Alt? Character? New and Weird

The other weekend my SO and I had her children for the weekend. We three were sitting around hanging out and I started doing a silly accent while I talked to them as i do often...I'm just a naturally silly guy!

Anyway, the accent was a German one, and I was being playful and fun. As my SO and I continued to listen to the banter we both began to notice that the accent was more than just a jokey voice, the accent was very thick and quite accurate. It referenced itself in the third person and in it's historical time period. The girls didn't know what was going on, but as it continued both my SO and I began to wonder if this was more than a playful voice.

As the night continued, this accent came out a few more times. There was NO switching like I usually do when an Alt fronts, the co-consciousness was different...indeed, everything was different this time. It was easy to pass this off as just playful at first, but as my SO prodded more she began to get information that seemed very Alt-like.*TRIGGERWARNING- HISTORICAL TRAUMA* He referenced his working in the camps *END*, a desire to be able to fluently speak his native tongue, all the while with a VERY convincing German accent. At one point he also directly referenced 'the system', when asked his name or age, he replied with 'you always ask that and we don't know, some of us don't know'...something along those lines.

So...my question is this; I have NEVER experienced this and I consider myself a seasoned veteran in the switching and fronting department LOL, but there were none of the tell-tale signs, no way to tell, it was seamless in and out between the two. As often or as slowly as wanted. Can an Alter not FEEL like an Alter...but more a character that is VERY convincing?

I have SOME awareness of what was talked about or said, but it's more pictures than discussion. Very vague. Very out of place and different from my 'usual' DID symptoms.

One last note, it is worth mentioning that I have recently undergone a pretty significant system switch and am still getting used to it. But this is pretty out of whack even for that.

Any help is massively appreciated. Hope you are all doing well.

As I read your posts, your system really does resonate for me. My doing accents and spontaneous characters has long been a wonder of mine, years before I knew about the DID.

I've had a random pressure to switch into a British accent. It felt non alter like and still does sometimes. A child alter (Ty) who I conflated with another child alter (Chase) may have been providing the accent I "switch to" as I "read aloud to myself" whenever I can't focus enough to understand what I'm reading. I've always done accents to joke around with friends or entertain myself but I avoid this now because each character with an accent feels like it might be or might turn into an alter. It feels wrong. I can do a solid German accent and it feels like a character but not an alter. Yours sounds like an alter.

I met a new alter last weekend when I sat around making sound effects aloud. At first it felt like I was entertaining myself but I kept trying out new ones. It felt like it was still me out front yet I also had to admit I was compelled to try out new ones. Each lasted for about 20 seconds, there was lots of repetition and I would move on to a new weird sound. This continued maybe 15 minutes. Shortly afterwards a five year old alter took over and later confided that his name was Inky Dinky Doo. Like Quato when he first returned, he seemed to make sounds to help focus the mind on nonsense rather than images or thoughts he didn't want. Sort of like a child will repeat a nonsense phrase or sounds to ignore someone or to calm themselves. Even his name fit the nonsense sound pattern. But I think he didn't have a name at re-awakening and based it on my mention of Enkidu, a character from the epic Gilgamesh, a day or two before. Our system rule seems to be that we all must come with or take on a name.

This is a bit rambling but I think if you can't just stop it, if he says things an alter would say and what he says surprises you, he's an alter. I have an alter who speaks the Kentucky Appalachian dialect fluently. This was confirmed when I recently visited there and Jack sounded like everyone else. A couple people assumed he was local. I've identified the likely sources of both English and Appalachian speech. Do you have a possible source for the German or might it be from something like movies?

When I do a character now for more than a word or phrase, they seem to take on a life of their own but after a bit it's clear they don't talk like alters. Jack was very alter-like, I got fuzzy when he was out at first. Not so much with Ty but he hasn't spent much time with us yet and we no longer get fuzzy. When I ask though, it's confirmed he's definitely an alter.

I've found there to be lots of surprises in DID. I've figured out many things which turn out to be invalid, though at the time they were solid, reasonable assumptions.

Mark, with some alters in my system I have a very different experience of them being "out". Some occupy ("fill") the body or take executive control. Others just have some characteristic manner of passive influence on me. They are active in my head, not in the body (ignoring for the moment that the head is part of the body). It is with these alters that I experience identity confusion.

It sounds to me like this Deutsch Gespracher you have encountered is using passive influence to communicate. He is talking through you.

As for the content of his conversation: There are a number of published articles and other work by prominent psychotherapists, reporting on cases where a client uncovered traumatic material that cannot have been experienced directly by the client. Generally the client is bewildered by this material. Often while the client has one of these uncanny experiences in a therapy session, the therapist experiences something eerie in himself. In many cases the material appears to be trauma carried for an ancestor of the client. The trauma typically is related to WWII, usually but not always a concentration camp.

This phenomenon of carried trauma is thought to be due to a psychological mechanism called projective identification. The clients who experience this type of carried trauma phenomenon tend to be highly dissociative but most of them are not diagnosed with DID. In certain religious communities such phenomena are very well known and they are treated as spirit attachments.

Thanks for the responses both of you, my mind is a muddle right now, but I wanted to quickly respond with something that may tie in to two things you both said.

As far as sources goes, my mothers side is ALL german. She came over with her parents when she was very young, before 10 I'm certain. I know very little of any of her very extended family, having only met 3 people from my mothers side, but I do remember being told that my grandfather (whom I knew very briefly and have no real memory of) was a german soldier during WWII, although I have no real solid way of getting this verified. (I also vaguely remember being told about various physical punishments suffered by my mother at her fathers very strict hands...again, I will likely never get this confirmed).

Anyway, I thought it was interesting, the comparisons, after reading what you both wrote. Again, thank you, it's been VERY helpful for me.