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Unfolding into Dissociative Identity Disorder

Writer's picture: patrickbrycewrightpatrickbrycewright

The moment I understood I am a they 


Original image by Pixabay. Edited in Canva by Keith Miller.
Original image by Pixabay. Edited in Canva by Keith Miller.

 

Have you ever wondered what it’s like for a person to suddenly realize they have dissociative identity disorder (DID)?

 

Well, with the release of Facing the Curse, Conjure Hill, and The Truth of a Kaleidoscope Mind, novels in which I gave the main character DID, I’ve decided to tell my real life story.

 

For context, psychologists now agree that DID forms during childhood. It’s a coping mechanism for extreme, prolonged, repeated traumas, such as abuse or growing up in a war zone. Psychologists don’t agree on what the cut-off age is, so it ranges from age five to age nine, and obviously, the cut-off is different for different children. What this coping mechanism does is save the child from remembering and being crushed by all the abuse, but the trade-off is that the child doesn’t form a single, cohesive identity. The other part of the coping mechanism is dissociation, which is a state of mind in which you don’t feel real and/or the world doesn’t feel real. You might feel dizzy or floaty, and the world might look concave, as if you’re seeing through a fish lens. You might even feel that you’re not really alive or that you’re only dreaming. The dissociation also cushions you from the abuse.

 

The two pieces together—the dissociation and the inability to form a cohesive identity—create the name of the disorder.

 

The confusing part about having DID is that you might not know it until you’re in your 40s, 50s, or even 60s. It can be invisible to you, and even to others, because it’s a myth that it’s obvious to notice in every case. The truth is it can be invisible to others. So it can seem like you didn’t develop DID until you’re an adult.

 

Then, when you least expect it, a new trauma puts too much pressure on you, and suddenly you discover you have more than one self inside.

 

For me, this moment came in October 2020.

 

I’ve seen online accounts of people with DID being in car wrecks, getting mugged, or experiencing some other new trauma that caused them to “unglue” and notice their other selves. In my case, it was months of pressure about Covid-19 and the fear that anyone or everyone I knew might die in a pandemic. I feared that I myself would die in the pandemic. And then, in October, I contracted Covid-19. At the same time, I was working on a trauma in therapy via telehealth and abruptly remembered the second part of a memory I’d always had. The missing part of that memory was that my babysitter had molested me.

 

After confiding the memory to my life partner, Keith, I realized I had panicking “child parts” inside of me. My therapist had been explaining to me for years that everyone in the world has “child parts”—the inner child we all carry who is often afraid, lonely, or even traumatized. Having “child parts” doesn’t mean you have DID, and basically everyone could benefit from healing their inner child.

 

So, without hesitation, I told Keith over the phone that I had panicking child parts. “But I’m no good at comforting children,” I complained. I was quarantined in my house, unable to leave, and I had to help myself somehow.

 

“Do you think there’s any part of you than can?” Keith asked.

 

I took the question seriously. Keith also has DID, and he had an official diagnosis. In fact, we had discussed since 2011 that he might have it, even prior to his diagnosis. I had talked to his child parts many times over the years. Also, my therapist had taught me about “self-states”—the different parts of ourselves we all have. Again, these “self-states” didn’t mean I had DID. Having “parts” or “self-states” is a normal part of being human. It’s why we say things like, “Part of me wants to go to the baseball game, but part of me wants to stay home and just watch Netflix.” Psychologists have known this since the 1970s, and Hal and Sidra Stone even wrote an entire self-help book about it called Embracing Ourselves.

 

Since I have a B.A. in psychology, I waded in fearlessly, searching my own heart. Was there another part of me who could comfort panicking children? “I think so, yes,” I said. I clearly felt the child parts; my therapist had been training me for years to sense them and try to attend to them. They felt like they were “standing” behind me inside my own mind. But as I scanned myself, I noticed warm, calmer energy to my “left,” as if I had someone standing beside me inside my mind.

 

“See if you can switch with that person,” Keith said. Although there are clinical terms like “self-states” or “parts”—plus much older terms like “alters”—Keith prefers the term “people,” meaning internal people.

