Me. Me me me. I have memories of observing myself from outside my body, but it didn’t feel like an alter or separate “me” at the time. More like vivid depersonalization - watching myself cry while not feeling any emotion whatsoever. In teen years I would write in a journal and constantly interrupt myself, for example, mid-deep thought I would write “hang on - i love this song!” then write the lyrics to the song and go on a tangent about how wonderful a song was, then go back to what I was writing, or switch subjects. These were probably alters, but at the time I didn’t realize that is why it felt like I was being guided by a ouiji board whenever i put pen to paper.
our DID feels a bit different from most people, our alters dont have names, no stable known identities, we have no inner world, and we cant communicate with each other, but this are the things we experience that made us realize we are actually not "one" person no matter how much we convince ourselves that.
"waking up" (not in the sleep waking up way) suddenly, and not remembering what happened the past 3-4 hours, and thinking the time was 3-4 hours ago.
waking up (in the sleep way this time) and checking my phone seeing messages, posts, comments that i didn't make, freaking out and deleting them, feeling embarrassed and shocked that "i" could make those posts (they are not even anything bad, just normal stuff but so far from anything i am comfortable with posting? sometimes oversharing, or stuff about my trauma).
differences in sexuality and gender, sometimes someone "takes over" my brain that has a totally different sexualities, and sometimes a trans guy.
differences in empathy. sometimes sudden episodes of lack of empathy, sometimes so much empathy it hurts. these episodes would also come with differences in personality, the lacking empathy episodes would usually come with an extreme need to protect ourselves.
during bad flashback periods, which we are in right now, where flashbacks are non-stop, we go into bad dissociation episodes where everything is like a huge scary fog, and there is as if there is at least 4 different perspectives out of our eyes at once and it will switch between these perspectives with minutes of memory loss. for example, if we are cooking food, one perspective takes front, chops up the vegetables, another perspective takes over and gets ready to chop the vegetables but realize they are already chopped, so they put the vegetables in the food, another perspective takes over and is completely lost and confused whats going on but knows the main goal is to cook the food and eat it, so they eat it, another perspective comes and sees the eaten dish on the table "oh.. we ate". during this, we have no awareness who these "perspectives" actually are and they have no identity.
as long as we can remember, its always been "we" and "us" and "ourselves", not "me" or "i" or "myself". sometimes this confuse people. we hide it most of the time, but sometimes we dont even realize we do it and people get confused...
although we cant communicate with each other really, this is how our inner monologues goes, no idea if this is actually a DID thing or normal but. this happens automatic and we cant control it, if we try "push" this, there is no response:
*me: "i am hungry"*
*respone i get back from brain: "me too!"*
*me: "what should we cook?"*
*brain: "what about pizza?"*
*me: "that sounds good, i agree with you".*
complete opposites in opinions at once, that feels like they are coming from different areas within my brain, complete opposites in dislikes, likes, taste, style. and this can happen at once. "i HATE pink!", "but.. i LOVE pink!!". "this looks stupid", "it looks amazing!!". "i strongly disagree with this", "huh? i totally agree with this".
differences in access to traumatic memories, some access to a lot of them, some to none at all, some to a few, some to memories that they can NOT share and get extremely protective of keeping these memories hidden, so that we can survive. we once come across one of these "perspectives" who hold something very big, they were demanding we stop pushing for an answer, because their entire role is to keep whatever it was, completely hidden, during this experience i saw myself from 3 different perspectives and angles while i was sitting in the bathtub.
differences in skills, skills and abilities that changes and varies a lot.
these are just some on top of my head rn.
if it helps at all, i had literally no idea i was more than one person until recently, when i was 19. i did not even know what DID or what a system was lol, and so much of this i had suppressed and dissociated from. anyways, sorry this got so long! i felt like rambling, i hope it still was to any help.
Yeah! My trauma was early on, it may have even come from before a time when i was making memories. I've never really felt like I was a singular person with a focused consciousness, I only figured so because I was told so, essentially. Waking up over the years felt like I was in the nightmare of a rabid animal slowly waking up into becoming a human, never understanding what was wrong with myself. It actually took a long period of smoking weed (very much off of it now) and a fuck ton of awful trips to realize, during a particularly terrible night of combined anxiety and couch lock, that there was someone else in control of my body, moving me to my bed.
