When we first stumbled across this site, we were very excited. Just what we’d been hoping for! And so we made a profile, posted a few comments, and promptly disappeared to re-evaluate the situation. As per usual.
Our system is…not really a typical presentation of “oldschool DID”. We have had internal communication since childhood. We’re polyfragmented – our therapist said that she knows of about fifty of us, but we know that there’s more than that. We have a lot of fictives. And we have, at least for now, at least for the most part, very little shame over being a system or existential crises over being alters.
There are a lot of reasons for this. We have a lot of different types of trauma, and there wasn’t really a separation between “trauma life” and “regular life” as we grew up. We became best friends with another system when we were four or five years old (we’re married now, and, yes, it is adorable). The few good people in our childhood were outstandingly selfless and kind and taught us that it’s safe and okay to feel the feelings. Some of our alters were able to pretend to be Jesus or the Holy Spirit so that they could talk to the rest of us without raising internal fears of “being crazy”. “Oh don’t mind me, I’m just Jesus, and I’m ‘living in your heart’, which is why the voice is coming from inside of you. This is totally normal and nothing for you to be concerned about.” System members got to know each other and watched each other split. Over and over and over, until the trauma of losing beloved parts of the system overruled the fear of having other people living alongside with you in your head. We want everyone to feel as loved and welcome here as possible, to make up for all the years we have lost to splitting and hiding and none of us being able to EVER truly be ourselves.
There’s more, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet. But everything has sort of perfectly come together to create our system the way that it is.
Having said all of that, we’ve only been diagnosed for about nine months, if memory serves. There is so much more communication to accomplish and memories to uncover. But I still want to start blogging on this site. It feels…a lot less high-pressure than a Youtube channel, for example, where I’d be concerned with reaching a larger number of systems (and non-systems) and feeling the need to fight DID stigma. I still want to fight DID stigma. But “should” and “want” are not the same thing. I do not think our therapist would approve of us diving headfirst into the murky waters of the Youtube comment section. We’ve been severely gaslit for our entire life. We have not been in therapy long enough to justify reckless acts, no matter how desperate we are for the world to change for the better.
I’m not sure what we’re going to use this blog for yet. But I’m excited to see our system members feel more comfortable talking about their passions in a space with other systems.
Welcome back! This site is certainly a lot lower-key than YouTube – we weren’t ready to go there either. Having your face and voice out there in front of millions of people is a lot different ballgame than blogging under a nickname on a site with a couple hundred users. 😉 It’s much more homey here.
We’re a bit more of an old-school (or just plain old) system, but love reading posts from other systems of any kind. I can’t imagine the complexities of being polyfrag – we struggle enough as-is!
Don’t feel like you have to blog only about dissociation or trauma here, by the way. You’re a system; you belong here, no matter the topic. So if you want to blog weekly about your purple Furby collection, more power to you.
Homey is good!
Yeah, it’s cool to hear about all the different system structures and types. Being polyfrag isn’t so bad for us because we have multiple alters who can communicate with large sections of the system. They kind of act like middlemen for everybody else. Our main communication issue at present is the power imbalance that comes from a handful of alters being the voice for the entire system. But our spouse is polyfragmented AND they have near-total amnesia between each switch. We have no idea how they function.
Okay! That sounds good to us.