Category Archives: Dissociative Symptoms

identity confusion, identity alteration, depersonalization, derealization, dissociative amnesia

Speaking of Depersonalization and Derealization …

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 3 Comments

Severe depersonalization and derealization are part of living with Dissociative Identity Disorder. And in general I don’t feel like I have any control over my dissociative symptoms. But something interesting happened recently that has me thinking about the role my choices play in my pathology. I’ll tell you all about it but I have to tell you these two other things first or else the original thing won’t make any sense.

Thing One

I like to make digital collages. I use polyvore.com’s web-based application to make them. (It’s easy to use, super fun, and I totally recommend it to anyone who likes to play with color and images and textures and space.) I made this one last May for a faux photos contest: It’s a fake picture of me. Lizard is a nickname my father gave me (my middle name is Elizabeth). And though that child isn’t me, she looks prim, awkward, and inwardly melancholy enough to play the role.

Thing Two

I don’t have any real pictures of me as a kid. None. No school photos, family pictures, nothing. And it’s not because they were never taken, it’s just because … well, I don’t know why. I feel like I must have had some at some point. But I’ve no idea what happened to them. I would like to have some because I think mementos like that are part of how human beings build a sense of personal history.

Original Thing

Sometime during my hiatus the polyvore website hiccupped and evidently some of the images went all wonky because when I came back from said hiatus and looked through my collages I found several were not as I’d left them, including the one above. Now it looks like this:

And that strikes me as terribly amusing. After all, this is how I see myself as a child. Invisible. Leaving no trace of my existence in my wake. Or maybe it’s fairer to say this is how I prefer to see myself as a child.

Investing in Dissociative Symptoms

You see, depersonalization and derealization aren’t things that just happen to me willy nilly. I also invest in them. As much as I’d love to know what I looked like in kindergarten, I haven’t gone to any great lengths to find out. I haven’t exhausted every avenue, knocked on every door. There’s a reason for that. And it’s not just because I have Dissociative Identity Disorder … it’s also because, without even meaning to, and without any conscious awareness of ever doing so, I colluded with DID. I partnered with it. I decided, in millions of tiny, imperceptible moments throughout my life, that I’d rather not know.

And that is the real reason I don’t know what I looked like in kindergarten. That is the reason I created a pretend picture of myself for a polyvore contest. Because yes, I want to know. But not badly enough to find out.

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A Bird’s Eye View of the Dissociative Labyrinth

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 1 Comment

Imagine you live in a neat little garden with nicely clipped hedges. It’s an okay place to live (or a fantastic one, or a horrible one, depending on who you are) but weird shit tends to happen there. One day, when you’ve gotten fed up with all the bizarre, unexplained incidences, you go looking for the source of all the trouble. And there, in a corner of your garden, is a slim opening in the hedges that you’d never noticed before. It makes you nervous, this opening; where did it come from? how long has it been there? what, oh what, is waiting for you on the other side? You slip through the gap, your stomach tumbling and your palms wet, and find a path lined with more hedges. You follow the path in a state of near panic, terrified of what must surely be a huge, horrible demon lurking nearby; but all you find are more paths, more hedges. And the terrible truth dawns on you … what you thought was a garden is actually a labyrinth, and you are trapped inside.

That’s what it was like for me to learn that I had Dissociative Identity Disorder. Doctors and therapists wanted me to give them a map of my labyrinth, but that was (and still is) a hopeless endeavor. I don’t know if it’s my super low spatial intelligence (it’s true, I’m spatially stupid) but I am incapable of mapping, not to mention understanding something from the inside. I tried doing it their way for a while and then I took matters into my own hands. Instead of attempting to understand my specific labyrinth, I would learn everything I could about labyrinths in general, thereby getting as close to a bird’s eye view of my own as I could.

And so I did.

For me, getting a bird’s eye view of the labyrinth started with understanding these basic dissociative symptoms:

  • Depersonalization
  • Derealization
  • Dissociative Amnesia
  • Identity Confusion
  • Identity Alteration

People experience these dissociative symptoms in classic, textbook ways and in unique, individual ways. What’s universal is the essence of dissociation: separation. Just like in the labyrinth, dissociative symptoms create barriers between the self and itself, memory, or environment. We’ll examine the nature of those barriers in the next several posts, beginning with depersonalization.

Or, I will anyway. Join me? (It’ll be riveting, I swear.)

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When Worlds Collide

Posted on May 18, 2011 | 16 Comments

I’ve spent a good portion of the last three weeks sequestered in the garage, making messes with paint and paper and canvas and board. I find, as I write this, that I’d prefer to stay there.

I have a hand tremor. My photos never turn out well.