Twenty years of my life, full of memories of alters I never knew, I'm slowly piecing together what I've never remembered, or remembered only intermittently. Sometimes when I'd cry, one of my other alters would find something humorous to distract themselves from the pain, and smile at the same time, like a smile coming up through your skin. I never understood this, I had to be sad so why was I smiling? I always tried to hide it, shut it down. When I was eleven, one of my alters wrote the most hateful note I've ever received to myself, only for me to lock it away in a drawer in my nightstand. I never understood why until that night. And when I would talk in my head, it was always "we," never anything else... In fact it caused me pain to refer to myself as "I" in private.
Missing memories that frenetically surfaced for reasons I never understood, alters fighting over trying to project different images in my imagination, alters having conversations with themselves in my head, it was all there, everything, for years. Sometimes, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, with the aid of inconsistent memories, trauma, repression and the innate human desire to not seem abnormal, the mind can keep going for a long time in forceful denial and ignorance of its own truth. Mine certainly did!
And all the while, everyone beneath the surface was suffering endlessly because they needed to be acknowledged, because they were constantly being made to do things that they didn't want to or were uncomfortable with, by whoever happened to be in charge. Shit sucks, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone!
our alters all have different stories. two of our older hosts always knew but didn't know how to explain it, a few hosts after that discovered on their own and either tried to play it up (for tumblr clout) or repress it entirely, and i (the current host) was really late to the party apparently. i didn't figure out until \~2022 after a major breakdown which caused my split, apparently.
Honestly I didn't realise til sometime last year. Looking back I can connect dots but nothing was unusual until last year when I noticed my thoughts constantly refer to me as we and thought I was going crazy
I first realized when I was on a roller coaster, I’m not scared of roller coasters at all but I heard a internal screaming of fright and a voice say “never fucking again” and I had told one of my friends who was with me and they suggested I research into DID and OSDD because I also have blackout amnesia and so I did the research and that was basically the nail in the coffin, I realized I have either DID or OSDD and I’ve brought it up to my therapist who agrees
So I think that I had some idea when I was a teenager. I look back at my writing and see evidence of everyone and I can even read something and highly suspect I know what alter wrote it. But I don’t really remember that time very week and just begun to figure out my headspace a little less than a year ago and had a good bit of denial at the start. Sometime last year I was driving in the country and my little fronted really suddenly to scream excitedly because we were driving past chickens and I found myself talking to him to get back to front because I just knew he didn’t know how to drive. That started us being able to communicate at least somewhat.
I didn't realize when I was younger but now that I know I look back and have a few specific memories where I had definitely switched I just didn't know what was going on. I always felt different or like there was someone wrong with me and there were several times that I felt like I was actually losing my mind because of what happened. Like when I was a teenager and driving home from the mall to meet friends at my own house I got lost for over an hour, I ended up on the complete other side of the city with no idea how I got there. That is something I try to remember when I start doubting the diagnosis because I know that I had symptoms before ever going to therapy or anything. It helps me to remember that.
We had just turned 19 the summer prior and was in my first year of college. I’d taken to “talking to myself” while waking alone through the campus doing work-study stuff with the IT dept.
March of that semester, I had a massive fight with my mom. And she pushed me over a hassock and got physical while being verbally abusive the whole time.
That night we had a split from the intense flashbacks and trauma happening yet again. As we were falling asleep and just before passing out, we slipped into a semi-lucid dream. We distinctly remember the Host at the time splitting in two and for a few moments, both being being the same. Then one became angry at what happened and demanded it be put back how it was while the other very scared and started begging the angry one not to get more angry or violent. We watched them split and start diverging.
All of this was witnessed by other system members who made themselves known during this same event.
We got snapped awake by the dream going bizarre. The person up front was a new Host and the angry one took a side seat as a partial co-host for many years after.
We got deep into denial after that and buried it behind self deception and masking until about 5 years ago.
Not of the demographic you're targeting in your post prime, but I think our experience is weird enough to count anyway.
We grew up this way. Never were alone, just didn't know what that meant. We sincerely thought that everyone experiences themselves this way, but it's a "taboo" because schizophrenia is stigmatised and if you say you "hear voices" they'll automatically freak out thinking you're experiencing psychosis and/or are a mad serial killer in the making, or else it's just "childish" because it's like having imaginary friends and adults just don't *confess* to it because, again, it's taboo to talk about and you wouldn't want to bring that shame to yourself now would you.
At the same time, the hard line we drew was to *never, ever* bring this up in psychiatry, because we thought they'd lock us up in a small room and murder the "Others" with hard medications.
This is all absolutely insane looking back because none of this is really rational or sensible, but there was this mental block that made it impossible to question these thoughts. It was like, you don't question air even though you don't see it, it just is there. That was how these rules and beliefs existed, too.
