Any other parents with complex trauma/dissociative disorders?

I’ve just found this thread. I have BPD, PTSD (diagnosed before C-PTSD existed) and DID.

I don’t tell anyone about the DID (except my psychologist obviously) and hiding that and trying to manage it everyday is painful and exhausting.

Just wondering if anyone else with DID (or maybe other dissociative disorder) has experienced this, and did it get better?
In my latest therapy session I was talking about one of my abusers (not even the abuse they did). But a perpetrator introject part started to shut me down. I can't describe it in any other way. It wasn't like when I switch to a different identity. It was like I was fainting, everything went dark, I couldn't really hear, I couldn't move. But I hadn't switched to another part - I could still vaguely think. But if I tried to think then they stomped on my thoughts.
It was literally like the perpetrator introject didn't want me to even hear what the therapist was saying, let alone talk about what had happened.
That wouldn't have been so bad, except when I went near the therapist office at a different occasion (not to go in) I could feel my system being shut down again and I thought I was just going to end up collapsed on the pavement.

Sending compassion and joining the thread. It is encouraging to see that the NHS now have some knowledge and interest in this. When I fell apart some years ago after having my child they were awful. I got a psychiatric nurse visiting me who just basically took the piss out of me. I was so vulnerable. 🥲

I managed to pick myself up on my own completely, god knows how (although at one point I was very close to suicide) and found a private therapist where I realised cPTSD is at the forefront probably ASD too. Alcoholic bullying mother, non-present father etc etc etc. I am lucky enough to have been able to have lots of therapy.

My issue is often with bullying, sexual or otherwise. I don't see it coming until it's too late. Sometimes I forget and think everything is fine, start trusting people a bit and then realise I've not noticed their behaviour. Its a massive blind spot but have to say I have got much better at working it out. My therapist says she is amazed I am still alive and thriving! I am proud of myself to have got to where I am. I am able to protect myself now in a much better way, whereas I didn't or couldn't as a young person. I try to treat those moments as a learning experience and send gratitude to the person/people for reminding me (whilst energetically disconnecting from them). Meditation has also been very useful.

@DarkEyedSailor I know exactly what you mean and yes I do.

The other thing that I struggle to explain to other people is that I have no sense of object permanence relating to other people. e.g. when I go away from my family with work I don't think about them at all, even if that is a couple of weeks. They might as well not exist. It is literally a case of out of sight out of mind.

Does anyone else feel like an imposter in their own life? I feel like I'm pretending. Pretending to be an adult.

I see other people my age and think they're so much older and better than I am. That compared to them, I'm immature and childish and not quite right.

It's hard to explain. I haven't explained it very well. It's as if the inside of me is stuck at the age the bad things happened and no matter how old the outside gets, it'll never catch up.

Thanks for this thread, which I have only just found. The pp who said they want to talk but can’t find the words. That resonated with me so much. I am the same. I have survived so much trauma/traumatic loss in my life. I don’t talk about it at all, I don’t want to be pitied or disbelieved or written off as a fantasist (if I read my life in a novel I myself would think it was far fetched that so much tragedy could happen to one person) . So I don’t talk, and I put on an act all day every day. I keep everyone at arms length and no one on earth knows the real me. I hide it all, even from my own children (who are young adults now). It’s utterly exhausting. I’m 52. I suffer with flash backs, ocd, overwhelming feelings of impending doom, anxiety, terrifying derealization and depersonalisation (I first experienced this at age 11 and genuinely thought I was dying). I have diagnosed PTSD and had EDMR and psychotherapy over the years but nothing really helps. I’m just resigned now to making it through each day at a time best I can, until maybe a day in the future sometime when I just can’t anymore.

A good question

I didn't know that DID was a thing. So whilst I couldn't account for Amazon purchases arriving that I hadn't ordered. Or having no knowledge at all of most of my life e.g I knew I had been married but couldn't recount a single event from that time, not my wedding day, not the birth of my kids etc. I thought I had some form of amnesia.
The banging headaches I now know are from switching I was on migraine medication for.
I had countless tests to find out why I kept passing out, now I know it was from switching but no part coming forward.
But I had no clue any of this pointed to DiD. After a year of therapy (with a different therapist specialising in rape and CSA) where i found out i was disociating i then went for a private diagnosis. But even then I thought when I went for diagnosis they would say dissociation with amnesia. When my report said they had spoken to other alters I had absolutely no idea. Although that does make sense why the assessor spent most of her time saying are you ok can you remember what we have been saying. And me thinking that's what you just said... when I got the DID diagnosis my then therapist said it was way out of her knowledge band and hence I moved to the new specialist therapist.

I see an NHS psychologist and also have a support worker. We work on slightly different stuff to the dissociation specialist probably as they have never worked with someone with DiD before.

@Cayennepepper7 Structural Dissociation(SD) is a hugely important thing to understand but there's not a large amount of books or videos about it.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is very similar to SD in how it deals with parts and there seems to be a lot more information available on IFS

I found this video helpful as it shows you how to talk to and befriend your various parts when our natural reaction is to get angry and hate them.

Richard Schwartz is the person credited with creating IFS.