Something happened several Fridays ago that shocked and scared me. The specifics aren’t relevant here but the fallout included something I call Worlds Colliding. I think most people have, in a sense, many worlds they live in. Work, home, parent, spouse, perhaps hobbyist or athlete. Those of us with Dissociative Identity Disorder experience the same thing, only to a far more separated and compartmentalized degree. Within the context of DID, it’s natural for the personality states who exist and interact in the work world to have little to do with (and often little to no knowledge of) the home world, for example. But from time to time, those worlds collide. You’re at your weekly book club meeting, let’s say, and in walks someone you don’t know, but who knows you because you work together 30 hours a week. Surprise! I don’t know what these ruptures in the order of things do to people who don’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder. But I know that for me and many others with DID, Worlds Colliding causes tremendous anxiety and distress. Continue reading →

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Posted in Dissociative Coping, Dissociative Symptoms

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Ah, Depression. I Should’ve Known It Was You.

Posted on March 8, 2011 | 49 Comments

Cautionary Tale

For a reasonably intelligent person I am sometimes rather daft. I’m a good 7 months into a major depressive episode and only just realized it. Granted, I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is a fancy way of saying I can’t even maintain a cohesive sense of identity, let alone consistent awareness of my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. So for months now I’ve been struggling, talking about the fact that I’m struggling, even going so far as to take stock of my symptoms, and yet I never once thought to myself, ‘Oh right, I have Major Depression. I should see my psychiatrist.’

To be fair, it’s not like failing to grasp the obvious is exclusive to those of us with Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s just that I prefer to think of myself as a remarkably astute, discerning individual and evidence that suggests otherwise offends my delicate sensibilities. But I have to admit, dissociation and depression got the better of me this time. Tricksy hobbits.

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Posted in Comorbid, Dissociative Symptoms, Struggles

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Drowning in the Not Knowing

Posted on November 5, 2010 | 22 Comments

October was rough. Every year as it rushes toward me I brace myself for impact thinking, ‘I’m better prepared this time. This time won’t be so bad.’ And every year the gritty October wave slams me into a tumbling, desperate struggle for survival. October’s undertow is dangerous. When I tell others with Dissociative Identity Disorder that I’m struggling “because it’s October,” they nod knowingly. Explaining that the date on the calendar is the reason I’m overemotional and behaving erratically to someone who doesn’t have DID is not as simple. “Why?” they say, “What’s wrong with October?” Continue reading →

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Posted in Comorbid, Dissociative Symptoms, Struggles

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Dissociative Identity Disorder Symptoms Just Cost Me $300

Posted on October 18, 2010 | 15 Comments

If there were words that could adequately convey how desperately I want to be a reliable human being those words would go here: ________ _____ __ _______ ______ __ _____. But you can’t really count on me to be consistently, well … me. Worse, I can’t count on myself. The symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder guarantee it. And because stress exacerbates those symptoms, the more I have going on in my life – positive or negative – the more dissociative I am. Continue reading →

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DID & Free (sort of) Will

Posted on August 10, 2010 | 2 Comments

In response to Friday’s post, reader Lu pointed out that those of us with DID ” … do not have the same choice of behavior at any given moment that others do or expect of us.” I absolutely agree and find the limits that DID imposes on my free will utterly maddening. DID wouldn’t be nearly the struggle – not to mention the embarrassment – that it sometimes is if I could control it.

Recently I spent three weeks at the National Treatment Center at Del Amo Hospital in Torrance, California. Getting there was difficult. I was making arrangements for my son and checked in with my partner about my departure date, suggesting a change of a couple of days to make it easier on everyone. She responded by saying that she wasn’t aware I’d made the decision to go. I felt surprised and angry. We had been talking about this trip for weeks. I had been consciously reminding myself to keep her apprised of the details and any changes to either my son’s schedule or mine. I knew that my anxiety about going would likely exacerbate the symptoms of my disorder, thereby allowing important information to slip through the cracks. I was trying hard to keep that from happening. Continue reading →

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Posted in Dissociative Symptoms, Recovery, Struggles

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Conflict, Identity & Self-Expression

Posted on July 30, 2010 | 7 Comments

One of the most eloquent things I’ve ever read about DID is from a book called Multiple Personality Disorder From the Inside Out.

Healing from MPD is like putting a puzzle together without seeing the picture on the box. -Amie R.

I would add that it’s not just the recovery process that feels that way, but the experience of living with it too. The puzzle pieces are identity fragmentation and dissociation is the force that blocks the picture from view and drives the pieces away from each other, like magnetic polarity.

What I find most frustrating – for today, anyway – about that puzzle and the weird force that resists bringing the pieces together is the sense that parts of my mind are always just out of my grasp, but not so far away that they can’t influence what I feel and think and desire. When varying influences jockey for lead position, the result is internal conflict that leaves me in a state of helpless confusion and, ultimately, not knowing who I am.

For me, that internal conflict feels like this:

I decide. I turn towards my decision and take half a step in its direction. Something inside me rises up to block my path with a fierceness that is almost tangible. I cannot identify the obstacle. I can’t see it, hear it, or touch it. I have ideas about what it might be, but I don’t know. All I know is I can’t move. So I step back. I rethink. I choose differently. I move, and a new obstacle appears. One that, again, I cannot name. In these moments, I am a person who doesn’t know how she feels, what she thinks or what she wants. I am a person who doesn’t know who she is.