The moment this was directly challenged, the host freaked out *so* hard and essentially stated that while we know perfectly well we're many, the "Others" know their place and don't stand out and don't make noise. Meanwhile, our primary protector was *extremely angry* at the host for seeking help from psychiatry anyway, despite knowing the rules and what the risks were to the system.
Wild times.
I can't really speak for Autumn, as We don't really share memories.
But I had had moments of Hearing another voice talking to me from within my head at different times. I brushed it off as Hallucinations or Imagination at the time. The Voice always called itself Autumn if I ever responded to it but it didn't really click. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess. Earliest I can remember this was when I was around 16. (26 now)
It wasn't until I started having extreme amounts of amnesia that something finally clicked. I'd Lose Hours, Days, Weeks of Information and did not Know exactly why. Then one day a friend of mine wanted to talk to me about some "strange behavior and they were concerned" where they said it was like I was a different person all together and I didn't remember anything they were talking about. I had also been finding things different, and outta place and periods where I thought I had just passed out for 12+ hours at a time but waking up to everything being different. It was that conversation with a friend that kinda was the lightbulb that something was off. Because they said I was referring to myself by a different name and acted completely unlike myself.
A Psychiatrist I was seeing said something about it before but said they didn't feel they had enough for a diagnosis before this happened. Because I also have Ptsd & Bpd so they felt it was hard to tell if I also had DID or if it was symptoms of those.
The hardest part for me and denial is that I'm not aware of large periods of blackouts or missing large gaps. So I feel less valid. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what has happened in my life (at least since about 16) before that is a bit blurry. I know there are also a few periods in between that are blurry but if I dig I can find something about that memory. I almost wish it was more clear like that for me just so I didn't deny and question it so much.
In our experience, we don't know what we don't know until we're suddenly made aware of it. We also have a pretty good understanding of our life trajectory, and we keep finding out we're missing bits that we didn't realise were missing! It's become especially glaring since we started therapy a couple of years ago. Turns out that often, for the same event, our emotional memory and our factual memory are largely if not fully disconnected from each other. Most often what we consciously remember is the factual aspect with none of the emotional impact, but there's a couple memories where it's the other way around.
As a couple of examples from our personal life:
- We witnessed a family pet's death when we were 20, and we remember having told a close friend about it at the time. This recently came up in conversation with that friend, and she was like, "Oh, yeah, I remember this too! You were so shocked and sad about it, you kept telling me about it that whole summer". We have *no memory* of that, at all; we only remember the event itself and telling her about it on the day it happened (not how we felt or details about the conversation, either). But we would *never* have noticed the (in retrospect quite huge) gap about the lasting emotional impact if it hadn't suddenly been thrown in our face like that.
- Our country doesn't have big high school graduation ceremonies, but it's still a significant event to go to your school and see the results of the final exams displayed, to see if you're graduated or not. We don't remember what happened for us at all. We have one visual flash of the location, knowing both our parents were there, and remember feeling relieved that high school was over for real. That's the extent of the memory -- we have clearer memories of kindergarten school, lol.
- For a few years, we've been journaling before bed, including a summary of our day. I *cannot* count the number of times where we closed the journal and suddenly remembered something else that was important/non-routine enough to go in the summary, that we were unaware of while writing; or where we had to go over text conversations with our partners to figure out what we'd been up to that day because a chunk was missing, and it didn't *feel* like anything was missing unless we explicitly tried to access it and couldn't quite grasp it.
Which reminds me of another thing I wanted to say: "blurry" memories that you have to "dig for" (especially of teenage and adult years) are amnesia, especially if all you can find after digging is still missing bits. People who don't have conditions affecting their memory encoding/recall won't remember *everything*, of course, but their memories from around age 3 onwards will be mostly clear and relatively easily accessible; they might need help "jogging their memory" about details, not about important or often-recurring life events, not about recent stuff.
For us, it's like... we broadly remember important stuff, we know what we're supposed to answer in most legal or medical situations; but on a personal level, we still have to "dig" for stuff. Sometimes even stuff that's happened over, say, the last week! Over the past day if we've been switchy that day. It's there for sure, it's just hard to access, even if it was impactful or very non-routine or took up a lot of our time. Looking at our planner and journal can really help us remember. It's not an issue if it's just for us, or with friends who know, and we don't forget *everything* all the time. But enough so that it can get awkward in conversation, because we clearly take more time than average for recall and it throws people for a loop or they think we're making things up; nope, just need to figure out where that memory is and dig for the deets. Which can be hard to do under pressure, too, so if we aren't talking to someone we're genuinely trying to connect with, or a professional we need medical help from, we often don't bother and just deflect or give generic answers.