I missed your original post.
I have DID, diagnosed just over a year ago. But have different parts who have PTSD, anxiety and depression (one is suicidal). I have one part who needs quite strong glasses, but the others of us don't!
I have been in private therapy with a DID specialist which is very helpful. We are learning to communicate with each other a little bit through journalling. But the parts who hold all the trauma memories talk to my therapist only as they know that she won't tell me what they have said.
I'm also under NHS secondary MH care, but they are learning about DID on the job.

Awwww thanks @Cayennepepper7 , all good here.
im very tired , not sure why, but otherwise feel very well.
my friend who has lots of trauma and lifelong anxiety is just starting on sertraline- im really hopeful that she will also experience the good life soon.

I live in Ireland and was lucky enough to get 25 therapy sessions free through the HSE.
They spanned over a year and I have found them so beneficial. I have my last appointment in Jan and I’m dreading it. I don’t want to stop but that’s all I’ll get with HSE. She had been amazing and has given so much support and I’ve learned so much but it’s daunting to try do it on my own now.

I had a traumatic childhood, high functioning until the age of 50….. then I couldn’t cope anymore, I was exhausted from pretending everything was ok and normal. Therapy has helped but I think I will need more help going forward. One day I’m fine, the next I’m spiralling.
Well, I’ll see how it goes. It’s sad to read your stories and affected our lives have been by childhood trauma.
As my therapist would say, go gently.

Yes. Initially diagnosed ptsd, then bpd then cptsd and osdd. I’m in long term therapy. It’s hard

Yes, CPTSD, and DID traits
better now - years of therapy and Citalopram have helped!

That sounds like a really tough childhood

I've been reading/watching stuff as I wait for my therapy to start.
Gabor Mate is excellent.

He has books and there is lots of content on you tube you can watch.

He was a jewish baby given away by his mother to save his life under Nazi Germany. He became a workaholic doctor (trying to prove he had value). For anyone with trauma from a bad childhood I really recommend him.

Yip me. It took me till middle age to realise something was wrong with me. I mean prior to that I made impulse decisions, had fits of rage over nothing, was terrible with money, binge eating disorder and always felt uptight, worried and anxious.

It was a while before I pieced together this behaviour was not normal.

Then you start you realise your childhood was very much not normal or good. I think all children think whatever they have is what everyone has.

For me it was 2 mentally ill parents - depressed dad who didn't want me, didn't love me and made it pretty obvious. BPD mother who swung between being Mary Poppins and wicked witch of the west and made her children the brunt of so much anger, shame, guilt, humiliation, mocking. Then there was the violence between my parents (mum was worse than dad), money problems.

I 'coped' by using alot of maladaptive coping mechanisms - being perfect so nobody would be angry, being pretty so nobody would reject me, keeping quiet even when I felt resentful then exploding, OCD.

Finally had a diagnosis from the NHS when it all came to a bit of a head. The MH nurse who I saw first said she thought complex trauma. The 3 clinical psychologists who I saw did not want to give me a 'label' so I don't know what the final answer is. I did ask if they thought I had BPD and they did not want to answer me. I think BPD and CPTSD can look very similar so hard to tell.

Anyway I've been on and off AD's all my life and currently on a max dose. I'm booked in for schema therapy next year on the NHS.

I literally still have moments of amazement when I see things that to me look like 'flying sheep' ie unbelievable. Dads who are affectionate and interested in their daughters. Mind Blowing. Dads who are calm and protective of their daughters. Wow.

Mums who are 'the same' each day and not completely unstable, making their children look after them and making sure they know their dad wanted them aborted/hates them. Ridiculing them in front of friends to get a laugh and mocking how they used to be distressed as a baby (you were such an ugly baby who use to frown alot). Fuck me, yes that's hilarious.

Yes it completely changed the path of my life.
Plenty of nice, kind, stable normal men who tried to love me and whilst I could certainly play along, I felt nothing.
Men who treated me with distain or indifference (only happened twice) I feel head over heels for them and turned myself inside out trying to make them love me.

I trust nobody.

They had hoped I could go into a group therapy on the NHS but they decided i was going to need individual.

Mostly now I am just sad and empty - like my entire life was stolen from me.

People who grow up with stable, kind, consistent parents have no idea how lucky they are.

I've spent my life being 'triggered' by things people said or did although I had no idea what was happening. The whole thing is just exhausting. It's like realising you look like a normal person on the outside but inside you are a frightened, distressed, young child with no confidence, no self esteem and no security.

The psychologist asked me if I remember being frightened when I was a child and I said no. This made me pause and then say 'oh well maybe I wasn't frightened (after all I probably just got used to it). Her theory was I didn't know anything except being frightened.

I hope the therapy helps me next year but it has come so late in my life that I just feel very, very sad.

There appears to be large chunks of childhood I don't really remember anything so kind of dreading what is going to be 'unearthed'

Hugs to all of you in similar boats

Yes, cPTSD, ADHD, FND with dissoc seizures, Adjustment Disorder. Iatrophobia as a result from MH services experience. It has wrecked the last five years of my life and blown my sense of identity.