DID has stretched and sharpened my ability to tolerate ambiguity, a helpful skill whether you have DID or not. But sometimes I feel angry at all the not knowing.

Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today, even after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel – that bothers me, that rankles. -Henry Miller, from The Tropic of Capricorn

I do care when I die. In fact, over the years I’ve come to fear death. But larger than that is the fear that parts of my mind will forever be strangers to me. I feel like Jason Bourne, in that scene from The Bourne Identity when he faces his reflection in a mirror and says, in different languages – hoping, I assume, to happen on the one his mind understands, “I don’t know who I am. Do you know who I am? Tell me who I am. If you know who I am, please stop fucking around and tell me” to no avail. There is only confusion and a deep sense of frustration that I cannot simply express myself. And like Henry Miller said, that bothers me. That rankles.

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Many or One?

Posted on July 19, 2010 | 1 Comment

One of the more confounding things to me about understanding DID was my struggle to conceptualize a severely fragmented identity. What stymied me most was the suggestion that I get to know these other parts, respect them, have gratitude for them, all while recognizing that, in fact, we’re really all one person. This utterly perplexed me. Everywhere I turned for help I was told to communicate internally, begin a dialogue with these parts. But these same people and books also instructed me to remember that I don’t really have other people living inside of me.

So let me get this straight – you want me to accept that there is not only one in this body, but you want me to do so with the understanding that yes, there’s only one in this body?

It felt akin to making a promise with my fingers crossed behind my back. There I was, asking questions like, “What’s your name?” and “How old are you?” Questions that attest to the separateness between us.  And all the while, I was trying to remember that these parts whose names I didn’t know were really me after all. To say this confused me is understating things to the extreme.

From smashed vases to ripped up rose bushes there are plenty of metaphors to help illuminate the experience of being many. But none of them have ever come close to satisfying for me the duality – the experience of being many and the contradictory and yet parallel experience of being one.

I’ve finally managed to make sense of this apparent paradox for myself by thinking of DID as a microcosm of humanity. Throughout the ages mystics and spiritual leaders have taught us that we human beings are one. Yet we experience ourselves as distinctly separate. If we ignore the very real connection we have with all human life, we diminish our ability to see beyond ourselves. Conversely, if we ignore our individuality and uniqueness in favor of the idea of oneness, we lose the opportunity to learn from each other. And in both scenarios we limit our capacity for compassion and empathy.

So it is with DID. If I see us exclusively as singular beings without recognizing the larger organism that together we make up, I limit my view to a degree that will eventually eliminate the possibility of further growth. This is not seeing the forest for the trees. If I focus on us as one without truly considering what separates us from each other, what is different and particular about each of us, I am blind to vital aspects of who that one larger organism is. This is not seeing the trees for the forest. Both perspectives, while essentially true, are finite. Like humanity as a whole, the person with DID is both many and one. And it is in that duality, in those seemingly incongruent states, that the vast potential for wholeness lies.

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MPD or DID?

Posted on July 7, 2010 | 8 Comments

In 1994 the American Psychiatric Association published the DSM-IV with some notable revisions since the manual’s last publication in 1987. One revision was the new designation of MPD as DID. Since then, Multiple Personality Disorder has been known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. To me, the distinction is an important one.

The name Multiple Personality Disorder is misleading. It suggests to those who are basically ignorant about the disorder the existence of at least more than one person within one physical body. The name Dissociative Identity Disorder more accurately conveys the disorder as a severely fragmented identity. What’s the difference? At first glance, the difference might appear subtle enough as to render the change in name arbitrary. Call it what you like, we’re still talking about essentially the same set of symptoms. But where the former places emphasis on an intrinsic separateness, the latter places emphasis on an overarching oneness. A oneness that cannot be felt, but exists nonetheless.

I would like for there to be more genuine understanding and acceptance of DID within both the mental health community and the general population. It’s an ambitious goal, and one that cannot be met without first finding common ground. If one cannot relate to the concept of Dissociative Identity Disorder, understanding and accepting it becomes much harder to do.

Multi-faceted identity is something everyone can identify with; but having more than one person living in your body is not. Very few people present the same character traits, behaviors and mannerisms during a job interview as they do at a dinner party with old friends. Likewise, it’s natural and commonplace to look a bit different in your mom hat than you do in your brunch-with-girlfriends hat. Because those sorts of distinctions resonate with us all, explaining DID in a very basic way isn’t all that difficult. All it requires is to imagine that the you that wears the mom hat doesn’t have access to the memories of the you that wears the brunch-with-girlfriends hat. Or to envision that the job interview you isn’t aware of the dinner party you.

Granted, this simplifies things to the extreme. But that’s precisely the point. With a label like Multiple Personality Disorder, compassion and empathy are harder to come by because it’s not relatable. We cannot say to people, “Well, just pretend you and all those other people over there are all living in the same body” and expect anything but confusion and retreat. We can say, however, “You know how you’re different at work than you are on weekends with your family? I am too. But for me the differences are more profound and the barriers between the different me’s are more opaque.” Again, it’s a simplification. But more importantly, it’s a universal, relatable place to begin a dialogue.

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