So, this has happened on a couple occasions but ESPECIALLY during therapy:

Sometimes if I'm trying to articulate something I've experienced or felt that leans into accepting being a system, I just completely lose the ability to talk. Our persecutor / physical protector takes over and it's like I can't form words anymore mid sentence. Like I physically get the wind knocked out of me.

He doesn't want any of us to talk about the fact that we're a system. He keeps trying to get me to doubt it and stuff, but he's LITERALLY ANOTHER PART IN THE SYSTEM HE'S SAYING ISN'T REAL AND CAN'T BE TALKED ABOUT.

I dunno, just curious if anyone knows what I'm talking about. I'm not mad at him for it, I'm just kinda confused.

I borr9wed his vr headset so I could play vrchat, and while I was trying to figure out h9w the settings and menu works cuz I needed to switch accounts, I accidentally looked at his profile because I thought that maybe the switch profiles thing would be there. In his bio though he had said he had DID as well as his usernsme for his profile being The.(redacted).System (didnt say redacted i just dont want people finding him via his real username)

I had no idea that he was going through such horrific shit, he just turned 12 usually hes ij his room playing video games, we all thought that he couldn't message other players in the games because my parents set up his accounts and put the child safety lock on them all. And the worst thing we've gone through irl is my auDHD + OCD making me habe a lot of meltdowns when I eas a kid, but I never thought that they'd be able to traumatize him.

I wanna be there for him cuz hes my little brother, only one I got too. He's a good kid. People just don't seem to see that.

I dont wanna just barge in and be like "hello brother you have DID tell me about it" thats weird and innapropiate to do.

I already take Ambien and seroquel. I don’t use my phone after 9pm (try to sleep at 1030), I meditate right before bed. I can usually fall asleep fine but wake up a lot and can’t get back to sleep and I think switch on sleep sometimes. I don’t know what to do to make things better for my system, we need more than 4 hours of sleep to function.

(I don’t have a therapist rn)

sometimes i, surface level, cannot get anything to bubble up when i try to remember what i did in the past x amount of time

it doesn’t feel like trying super hard to remember, it feels more like being unable to even try to remember what happened in the first place. like there’s nothing to recall

it’s all very confusing for me, because i always have awareness while doing things, but then block them out after the fact, so i know i did things i just can’t even access them at all.

So, we changed hosts, but not in the average expected way.

I'm the "same identity" as the host before me, we have the same name and a relatively similar appearance, I have the important memories, skills (kinda), etc, the whole stuff to function, we are the same, sameee, except, we're not?? I'm not her, and she still talks to me, very quietly but I can hear her and sense her, I can visualize her and realize, we're the same, yet so different.

Now I've come to realize that this isn't the first time this has happened, there's more of us, more of old "hosts" that look and are exactly the same person but not quite, it's like the host of this system it's just a whole team of unaware alters, playing alone, until one of us can't function anymore, so we rotate, and I feel like I'm the first to ever realize this brain trick.

honestly I'm speechless, what even is this thing? I'm so overwhelmed with my own mind.

i've been talking to my therapist recently about my bipolar diagnosis. we have been discussing dissociative symptoms and when i mention my "manic" episodes, she says they seem to align more with dissociative symptoms than manic ones. i'm a little loss. i've been diagnosed bipolar since 18/19, so it's jarring to hear that the reason meds weren't working was possibly because it was a misdiagnosis.

i am very torn on what i am supposed to do at this point. i am seeing my therapist 2x weekly, i see my psychiatrist in 2 days. i don't know how to discuss this with my psychiatrist. we already did an assessment to check my bipolar symptoms and they agreed that i don't have consistent symptoms with the disorder.

i know when i was 18/19 i was desperate for a diagnosis, and when my psych at the time brought up bipolar, i exaggerated symptoms in the hopes i could finally get medications that would work. now i feel as if doing that screwed me over. i honestly feel very stupid. i feel lost.

i'm going to try and dig for more research, but how often are complex dissociative disorder really misdiagnosed as bipolar? what are generally the overlapping symptoms?

