DCMS Mailbox: My Partner Is Disappearing

Holly please help! My partner has DID and she herself is disappearing. I dont know what to do. For weeks now she has not been out and i have heard from her personalities that she has little to no chance of coming back. She herself has no idea what is going on. I dont know what to do. I love her very much and I dont want to lose her. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I cant just say shes gone. I know she has been going through some seriously large amounts of stress lately that has to do with her family. Please help me.

My advice is not to freak out. And I don’t mean ‘pretend not to be freaking out in front of your partner’ because dishonesty, no matter how subtle and no matter how well-intentioned, is almost impossible to hide from people with Dissociative Identity Disorder; and if she senses that you’re covering something up (in this case: your worry) it will only stress her out more. But worrying about her creates stress, too. So I urge you to do your absolute best to genuinely remain calm, but if that’s just not possible, don’t lie about it or go in the other direction and give in to it. It’ll just make things worse.

Exercise your flexibility

I get why you’re worried. But there are very good reasons not to be. The first being that, no matter what her alters tell you, nothing with DID remains constant. They may believe that she’s not coming back (or they may not – there are reasons a Dissociative Identity Disorder system might tell you this even if it isn’t true) but if she is your partner, that suggests to me a fully-fledged personality. It is possible, particularly if other aspects of her system are capable of navigating the world successfully and without calling much attention to themselves, that she might remain dormant for some time. But it’s highly unlikely (read: just shy of impossible) that she will simply disappear, never to be heard from again.

Focus on the whole

The second reason to refrain from worrying is theoretical and therefore one people generally dismiss (which is a profound mistake in my opinion.) Namely, that your partner is not one specific personality. Your partner is a dynamic human being with a number of aspects of self that, due to this particular pathology, tend to operate with greater independence from each other than they do in most other people. Your partner, then, isn’t disappearing at all. Why not embrace this opportunity to get to know more of who your partner is instead of lamenting the apparent loss of one aspect of who she is?

Trust the system

The third reason (and there are more but this is as far as I’ll go) not to freak out is that she – and I mean the entirety of her person, not one singled-out aspect of it – knows what’s best for her. Have faith. You said she’s been dealing with an inordinate amount of stress … this is how DID systems deal with stress, they rearrange themselves, they move things around to take pressure off of certain aspects. This is what she does. Let her do it. Don’t try to stop it.

In a nutshell: don’t worry!

If I were in your shoes I can tell you exactly what I’d do: I’d interact with whatever aspect of my partner’s identity was presenting and I wouldn’t worry, while interacting with them, about all the other aspects that weren’t presenting. I’d let her be. I’d ask her (whoever) if there was anything I could do to help mitigate the stress in her life and then, assuming I could do it without hurting myself, I’d attempt to meet those needs.

The biggest mistake a partner (or therapist or family member, whatever) of someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder can make is – in my opinion – to infantilize them, to assume that their apparent pathologies ought to be interrupted, thwarted, and redirected for their own good. If she needs to disappear, let her disappear.

Good luck.

It Was A Very Good Year

christmas is prettyThere were rough spots, sure. My partner and I split up, I’ve had some health problems, and I’m feeling pretty directionless. But the beauty of an unraveled sweater is the opportunity to knit something new, something different, something that fits better now. And as I was going through photos taken throughout 2012, I could see by the moments I chose to save that, all in all, it was a very good year. Continue reading

The Beginning of Happiness

Stop Being So Religious

Dissociative Identity Disorder treatment claims to be a 5 to 7 year process. I would like to meet the person who has begun and successfully ended DID therapy within that time frame. I would like to hear from that person about what treatment was like for them. Were they in and out of hospitals, like so many of us with Dissociative Identity Disorder? Were they still dissecting trauma years into therapy? Did they ever?

After several years, DID treatment started seeming redundant to me. After a couple more, I lost my patience and quit.

I don’t believe Dissociative Identity Disorder treatment is supposed to be about building a shrine to the past and wailing at it for 60 to 90 minutes, 1 to 3 times per week. And I don’t think anybody reading this believes it, either. But that’s exactly what DID therapy looks like to me.

I guess it’s no surprise that I’m happier without it.

Don’t Mind the Rubble …

I wanted to do one of those snazzy, big-reveal type deals where one minute the site is as it was and the next it’s OMG COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and everything is exactly where it belongs. Sort of like renovating a house without the neighbors ever catching a glimpse of the rubble.

But this is me we’re talking about.

It’ll take some time for reality to catch up to my vision. For instance, those buttons in the sidebar on the far right? You ought to be able to click on them to access the feature posts they represent, but you can’t … yet.

Welcome to my Work-In-Progress!

DCMS Relaunch

When I first started writing Don’t Call Me Sybil, I just wanted a place to publish my thoughts as someone living with Dissociative Identity Disorder. I had things to say and I wanted a place to say them.

Then I started writing Dissociative Living … and that gave me another place to say all those things I wanted and needed so badly to say.

I got a lot off my chest. And now I don’t have all that much to say anymore.

No, wait – that’s not right. I have plenty to say. I always do. But not about Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Actually, no – that’s not right, either.

