Hello everyone!!

This is our first post here and I just wanted to introduce us and I wasn't really sure of the best way to do so but I hope this works....

We are a system with a large number of alters but a much smaller amount who regularly front so far. We have suspected we have DID on and off since around early middle school at least but started blocking it out and only recently became fully aware of it and started therapy for it a little under two years ago, and it's now around a decade since we graduated high school. We are also a transgender system in the sense that we have alters of both genders but the body is male and the vast majority of our alters including me are female and we have a general agreement that without DID we probably still would have developed as female; we have been transitioning slowly for many years before fully realizing our DID and it's still a process. We think our transgender issues have played a role in the way our system developed over time but as far as we can tell we were already a system by the time we discovered that about ourselves, our earliest memories we can currently access involve us already having dissociative experiences and we're not really sure what caused us to have DID yet, or at least I'm not, but we do have some hunches.

We do not consider ourselves to have a core identity or a steady host alter. Our system is very fluid and co-conscious anymore and for these reasons and others the name we used to use for our single self that we chose as part of our transgender transition is now the name we use for the system at large and all feel comfortable responding to for the sake of ease or privacy depending on the situation, but none of us use that name individually anymore; I'll keep the name secret here for privacy reasons too but we've decided that the name System Harmony is a fitting label in these such occasions as it reflects our system's mantra. I just happen to be the one fronting right now, and my personal name is Desirée! I am introject of someone who played a meaningful but also complex role in our life who seems to be frozen somewhere around the age of I think 18-20 as she was when we first met her, but I don't think about the age aspect of myself too much. My time at the front comes and goes but I tend to be around a decent amount these days.

We made this account and I am making this post here primarily because after trying to do things our way for the past couple years (and then some when looking back with added perspective) like we usually do, some of us have started breaking down and deciding that we need to start taking our mental health more seriously and communicating with others who both go through some similar experiences and/or have expertise in this area. We were lucky in that our transgender therapist is actually also a DID therapist and we made a smooth transition between the two with her but I'm also not sure we fully made that same jump psychologically with her and we haven't been going much at all since we first started figuring this stuff out, and we're hoping to change that by being more active in places like this and giving ourselves more motivation to improve. We're also hoping to connect more with the mental health community in general as some of us including myself realize that we may have additional mental health issues that need examining and working on aside from just DID which we initially sort of stopped looking beyond when we found it, like right now I seem to be slowly coming off of a period of intense mood swings that we increasingly can't avoid thinking might be something like some kind of bipolar disorder, not definitely but just speaking from how we've been feeling lately, and I'm hoping that posting this myself now that I actually have the energy to do so will also help give me some resolve to start working through that kind of stuff more too.

Aside from that I'm not sure there's much more to introduce right off the bat that I could really say myself, but we have a lot of opinions in here and I'm sure we could find a lot of discussions to contribute to and share more about ourselves as well. For now I really just wanted to put a little bit of our story out there though and say hi, so hello again everyone and I hope you're all doing well today. :) I look forward to posting more when I can, and I thank you very much for reading all this too if you have!

~ Desirée ~

Welcome to the forum, Desiree!

the Gang

Hi and Welcome

Hey Desirée,

Welcome to the forum.

Viola

Thanks everyone, I'm glad to be here! ^^

~ Desirée ~