 

“Do you really think I have DID, too?” I asked.

 

“I really do,” Keith said.

 

I wondered why he thought that—he didn’t explain until several weeks later that he’d noticed I had holes in my memories—but there’s nothing like a bunch of terrified children to motivate a person. So I said, “Okay. Well, I think this person in here with me can comfort my child states better than I can, so I’ll try.”

 

What followed was 15 minutes of me (Patrick) desperately trying to move out of the way, mentally, of this other person inside of me. I felt—without hearing a voice—that this person agreed that he could help the terrified child states who remembered being molested by our babysitter. I pushed and pushed internally, glancing at the clock and noting how long it took.

 

Slowly, the room distorted in my vision and looked concave. I felt bubble-headed. Then I felt halfway present and halfway not present. It was odd. I realized I was dissociating in my attempt to switch. Then, finally, I figured out how to let go internally.

 

A different male self-state settled into place. “Okay, I made it,” he told Keith.

 

“Good,” Keith said. “Can you feel or hear the child states?”

 

“Sure can,” he said. “I’ll take care of the little tykes.”

 

I could hear him talking, and I noticed right away that he sounded different and spoke differently. He spoke more casually than I did. And what was more, I could remember sounding like that before on several occasions but not knowing why my entire mode of speech had suddenly shifted.

 

What followed was an impressive session of this other me comforting the child states and calming them. Once all the internal kids were soothed, he slid out of the way, and I mentally “swam” my way back into control of our shared body. That took much less time. There was a certain feeling to being me, so when I felt it, I knew I was back in place.

 

“I’m back,” I told Keith. “Oh my God, it’s true. I really do I have DID.”

 

“Yes,” Keith said in a knowing voice. Not smug. Just certain.

 

Over the course of just a few days, I discovered two more internal people. Three of us were male. One was female. (Everyone has both male and female “parts.” That’s normal. Carl Jung discussed this energy as the anima and animus, and Eastern philosophy calls it yin/yang.) We picked out names for ourselves and then later discovered we had already had names. Noticing each other and learning to talk to each other caused the process of our memories coming back, and over the course of the next year, we understood perfectly clearly how and why we’d ended up with DID. Our babysitter molesting us turned to be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We also discovered more selves along the way, and after being tested, we were officially diagnosed with DID.

 

Capturing this process in Facing the Curse, Conjure Hill, and The Truth of a Kaleidoscope Mind was difficult. I wanted to write novels with protagonists who have DID because I have DID. I wanted to write it #ownvoices. But condensing down a year’s worth of initial experiences into something intelligible during a novel plot was a challenge, and everyone who has DID has a different story and a different experience. Keith’s process of discovering he has DID looked completely different than mine.

 

But Keith and I worked together, discussing ideas and comparing our experiences to other people with DID who had made videos about their lives and posted them to YouTube. As I wrote my novels, Keith read them and offered feedback. In the end, I combined Keith’s and my experiences because Keith had known more quickly than I did and had more obvious experiences earlier in life.

 

And what is life like now that I know I have DID? After all, I went over 40 years without knowing.

 

Better.

 

There’s nothing worse than reacting strongly to things that are happening without knowing why. I had little to no explanation for my fears, my panic attacks, my depression, and my triggers. Without knowing about what had happened to me as a child, I couldn’t make sense of myself and my life. I seemed mysteriously broken for no reason at all.

 

Now I understand myself and my life. I know which parts of me are the best at different things, and I let the right parts of me handle what needs to be done.

 

And the truth is that even though I have poly-fragmented DID—the most extreme form of DID in which a person can have dozens or even hundreds of self-states—I’m actually not broken. I’m a survivor who survived ridiculous things by a very clever method, applying a defense mechanism so I could still grow up, get a job, and write novels.

 

And what could anyone ever want more than to give their abusers such a big fuck you?

 

I’m not broken. I’m victorious. I’m glad I understand I have DID, glad I’m healing from the abuse in therapy, and glad I can write about DID from an insider’s view so that other people don’t have such warped notions about what DID is.

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