Reply To: How did you first get to know your different parts?

[janet.t-e-c]

Hi. I’m kind of co-con with Saoirse and kind of spacey. I don’t know if I’ll be able to complete this.

How did I come to know I was part of a system? “I” kept blacking out and trying to hurt myself, sometimes terminally. It’s easy to gloss over normal bits of missing time. It’s harder to gloss over that your car has gone off a cliff and the radiator and fan are now pushed in to the engine block. Or that you tried to break your neck with a rope while at a friends house. I ended up in a psychiatric hospital in 1994. That’s where I was first diagnosed with DDNOS (which was in the brand new DSM-IV), and referred to a psychologist who worked with MPD patients (1994 was when MPD became DID. At the time most of the references still called it MPD.) That psychologist was part of a husband/wife team (she was a psychiatrist) who gave me my first DID diagnosis. (I resisted that diagnosis highly for over a decade. What finally made some headway with me is when my Mom would take pictures of me doing things I had no memory of, and get them developed at the 1 hour photo place. “Look, this is you in the same clothes you’re wearing right now, but you’re on the floor playing with winnie the pooh riding on the cat… this was two hours ago…”)

I remember the sheer terror I had when I saw my first system map in that psychologist’s office, drawn by another part of myself. In fact, one of my big fears is still that we’ll discover another F’ing subsystem. With the possible exception of one of us, I don’t think anyone knew the full extent of the 3 subsystems… that map wasn’t even complete.

So yeah, it was scary. I had parts trying to unalive me. I was having flashbacks to horrible crap I didn’t want to believe. It was not one of the finer points in my life. Like Saoirse mentioned, when we started out, most communication was still written. I threw letters written to me away, telling myself it wasn’t real and I just needed to snap out of it. Well, its almost 29 years later, and I haven’t snapped out of it, so I finally have to admit its probably real.

I didn’t want to communicate. I didn’t want to learn about “my system”. I just wanted it all to stop, to not be true. It was a bad fantasy I needed to let go of. It was a nightmare.