New and Lost

I’m not too sure how to ask this, but I will try. I am not too sure what is going on with me and it’s all so very confusing. Sorry, it may be long, but I’ve been lurking these forums for a while and it seems to me to be a good community to voice my concerns.
My therapist seems to think I have dissociative disorder, and sometimes I believe it too. But a part of me denies it and thinks I’m making it up. I have periods of amnesia, intrusive thoughts...my girlfriend says I appear differently and speak differently at times. But I cannot speak with the thoughts, very often. Usually it just sounds like background conversation and when I try to think to it my head just goes quiet. So when my psych says I should try talking to the other parts...I don’t know how. It seems everyone here knows how, so this is the main reason why I doubt myself. I also have times where I feel like I’m in my head but just..watching? Like my brain is an observatory and my eyes are windows. I don’t feel like I’m me but just inside of me. During this time I do things and then when I look back on it I think...”Wow, that was really weird to say/act”. I’ll do things that are very uncharacteristic of me most of the time. Sometimes, it seems I have abilities or talents that I don’t always have.
I can’t think of everything to write right now because my memory and attention span is so bad, but if anyone has comments or questions that are specific I’m sure I could answer.
Thankyou for taking the time to read this.
Also, two of the parts in me have names, but I’m not sure if I made them up due to therapist suggestion or not. One was named long before her, though. So maybe not.

First off I want to say that I'm sorry that you have to go through this. I can completely understand where you're at in all of this because I have been there. But if they have names and you feel like you're having an out of body and you're seeing yourself doing or saying things that you would NEVER say or do than I believe you have Dissociative Identity Disorder. From personal experience I felt the same way you did when I was first discovering my Disorder. I felt like I was watching myself do things that I wouldn't do, and I had people I had never met in my life coming up to me calling me by a different name and acting like we're best friends.

Honestly you should look with in yourself and ignore everybody elses opinion. Do what YOU believe is best for you. If you believe that maybe talking to your alters might help you then that is what you should do, but you should do it when you're good and ready because this is about you and nobody eles. If you think you're ready than you should set asode some time to just talk to you're alters and find out what's going on. But first you need to accept the fact that you habe a disorder. I know it's hard trust me, but it may not seem like it but accepring it is better than trying to fight it.

Greetings,

I can relate to the part about not knowing if you should trust a therapist's diagnosis. After all, they are not infallible. On the other hand -- they do have knowledge and experience and might be able to see the forest while you are still lost in the trees of your life.

Dissociation is sometimes thought of as a spectrum with "normal" people on one end of the spectrum and full-fledged DID on the other. Both extremes are somewhat rare (being perfectly normal isn't easy in an internet-saturated world). The fact that you therapist thinks that you have a dissociative disorder and your girlfriend notices changes in you is good evidence that you are not on the normal end of the spectrum -- but ultimately only you can determine where you are on the spectrum. In my case, after much soul-searching I decided that I am in the middle of the spectrum (my official diagnosis is DDNOS). I call it living in the asteroid belt (somewhere between the rock-solid normal inner planets and the more nebulous outer planets). That astronomers think of the asteroids as being in effect a failed planet which couldn't coalesce around a single center seems poetically apt.

I could also relate to what you said when you wrote "I also have times where I feel like I’m in my head but just..watching? Like my brain is an observatory and my eyes are windows." It reminds me of part of a poem by Ian Hunter (a musician from the 70s) which struck me forcefully when I first heard it and still strikes me now, decades later:

See it never was easy to live with a head
So I kept to the back room and I live there instead
What comes from the front-room is only for friends
I have a bay window but that's where it ends

As far as "talking" to your parts. Maybe journaling? But -- don't force it. I tried it for a while but ultimately decided that I was falling into self-hypnosis rather than self-knowledge. YMMV -- some find it genuinely helpful. Does your therapist have any recommendations?