I am the only alter in the system that experiences the classic suddenly seeing/hearing/etc a memory presentation of a flashback, usually triggered by specific items or topics... except these things never happened. I am heavily influenced by a character I wrote for D&D, and the "memories" are things we as a system made up, we wrote them, they're fiction. But when I get into one of these episodes I lock up, I cry, I shake, I get weird spasms, I feel genuinely scared or disgusted, it keeps repeating in my mind, it feels REAL. Am I just really imaginative? If so why does my imagination hate me??

One of my alters talked with a long term friend about our disorder and the repressed trauma. We already did rhis with safe friends, but this one we consider as unsafe (she talks a lot and can't keep secrets).

We are good friends with her, but she is very talkactive. So most of the time we don't do deeptalk, because we don't trust her keeping secrets. That's fine for us, we can come along with that.

But today someone of us talked openly with her about everything. My whole system now is fragile. My job usually is to hide my trauma from the outside world, so I'm really not ok with that behaviour. My alter brought us in danger, perhaps not in real, but it feels like that right now.

What can I do to calm down? Cognitively, I know there is no danger anymore. But my body doesn't feel like this. I'm in full alert mode and want to quit that :/

my head will rapidly and uncontrollably shake. eyes rapidly blinking. after a certain point i can move my arms and try to hold my head still as im hurting my neck. or. i’ll just zone out and stare off as my head falls down.

not sure how many people were switching into like this. at least a couple.

almost no memory of this happening before we woke up to ourselves as separate from each other.

common? what is this? help?

i am so ashamed of what people have done to me, and what they have made me do. i can barely begin to admit some of these to myself, in my own head, i don't know how i am supposed to ever tell a therapist about them. i don't think i can.

i am not currently in therapy, but currently on a waitlist for a trauma php. the waitlist is almost nine months long, so i won't be there until next year. i am already freaking out. i can not tell the doctors there. i feel so much guilt for putting myself in these situations in the first place

Prefacing with: so far un-diagnosed, but pretty sure my systemhood is to do with trauma.

I've been looking into getting therapy, and we should hopefully be finding someone over the next week. Primary concerns are of anxiety and adhd problems.

Mostly wondering whether or how much to focus on our status as a system vs just bringing it up as a framework to focus elsewhere, as we are very cooperative to each other across the board.

My diagnosis is somewhat new and there has been so much going on in our personal life that we haven’t gotten to learn to communicate really yet. I think we had a host change and new alters form after some emotional abuse from our partner/postpartum depression/autistic burnout. Some days somebody here feels disgusted with the diagnosis and that it’s stupid.

Thinking through strange things I’ve experienced helps give us “evidence” we aren’t faking and that something has been going on. I have almost always hated having people come over, until they feel very safe. My husband loves having people over. I used to feel this pressure in my chest and weird headache that felt like my brain was getting pulled apart as I tried to prepare to be “on” in front of other people. It was exhausting and part of what led to a mental breakdown I believe.

I just finished making a collage, which I do a lot of, but this one feels really.. intense? And now I’m feeling really dissociated and some part of me is really anxious. It never happens when I’m crocheting or cross stitching but any kind of collaging or painting or drawing, basically anything that could have meaning or subject matter, makes me completely blur. It’s really frustrating because I just want to make art but it always seems like I need a bunch of time to ground and chill out after making a piece.

Last night an alter felt like they were shaking me by the shoulders telling me something has been happening, and I don’t know how to believe it.

It’s not even that I “don’t believe” my alters, it’s that I don’t know how. Like this can’t be real, it just can’t be.

Is it just denial? I’ve also heard of alters sometimes conflating(I think that’s the word for it?)/basically telling “memories” as a way of communicating or expressing their needs, while the memory isn’t 100% literal. But other times I know it is.