I guess what I mean is that it’s less personal now. The desire to write about dissociative disorders is, I mean. I’m not exactly sure, but I think when I started writing I wanted to prove to myself that I could be someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder and also be proud of who I am. I wanted to know for sure that having DID doesn’t render me useless. I wanted to show myself that I have something unique and valuable to offer, not in spite of my mental illness, but partly because of it.

I accomplished that. Now I want to do something else.

When I write, particularly about the more basic stuff, I try to write the articles I would have wanted to read in those first few years after diagnosis when I was so confused and desperate to understand myself within the context of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Now I want to take that a step further … I want Don’t Call Me Sybil to be less a blog, and more the comprehensive source of reliable, accessible information on DID I searched and searched for in those early days and never found. I want DCMS to be the site I wanted to find.

I’m working hard on it and will relaunch in two weeks, on November 15th.

Laughing at the Sky

This is how I feel lately. I wouldn’t have understood it a few years ago. I would’ve felt defensive … Perfect??? In a world where we murder children and attack entire races simply because of the color of their skin? Bullshit. I would’ve thought that to laugh at the sky one would have to ignore life’s horrors. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to ignore anything. I wanted to be someone who wouldn’t look away. I wanted to be, if nothing else, a witness.

Witnesses don’t laugh at the sky, I would’ve thought. They’ve seen too much for that.

But one day not long ago I woke up laughing and I haven’t really stopped since. Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress … it’s all still there; I still have Dissociative Identity Disorder. Perhaps I always will.

And somewhere in the world right now people are suffering. In many somewheres actually. Right now and right now and now and now and now man is demonstrating his own inhumanity in new, ever crueler ways. I didn’t think it was possible to know that and also know that life is beautiful.

My God, though, life is beautiful.

Holly Gray, Now with Even More Authoritative Expounding*

When I said good-bye to Dissociative Living last year, life was pretty turbulent. And by “pretty turbulent” I mean I was in a crisis-ridden situation with no discernible end in sight. That makes for some toxic stress, which just intensifies dissociative symptoms, thereby making life even more difficult to manage. I started ditching things that I knew brought me nothing but grief, e.g. smoking. Then I had to get a little ruthless and ditch some things that were awesome, but too much for me to manage at the time, e.g. work.

Things Have Changed

All of those efforts paid off, but ultimately it was removing myself from the crisis-ridden situation that made the biggest impact on my mental health.

I know. Duh.

I’m not losing time as often or as completely (i.e. no recall) as I was before. I’m able to relax fully for at least a little while everyday, where before I was unable to get out of that hypervigilant state that is so hard on the mind and body. My depression has improved dramatically (but that’s also due to a med change) and my anxiety, which was disabling before, is significantly lower. So I’ve decided it’s time to welcome some of those awesome-things-that-became-too-much-for-me back into my life.

Starting With Dissociative Living

That’s right, folks! I’m going to expound and come off as an authority on Dissociative Identity Disorder EVEN MORE now!

I don’t know about you, but I am really looking forward to hearing what I have to say. I’m sure it will be extra authoritative and doubly expounding. I hope you’ll join me, beginning tomorrow, for new content and dynamic discussions!

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*I really do try to reign in my sense of humor here at DCMS. I don’t know, you guys just never seem to realize when I’m joking or tongue-in-cheeking. Anyhow, the better I feel and the less seriously I take myself and my life, the harder it is to keep a lid on it. So, you know … heads up.

DCMS Mailbox: Do My Alters Have A Goal? What Is It?

I answered this DCMS Mail twice.  My first response was crap on account of I inadvertently wrote it more for my critics than the person who asked the questions. I restricted the scope of that answer to my own personal experience and even threw in this ‘find your own answers’ thing that just ended up sounding like a condescending cop-out rather than the humble abdication of authority I was going for. I didn’t realize I was doing any of that at the time, but the whole thing just nagged at me and when I revisited the email exchange it was crystal clear.

It was also pretty amusing. I mean, that first response wasn’t necessarily wrong. It just wasn’t me. And the thing is, Anonymous asked … that’s right, ME. Continue reading

“South to Drop Off, Moron!” and Self-Discovery | On Our Dissociative Minds

Of the four blog posts I published this month, three were about blogging itself. That’s called metablogging; and I do it a lot (more on that later). This month I was bitching about Dissociative Identity Disorder therapists doing it wrong and worrying about how to expand on that without upsetting readers. Continue reading

What My Search for a Mary Oliver Poem Taught Me about Dissociative Identity Disorder Blogging

The text is from a Mary Oliver poem titled Mockingbirds. I read it a few years ago and this section, the last three stanzas, compelled me to bookmark it for later review. The words seemed to me to embody a level of freedom and acceptance I’d never felt. But I knew that I would feel it someday and, when that someday came, I wanted to read the poem again and rejoice that these words had gone from foreign to familiar:

But then my someday arrived and the poem was gone. I didn’t remember the title. I didn’t remember anything about it except that Mary Oliver wrote it and that the last lines said something about opening windows or doors. Not a lot to go on. Continue reading