Struggling as newly diagnosed

So I've been grateful to read about this a bit on here already, which has been helpful. I am newly diagnosed, like within the past couple weeks, and I am still not sure what to make of the diagnosis. There are parts that fit and others that don't. I guess I was just wondering if other people have ever felt like at first DID didn't seem like what was going on and then how you get to accept or really understand it.

HI pccats,

Welcome to the forum.

It took like forever for Host to accept he had DID even though our T was super sure. This is like totally normal. It's ok if some parts of the diagnosis don't fit your system. We're all pretty unique in the ways we do DID. The important thing is to learn to communicate with the parts. To do that you have to accept that you're a system.

Good luck,

Iain

Hi

This is a very supportive place. DID can take a lot of getting used to and even once diagnosed lots of people go through periods of acceptance and denial. There is a thread on here somewhere called something like 'I don't have DID because' and then people list why they can't possible have it whilst part of them knows that it is true. Dissociation is about the brain removing itself from harm and keeping safe and if we all had clear insight to it then we would realise that it wasn't always necessary and would stop doing it - so to some extent lacking in insight is part of the difficulty and gaining insight ie getting all the parts/modes/alters/personas to communicate more effectively is part of becoming more functional. I don't know if that makes any sense.

Are you able to talk to your T about your uncertainty? That might be a starting point to understanding.

Take care.

Welcome to this forum. I have found it extremely helpful. I hope you will too.

My experience has been that therapists are reluctant to make this diagnosis. People usually go through several other diagnoses before they get to this one. Just saying, the diagnosis isn't made flippantly and you can trust if they say that, it's very very likely true.

So one thing that happened to me and I see it a lot is the big D - denial. I do it less than I used to, but even now I can think, "I'm just faking this." It couldn't be. I don't fit this diagnosis. Denial is very BIG with this diagnosis.

Give yourself time.

Warmly,
Berta

But sometimes denial is like that feeling in one's gut, trying to say something is not right. Maybe there is denial because the diagnosis is incorrect. Maybe denial is the rational part of the brain trying to say something important.

I'm not saying that this is the case for everybody or even for most - maybe it is true for just a tiny portion of people.

But sometimes there is denial because the therapist has it wrong.

I had many diagnoses before I got the final one of DID. But just because the other diagnoses were wrong didn't mean that the DID diagnosis was more likely to be right.

I'm not trying to make anyone uncomfortable. But after many, many years of treatment, I understand that caution is important. Never let someone else's judgement replace yours - not even a therapist's. I've had a lot of harm because of that.

But sometimes there is denial because the therapist has it wrong

And there in lies the problem. Well for me at least. What do you believe, who do you believe, when you have no faith in yourself? I was taught from a small child not to trust my own ideas and feelings. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. Its seems easy for a therapist to tell me that me saying "I don't have this" is just the big DENIAL. But how do they know I'm not lying to them? It becomes a circular argument that has no end in my head - until I can learn to trust.

Is it OK to post a link to another site? I found the following a while back, written about Denial. I read it from time to time and it helps me not panic. The "columns" and the turmoil she describes fit my experience as if I'd written it myself:
https://information.pods-online.org.uk/ ... id-denial/

The hardest person to learn to trust is not the therapist - but yourself.

I was constantly told how stupid I was as a child, more stupid than anyone else my age. I was even told that it was impossible to be as stupid as I was and therefor, I must be a liar.

My self-esteem and confidence were in the pits when I became an adult. I couldn't picture myself succeeding at anything.

But just because your confidence is gone, doesn't mean that you should blindly work on trusting someone else. Maybe it means that you should be working on trusting yourself.

Maybe the therapist should be helping you to trust yourself, not to suspend your disbelief and trust her (or him) instead.

The OP didn't say or imply that they were trying to trust the therapist over their own judgement, just that there were parts of the diagnosis that fit and parts that didn't. And they were wondering "if other people have ever felt like at first DID didn't seem like what was going on", to which the answer is a resounding YES! Denial is SO commonly a part of DID that maybe it should be considered as one of the criteria!

In fact, when I was recently having a brief "am I making this all up?" feeling (which I think occurs whenever something uncomfortable or scary comes up), I had an insight (which I'm sure others have had before, but it was new to me): Denial is basically derealization, which of course all people are capable of experiencing when faced with something that they don't want to be true. (Someone diagnosed with a fatal illness, for example, will often initially react with denial). But in people with DID, derealization is one of the main coping mechanisms for anything even slightly or temporarily overwhelming. It's often the go-to way of dealing with unwanted truths, unless something is really overwhelming, and then it becomes split off and put out of awareness altogether.

So just the fact of being diagnosed with DID can cause derealization: it can't be true, I'm just making it up.

kittenspuppies wrote:I had many diagnoses before I got the final one of DID. But just because the other diagnoses were wrong didn't mean that the DID diagnosis was more likely to be right.

But wasn't it more likely to be right? It was the diagnosis that best explained your symptoms, all along, and the only reason it was previously overlooked is that most mental health professionals don't know enough to put it in the list of differential diagnoses.

If denial is to be expected and neatly folded into the experience of DID - then it completely loses it's power to warn the patient that something may not be right in terms of the diagnosis.

I'm just saying...if only part of the diagnosis fits...don't let the therapist say that it is just denial and to be expected. Don't let any therapist dismiss concerns that way.

I can only share what I have leaned over the years - these are my life lessons. Other people will reach different conclusions because their life experiences will be different.

But I would never fully accept a diagnosis that had me frequently experiencing denial. I would search for other possible answers. Numerous misdiagnoses have taught me that much.

I'm talking about denial as an internal conflict, not a situation where a patient consistently maintains to a therapist that they don't have a particular diagnosis and the therapist insists that they do. Any good therapist is going to hear out concerns and NOT dismiss them. And of course, there couldn't be an official criteria in ANY diagnosis that the patient continues to insist that they don't have it!

But the denial in DID seems to be different than in other diagnoses because of the way that it comes and goes, and the way internal parts argue about whether or not they have DID. On this forum, I have seen alters in a system openly argue with each other about whether or not they have it. In at least one case, an alter made their own account to go on here and argue with other parts of their system about how this whole thing was ridiculous and they absolutely didn't have DID.

There is also the "I must just be making it up" aspect that seems to be unique. Someone seeking treatment for anxiety or depression doesn't relay their symptoms and distress and then say, "You know, I think I've just been imagining all of this. I'm not really depressed or anxious." At most, they may worry that they have exaggerated their symptoms--they may decide that it's not severe enough to need medication, for example, if that's suggested to them, but they wouldn't maintain that they don't have it at all and just invented the whole thing. And no one who is actually making up symptoms for attention or benefit worries that they might be doing that.

So there are a lot of differences, in my opinion, between an assertion, with evidence, that one has been misdiagnosed, and the denial of an accurate diagnosis. And there are unique aspects of the denial of DID that only add to the likelihood that it has been correctly diagnosed.