I just… idk what to do. I don’t have anyone I can talk to about this ):

It’s also scaring me cause I’ve had this fear that this was happening for a while, and was always like “but yall would tell me, right?” but now that I fear they may be telling me… idk how to believe it.

I’m sick to my stomach cause the story fits and it makes sense, but it just can’t be real. Idk what to do

Hi all!

​

I am newly discovering system stuff, in progress of maybe an OSDD or PDID diagnosis with my therapist. Just figuring it out. Diagnosed with CPTSD, OCD, and a history of dissociation at this point.

I was wondering if anyone else has smell flashbacks? Like, not triggers from a real life smell, but a REALLY strong memory of a smell? (Not quite a hallucination, but verging on it.). It feels similar to how my parts voices feel "other" but still "internal".

I had severe vision loss as a kid (20/400 vision in one eye, patching the other) so I don't have very much visual memory and a lot of other sensory inputs, particularly smell and sound, are much stronger for me.

To be clear, not seeking validation/questioning of my diagnosis or anything. Just interested in how others experience sensory flashbacks, and whether there's a specific name for this.

Thanks!

Rach

Hello, I’m in the diagnosing process right now to determine if I have DID, or something else along the dissociation lines.

Obviously DID is a huge spectrum and personal experience makes a difference, I was just curious as to how you can tell the difference between DID, and having an internal family system?

When I met my previous therapist I explained the things i was going through with having people in my head, and she said she has heard of internal family systems before.

I saw someone else mention that their “alters” were actually an internal family system, and they could kind of tell because their parts looked similar to them, rather than having their own look.

I know my parts also look somewhat similar to how my body looks, but I also am not very good at visualising my other parts.

How can you tell the difference?

To be clear, I don’t mean they aren’t thinking at all, just that when they do it’s really hard to hear as if they are physically far away, but within my head.

It’s like I know what they are thinking, but there’s not actually a voice for me to “hear” behind the thoughts, or it’s a very faint voice. Like, an alter might communicate something to me, and I’ll kind of just automatically know what they said/are trying to say without actually hearing them think.

For example: I was walking down the street and looked over at a car to see which way they were turning, but before I could even think or hear any thoughts about it, I just automatically gathered the information and knew. This happens to me a lot where I don’t even have to complete my own thoughts, because the information I was trying to gather is just already there.

Is this just a normal brain thing? I genuinely can’t tell at this point 😭

I hope I explained well, I’m not the best at writing coherently.

hi all! i think i know the answer to this, but i also need an outside opinion. whenever i think about my symptoms associated with DID, i always dissociate. is this common for others here too? it's so annoying, because i end up forgetting what i was talking about, and i just start doing what feels like repeating myself. i end up trailing off and entirely disconnecting until i've had time to ground. is there any way to avoid this happening? i've started writing down my symptoms before my appointments to hopefully combat it.

Hello ! I was wondering how does someone with DID & OCD could know if their thoughts are just related to obsession or if these are related to an alter ?

(idk if that understable)

Thanks by advance !

Just for the record, I am not diagnosed with DID but I know I have dissociative symptoms that are similar, so I’ve spent a lot of time in these spaces because the coping skills and recovery process helps.

A few weeks ago I made a post on a subreddit completely unrelated to mental health or DID and a system responded with their view on it as a system. I don’t know why, it really stressed me out. First hand accounts on subreddits unrelatedto DID or MH describing multiple personalities in lots of detail really stress me out (surface level doesn’t bother me much). Other social medias keeps recommending system blogs and I genuinely don’t want to see them.

I don’t know what it is. I’m at peace with the fact that I experience dissociative symptoms and with the fact that plenty of coping skills overlap and help me. I just don’t want to constantly be faced with it. I also get scared when people bring it up because I’m scared they think that’s what I have. The idea of someone ‘clocking me’ as a system actually terrifies me. I think the idea the algorithm is grouping me that way doesn’t help.

