What's the longest stretch of time "you've" been in denial?

Just got "back" after 4 months of denial. After doing research a few months ago I thought Autism suddenly made more sense for my whole life than a dissociative disorder, or Adult ADD. I dropped the DID label, hid all my notes to forget about them, and felt free for a while.

....until a few days ago when I'm struggling with daily life so much that I finally "caved" and asked for help, and a wonderful helper alter quickly rose to the surface, yawned/stretched like a long hibernation just ended, and easily took care of the daily stuff I couldn't handle.

I think I felt so incompitent/ashamed for "going back" to DID, but also grateful I didn't have to do this alone anymore. But the self-embarrasment pushed even this brief moment of acceptance out of my awareness until tonight. All day I felt like I'm failing at things again, and am too overwhelmed to handle things by myself. Another cry for help and I'm suddenly out of the denial. Back watching DID videos and reading the literature for reconfirmation.

I'm not happy to be trying to accept this all over again. But I am a bit relieved.

Similar experiences? Anyone care to share some?

(I should add, I probably also am on the autism spectrum, definitely high up in level 1, though I'm realizing it's just another additive quality I have. It doesn't necessarily negate or explain away other things like DID.

Also I remember "banning" everyone else from fronting a few months ago too. That probably didn't help with this whole denial experience.)

Years. We realise we have parts and go into denial for years at a time. Really tried lately to avoid it. Introduced parts to eachother that didn't know eachother. Brought them together more like a family. Trying to avoid sliding into denial again but it's so easy so dunno.

Just switch off knowing and parts just come in and out and live a life. Denial is easy. Maintaining knowing is hard.

We have a similar experience, being on the spectrum ourselves.

We could say that there have been chunks of time in which I, being the host, was in denial. Our situation is a bit more complicated though, since I as a host was barely ever fronting my myself since I was constantly in a sort of haze in the inner world, not even knowing I existed. Weird story, but since when I woke up, the denial has always been something really rare. The fact that I'm a different age and look slightly different from the body naturally helps in keeping our mind off of denial, DID being the only explanation for what we experience. But it doesn't happen to everyone, so I understand it can be easy to discard your experiences and place them in another diagnostic box

The point is, you don't have to put them in a box in the first place!
We found that the most helpful way to deal with denial is to say "well, yes, this thing could be something else. So?". You still have your experiences as they are, meaning that even though you might not feel DID, if treating your experiences like they are DID results in you feeling better, and makes you more functional, it's okay. And if it makes you more functional to listen to your alters and accepting them, that's usually a pretty good sign that you do have DID, or a dissociative disorder.
It's a win-win for us!

Also reading about denial and its mechanisms is always helpful to us. It helps seeing it from an objective perspective and anticipate when it will come.

Good luck!

basically we knew in 2004 that something was wrong, didn't get dxed til end of 2008
then went into denial in 2009 and didn't come out until the end of 2013
it is fortunate that now we seem to not go there in the extreme because all that always ended in crisis.

the thing is, we always went into denial when our life was not offering us a chance to do something about the thinks we figured out. still dependent on family member. financially dependent and no therapist around. it served a purpose. if we had not been in denial we would have been all alone with everything.

I was in denial for the better part of 20 years after we realized in 1996 that we were multiple. I was fronting the most, and our known system was small. I was a very gung-ho, head-in-the-clouds idealist who had all these grand visions of making our system and our innerworld the happy place that we never had on the outside.

Then our system started to grow exponentially, and I couldn't handle it. I went inside in late 1997 or early 1998 because I couldn't handle it any more. I couldn't handle our system, I couldn't handle our life, past or present. Others had to take over running the system and our daily life, and there ended up being a lot of resentment toward me for going into hiding. It wasn't our whole system that was resentful; we had (and still have) a large contingent of people who are supportive and caring. But we also have a few who were (and are) very angry.

A few years ago, well into our work with our current T, I finally started to force myself to come out and take life and healing on again, albeit slowly and, to this day, with much struggle. I heard the frustration of our others venting to our T over and over again how I'd abandoned the system, and I didn't want to keep contributing to their pain.

We've had some very dark days since then. Several external life crises, menopause and postmenopause....very dark days indeed. But I--we--continue to work in therapy to defeat the darkness. We will not go back.

Charity and others

That is a good questions but a real stumper of a question for us. We might answer many decades but the truth feels more like a couple hours occasionally, and this was only after it became clear we had DID.

We didn't know for decades but I can't really describe it as being in denial. Our system was extremely covert and dedicated to survival and basic functioning. We just never had enough evidence. We suspected. Different alters made decisions that would keep us from understanding what was happening but the decisions weren't because anyone was in denial.

Overall, it's felt like we wanted to know why our life didn't work. Desperately. We saw over a dozen therapists, bought dozens of books, went to group-consciousness things, and spent a small fortune on all of that. The host or hosts together knew we had plenty of skills to have a good life but we kept going through phases of depression every 3-4 years, when we'd lose everything and have to start over. None of it made sense but so many of our alters, particularly our child alters, were sleeping, in hibernation, so there was just not enough overt evidence of DID.

We had automatic amnesia for any amnesia but even with that we didn't lose spans of time as an adult. We knew there was this something going on we didn't understand. We kept looking but the focus would melt away and even though we had an inkling that that happened, it was like trying to find a specific word and the more you try, the more elusive it becomes.

For me the longest I've ever been in denial is about 2 to 3 years. However I've recently realized just how complex my brain has become. It seems to be that I experience voices parts of the time but other times its the different versions of myself that come out. I have stated in previous posts that I don't show signs of trauma or amnesia but I do experience the different personifications of myself. I'll notice periods of when I go from being completely normal to extremely aggressive for no reason. This is the result of someone we refer to as R.L. it's an alias that he gave but otherwise I'm still trying to figure out his true name. He tries to instill fear in me and takes control to some extent to try and torture me but I usually have ways of working around his feeble attempts at trying to scare me. As for the denial it goes off and on every few months. Its sorta like the ocean waves crashing in and retracting back into the sea. It'll start with little ripples that give me a taste of whats going on and then comes down like a tsunami of just a bunch of people asking how I am despite the fact that they basically share memories with me. Though its hard to tell how much they know and don't know it still gets a bit overwhelming at times.
~ Maria (host)

This is relatable.
We go through periods where whoever is at the front doesn't acknowledge us. Sometimes this goes on for years. Red Text believes that she made the whole thing up and created us. Some alts think we're evil. We live through life without communicating with each other, then some alts get into trouble and need the group to help fix things. We're most stable when we talk to each other and work together.


Chet