ask anything about DID

I just realised this can be read as "a score of 51 implies I have DID", I meant "the score of 51 confirms a low likelihood of DID" considering it seems to be close to the middle of possible scores

 

Can't take the test because I'm bad at the scales thing and probably wouldn't answer truthfully, but I dissociate mostly when I'm feeling lots of emotions and/or recovering from a meltdown. Like, I'll look back at, as an example, the stuff I typed later, and feel it was a completely different person typing. It's always still me, though, I don't lose time or my (very vague) sense of identity.
... Except that one time my phone wallpaper changed and I was following a bunch of new people on Tumblr I had never heard of, but I still don't know what happened then and it might not actually have been dissociation.
There's also near-constant maladaptive daydreaming and internally speaking to characters.

 

I got a score of 3. I am the low score champion of not disassociating ever.

 

As I said before, I'm pretty sure I'm not accurate enough in evaluating myself since I'm bad at the scale thing and my answers might not be truthful, but I scored a 73. Probably explained by autism and BPD.

 

basically, my auditory hallucinations are always the same voice, and they also stop when I'm on medication. additionally, they always have a point to what they're saying. the alters aren't always nice and helpful so much as....random. "cookies" is a thing that an alter would say, not a thing a hallucination would say. but really, my main way of knowing if it's a hallucination or an alter is: am I currently on medication? if yes, then it couldn't be a hallucination--there's only one possible hallucination that's not been stopped by meds and it's not an auditory one, all my hallucinations that are auditory are stopped by my medication. if no, it could be either, and I just try to ignore it. I didn't even realize that there was a difference in the voices I was hearing until my auditory hallucinations stopped. additionally, the times I hear my alters most clearly are when I am most dissociated, which is the time when my hallucinations are weakest. finally, my auditory hallucinations show up as things I hear outside my head, around me. my alters' voices are inside my head. more similar to thought-insertions, I think, but I don't have thought-insertions. I have had a possession-type delusion, and hearing my alters is nothing like that. and they're not at all similar to command hallucinations or intrusive thoughts because my alters don't command me to do things the way my hallucinations sometimes do, and they don't come with a feeling of fear or stress the way my intrusive thoughts do. they're more...helpful suggestions that usually calm me down.
there are hostile/abuser alters in some systems--not ours. we don't have any.

edit: at least, we don't have any we know of.

 

56

 

55

 

cool.
fun dissociation+psychosis things when you and a friend are both dissociating and psychotic:
"if I'm not real, and you're not real, WHOSE HALLUCINATION IS THIS?"

 

So I got a 7.

Most of my experiences of not recognizing myself and brainfog and the like probably come from being transgender and autistic, too.

 

I got a 7. Makes sense.

Spoiler: i babbled

A lot of the time, while ticking 'never', I noted that this was to a problematic degree. As mentioned in my 'what even is dissociation' thread, my brain pretty much does the opposite: I'm always attached to my mind, body, and senses, far more attached than I need to be and apparently far more than other (non-dissociative) people, and it causes significant distress.

And I know this is not DID, but it has always frustrated me that there aren't proper words for it: I have always thought of myself as having inner "people", which are mostly personifications of different aspects of myself. This happens of its own accord; I did play pretend games with imaginary friends as a child, but the "inner people" have always been distinct from that - they happen on their own, I don't create them deliberately. The most I do to "construct" them is figure out their names, but there's always a nebulous sense of their name already in place; I just have to find the right one. They're not actual people, though some of the bigger ones are closer to that. We don't often 'talk' in my head in the moment, but whenever I recall or reflect back on a particular internal experience, I *automatically* perceive it as a dialogue between the parts. They have no executive control, which they hate - one in particular spent years yelling at me every day for not doing what she said and not letting her just take over for me, even though I tried and it just doesn't happen. I've wished since childhood that she (or one of the others) could take over ("front", basically) for me, but it is simply impossible. Even while undergoing trauma I was stuck in place, hyperaware of being me and having a body and living in the world.

My theory is that my brain is extremely resistant to dissociation, and if that wasn't the case, I might have developed something more closely resembling DID/OSDD. I don't know. The only "official" terminology I can use to explain it (because as a psychologist and hopefully a decent person, I do NOT wanna misrepresent it by using DID terminology) comes from Internal Family Systems or Ego-State therapies, both of which encourage non-DID patients to personify their inner parts as a therapeutic tool. I could probably do very well in that type of therapy, because my inner parts have personified themselves already; I don't have to construct that narrative.

I know I'm not the only person who is like this - the eating disorder community is full of us - but we don't have a vocabulary for it, and I think that's one of the reasons why you get people co-opting the framework of DID and related phenomena to try to talk about it. Not the only reason, but certainly one of them.

(Actually, I think it may be a synaesthesia thing. Like way enhanced synaesthesia. You know how some synaesthetes - myself included - perceive personalities from numbers? I think that the faces, names, and personalities allocated to the different parts of me are like that, except much more intense.)

(also because i am a giant psych nerd & word nerd i have created my own terminology & model to explain it in a way that also explains people with similar non-DID experiences and differentiates explicitly between this and DID)

i did try not to babble

 

Another "not DID-ish but upped my score on the test" thing: I get what I used to think was depersonalisation and what I now would refer to as a recursive crisis, and I think it's an autism thing. Basically, I get so wrapped up in thinking about people and social interactions between people and the way that people think and feel that I have an awkward reminder, e.g. by catching sight of my reflection and being jarred, having to force myself to go "oh yeah, I'm that one". "That one is me. Not any of the others. I am this one here." And then I feel sad, because I'd rather be one of the others and I know I'm not. But it's not "not feeling like myself", it's always "feeling like myself but wishing I didn't", and I don't think that's really the same as dissociation...

 

my dissociation test score: 15

which might be 'cause i was erring on the side of choosing the lowest answer i thought fit each time

 

Hmm, I also do something kinda like that.

 

I got 40 on the test! Worth noting that I've got social anxiety and pretty severe depression, which leads me to not want to inhabit my body as much as physically possible. Also I'm kind of the "absent-minded professor" archetype so my memory is a sieve. :P

 

I'm kinda wondering how and why fictives getting memories happens. IDK.

 

I have no idea, honestly.

 

If you want to talk about it, feel free to shoot me a PM and we can share and theorise :)

So are you actually able to do that? Like, do you find yourself more often dissociating by choice, or do you struggle with periods where you really want to [not inhabit your body] but it's not possible?

 

I do personally get a kind of "I'll just lie down in bed and kinda Stop for a while" thing.

 

Human brain being very creative and memory being highly vulnerable to reshaping through suggestion?

 

I feel similarly occasionally, except in my case, I tried to cheat the system by taking dissociative drugs.

Advice: Do not do this.