Still reeling after our doctor assessed us. Advice?

It still hasn’t been that long since our doctor finally name-dropped DID in our session and said “I’m pretty sure this is it”. Before being met with this, we really thought a diagnosis would help us feel grounded, more secure in what we were experiencing. But now we’re seeing, at least for us, that isn’t the case.

Don’t get us wrong; We feel this is assessment is accurate. We’ve been working with this specific doctor for over a year before we finally came to DID. But we expected her to treat us how we’d been treating ourselves; Second guessing and trying to convince us we had something else going on. Clearly, she didn’t.

Has anyone else been in this situation? Where even a diagnosis kind of left you hanging? Do you have any tips to help feel more grounded and secure?

Thanks,
The Coven System

We're still coming to grips with this. We didn't have a diagnosis until this past session with our T, and we had to kind of spell it out to her since, until a few months ago, we had been doing a lot to keep this concealed.

It was as if the floor had been pulled out from under our feet. Right now, we're doing what we can to ground and to take care of each other. I'm not sure I can explain our grounding techniques, though. But we spent weeks going 'this isn't real', and doubting it, but we've finally come to grips with this is real.

So, yeah, you aren't alone in that feeling.

Having an official diagnosis can feel like being hit by a ton of bricks. There is no denial possible anymore. The implications of "this is DID" are that "this is real I cannot hide from it" but also "I have been through the worst possible situations while growing up" and this is scary, too. It shatters old beliefs in safety and control. It feels like the rug has been pulled from under your feet and you're left on the floor hurting all over.

The first steps hurt. They really do. Opening your eyes after years of keeping them shut, it hurts. It's normal that it hurts in the sense that, anybody in the same situation would hurt. I would be concerned if you did not.

And you know what? It's okay. It's healthy, even. When you hurt, you can pinpoint where the wound is and start working on healing it. When you do not hurt, you do not know where the wound is and it becomes way more complicated to tend to it and heal it. Metaphorically AND literally. (There are some sorts of pain that I am unable to feel and I have to constantly check my body for the other signs outside of said pain, and it's not practical at all. Almost lost a finger as a teen because I waited last minute to get it checked because hey, it did not hurt so why bother?)

Do not hesitate to talk about this with your therapist. After all the first step in therapy is to learn how to keep grounded and manage everyday life and keep it on tracks! You cannot heal trauma when your everyday life is a trainwreck.

I think this Twitter post summarizes it visually very nicely: https://twitter.com/juliet_young1/statu ... 9893789697

ArbreMonde wrote:Having an official diagnosis can feel like being hit by a ton of bricks. There is no denial possible anymore. The implications of "this is DID" are that "this is real I cannot hide from it" but also "I have been through the worst possible situations while growing up" and this is scary, too. It shatters old beliefs in safety and control. It feels like the rug has been pulled from under your feet and you're left on the floor hurting all over.

The first steps hurt. They really do. Opening your eyes after years of keeping them shut, it hurts. It's normal that it hurts in the sense that, anybody in the same situation would hurt. I would be concerned if you did not.

100% this.

I was officially diagnosed in may 2022, after a 4 months assessment with a diagnosis tool of +200 questions.

I know I have DID since 2015/2016, and I've been working on cooperation and communication since then, because we were so dysfunctional we couldn't feel safe enough to stay in therapy. When we finally reached the point we could go, and find a specialized psych in 2020, she agreed about us having DID pretty quickly.

At the time, she wasn't trained to diagnose it, but she had a decade of experience working with psychotrauma and dissociative disorders. She didn't train to be able to diagnose DID because where I live, psych evaluations need to be confirmed by a psychiatrist to become diagnosis, and she didn't find any psychiatrist open to DID, so she didn't see the point back then.

Having an experienced professional confirming it was weird. It was nice, but also... unsettling. We had only 3 sessions before she confirmed my DID, and okay, our entire system agreed to go to a psych, we were all here to make true efforts to be cooperative with her, we just had our bachelor degree in psychology and a ton of "small" training about dissociative disorders. We knew what to expect from a good therapist, we were able to communicate clearly in professional terms and with our own words + at the second session, she already had (not on purpose) found a positive trigger that made us switch in front of her (really easy with us, we're all very sensitive to our names, that why only people we trust know them), and even if we hide it because we were really uncomfortable with how easily it happened, we know now how sensitive she is, so we're sure she knew what was going on.

But still... what the heck was going on? She respected what we said, didn't even try to contradict or "tone down" what we were saying, and even more: she respects our experience and POV as a psych student specializing in the same field as her. We never, ever had that before. Until now, being a psych student had always been used as an excuse for professionals to look down on us and patronize us.
So... what if we were faking and had successfully fooled her?

It took us a while to accept she was really thinking we have DID, that it wasn't a trick (from her or from us).

As she had more patients in need of a DID/partial DID diagnosis + I found a psychiatrist okay with dissociative disorders, she finally trained last year. As I'm super-stable now, and a psych student able to be critical of the tool (also, we didn't know it at the time, but I have ADHD and need questions to be super-clear, so it also gave her most of the points she needed to prepare in order to be able to explain weird questions to her patients ), I was her first "real patient" she assessed. We had done more than 75% of the tool when she told me that, with my answers now, I didn't qualify for DID or pDID. She also told me she was frustrated, because she sees that if we had done it when we started together, the result would have been totally different. I wasn't surprised about that result. I know my symptoms have decreased to a point I really struggle with them only when things become really bad - and even then, I'm able to use behaviors adapted to the situation.

We finished the assessment, she wrote her rapport about me still having issues but don't qualify for a DID/pDID diagnosis. Honestly, even if I was a bit disappointed, it mostly felt nice. I took it as proof I am getting better. I was surprised, I thought it would make me jump back into denial, but nope.

And then, she went to talk to her supervisor, because she felt something was off about the result. Her supervisor reminded her this tool is primary made for research, so it has to be really, really sensitive and precise - but she's not doing research, she's doing therapy. She can add to her rapport what she saw in our sessions since 2020. So, with a profile like mine, a diagnosis of high functioning pDID is totally valid, the criteria of the ICD-11 for pDID were made for such profile.

When I get the new rapport of pDID, it was surprisingly harder to accept than the previous one. It was now official, I couldn't run away from it anymore. I know my feelings come from my wish to be as "normal" as possible (as in "stable, balanced, healthy adult") + because of the impostor syndrome, and a part of me was hoping that not having the diagnosis and healing meant that maybe, at some point, I would have been able to pretend it never happened...

I had the previous experience with the "what if I tricked her?", so it didn't hit me as strong as the last time, but I still needed a bit of time to adjust.

Now I've worked on that, I'm much more comfortable with my pDID diagnosis. So yeah, I understand how weird it can get when you finally find someone who listen to you without second guessing everything, who acknowledge your struggles without minimizing them.

The only thing that worked with me both time was talking about it with my psych, and time to get used to it.