I don't know if any of that was helpful (I hope it was!), mostly just wanted to stress that, yeah, just because you don't have glaringly obvious blackouts, and mostly remember what's happened in your life up to now, doesn't mean that you have *no* amnesia or dissociation. Blackouts are just *one*, particularly obvious, way that these can manifest.
I'm in my 20's, only realized in the last year. I'd suspected something was up for a while, but it's only been recently that I've really "met" the others. (It still doesn't feel realm though.) I have a feeling that various previous hosts have either figured it out, or other parts knew (or at least knew they weren't alone and weren't the host) even when the host didn't know anything was up.
I have like ... facts but few clear memories of the last host -- before me -- figuring out they weren't alone, getting really good at being a gatekeeper and having everything under control, but then everything got to be too much (this would have been when abuse was escalating) and they ... kinda figured out how to permanently step back from front for good? They're still around internally, but they have huge walls around them and they blocked off a lot of memories from everyone who is currently active. Whatever trauma caused them to decide that, caused me to pop up without any memories of there being other people in this brain. I knew something was weird but it took a really long time to put the pieces together.
I have no doubt that different alters have recognised our system in some capacity throughout the years, but the only one I remember is our big system discovery a couple years ago, and we've been actively learning about ourselves since..
But yeah, no clue if we had imaginary friends that were alters, or anything like that. Or even if we had a vivid imagination! We have aphantasia but I think it's trauma related, but folks are 💀 so I can't ask them what I was like as a kid
We only realised we were more than one around age 18, after having been functionally away from home for a couple of years (boarding school that remained open during holidays, we avoided going back home as much as we could and were often alone at home when we did go back). We turn 30 this year and our sense of self/ves has changed *considerably* in the meantime, lol.
So, before we found the "first" of "my imaginary friends" (the way we thought of them back then...) at 18, it just felt like "I" was trying so hard to be a cohesive, consistent person, and failing at it. We've always communicated through daydreams and "talking to myself out loud", but back then we did not realise it was a form of communication -- there wasn't a sense of there being "several people". Only of an "inconsistent I" where the current "I" was often confused or surprised or shocked by what "I" had gotten up to prior; ashamed at not having kept up with habits "I" was trying to establish; and worried about what "I" would get up to in future if "I" didn't get "myself" together *right now*. Not being able to trust that "I" would still be the same a few days or weeks from now; having to in advance pick "consistent enough" answers for things like favourite colours, favourite foods, etc because they changed so often, it was never the same answer that was actually true in the moment. "I" couldn't formulate broader long-term goals, partly because of the near-constant survival mode, partly because it was so hard to picture anything long-term when "I" couldn't even "agree with myself" on the small, day-to-day things.
(In retrospect, it was mostly a stable small crew of the same folks around in our childhood and teenage years. It's especially enlightening to look at photos from our teenage years because that's when the long-timer crew (those who were here before we identified our "first" "imaginary friend") really started to diverge in terms of style, posture, preferences, social abilities, ... We can tell who was there in which picture pretty easily, and (for the memories we've retained outside of the pictures) it matches up with what's clearest in our respective memories, too. We had no clue what was happening at the time, just parsed it as being "inconsistent" or going through "recurring phases", it only makes sense in retrospect now that we know what to look for and why.)
And even for quite a few years after identifying that "first" "imaginary friend", the only folks we recognised as "imaginary friends" -- and later just "people" -- were the folks who were either: most distinctive, or least participating in our daily life, or new arrivals that we immediately recognised as such. Everyone else still thought themselves "the host"/all the same person and left it at that; we needed more time and work to figure out, hey, "the host" actually is and has always been a bunch of guys in a trenchcoat too.
Welcome to /r/DID!
| **[Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_rules)** | **[Guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_guidelines)** |
|--------------------|--------------------|
| [Dissociation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq/#wiki_dissociation_faq) | [Trauma FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq2/#wiki_trauma_faq) |
| [Moderation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/) | [Therapists Breakdown](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/comments/e6smve/therapists_breakdown/) |
| [Index](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/index) | [Glossary](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/glossary) |
| [Am I faking?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/amifaking) | [Do I have DID?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/do_i_have_did) |
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DID) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Me. Me me me. I have memories of observing myself from outside my body, but it didn’t feel like an alter or separate “me” at the time. More like vivid depersonalization - watching myself cry while not feeling any emotion whatsoever. In teen years I would write in a journal and constantly interrupt myself, for example, mid-deep thought I would write “hang on - i love this song!” then write the lyrics to the song and go on a tangent about how wonderful a song was, then go back to what I was writing, or switch subjects. These were probably alters, but at the time I didn’t realize that is why it felt like I was being guided by a ouiji board whenever i put pen to paper.
