Thanks so much for your well wishes!

“I just play along and act like I’m right there with them.”

Ah yes, the playing along thing people with DID do so well. Do you even notice you’re doing it? It’s so intuitive, like breathing, that I never realize I’m doing it. I’ve only recently begun to recognize it sometimes, but only after the fact.

Good question. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend. I don’t think I’m very good at helping my system through stressful times like these, so it’s definitely something for me to consider. I’m curious about how other people with DID manage stress and help their systems navigate high-pressure situations. I’ll write about it and hopefully you and other folks will offer their insights.

You make a good point about the system hurting. I tend to think in pretty clinical terms sometimes – I have no business doing so, I’m not a clinician! I find that I need to be able to conceptualize DID and it’s symptoms in order to feel less overwhelmed and controlled by it. But because intellectualizing it is part of how I cope, I sometimes forget the most obvious things. I look at this situation – the cell phone bill – very matter-of-factly: Stress exacerbates DID symptoms —–> There’s a lot of stress in my life right now —–> Symptoms are amplified —–> Cell phone bill is outrageous. But I haven’t thought to try and understand why someone made those calls. I simply thought “stress made it happen.” I’m glad you commented because now I’m wondering what that part of my system needed and how those phone calls provided it (assuming they did). Anyway, thanks for mentioning it.

Fall is hard time for my system as well.

Good luck with your new job. I bet you will do well. Congratulations on your new home as well.

Sunshine

I can’t live without my alerts. I’ve tried, everything winds up a mess. First thing I do should I have to reinstall my OS or move is get my calendar and notes set up. Everything else is so reliant on it that if I forget it, I lose grips on my entire world. Sometimes I still do, if I don’t put something in there. Or if one of us convinces themself to not listen to them – which is a whole bundle of problems in itself.

I’m with you – it still bothers me, after all these years and all these mishaps. I suppose it’s partly because even though, like Paul says, I’ve live my whole life with situations like these, I’ve only known they were due to DID for the last 5. As ludicrous as it sounds, for most of my life I genuinely believed other people were just confused or drunk when they claimed I said or did things I knew I didn’t. And things like the cell phone bill? Before diagnosis – and probably even for a long time afterwards – I would have been convinced Verizon had made some kind of mistake. So even though dissociative amnesia and identity alteration aren’t at all new to me and neither are their consequences, my awareness of them is very new. Maybe that’s part of why incidents like this one still distress me when they happen, no matter how often they happen.

Calendar alerts – I shudder to think of the mess we’d be making without them and other task management tools. I call it outsourcing memory, DID’s best friend.

it’s still always distressing when it happens.

I think a lack of personal responsibility fosters a victim mentality that echos past victimization. Which just makes me feel that much more powerless and, quite frankly, shitty. Maybe it’s an illusion of control I’m indulging in, but I feel better when I take full responsibility for anything my system does.

But, again that can be spun because we can see all around us that most people don’t learn from their mistakes…

Ha! That made me laugh, thanks.