I feel very concerned actually and find it fascinating (hoping that isn’t insensitive) that someone as an adult can become a child and not really know what is happening, and somehow stay safe.
I think sadly many people with DID won't always be able to keep themselves safe always? Or at least they will find themselves in really scary situations where the child part is totally unable to cope? I guess that's happened to me, but it's hard to say with amnesia... People in general seem reluctant to tell you things about yourself you can't remember, I find.
I have in some point developed a helpful disembodied voice to guide me through some tricky bits. I think it was originally an internalised image of a real adult woman i knew, who helped me, but now it's just my own "helper". So often if I'm out and about and suddenly not exactly switch, but get very confused and feel helpless and don't know what to do, the voice in my head reminds me to breathe, to walk, how to get home etc and talks me through it kindly. It's great.
can you feel/sense when new identities come into being or old ones end (I’m not sure that’s the right word at all but I can’t think of a better one)? If not, how do you know when a new identity exists? Or have “new” ones always existed but just not interacted before?
I think for me it's a case of them having been in the background and me not paying attention to them before, if that makes sense?
I don't have a huge host of parts, and I'm not entirely sure how many to count, as many aren't full personalities in any sense, but just little fragments. Eg. there's a little girl part that doesn't speak and just randomly hangs around at the back of my mind, accompanied with a sense of worry. And a slightly older little girl who pops in my head occasionally when childhood trauma events are either talked about or I've had a flashback or a nightmare, and is just this pitiful embodiment of all things victimhood. I don't have a sense of personality to them, so do I count them as parts?
But I actually started out with lots and lots - not parts but "imaginary people" when I was a child - people I imagined around me like a normal kid's imaginary friends, I guess, who were always around, and I could fluidly switch between feeling like I "was" one of them. They were around more or less consciously until my early to mid teens (although of course I'd learnt not to talk to them out loud or let people know about them by then), before I guess going into hiding inside my head. I have no idea if this is how it is for anyone else - just how it was for me. So when a "new" part has made itself more known to me, it's actually usually been an old one.
They all seem to represent different things for me. Not just trauma. One is definitely the carrier of all of our anger. One is all about hopelessness, self-soothing and depression. One is an exceedingly super positive health enthusiast, and so on. I've been more easily in touch with these ones than the trauma stuff. That's still mostly hidden I think, and the trauma parts rarely say a word in my head - they just channel the horror of it.