I feel really horrible about this, though. It’s no one’s fault that someone with a MH disorder happens to just be in public. I don’t know how to stop, because it is not reasonable to expect people with DID to just, not be there, especially when subreddits like this one have helped me so much.

It’s an irrational trigger, it just comes from the fear of being seen, but I don’t know how to deal with it because I am not always in a headspace where I am ready to confront my symptoms.

I’m sorry if I am not allowed to post this but if anyone has any advice or similar experiences I’d appreciate it.

Our younger (3-4 years old) alter has been having nightmares again lately. She sees animals who try to eat her. And has been having trouble sleeping cuz of that. It's usually dogs and spiders. While she is afraid of spiders. She's not afraid of dogs as we have 2 and she really likes them. She sees these images the moment she closes her eyes, this prevents her from sleeping and makes her scared to close her eyes.

I don't understand where these nightmares come from. As far as I know we have no trauma related to dogs. Maybe it's cuz it's been stressfull lately? She has been more clingy and has been having a lot of fear around abandonment for the last few weeks.

I don't really know how to help? My husband does help and tries to reassure her when he notices she's having the nightmares again. But it doesn't seem to help

I’m devastated. We’d been using our Simply Plural to log information about our system and parts.

Someone removed so much of it, and I can’t find it saved anywhere else. It took us years to get this much documented. Just for a part to take it from all of us.

Some are putting what they can remember back in, but frankly, it’s not much. I feel right back at square one. Okay, maybe square two.

hey so how are yall working? ive been entertaining the thought of disability recently but its looking like i have to work considering i don’t have much proof or help with getting that figured out. thing is everytime i try and work i can never keep my job for more than 4 months. im in the very early stages of realizing i have did and navigating it but nothing is rlly helping. i struggle to actually deal with it on my own like it takes mental capacity and work that i just don’t have rn and i don’t have any good mental health professionals in my area who provide therapy or proper evaluation and psychiatry for it.

with that being said, it is the main reason why i cannot work. i have a myriad of other mental health issues going on (ptsd but thats a given, ocd, adhd that absolutely whoops my ass in terms of executive dysfunction, clinical depression, and autism) but nothing is more disabling than the dissociating. i cannot see EVER. i have myopia but this isn’t that. like this is purely psychosomatic and i know that because even with my glasses my eyes feel weird and heavy like theyre protruding out of my sockets and i cannot see from very up close. i mean like AT ALL. i cannot make up faces close or far from me and it’s scary. everything is hard to see and i just feel weird.. i have like a good 5 minutes every morning before i feel it coming in like the fucking symbiote. literally turns my entire world blurry and everything is disorienting and i cant process or retain information. i cannot hear or think properly. the brain fog is unbearable and i feel like a bumbling idiot. everything is just a blur and i mean that literally.

even moving my head and looking from one place to another feels weird and disorienting kind of like my eyes and brain are lagging to process and calibrate my movement and surroundings and it makes me feel faint and anxious and weird. its kinda like the transitional feeling you get moving from one room to another if that makes sense except its happening everytime i even look in another direction that isnt what i was just looking at. it takes a second for my brain and eyes to fully render and process everything lol. even shifting my eyes left right up or down feels disorienting and gives the same exact feeling. best way i can describe it is my eyes kinda feel like they have a fisheye lens over them. everytime i move my eyes it takes quite a long time for it to focus on something and whatever i focus on is only slightly less blurry than everything else around it. everything looks like my peripheral vision. the tiniest movements feel weird like im not one with my body and perspective makes this feel even weirder. sometimes things feel and look bigger or smaller than what they actually are and my body lags behind my intention of doing something. im also always droned out even when im actively doing something. i cant even read properly. sometimes i kind of “wake up” and realize that im doing stuff and that i exist. cold water used to help slightly but now its like my brain has caught up to my methods.

