Do people really ever "completely" believe they have DID?

katana - I started highlighting your post to quote the parts I could relate to and found myself highlighting nearly the whole thing! From the blending (still with some, but not a lot, of very obvious experiences) to the feeling like you should be able to just willfully change it to feeling like discussing it is attention-seeking to thinking you are deluding yourself the more you acknowledge everything. It's both unsettling and reassuring to hear that others with this or related diagnoses have such mirroring experiences. Yesterday, I said something to a DID friend from another forum and she said, "I could have written that paragraph word for word." Then she said something back to elaborate on that experience (in reference to what it feels like when "nobody" gets stuck forward) that made me feel that was exactly it and triggered a more detailed understanding of it within me.

It's funny, because I went from assuming everyone just experienced themselves in the way I do (the voices and discordant feelings/perceptions have been around for AGES, but since I knew they were internal, I didn't think anything of it) to thinking, "Wait, something is off here...I am missing some stuff that others have in terms of their memories and have internal noise that no one else i know has," to thinking I must have just been imagining this whole experience for years, because I only "noticed" it as significant recently. It's like being caught in some sort of time loop where I repeat the same thing over and over (wow, a Star Trek: TNG episode I used to watch as a kid just popped in my head). Anyway...so glad to be here and just have other people to relate to.

I do most of the time, now, but I had a MAJOR doubt-fest recently before and after the failed attempts to get treatment the past two weeks.

Reading a book that gave a more accurate picture of what it is and how it works helped immensely. After that, being able to compare notes with people who HAVE been diagnosed here and on one or two other DID support websites doubly so, because it helped me see that yeah. I seem to fit. My experiences are far closer to the people here than they are to "normal" people, and what I've seen seems to fit for me, even if I am co-conscious and there is more "mixing', as I call it, than with a lot of people.

I don't worry about it when I operate normally, but I separate out a lot or switch "modes" and have to talk between parts or try to reach compromises or agreements or mediate disputes/misunderstandings/distrust between sub-selves. That simply cannot be done if I'm not considering parts separately and considering my issue to be DID. I can only go so long being "one" person before I start running into major problems that have to be solved as multiple, I guess.

Even so, yeah. Sometimes I still have freak-outs, but most of those are irrational anyhow, and I can tell after the fact that they were unfounded, so. ~Shrugs~

Sorry to hear you are doing so rough. i think its the nature of the did beast. to hide. to protect. to deny. I have denial at least every day. i have integrated parts already and i still have denial. i have pseudo-seizures, voices and dissociative flashbacks. still i deny. i dissociate at the drop of a hat, depersonalize on a whim and drealize without a blink. still i deny. i watch myself acting like a five year old with no control to stop it. still i deny. i watch my hands dancing to music and i can't stop them. still in denial. i have an extremely competent therapist who knew a year before i figured it out and when i came out to him out it he was just like 'good now we can move on'. still i have denial. everyone who loves me knew and when i came out to them the basic response was 'oh thank god you figured it out finally'. still i have denial. deny. deny. deny. it is exhausting.

i have alters that hide and make the source of the denial hard to find. In fact this is the primary job of at least two of my most powerful alters. I was not supposed to know because as a front, I was supposed to stay unknowing of the abuse so I could function at survival and life.

Still as i get deeper into healing and therapy this denial makes less and less sense. i still feel it though. i just ignore it most days. other days i fight with it. as i am learning to integrate i am finding that i need to go directly to the source of the denial to shut these things down. this is often hard to find because the whole system works to hide it from you.
Marie et al