Alters with different health problems

I haven't seen a thread for this but I apologise if one already exists.

I know its possible for alters to have different mental needs, there seems to be a lot of research material available on it and plenty of first hand accounts.
There isn't however much on alters having different physical needs or issues.

I'm asking this because we have a little (under 6 months) who when around the front causes the body to have an upset stomach and limited control of bladder and bowels. It only happens with this little around. It makes sence considering its a baby but given we have an adult body.
We also have another little (under 10) who is unable to speak when fronting.

Is it normal for alters to have phisical effects on the body in this way? I know everyone is different and I've read a few blogs of system who have alters who effect the body in different ways.

Sorry for the ramble

There's some research about different alters having different medical needs, but it isn't consistent across systems. However, our youngest alter is three and doesn't speak. That may be just her autism, though, as selective mutism is fairly common among autistic people. In our system, the intensity and manifestation of our autism is different depending on the alter in question. We have a couple who find fronting painful without assistance just because the sensory issues are more intense for them.

On the physical front, Aurora, who is 12, needs a cane to walk. According to her, it's because the left leg won't move properly. She and Pippa (13) both tend to have more asthma attacks than the rest of us.

The weirdest part for us was our body is allergic to sulpha medications; however, Beth didn't react to it.

Some of us, when close to the surface, will impact our light sensitivity and eyesight, especially in the right eye for some reason. So, yes, from what we've experienced and read up on, it can happen that different alters have different physical needs as well.

Vi

It's normal!

A lot of things can be affected by your psychological state. Even some allergic reactions can be worsened by stress, anxiety, etc.

Like, I technically have asthma, related to anxiety, effort and to irritating things like smoke, but only one of our alters ever had crisis. The others could be standing in the middle of a smoking crowd without a single symptom. The anxiety of that alter was so strong, it worsened our vulnerabilities to the point of making asthma crisis possible. When we realized that, the crisis totally stopped.

Also, dissociation affect how the brain works. You can see it as neuronal pathways being more or less isolated from each others. Some can share neurons, others don't. This can mean alters can lack the access to specific abilities, including the control over the body. That's why you can have everything working in the brain, but have an alter that is blind, or deaf: they don't have access to the part of the brain that handle vision or hearing.

Learning to be co-conscious with alters that have access to the ability might helps! Just, be careful. If the lack of access to an ability is trauma-related in some way, working on that can be very scary for some alters. You might need to approach that very slowly.

Yep also alters may be stuck in a memory of a previous injury. If 33 is host we struggle to hear like we are underwater. We were physically deafened when she was main and she became reliant on two hearing aids and sign language the physical damage took 10 years just about to heal. We think in that time she lost the ability to interpret sounds because we have had hearing tests done where the sensors show bone conduction and air conduction are perfect and yet clicker response was non existent. The audiologist changed our diagnosis from profoundly deaf to audio processing disorder. Only 33 struggles with hearing now that the physical injury has cleared.

Another alter has terrible eyesight. It is so bad that noone can read his writing if we want to read his notes we have to blend with him. Then the writing become legible but without him its just a scrawl. He is also light sensitive and will screw our eyes nearly shut.

I have fluctuating access to my sensory abilities or fine motor skills. It used to be specific to some alters but with integration it has more evened out, with slight fluctuations.

Some of my alters used to be so disconnected from the body compared to the others, that they would be unable to sense fatigue, thirst, hunger, potty needs... leading to dizzyness from dehydratation or hypoglycemia as well as "accidents" or near-"accidents".

Some of my alters used to be badly connected to my motor skills, making them near-incapable of writing by hand. Another was too much connected to some sensitivities to smells and tastes that he was unable to eat fish, meat, dairy or eggs. One was partially disconnected from the sense of sight and unable to grasp fine details: even wearing my regular prescription glasses he would see things very blurry. This was fixed bgiving him prescription glasses in the Innerworld, which symbolically gave him full access to the sight areas of the brain.

Depending on the "brain access" I can have at any moment of time, I can be more or less sensory sensitive or skilled. Integration tends to even things out, leaving only the "permanent brain things" activated (ADHD, autism, dyspraxia...) to their normal level (normal for me, that is).

TheHiveMind wrote:I haven't seen a thread for this but I apologise if one already exists.

I know its possible for alters to have different mental needs, there seems to be a lot of research material available on it and plenty of first hand accounts.
There isn't however much on alters having different physical needs or issues.

I'm asking this because we have a little (under 6 months) who when around the front causes the body to have an upset stomach and limited control of bladder and bowels. It only happens with this little around. It makes sence considering its a baby but given we have an adult body.
We also have another little (under 10) who is unable to speak when fronting.

Is it normal for alters to have phisical effects on the body in this way? I know everyone is different and I've read a few blogs of system who have alters who effect the body in different ways.

Sorry for the ramble

We have multiple health/neurological issues... and have had from a young age. We were born with a condition which was at the time (60's) rare in babies and it was missed for too long, due to birth complications too we've had autism from birth too so had delayed development throughout life and a lot of hospitalisation in our early years (birth-7) of which we have no memory.

We never understood we had DID at the time but looking back can see where new alters were created from 'medical incidents' ..they would then get stuck in that moment and that alter then always have that symptom to that degree..if the symptom disappeared another alter would come out from before that symptom started and be fine but as we did not know we had DID we didn't know it was happening and there was amnesia between parts coming out and fronting. whoever was hosting would never be aware there were 'others'.

As an adult body we also now have a fluctuating condition (arthritis & chronic fatigue) so how much we can do varies from day to day...this also affects which alter tends to front.

We all first became aware of each other due to a medical emergency too.