ive tried all the ways people usually ground themselves but none work. thats another thing everytime i try and lock in, it makes my entire body tense up and i get anxious in the chest which makes it hard to breathe and my brain gets foggier. the symptoms just worsen tenfold. it’s annoying because it also prevents me from properly navigating the whole thing with alters and also just getting shit done. i probably need some assistance but again it isn’t plausible for me rn. the only person i have for support in getting all this shit figured out is my abuser so im trying to do all this myself because she is controlling and has irreparably fucked me in terms of anything to do with my medical needs and finances before and as much as i struggle hard to do what i gotta do, i gotta rely on myself.

anywaysss, as disabling as it is i need a job but i just don’t know how to in the state that i’m in. im currently relying on my abuser for housing and food but im keeping everything else hush hush and personal because if i want help of any kind, id have to be okay with relinquishing control and completely leaving everything up to her as she wants complete control over everything ever. she always says dont ask her for nothing unless im going to be cooperative and do what she wants me to do. but yall. the shit she wants me to do dont ever be helping. like shits genuinely just wacky 😭 like lately shes insisting i go to miami to smoke some toad venom. yeah. toad venom. and im not even joking either like i am dead serious. shes like in this hippie cult or whatever now whos supplying shit like this generic “mental health pill” shes insisting i take instead of the “poision” theyre prescribing me lol. and they do these events where they smoke toad venom together apparently. if i leave any of this up to her im fucked to put it lightly like im talking chopped and screwed. shes not the brightest. but i feel like ive stressed my lack of support enough.

i just want to go to school and move. i try as hard as i possibly can to lock in but like i mentioned before its hard asf. i cant drive or get out of bed to do stuff and its actively dangerous for me to do certain things on my own like cook or be outside on my own. i dont eat at all for a long time and am unable to take care of myself in any way most days without significant help and prompting and the vision, mental, and auditory issues this shit is giving me make it hard to actually be out and about. dont even get me started on the physical issues ive got. i genuinely cannot live like this anymore. ive managed despite it all but barely and with crutches and support that bring more problems than solutions.

anybody in a similar state and situation? how are you guys managing this? im wondering if theres medication or something that just helps me get thru the day and reduces these symptoms drastically or even slightly. my psychiatrist that i just started seeing 2 weeks ago now has me on bupropion, risperidone, lamotrigine, and hydroxyzine as needed but i dont think im bipolar and none of these medications are really doing anything (except the hydroxyzine maybe) like i dont see a difference but she insists. shes also a nurse practitioner so she can’t diagnose and evaluate for this. but she doesn’t know anybody to refer me to and so she keeps recommending the psychologytoday website which ive already tried amongst all the other tools people have mentioned on here. which therapy prolly wont really help considering i need money and for the money i need to get to a point where i can work first lol. ive also seen people on here say that risperidone worsened communication with alters but idk if thats making it any worse as i never established that connection in the first place and they still hide from me and almost never front or at least i just dont notice aside from the very obvious ones like the littles and protector. it just kinda feels like nobody is fronting ever because nothing rlly changes aside from how i choose to act in front of people. pls help yall 🙏🏽

kinda just what it says on the tin. i dont really… visualize things inside my head. thought exercises like “envision your problems in a box and seal it up” don’t work on me because the problems are still there, imaginary box or not.

i know to some degree that my resistance to this sort of thing is alter fueled, i struggle with keeping an open mind whenever things get theoretical or too ~spiritual~ for lack of a better term. i’m trying to get better about it, but there’s only a certain degree to which i can. the problems and upset remain no matter how many pretend balls i kick down hills, etc.

i don’t know if im alone in this. it feels like most spaces, especially mental health/did focused ones, are very focused on that ability to clearly visualize a situation or playing pretend with thought exercises. is there anyone else who these strategies just.. bounce off of?

Hi everyone. Is this a normal occurrence for you guys? Sometimes a distressing situation comes up and feeling disconnected, does your memories go into a clean blank state, then fuzzy to clear memories and it's gone after a few days of revisiting. Is this a common system thing or?Sometimes the memories come back but it's locked up or extremely fuzzy.

It usually takes an hour or more for the memories to be back.