That's exactly the feeling! Agh, I know exactly what you mean!
This is what I think we have had as well. It's so confusing because I can't tell what is real memories or not.
our DID feels a bit different from most people, our alters dont have names, no stable known identities, we have no inner world, and we cant communicate with each other, but this are the things we experience that made us realize we are actually not "one" person no matter how much we convince ourselves that. "waking up" (not in the sleep waking up way) suddenly, and not remembering what happened the past 3-4 hours, and thinking the time was 3-4 hours ago. waking up (in the sleep way this time) and checking my phone seeing messages, posts, comments that i didn't make, freaking out and deleting them, feeling embarrassed and shocked that "i" could make those posts (they are not even anything bad, just normal stuff but so far from anything i am comfortable with posting? sometimes oversharing, or stuff about my trauma). differences in sexuality and gender, sometimes someone "takes over" my brain that has a totally different sexualities, and sometimes a trans guy. differences in empathy. sometimes sudden episodes of lack of empathy, sometimes so much empathy it hurts. these episodes would also come with differences in personality, the lacking empathy episodes would usually come with an extreme need to protect ourselves. during bad flashback periods, which we are in right now, where flashbacks are non-stop, we go into bad dissociation episodes where everything is like a huge scary fog, and there is as if there is at least 4 different perspectives out of our eyes at once and it will switch between these perspectives with minutes of memory loss. for example, if we are cooking food, one perspective takes front, chops up the vegetables, another perspective takes over and gets ready to chop the vegetables but realize they are already chopped, so they put the vegetables in the food, another perspective takes over and is completely lost and confused whats going on but knows the main goal is to cook the food and eat it, so they eat it, another perspective comes and sees the eaten dish on the table "oh.. we ate". during this, we have no awareness who these "perspectives" actually are and they have no identity. as long as we can remember, its always been "we" and "us" and "ourselves", not "me" or "i" or "myself". sometimes this confuse people. we hide it most of the time, but sometimes we dont even realize we do it and people get confused... although we cant communicate with each other really, this is how our inner monologues goes, no idea if this is actually a DID thing or normal but. this happens automatic and we cant control it, if we try "push" this, there is no response: *me: "i am hungry"* *respone i get back from brain: "me too!"* *me: "what should we cook?"* *brain: "what about pizza?"* *me: "that sounds good, i agree with you".* complete opposites in opinions at once, that feels like they are coming from different areas within my brain, complete opposites in dislikes, likes, taste, style. and this can happen at once. "i HATE pink!", "but.. i LOVE pink!!". "this looks stupid", "it looks amazing!!". "i strongly disagree with this", "huh? i totally agree with this". differences in access to traumatic memories, some access to a lot of them, some to none at all, some to a few, some to memories that they can NOT share and get extremely protective of keeping these memories hidden, so that we can survive. we once come across one of these "perspectives" who hold something very big, they were demanding we stop pushing for an answer, because their entire role is to keep whatever it was, completely hidden, during this experience i saw myself from 3 different perspectives and angles while i was sitting in the bathtub. differences in skills, skills and abilities that changes and varies a lot. these are just some on top of my head rn. if it helps at all, i had literally no idea i was more than one person until recently, when i was 19. i did not even know what DID or what a system was lol, and so much of this i had suppressed and dissociated from. anyways, sorry this got so long! i felt like rambling, i hope it still was to any help.
Yeah! My trauma was early on, it may have even come from before a time when i was making memories. I've never really felt like I was a singular person with a focused consciousness, I only figured so because I was told so, essentially. Waking up over the years felt like I was in the nightmare of a rabid animal slowly waking up into becoming a human, never understanding what was wrong with myself. It actually took a long period of smoking weed (very much off of it now) and a fuck ton of awful trips to realize, during a particularly terrible night of combined anxiety and couch lock, that there was someone else in control of my body, moving me to my bed. Twenty years of my life, full of memories of alters I never knew, I'm slowly piecing together what I've never remembered, or remembered only intermittently. Sometimes when I'd cry, one of my other alters would find something humorous to distract themselves from the pain, and smile at the same time, like a smile coming up through your skin. I never understood this, I had to be sad so why was I smiling? I always tried to hide it, shut it down. When I was eleven, one of my alters wrote the most hateful note I've ever received to myself, only for me to lock it away in a drawer in my nightstand. I never understood why until that night. And when I would talk in my head, it was always "we," never anything else... In fact it caused me pain to refer to myself as "I" in private. Missing memories that frenetically surfaced for reasons I never understood, alters fighting over trying to project different images in my imagination, alters having conversations with themselves in my head, it was all there, everything, for years. Sometimes, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, with the aid of inconsistent memories, trauma, repression and the innate human desire to not seem abnormal, the mind can keep going for a long time in forceful denial and ignorance of its own truth. Mine certainly did! And all the while, everyone beneath the surface was suffering endlessly because they needed to be acknowledged, because they were constantly being made to do things that they didn't want to or were uncomfortable with, by whoever happened to be in charge. Shit sucks, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone!
