Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder: A guest blog by listener Melanie
D.I.D never comes alone. I’ve been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Phobic Disorder, Avoidant Food Intake Disorder, Depersonalization, Excoriation Disorder and PTSD.
All of these disorders effect me deeply, have run my life from a very young age, but I think the disorders that have most effected me besides my D.I.D are my Panic and Anxiety disorders.
I was diagnosed with D.I.D around 11 or 12 years old. Strangely enough, that was around the time the abuse that caused my disorders stopped. My abuser sexually, physically and emotionally abused me on almost a daily basis from the time I was 5 until I was 12. They moved when I was 12. I don’t know how long they could have continued the abuse if they hadn’t left and I didn’t breathe a word of it until I was 16.
Being so young when it began, I was very submissive. I had a lot of outer body experiences during the abuse, complete black-outs, episodes of losing time – sometimes for days or weeks at a time. My other personalities (alters) started taking defined shape when I started to fight back, around 8 or 9 years old. That’s when the violence escalated and it was at 12 or 13 that I developed my most prominent and dangerous alter.
I’ll talk about this alter as if it were my only one, so I don’t confuse all the details and draw this out too long.
The sexual abuse was never verbalized between me and my abuser. Which made it hard to think or talk about in clear words. When it’s never spoken about, it’s hard for anything to feel real. I was little and, especially being a little girl, I was socialized and conditioned to be more obedient, to argue less. I was submissive, nonconfrontational, fearful of authoritative figures, easily manipulated, naive and very trusting. I was a perfect victim.
The rape and molestation, the cutting (that my abuser inflicted upon me, not self-inflicted), verbal abuse I underwent was all so commonplace growing up, I just tried not to think about it. When I was at school or summer camp, I’d often forget about it entirely. There were several times I remember consciously thinking to myself, ‘if I just don’t think about it anymore, it will go away.’ I said that to myself in regard to my memories of being abused and my disorders. Particularly my loss of time and depersonalization. Those were so frightening to experience and I was scared to think on it, let alone verbalize it.
There were times I opened my mouth to actually say ‘I think I’m being raped,’ ‘the blood on my mattress was not from my period,’ ‘I think I’m going crazy,’ ‘I think I want to harm myself,’ ‘I think I already have.’ I’d open my mouth in front of family or friends, at the dinner table and it would get stuck in my throat like a hot rock and refuse to come out. My body wouldn’t make noise and I eventually surrendered to that.
I was scared to even say it out loud to myself. I didn’t write about it, I didn’t talk about it, I didn’t release it anywhere. I hardly slept, I always felt ill. There was so much time my body was piloted by my alters that most of my childhood is so warped, I can’t really trust any of my own memories to be true or real. Time is like this loose, flat circle that pushes me around like bumper carts and is at the same time, impossible for me to grab hold of.
My dangerous alter hates me as my abuser did, but also hates me in the ways that I have. Considers me weak, disgusting, pathetic, self-pitying and unworthy. She has threatened to kill me before, in writing. I would find frightening notes from her in my bedroom or my school notebooks.
I think she is the part of myself that took on the traits of my abuser to match their severity; to fight fire with fire, in a way. I once heard it explained in a story about a young girl who was attacked by bears and she went home, made a bear costume with big fangs and big claws and when she next saw the bears, she attacked them just as viciously as they had attacked her, not for vengeance, but for protection. That is to say, she couldn’t protect herself from her attackers until she became one of them. So, I think my alter took on that role of condensed evil equal to that of my abuser’s so that I might survive the abuse at all.
I attempted suicide at 12 during a bizarre episode of depersonalization and I saw one psychologist in particular that same night. My mother wouldn’t send me to the hospital (even if that may have been the smarter choice) because she knew she would lose legal control over me once I was in the hospital. I don’t know if it was a desire to protect me from a psych ward or shame of my illnesses that kept her from taking me there. She would’ve given anything for me to be ‘normal.’ I think she still resents me for the macabre strangeness of my brain.
I did some EMDR therapy with this psychologist, he made me draw a lot and we did some exercises that were almost hypnotic. He had me keep journals that my alters would write in, all in different hand writing styles, all with different narrative flows. I know I lost time in his room, I had violent panic attacks in front of him and his room saw a lot of the worst of my symptoms. He told my parents that he ‘suspected’ I was being abused and he even knew by who, though I never said. My parents didn’t take him seriously, I suppose. I didn’t see that doctor again. My family didn’t talk about it again.
I came forward on the night of my 16th birthday. This was entirely by chance. My mother’s friend caught me in a very vulnerable moment, mid-panic-attack and asked me ‘did someone hurt you?’ and I had a complete meltdown. I never even answered, but it’s sort of hard to respond to that question with hysterical tears and full body tremors and then say ‘nah, nothing happened.’ I told my parents that night.
My mother believed me, asked me if I wanted to press charges and respected my decision not to. I don’t know if my father ever believed me. He used my diagnosis against me, saying ‘she makes stuff up all the time,’ ‘how do we know that any of this is real?’ ‘This could just be another one of her stories.’
My sister actually walked in on the sexual abuse once. When I brought it up to her, she had no recollection of it. When I brought up that discussion again, she had blocked that too. Every time I mention it, she seems to be hearing about it for the first time all over again. I think what she saw, she blocked and the unpleasantness of it all just keeps getting blocked again and again.
The last I heard of my abuser was that they were arrested for attempted murder, having stabbed a woman over 30 times, strangled and beaten her. She survived by some miracle. My abuser served 3 months in prison for this attack.
I’ve heard it said that life is an uphill battle. With D.I.D, sometimes the battle starts all over again, skips over parts, rewinds, pauses, sometimes you pop into existence on another hill entirely, watching the battle from some other hill, unable to get back to where you need to be. With anxiety, sometimes sink holes form instantaneously beneath you, landmines go off too close, you hear missiles that haven’t been fired yet, you swing your sword before there is anything to swing it at. With depression, sometimes the air becomes thick like water and every movement to strike or land a blow becomes overwhelmingly difficult, like all of gravity is working against you, there is a loss of impact, a lethargy to even the air.
Reality is bendable to me. Memory is often false, mostly unreliable. Time is almost irrelevant. I experience life with the constant fear that nothing is real and even if it were real, none of it matters.
I haven’t lost time since 2011. I still have a lot of depersonalization pretty regularly, but it’s manageable. I still have panic attacks, flooding, flash backs, casual, passive suicidal ideation, bouts of severe depression that sometimes come without any warning.
There is so much to my story, it was so difficult to write this. You asked me for 500 words or so and I gave you 1500 and it hardly says anything about my experiences. I hope someday I will be able to share it in greater detail.
Thank you for reading this and giving me this opportunity to share a part of myself that is so often too ugly or heavy to impart.
Melanie
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