Confused and Struggling

Hi, everyone. My name is Eric and I'm 16 years old. I've been through a lot of trauma- emotional, verbal, sexual, just tons of different awful stuff.
I'm not able to see a therapist for two years, until I graduate high school. I've been working on my mental health for a while now, which is difficult without a diagnosis. I don't diagnose myself, I just appreciate knowing I'm welcome in certain communities due to a state of "there's a possibility I have this"

I'm realizing my massive gaps in memory(read: years at a time) aren't normal. I regularly lose hours of time and don't know how. I feel as though I have dramatic personality shifts as well as my "main" personality- interests, hobbies, sexual preferences, and personalities all seem to vary and "switch," but I have no idea if these are different facets of me or specific alters, since they don't seem to have names or distinct personalities. I definitely age regress, but how do I know if this is just me age regressed or a young alter?

Another question: if I do have alters, how do I figure out their identities or communicate with them?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Hey Eric, welcome to the forum.

Best thing I can say for communication right now is, be open and accepting. Let them know you want to meet them, or talk with them. It can take time, sometimes they're shy or whatever, or wanna watch a while and make sure its safe.

Viola

Welcome to the forum, Eric. I'm sorry that you've been through so much. It's impressive that you recognize it and that you're aware of memory gaps.

The questions you're asking are very common. If you spend time reading previous introductions on this forum, you'll see that they come up a lot. Also, a number of us have journey threads where you can follow how we figured out our various systems and started to meet our parts. Many of the threads that have a lot of pages are journey threads.

Like Viola said, being open and accepting of feelings is the best way. For me, my parts started making themselves known when I accepted a surge of feeling as being ok, and instead of pushing it away, I just observed it and commented on it inside. That feeling was coming from an alter, and she started talking to me when I did that. I hadn't known about parts before--I thought they were just moods.

Welcome and you're very strong to come here and be open minded and aware of what possibilities could apply to yourself/ves.

Something that can help starting communication going is, leaving written message/s to the possible others, and allowing them to answer. It can start a dialogue. Also, with time I have come to realize it's more fun to do it hand-written because everybody DOES have different handwriting and it's nice to see all of the different handwritings and how they become more and more singular and characteristic with time as everybody finds confidence. And, it allows Lust to add little hearts everywhere, Theia to do some papercraft with leaves and stuff in her own notebook, etc.

I hope your journey of self/ves discovery will be more fun than the rest of your life so far.

--Zami--