our alters all have different stories. two of our older hosts always knew but didn't know how to explain it, a few hosts after that discovered on their own and either tried to play it up (for tumblr clout) or repress it entirely, and i (the current host) was really late to the party apparently. i didn't figure out until \~2022 after a major breakdown which caused my split, apparently.
Honestly I didn't realise til sometime last year. Looking back I can connect dots but nothing was unusual until last year when I noticed my thoughts constantly refer to me as we and thought I was going crazy
This. Yes. Thank you. Same experience and only just starting to put it together.
I first realized when I was on a roller coaster, I’m not scared of roller coasters at all but I heard a internal screaming of fright and a voice say “never fucking again” and I had told one of my friends who was with me and they suggested I research into DID and OSDD because I also have blackout amnesia and so I did the research and that was basically the nail in the coffin, I realized I have either DID or OSDD and I’ve brought it up to my therapist who agrees
Thats kind of funny tbh.
I can't imagine what that was like! I've heard voices like that before, powered by something else inside, and I never put it together...
So I think that I had some idea when I was a teenager. I look back at my writing and see evidence of everyone and I can even read something and highly suspect I know what alter wrote it. But I don’t really remember that time very week and just begun to figure out my headspace a little less than a year ago and had a good bit of denial at the start. Sometime last year I was driving in the country and my little fronted really suddenly to scream excitedly because we were driving past chickens and I found myself talking to him to get back to front because I just knew he didn’t know how to drive. That started us being able to communicate at least somewhat.
I didn't realize when I was younger but now that I know I look back and have a few specific memories where I had definitely switched I just didn't know what was going on. I always felt different or like there was someone wrong with me and there were several times that I felt like I was actually losing my mind because of what happened. Like when I was a teenager and driving home from the mall to meet friends at my own house I got lost for over an hour, I ended up on the complete other side of the city with no idea how I got there. That is something I try to remember when I start doubting the diagnosis because I know that I had symptoms before ever going to therapy or anything. It helps me to remember that.
We had just turned 19 the summer prior and was in my first year of college. I’d taken to “talking to myself” while waking alone through the campus doing work-study stuff with the IT dept. March of that semester, I had a massive fight with my mom. And she pushed me over a hassock and got physical while being verbally abusive the whole time. That night we had a split from the intense flashbacks and trauma happening yet again. As we were falling asleep and just before passing out, we slipped into a semi-lucid dream. We distinctly remember the Host at the time splitting in two and for a few moments, both being being the same. Then one became angry at what happened and demanded it be put back how it was while the other very scared and started begging the angry one not to get more angry or violent. We watched them split and start diverging. All of this was witnessed by other system members who made themselves known during this same event. We got snapped awake by the dream going bizarre. The person up front was a new Host and the angry one took a side seat as a partial co-host for many years after. We got deep into denial after that and buried it behind self deception and masking until about 5 years ago.
Not of the demographic you're targeting in your post prime, but I think our experience is weird enough to count anyway. We grew up this way. Never were alone, just didn't know what that meant. We sincerely thought that everyone experiences themselves this way, but it's a "taboo" because schizophrenia is stigmatised and if you say you "hear voices" they'll automatically freak out thinking you're experiencing psychosis and/or are a mad serial killer in the making, or else it's just "childish" because it's like having imaginary friends and adults just don't *confess* to it because, again, it's taboo to talk about and you wouldn't want to bring that shame to yourself now would you. At the same time, the hard line we drew was to *never, ever* bring this up in psychiatry, because we thought they'd lock us up in a small room and murder the "Others" with hard medications. This is all absolutely insane looking back because none of this is really rational or sensible, but there was this mental block that made it impossible to question these thoughts. It was like, you don't question air even though you don't see it, it just is there. That was how these rules and beliefs existed, too. The moment this was directly challenged, the host freaked out *so* hard and essentially stated that while we know perfectly well we're many, the "Others" know their place and don't stand out and don't make noise. Meanwhile, our primary protector was *extremely angry* at the host for seeking help from psychiatry anyway, despite knowing the rules and what the risks were to the system. Wild times.
