Can you develop DID/OSDD from abuse as a teenager? TW

Hello, I know most of you have been abused as a child or faced some sort of trauma, but I do not remember my childhood, so I do not know what happened during those years, but according to my parents, my childhood was fine and without worry, however during my years as a teenager I have faced constant emotional parental abuse and neglect for my mental health, aswell as constant bullying by others my age and betrayal of adults in a caretaker roles.
So my question is, if my childhood truly was all well and good as my parents claim it was, could trauma
and abuse from my teenage years still have led to DID/OSDD?
I do not question at this point that I have this condition, albeit until now I have never came out about it to anyone, so I still require professional help wich I plan to get in the near future together with an official diagnosis.
Thanks for reading and thanks for your replies.

No, according to the research, you cannot develop DID or OSDD as late as your teens. The Haunted Self (which is pretty much the book on dissociation) says the maximum age for DID/OSDD to form is 7 or 8 years. By the time you were a teen, your personality should have been cohesive and therefore not likely at all to split as much as an OSDD diagnosis would suggest.

As for your parents being good to you as a child and then suddenly becoming neglectful and abusive when you were a teenager, I don't buy that. People do not chnage that much. I think that either they didn't realize they abused and neglected you or they really down-played it. They couldn't have just suddenly stopped being good parents overnight.

Lastly, it is not normal to recall nothing from your childhood. What may be going on is that your parents abused and neglected you then and one or more different alters whom you have not met yet experienced the childhood. You may have simply only started being the host in the teen years while another alter or alters lived life for the years before that. If you really have that much amnesia, you can for sure upgrade your self-diagnosis to DID.

I know what I said sounds really harsh, but I don't know how to put things lightly. I hope all goes well for you in your healing journey. Really.

- Marcella

yeah, no, @Truly_happy is right on this. the answer is no, you can't develop DID in your teens. you can discover your alters in your teens, or alters can form in your teens, (as well as any other part of your life after developing DID as a child). the latest possible cut off point i've ever seen as been as far up as 12 for OSDD due to developmental delays, but i don't think i've ever seen a study on that personally, so i'd take it with a grain of salt.

this is because by the time that you're a teenager, the ego states you had as a child have finally integrated into a singular personality due to the fact that you don't need them to be separate anymore. at this point, you can finally start figuring out who you are as a person as you go through puberty and such and start really growing up. it's counterintuitive to stay separated like that if nothing is happening.

there's also the fact that if you can't remember your childhood like you say, then there's a chance that there's trauma hiding there that you can't remember because the memories are being held by another part. i wouldn't assume that just because you don't remember a lot of your childhood, that you have DID, because it's actually relatively normal not to remember a lot of your childhood off the top of your head. it's only when you have very few memories from that period, or if you have large chunks of time missing between years where you may remember things that there may be something to worry about.

i hope that helps.

grem (host)

Thank you for your informative answers, I will be sure to see if I can get myself a copy of that book you mentioned @Truly_happy ,I think the earliest I remember of my childhood was when I broke my arm around 8-9yo, however even before and after that event I do not remember much, I remember on that day repeatedly fading out of conciousness due to the pain (or perhaps switching?).
I feel like finding out more about my childhood is a slippery slope, because life right now is going pretty well, and I feel like remembering something traumatic could send my life spiraling in the wrong direction again, I will just have to see what my psychiatrist/therapist thinks about it and how we should handle the situation.

Did you have any medical issues as a young child that meant you were constantly in and out of hospital? Constant ongoing medical trauma can also prevent the personality developing in childhood.

Also if you have autism, particularly if it was very severe initially, autistic children stay in the 'tendency to dissociate state' much longer than a neuro typical child...and it could cause you to find even normal everyday life events very stressful due to the sensory processing issues that come with autism and of course emotional development would also probably be well behind for your age
( particularly in the early years - ie before 7)

I was diagnosed as having some areas in the 'learning disability' range when I got an adult re-diagnosis of my autism (late twenties at the time) despite the fact I'd just completed a degree at the time!

The area's in that range were nearly all (apart from Maths, general knowledge at the time was poor- non internet back then) the social, emotional and communication skills/development area's. The scores were so different they were unable to give me an average as my non verbal, shape shorting.recognition type tasks were completely at the other end of the scale and she commented I was 'exceptionally skilled at completing complicated patterns and puzzles and did them in the fastest time they'd ever recorded'.... but my emotional development scores were still in the range of a young teen still learning morals and not yet transferring knowledge between different areas.

These days with kids been so advanced compared to where they were when I was young, I'd probably score even lower. my parents didn't teach me about 'the birds and the bees' until I was late teen going away to college, now they know this stuff at infant school!! (5-7yr old!)!

so yes autism can significantly delay the 'completion of self' concept that would normally occur at a much younger age.

There is a thread on this board with a link to read the Haunted Self online.

Additionnaly, dissociation can start in early childhood from having a disorganized type of attachment. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625289/ Throw in the mix things such as school bullying, scary medical procedures (normal medical procedures can be awfully scary for a child!) or autistic hypersensitivities and voilà. You get yourself an OSDD/DID person who will dissociate more and more as additional trauma piles up.

"Trauma" does not mean "it has to be this much violent to qualify as trauma".

"Trauma" means "it has to be this much stressfull for the person going through it to qualify as trauma".

Everybody goes through things differently. What is traumatic for one person will not be for another person. It depends from a lot of factors: neurology, vulnerabilities, comorbidities, environment (with or without emotional support), level of fatigue, age, repetition of the event...

What can happen however is, to start realizing late in life that the environment you live in, is stressful/traumatic/abnormal. To start realizing late in life that you are dissociative. To have amnesia of the early stressful events.

Because something is covered by amnesia, does not mean it's horror-movie-worthy. It however means that the emotions you felt at that time, were too big for you to handle. Getting lost in a mall for 5 minutes can be a trauma for a 2 years old child. Now imagine the level of stress this child feels if the "getting lost in a mall" episode happens every week for years...

This is not "trigger warning worthy" but you do not need much to cause complex trauma and a certain level of dissociation.

__
Theo van Hohenheim.

Yes I do have autism, I'm not quite sure where I fall on the spectrum tho, I've had IQ tests and Autism tests before, so I'm officially diagnosed.
I've not however had any history of long medical issues that I'm aware of.

Akimi wrote:Yes I do have autism, I'm not quite sure where I fall on the spectrum tho, I've had IQ tests and Autism tests before, so I'm officially diagnosed.
I've not however had any history of long medical issues that I'm aware of.

The autism on its own will be enough to give you more of a tendency to dissociate if you were finding things very overwhelming as a young child even things like nursery, starting school. eg if you had sound sensitivity so the sounds of other kids just playing and shrieking (excited in playground) moving around unpredictably, grabbing you (even innocently like 'come and play' kind of thing), school bells (end of class etc), scraping of chairs as kids all get up at once to leave! ..the list is endless if that's the kind of thing you would have found really over-whelming! ..multiply that by days and years... and you can end up with a child who has to 'become someone else' to be able to cope with having to go to school!