Before you knew you had DID

What was life like for you before you knew you had DID? Were you often confused? Did you have the classic symptoms of finding things you didn't remember buying, or people saying hi to you that you didn't know? Were relationships difficult? What was the final straw that pushed you to seek help? Thanks--

To me it was confusing, often I had stuff I didn't remember buying or lost stuff I didn't remember throwing away. Relationships got started and ended without me knowing a thing, people sometimes knew me but I didn't know them. It was when I found myself at the other side of our country when I decided to look for help. Had a good therapist, but he wasn't experienced enough to really help (he was a basic psychologist, but the best we've ever had).
After that it got worse, starting educations, ending educations, money problems, memory problems, and during that period we actually worked on it ourselves. Claire knew a lot and helped all the alters, and F and Maya were very caring. So real professional help wasn't present, only self-help and internet.

In a different thread you asked me:

Lifelongthing, how did you finally end up finding out you had DID? What was the final straw where you realized it?

I decided this would be a good place to reply to keep in more on-topic. I hope some of the questions you asked in this post gets answered here too.

I was in-patient a long time and no one had a clue what it was that was wrong with me except it was "obviously something". A psychologist I had before then had apparently talked to me (e.g another part of me was forward for it) about dissociation but most of the employees at the hospital didn't know what that word meant. The unit I ended up in knew what it was but no one figured out what was going on until a man came to work there as a substitute a couple of times and told them all that "You know she's got DID right?". He saw it right away. Within hours of meeting me. He noticed that I didn't understand who he was (though it was subtle) when I came out of my room later that evening and things like that. Started asking me about how I experienced things. The person who worked with the most started seeing it around that time too. I actually had a very interesting thing happen around that same time. An expert of some kind came to talk to me (they never told me why or who this person was). My main contact (mentioned before, a lovely woman) was with me. I stood in the corner and was asked questions. The expert kept talking to different parts of me saying things like "I can see you are closer now. You can take the teddy bear if you want to" and then talk to me and then to another part over and over. I had no idea what was happening or that she was actually talking to someone else. I thought she was talking to me. It was so confusing and fragmented and made me feel so vulnerable and even at times used. I thought the meeting laster about 10 minutes and that I slept 3 hours afterwards due to pure exhaustion. I was right about the sleeping, the meeting however had laster about an hour and a half if I recall correctly. I asked my contact if she felt we were more than 1 person (after the substitute mentioned before had explained to me a little bit about what DID was) and she said "Don't you think I see you? " to a child part of me which left me perplexed as I thought I was the one asking. I wasn't. I know that looking back and knowing what part was forward.

So all in all there was no "bright light" for me, really. It was most of all being told that this was what the thing that was wrong with me was. I went to the doctors many years prior to this and told him that I would forget weeks at a time and that I generally "forgot" most of my days. That I would be somewhere and then open my eyes and be somewhere else; that I would hand in tests but never write my name on them and would get so vastly different grades each time - even handing in children's drawings instead of my math test and so forth. He told me all people who had been through some kind of trauma could be "forgetful" and basically didn't believe me about the severity of it. So I believed him. But I always felt like there was something different about me. It was just this "something" that I so rarely had in common with other people. I now recognize those that had this "something" to almost all be dissociatives.

Mostly I was just relieved to have a name for it. I was diagnosed and there was nothing more to it for me. I left the in-patient hospital with no resources and no stable living environment so to me it wasn't that big of a thing. More just an explanation to be dealt with later. Now, thankfully, that later time has come

Mine was more subtle, in that I was present for most but just in a very depersonalized state. Or at least, I though I was- I had no clue what DID was nor did it occur to me that these states were something more than just being distracted. I didn't specifically notice time loss, though it was there I learned later- I knew where I had been and stuff each day, mostly. However, in certain classes, this would happen to the extreme such as in class I'd forget what I'd learned, until I got back to the class the next day. Sometimes I forgot what classes I had even! I was semi-aware that I acted differently depending on where I was- such as in specific classes or clubs- but it didn't really click until college that it was that different until people told me, and then realized I'd often lost time as well. So it was very covert. But it was noticeable that I'd find stuff I didn't know I had and lose stuff I'd later find out that I'd given to my mother to sell at the annual yard-sale. One thing that was nice about it though was that I'd find money hidden around my room that I didn't know i had. Later on, I discovered there were friends I didn't know I had, from reading old journal entries of mine, since I began to journal in early high school. But that was later- initially I just noticed the depersonalization, which I called the "fog" or "autopilot". Eventually I brought it up with my mom, in about junior year of high school, asking to see a psichiatrist (for both that and the bipolar symptoms I was noticing- my grandpa has that so I knew the signs). She dismissed this, and since I wasn't old enough yet, I couldn't go to one without her approving it. Soooo, in college, there was a few incidents and I was forced to go see someone by the college and was nearly kicked out of college, which is when I finally realized there were larger problems than I thought, fights with people I forgot, etc, and my friends pointed out that I wasn't myself at times- outgoing when I typically wasn't, etc, even like a child sometimes. I only had a few friends in high school, since I was typically very shy, reading and videogames during free time, so no one had really been around me enough to notice before, other than my mom who was in denial. It also got worse by college, so there was that contributing to me finding out too.

Hmm. Well, first off, I have DDNOS, not DID, because I don't have major memory problems. So not those 'classic' symptoms.

Before I knew, it was very chaotic.
On the outside: dissociative flashbacks; panic attacks out of nowhere; catatonic stupors (dissociating); severe social anxiety (or none at all); self-harm/mutilation/destruction/deprivation; AN; MDD; etc; etc; etc.
On the inside even more so. In my head there was constant arguing/screaming/crying/suffering/laughing (which I tried to hide); I felt like I was being haunted; I felt like I was possessed; I was so passively observing the others live my life that I didn't even realize what was going on; everything was just so out of my control; I was too overwhelmed and confused to live my life. I knew that things were far from normal, felt amazed that we could 'fake it' most of the time.

As for relationships, I, personally, was debilitated with social anxiety/agoraphobia, but Sonja has always been a nice/pleasant/optimistic/etc social being for the rest of us. NInchen couldn't talk - has only ever talked to our T. Jane wouldn't. Aiden doesn't care to, unless the subject was highly intellectual, on a matter that was of interest to him. Niva would interact with others, unless she was too mad at one of us to speak. Cedar was pretty sociable too, but not as much as Sonja… So 'I' must have been very inconsistent to others… Moody? haha . From terrified to delighted/excited to despondent to incredibly shy/awkward to detached to hyped up to spiritual…

Our lives all fell apart eventually on every level in my early 20s (except for Sonja's - she just leaves when she can't fix things). Sonja actually used to go to T for us when we were younger, in our school years, because it stressed the rest of us out too much, so T was never beneficial to us then. But then we were debilitated - unable to work, to shower, to leave the house, etc. We saw no way out of our hell; we had no hope. We met our current T at 24 (he specializes in trauma), and decided to admit to him that we had never been emotionally present for T before, decided to make a point of changing that. We worked very hard, were functional within a few years, and have been thriving every since . We did all the work - especially ninchen, but we could not have done it without our wonderful T