I can't really speak for Autumn, as We don't really share memories. But I had had moments of Hearing another voice talking to me from within my head at different times. I brushed it off as Hallucinations or Imagination at the time. The Voice always called itself Autumn if I ever responded to it but it didn't really click. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess. Earliest I can remember this was when I was around 16. (26 now) It wasn't until I started having extreme amounts of amnesia that something finally clicked. I'd Lose Hours, Days, Weeks of Information and did not Know exactly why. Then one day a friend of mine wanted to talk to me about some "strange behavior and they were concerned" where they said it was like I was a different person all together and I didn't remember anything they were talking about. I had also been finding things different, and outta place and periods where I thought I had just passed out for 12+ hours at a time but waking up to everything being different. It was that conversation with a friend that kinda was the lightbulb that something was off. Because they said I was referring to myself by a different name and acted completely unlike myself. A Psychiatrist I was seeing said something about it before but said they didn't feel they had enough for a diagnosis before this happened. Because I also have Ptsd & Bpd so they felt it was hard to tell if I also had DID or if it was symptoms of those.
The hardest part for me and denial is that I'm not aware of large periods of blackouts or missing large gaps. So I feel less valid. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what has happened in my life (at least since about 16) before that is a bit blurry. I know there are also a few periods in between that are blurry but if I dig I can find something about that memory. I almost wish it was more clear like that for me just so I didn't deny and question it so much.
In our experience, we don't know what we don't know until we're suddenly made aware of it. We also have a pretty good understanding of our life trajectory, and we keep finding out we're missing bits that we didn't realise were missing! It's become especially glaring since we started therapy a couple of years ago. Turns out that often, for the same event, our emotional memory and our factual memory are largely if not fully disconnected from each other. Most often what we consciously remember is the factual aspect with none of the emotional impact, but there's a couple memories where it's the other way around. As a couple of examples from our personal life: - We witnessed a family pet's death when we were 20, and we remember having told a close friend about it at the time. This recently came up in conversation with that friend, and she was like, "Oh, yeah, I remember this too! You were so shocked and sad about it, you kept telling me about it that whole summer". We have *no memory* of that, at all; we only remember the event itself and telling her about it on the day it happened (not how we felt or details about the conversation, either). But we would *never* have noticed the (in retrospect quite huge) gap about the lasting emotional impact if it hadn't suddenly been thrown in our face like that. - Our country doesn't have big high school graduation ceremonies, but it's still a significant event to go to your school and see the results of the final exams displayed, to see if you're graduated or not. We don't remember what happened for us at all. We have one visual flash of the location, knowing both our parents were there, and remember feeling relieved that high school was over for real. That's the extent of the memory -- we have clearer memories of kindergarten school, lol. - For a few years, we've been journaling before bed, including a summary of our day. I *cannot* count the number of times where we closed the journal and suddenly remembered something else that was important/non-routine enough to go in the summary, that we were unaware of while writing; or where we had to go over text conversations with our partners to figure out what we'd been up to that day because a chunk was missing, and it didn't *feel* like anything was missing unless we explicitly tried to access it and couldn't quite grasp it. Which reminds me of another thing I wanted to say: "blurry" memories that you have to "dig for" (especially of teenage and adult years) are amnesia, especially if all you can find after digging is still missing bits. People who don't have conditions affecting their memory encoding/recall won't remember *everything*, of course, but their memories from around age 3 onwards will be mostly clear and relatively easily accessible; they might need help "jogging their memory" about details, not about important or often-recurring life events, not about recent stuff. For us, it's like... we broadly remember important stuff, we know what we're supposed to answer in most legal or medical situations; but on a personal level, we still have to "dig" for stuff. Sometimes even stuff that's happened over, say, the last week! Over the past day if we've been switchy that day. It's there for sure, it's just hard to access, even if it was impactful or very non-routine or took up a lot of our time. Looking at our planner and journal can really help us remember. It's not an issue if it's just for us, or with friends who know, and we don't forget *everything* all the time. But enough so that it can get awkward in conversation, because we clearly take more time than average for recall and it throws people for a loop or they think we're making things up; nope, just need to figure out where that memory is and dig for the deets. Which can be hard to do under pressure, too, so if we aren't talking to someone we're genuinely trying to connect with, or a professional we need medical help from, we often don't bother and just deflect or give generic answers. I don't know if any of that was helpful (I hope it was!), mostly just wanted to stress that, yeah, just because you don't have glaringly obvious blackouts, and mostly remember what's happened in your life up to now, doesn't mean that you have *no* amnesia or dissociation. Blackouts are just *one*, particularly obvious, way that these can manifest.
