About Me
My female alter and I have been learning to share the body since January 2009. There are 5 of us we are aware of in my System; me, my female alter, our 7 year old frag from the first dissociation, the Protector of the Self & and our Inner Self Helper. I’d had a successful professional career and nearly 20 years of marriage before an external life crisis triggered decomposition and my female alter became self-aware. Until then I’d been completely aloof to my dissociative nature. Therapy has helped me recover and begin to understand the memories of my childhood trauma with my adult mind. I have been fortunate to be able to verify them with my Mother. But my alters worked quietly in the background, protecting me from the pain for over 40 years.

The battle for control between me and my newly self aware female alter was a bloody one. My MPD/DID masked itself so well my first therapist diagnosed me as transsexual based on the acute gender dysphoria I was experiencing. Six months of insisting I did NOT want to be a woman despite my very clear need to BE a woman and I switched therapists. My diagnosis was changed to androgyne and my new therapist began treating me for Adjustment Disorder. It was another year and a half when I began to experience time/memory loss that she had her first indication I was dissociative and referred me for trauma therapy.

There are many similarities in my experience and that of transgender people who are both male and female (See bigender/Alternating Gender Identity). I joined an on-line community (www.bigender.net) that was a tremendous help with finding a balance that met both me and my female alter’s needs. I began to diverge from the group as we started to find our peace and the focus of my struggle shifted to my childhood trauma.

The solitary Self does not win when one half gains at the other’s expense. My female alter and I are extremely stereotypical of our respective genders with a strong need to express who we are. Cognitive therapy and a transition level female hormone regimen brought the dypshoria under control and were the first step towards learning to live together. I grew out my flat top and wear my hair in a shoulder length grunge, keep about an 1/8” of white showing on my nails, had my beard removed excepting a Van Dyke and my eyebrows groomed to their childhood shape with laser/electrolysis. To my disgust, pre hormone therapy I had to shave my chest, legs and underarms to satisfy my female alter’s dysphoria. A year on female hormones and it was no longer necessary. The fine vellum that remains does not keep her from wearing dresses to Church or a bikini to the beach and is important to my sense of self. The tiny breasts I have grown are extremely important to my female alter’s sense of self and everyone thinks I have great pecs when I take my shirt off in the summer. I grumble about it but let her wear clear nail polish and a French pedi when she wants. Shrug. She doesn’t push me and I am learning to oblige. I have an extremely androgynous body, the result of prenatal DES exposure. At 5’10” 146 pounds all it takes to swing from my surfer style to her natural athletic look is for my female alter to come to the front. Neither of us has ever had any trouble being accepted as our respective gender.

Trauma therapy has helped me to understand that my female alter contains the trauma of my childhood molestation and psychological pain. I am my System’s host but she is a strong alter. Capable of fronting as well as me for extended periods of time, she demands time to live her own life. It was a huge relief to me and my wife that my female alter is too young to have any need to express her sexuality. Although her psychological age is ~13, my female alter socializes very well with adults, has her own friends, does most of the shopping and errands, takes yoga and cooking classes, goes anywhere does anything any other woman would do. Therapy has helped us become co-conscious to the point that she is able to draw on my memories and experience to fill in the missing pieces of her own life. And regardless of who the Self is presenting itself to the world as, we have learned to pass well enough for each other when the need arises that often even my wife cannot tell who she is talking to.

My female alter and I live completely separate lives ala, Victor/Victoria, Tootsie, Mrs Doubtfire. Triggered personality shifts are beyond the System’s control and we are generally unaware of who is fronting. No one in either of our lives knows both of us. It is vital to the System’s containment of memories and emotions that our two worlds NEVER collide.

I am the most robust personality of my System. I have no problem fronting 3-4 days in a row each week, up to a month or so when it is necessary for me to handle a life crisis. My female alter can handle 2-3 days a week rather comfortably but is depleted if they are in a row. It has taken some getting used to; I am fortunate to be retired. But after 4 years my wife, me and my female alter have an arrangement that works pretty well for each of us. Having had an inner homeostasis that enabled me to live a normal life for 40+ years, a female alter who fronts nearly as well as I do for extended periods of time, integration not fusion has been the focus of my therapy. I cannot be the person I am as a solitary Self.

As ugly as the battle was between us, my female alter had her own demons to face. Like most adolescents she was preoccupied with her looks, fitting in, and her friends’ acceptance. She suffers the bulimia common to young girls who were subjected to early childhood trauma. But becoming self away in 2009, her piecewise experience of consciousness as an alter caused her a horrible shock. It wasn’t 1975; the world she’d known did not exist anymore…

Six months of gender therapy, 2 years of cognitive therapy, 2 years of couples counseling and just over a year of twice weekly psychodynamic trauma therapy. My alters protected me from childhood trauma by holding the horrible pain and memories it in the silence of their hearts. I owe each of them a debt I can never repay. But they no longer need to bear their terrible burden alone. Therapy is helping us learn to share the pain, to see that five are stronger than one. Teaching me to love each one of them, and to see that I cannot be the person I am without them. And I have begun to understand that my dissociation is not as a curse, that it is more than an amazing coping mechanism developed by my mind. It is a wonderful gift to experience life from two completely different perspectives.

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