Hi. So as far as I currently know I am not multiple, however I had a dissociative experience that I'm struggling to understand and I'm wondering if anyone here can offer insight. I've been doing a bunch of research on this stuff but I'm still not sure. Wall o' text incoming!
My background is that I'm a survivor of childhood physical and emotional abuse. I am diagnosed Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent, Severe w/o psychotic features (although I do hallucinate on occasion), Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and I'm autistic. Dissociation has been a part of my life since forever. I've struggled with identity my whole life (I'm also transgender which made that even worse), often feeling as though I had no identity, seeing a stranger when I look in the mirror, etc. And I've sometimes felt like I have different aspects of myself that go beyond just modulating my behavior and speech based on context. My only experience with lost time is from childhood though. I don't remember a lot of it, especially my abuse. I just have enough fragments and images that I know that it happened. There was also one instance where my sister went to my parents, crying and insisting that I hit her, but when my parents called me down to scold me for it, I had no idea what they were talking about and could only remember the time before and time after I supposedly hit her - in between was a total blank.
So on to the experience I'm having trouble with. My dad sent me an email in which he said some extremely triggering stuff. I went to the bathroom and while I was in there, I dissociated. Derealization happened first, followed by depersonalization. Then I heard an internal voice saying "Erika? Erika? C'mon Erika. You can get through this." It was not an audio hallucination, it was definitely within my mind but also definitely not self-talk. I very clearly and distinctly perceived it as coming from someplace not-me. Either they or I exerted enough motor control to send my arm, which was hanging at my side, clumsily swinging forward until my hand made contact with the tub. I'm not honestly sure who did that. But that bit of reality testing toned down the derealization.
Then the entity that was talking to me before took over. The thing that makes me very skeptical that this is actually DID is that this entity and myself seem to share memory - I had no lost time here. I remember them feeling very calm (whereas I was so triggered and upset there's absolutely no way I could have calmed down that much so quickly), and very warm, and very confident in me. I remember them thinking, "This is good. Erika's going through a lot of pain right now and she really needs and deserves this break." Although I'm aware of this, it feels like if anything I still had a residual process running to listen to my mind, while the rest of me was not there. The process of me coming back & the entity fading back to wherever it came from was fuzzy and I really don't understand what happened.
This is the only time that I can recall that anything like this has happened. That's another reason I'm skeptical that it's DID, because everything I've read says that it almost always begins at a very young age. So I'm not sure how to explain it. I'm also afraid that I may have pushed myself into this - that because I know and interact with some multiples online and so I'm aware of it, that maybe there was some subconscious process of deliberately going down this road to cope with stuff, and therefore I'm "faking" it, or it's not legitimate.