Any other parents with complex trauma/dissociative disorders?

[Cayennepepper7]

Just seeing if anyone is in the same boat here

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 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.

Glad you're doing well :)
I hope your friend is ok. I have also started back on sertraline after being off and on it a few times. The start can be rocky and cause a worsening of symptoms, but it should then start to improve.

Hi, thanks for sharing your story :) It sounds similar to mine. No worries if you would rather not say but I'm curious if you knew about/suspected DID before seeing your specialist, and also what secondary care you are under? I am also in private psychotherapy which is where I gradually started to learn more about CPTSD and structural dissociation.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

@CompleteUninspiredNameChange yes that is very similar to me as well. I had no idea about any of this. I knew I had a lot of unexplained somatic complaints, pain with no explanation, etc. I knew I had mood swings and general traumatic amnesia and things like that. But it took a specialist to help me notice that I would suddenly switch in the middle of a sentence and not remember what I was talking about before, or that things I talked about in one session were inaccessible and unfamiliar in another session, and she would call my attention to 'you're in one part...this is another part.' Then I gradually started noticing things - like I fired my child's longtime nanny and then had no recollection of it and was very upset that she had inexplicably left, until the memory of me firing her suddenly came back.

I have never brought up any of this to my GP as I have been nervous of having MH on my medical record due to stigma - but I am also curious whether there is genuine help available that I may be missing out on

I resonate with this. I think I can often present in a childlike way and feel that I want/need to be taken care of. People I meet can be surprised when I tell them my age and that I'm a parent of children myself! Although other 'parts' are age appropriate. This has been my biggest obstacle to longterm employment - I can't maintain the capable adult part, and then I panic and have to drop everything and leave. So I haven't ever been able to maintain employment for longer than a year.

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.

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.

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.