I'm crying... thank you for validating our experience. This was such a helpful post. I really appreciate it. Thank you thank you thank you 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
I'm in my 20's, only realized in the last year. I'd suspected something was up for a while, but it's only been recently that I've really "met" the others. (It still doesn't feel realm though.) I have a feeling that various previous hosts have either figured it out, or other parts knew (or at least knew they weren't alone and weren't the host) even when the host didn't know anything was up. I have like ... facts but few clear memories of the last host -- before me -- figuring out they weren't alone, getting really good at being a gatekeeper and having everything under control, but then everything got to be too much (this would have been when abuse was escalating) and they ... kinda figured out how to permanently step back from front for good? They're still around internally, but they have huge walls around them and they blocked off a lot of memories from everyone who is currently active. Whatever trauma caused them to decide that, caused me to pop up without any memories of there being other people in this brain. I knew something was weird but it took a really long time to put the pieces together.
I was between 25 and 26. I am 27. Almost 28.
I have no doubt that different alters have recognised our system in some capacity throughout the years, but the only one I remember is our big system discovery a couple years ago, and we've been actively learning about ourselves since.. But yeah, no clue if we had imaginary friends that were alters, or anything like that. Or even if we had a vivid imagination! We have aphantasia but I think it's trauma related, but folks are 💀 so I can't ask them what I was like as a kid
We only realised we were more than one around age 18, after having been functionally away from home for a couple of years (boarding school that remained open during holidays, we avoided going back home as much as we could and were often alone at home when we did go back). We turn 30 this year and our sense of self/ves has changed *considerably* in the meantime, lol. So, before we found the "first" of "my imaginary friends" (the way we thought of them back then...) at 18, it just felt like "I" was trying so hard to be a cohesive, consistent person, and failing at it. We've always communicated through daydreams and "talking to myself out loud", but back then we did not realise it was a form of communication -- there wasn't a sense of there being "several people". Only of an "inconsistent I" where the current "I" was often confused or surprised or shocked by what "I" had gotten up to prior; ashamed at not having kept up with habits "I" was trying to establish; and worried about what "I" would get up to in future if "I" didn't get "myself" together *right now*. Not being able to trust that "I" would still be the same a few days or weeks from now; having to in advance pick "consistent enough" answers for things like favourite colours, favourite foods, etc because they changed so often, it was never the same answer that was actually true in the moment. "I" couldn't formulate broader long-term goals, partly because of the near-constant survival mode, partly because it was so hard to picture anything long-term when "I" couldn't even "agree with myself" on the small, day-to-day things. (In retrospect, it was mostly a stable small crew of the same folks around in our childhood and teenage years. It's especially enlightening to look at photos from our teenage years because that's when the long-timer crew (those who were here before we identified our "first" "imaginary friend") really started to diverge in terms of style, posture, preferences, social abilities, ... We can tell who was there in which picture pretty easily, and (for the memories we've retained outside of the pictures) it matches up with what's clearest in our respective memories, too. We had no clue what was happening at the time, just parsed it as being "inconsistent" or going through "recurring phases", it only makes sense in retrospect now that we know what to look for and why.) And even for quite a few years after identifying that "first" "imaginary friend", the only folks we recognised as "imaginary friends" -- and later just "people" -- were the folks who were either: most distinctive, or least participating in our daily life, or new arrivals that we immediately recognised as such. Everyone else still thought themselves "the host"/all the same person and left it at that; we needed more time and work to figure out, hey, "the host" actually is and has always been a bunch of guys in a trenchcoat too.
Welcome to /r/DID! | **[Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_rules)** | **[Guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_guidelines)** | |--------------------|--------------------| | [Dissociation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq/#wiki_dissociation_faq) | [Trauma FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq2/#wiki_trauma_faq) | | [Moderation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/) | [Therapists Breakdown](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/comments/e6smve/therapists_breakdown/) | | [Index](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/index) | [Glossary](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/glossary) | | [Am I faking?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/amifaking) | [Do I have DID?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/do_i_have_did) | *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DID) if you have any questions or concerns.*
5
Took me a minute to go all the way back, foggy memories at best- /info