BabyCakes27: After regrouping can they split again?

This thread begins with part of a post that BabyCakes27, a new subscriber, made in an old DID Forum thread: Can DID "leave" and come back?

BabyCakes27 wrote:As to Identities coming back I don't know myself. I came here to find out if after regrouping they can split again. It's been about 5 to 6 years since it seemed to have impacted my life. But lately or over the last year, I have been recognizing the personalities I learned about being more pronounced then when they were "gone". I feel like More and more I am having to try to not dissociate and allow them to take over but It is becoming worse and worse. I have even started taking weed to stop myself from being either homicidal or suicidal. I have never been one to allow drugs to run my life prescribed or not. Is it possible who I think I am now is really just a stronger "other" whose been controlling me? whom ever "Me" is?

(Diagnosed 11 yrs ago)

Hello BabyCakes27. Welcome to the DID Forum.

Okay so you were diagnosed 11 years ago and I gather that for the past 5–6 years you have not been experiencing (or have not been aware of) DID symptoms, until recently. Is that right?

Back when you were diagnosed, did you get treatment? Do you know what kind? To me it sounds like you may have had a treatment that merely suppressed some alters, leaving the host in control of the body. That kind of “treat the symptoms, ignore the condition” treatment is common, fast, easy to do, and the treating therapist gets to count it as a "success" and discharge you. It used to be prevalent. It seems very satisfactory, only now we know it does not last. Later, sometimes many years later, the suppression fails and you end up right back where you were at the beginning. If this is what you are experiencing, then the next step is to enter therapy again, this time with a better informed therapist for a more integrative therapy.

If your treatment was integrative and you believed you had achieved fusions, even then yes fusions sometimes can come apart again in the face of significant stress that relates directly to the fusions. But from how you describe yourself I don’t think that is your situation. You refer to your parts as “they” not “we”, which is why I think they were merely suppressed.

You mention having feelings of rage; feelings are not "you", they are just information. In a person with DID very often feelings are information arising from identity states other than "you", that leak across the walls between identity states and thus reach you. That is, they are information but they may not relate to what you think they relate to. This is because they do not originate in your own identity or thoughts.

Rage is a very powerful and important emotion. Regardless of why it is there, where in your system it originates, and whether it is directed outward or inward (homicidal or suicidal, respectively), it is in all cases a strong signal to you that something inside you urgently needs your attention. Often it is telling us that we have not been listening to ourselves. Please don't push it away with drugs.

Speaking of drugs: Weed (marijuana) is a dissociative! Is it really helping?

Please tell us more.

I often wonder whether or not I am actually DID because most of the time I don't have alters showing up & talking, I actually have several months of having them around once in several years. At other times I am suppressed.And I have spent so many years in therapy- I think 15 years.
Suppression is a good term- this is also how my husband describes it, and he has been with me for 3 years.
At first I thought that I had an integration that failed.
But suppression sounds more like it.
I'm not happy without my alters because when suppression takes over I have more symptoms of pure PTSD, I think. I have chronic fatigue & I oversleep. When alters show up, chronic fatigue dissolves.
I think the chronic fatigue is out there to keep us safe & maintain the suppression.
My alters resurfaced after almost a decade of silence when I went back to therapy some half a year ago. I feel like after several months of hardly being around I am regrouped and in control again, but suppression is taking over again.
I don't want the suppression as it comes alongside with emotional detachment, flat emptiness, numbness. My therapist says that the alters do not disappear, they are still out there and will come out as they wish too. But I feel separation anxiety and identity confusion.
Thank you Una for giving this topic space.
Leafy.