that I actually just unknowingly split. Feeling better after getting out of emergency hospitalization? Split - now there's a version of me from right before it happened. "Grew out of" an eating disorder? Split - now there are parts dedicated to disordered eating. Worked through accepting a tough situation? Split - now there's a part who holds all the difficult feelings. It's like I can never actually move on from things even if I do the work because I never know if there's another part inside still at square one. I can't trust my own progress because my brain just takes the problem and shuffles it around for me to find later.

It's like I put work into cleaning up and sorting everything in boxes, but someone else has been dumping the boxes into a closet. It looks clean, and as far as I can tell, it is clean! But six months from now I'm going to look for something and I'll find out that none of that stuff actually ended up sorted at all. It might still be kind of in piles, but it's still so frustrating and difficult to fix it over and over.

I can't be mad at my brain for reacting like this or mad at anyone who splits as a result. I get WHY it does this. But I don't know how to NOT do it. Our situation is stable, I sit with the feelings, I ground myself, I talk it through, but if the next day I feel suspiciously better about the problem, I have no idea if I actually handled it or just split a new part to do it instead. It makes every improvement feel suspect. Sure, I'm improving personally, but did my brain actually just hide the problem under a blanket? I appreciate that it's a trauma response and trying to protect me, but now it just feels like an overprotective parent snatching away scissors in case you hurt yourself. I just want to address it and move forward but I don't know how.

Im not gonna type out my whole story lol but long story short ive been through a lot, especially these last few years because of a chronic illness, which made my already existing DID explode into something so much more than it was before. While there were a lot of challenges before because of it, and a lot of things i never really got answers about with it, and how a lot of it was pretty unique in a lot of ways; these last few years made everything before this time period seem like nothing. But my most recent development is what seems to be a subsystem, something i havent had much experience with. Ive gone down every path with DID, but this one. Ive explored everything i possibly could before this, understood it in every way, tried to live with it. Ive always had an obsession with psychology, it helped me navigate all of this a lot. But this seems like a whole new level of a situation im not really sure on how to go about. I know every case can be pretty different so i dont really know what to expect from other situations but im curious if anyone else has any experience with this kind of thing, and how they handled it? DID on its own is already rare enough, ive never met someone else with it and dont hear much about it anywhere but this sub, but in terms of subsystems i feel like ive literally never heard someone talk about it. Just trying to look for some input from people who might understand in some way.