A very confused person

You're right, your mother may know at some level that she wasn't doing a spectacular job, but may also not want to say anything. It isn't something to rush into discussing anyway. As long as you're fine with things the way they are, that's good.

And the whole situation you had with therapy was a mess, that is for certain. It took five years before we were ready to start telling our current T about the other voices, and that was because we were in crisis. This happens when it's time and not before.

You are also right, having access to other's experiences helps us see what is going on be it DID/OSDD, autism, ADHD, or pretty much anything. When we don't see those stories, we feel alone. When we see them, we feel connected and understand.

Take care,
Violette

I'm lying awake for three hours now after a nightmare with random thoughts and I just want to reiterate how great the people on this forum are. Other forums are judgemental and discredit people without even listening. Don't even get me started on websites like Reddit. They are full of gatekeepers (trigger warning for frankly dumb comments)
"You can't have alters without amnesia"
"You can't dissociate without an out of body experience"
"You can't have gender dysphoria if you're not distressed"
"You can't have gender dysphoria if you're not trans"
"Your PTSD nightmares are fake because mine aren't exact retellings of what happened to me"

And these are just some examples. I get so mad! Don't people see how damaging this? They don't care about facts either. People can quote the bloody APA or most recent DSM, they don't care. If it's not how they experienced it, it's not real.
Alternatively, they coax people into believing they have or are something when they aren't. Why do people do this? Here everyone is like "well, it could be this or this but ask a therapist. Your experiences are valid though"
How hard is that??

Right. I hoped venting the thoughts would make me calm down and sleep again. Instead I have a headache because Raven and Kay are arguing about this.
At least I got to read your validation and supportive comment. Thanks Violette. My therapy definitely was a mess now that I look back on it and know more. I felt brushed off before, now I just feel sad about it. The prospect of going through that again doesn't help convince me to go back either. It just makes me want to solve things on my own.

I feel sick and tomorrow I have to work again. I want to go home and I haven't even left yet... Anyone else ever feel like that?

Guess it's time to rouse my partner and hope cuddles help...

~ Grey

I feel you about therapy. Took me years to understand what was the core of my issues and find the proper treatment.

Well, now you know and you can head in the right direction now And you finally found what was the issue because you're a badass who keeps looking for a better solution all the time.

We know. We stay away from Reddit and such because of how awful they can be.

We've known systems which have little to no amnesia or they have, I guess, a kind of emotional amnesia. They know what happened and can access the memories but there's no emotional connection to them and they're, like, happening to someone else entirely.

There is the concept of 'gender euphoria', but there are also people who don't have a hatred of their bodies but still transition because that feels/works better for them.

We could go on.

People love to go 'Everyone's like me or my identity isn't valid', and it's stupid.

And yeah...therapy can be messy. We lucked out with our T, and wish others could find good T's as well.

Hope you're feeling better,
Violette

Thank you both.

I did the test and it went well I think. Now it's fingers crossed until we get the results in April.

Therapy is confusing to me in general. It's like psychology is a work in progress more so than other fields. The experts don't agree with each other. Some of them are even saying that mental disorders are nothing more than personality quirks. I get where they're coming from, but that's really not helpful to reduce stigma either. Imagine someone has schizophrenia and instead they're meant to say "oh I occasionally see things that aren't there and believe odd things, but it's okay it's just a personality quirk that definitely doesn't influence my life in any negative manner".
For someone catagorised as borderline to say "oh I'm very sensitive, emotional, and anxious that people will abandon me" that's sort of works because it's a lot easier to see that as merely personality traits anyone could have. That's why it's a personality disorder. I feel you can't say that about ADHD and schizophrenia etc. It's like saying "oh I'm not good at grabbing things with my right arm, that just happens to people" when you literally don't have a right arm.

Just me hoping therapists apply some of that logic they want us to learn to their own thoughts and ideas.

~ Grey

The difference between a quirk and a disorder / disability is that the later causes a notable impairment in at least one major area of your life.

Being sound sensitive = quirky. Being so sensitive you cannot sleep because you hear the electricity in the walls = disability (autism probably).

Having trouble managing your focus sometimes = quirky. Having so much trouble focusing that it's physically painful and also impossible to force your attention somewhere it does not want to go, even when you really want to = ADHD.

Zoning out sometimes = quirky. Zoning out so much of the time it feels like you're high 24/7 = dissociative disorder.

It's a bit like the difference between a therian identity (or animal alter in a dissociative system) and clinical lycanthropy. When you have a facet of your identity that is an animal and you can feel the shifts in mentality and phantom limbs (like a DID or OSDD switch) but it's not worse than in dissociative disorder, you're a therian (or a dissociative person with an animal identity/alter somewhere). If you loose control of yourself to the point that you're hurting yourself and/or others when in animal state and there is nothing you can do, it's clinical lycanthropy. It's very rare tho and most of the time it's psychosis related not dissociation related.


So, the difference between quirky and pathological is how you manage to function or not, how much you suffer from it or not. What it means to "function" will also depend on the person, it depends on what you see as a satisfying state of your life. That's why for some people, "healing" from DID means "back on the work market 9-5" and for others it means "no more flashbacks and I can finally manage to go to the store without panic attacks".

Yes, I always thought that was the thing about disorders. They had to essentially cause chaos in your own order, so, as you say, cause major problems in at least one area if not two areas of your life.

I'd not consider my fluctuating energy states an issue, had it not caused me to cheat in the past during highs, and made me sleep through entire days during my lows. I've lost dangerous amounts of weight because I was convinced I was overweight and I needed constant reassurance that I'm not. I hear voices that most of the time are surprisingly helpful and make me feel less lonely, but other times they give me headaches and anxiety.

The people I'm talking about claim that the things I'm experiencing shouldn't be labeled as anything but rather be seen as quirks. They say "if someone struggles they should get help despite of them fitting certain symptoms" which is fair, but they say it in the same breath as "people think something is wrong too quickly and we just characterise these personality quirks". They want to go to a time in which people don't get any labels or diagnoses, because we need to perceive these disorders as quirks -- I find fault in that. I think it's harsh to say that someone with autism just has some quirks that need helping with. There's a cause for it that I'm sure is at least in part in the genes.

I don't know, it just feels like they say we're whining and should grow out of it, which is a rather pessimistic approach to it on my part but it's this kind of attitude that makes it harder for me to go and look for help. If I'm just going to be told that there's no cause for my struggles and that it's just my personality then what is the point ?

Am I making sense ?

I feel like I'm not making sense, lol. Maybe better luck when I get some sleep into my system. Been too busy at work.

Hope you all are well.

~ Grey

I don't think we are typical of the conditions either... Even the psychologist who confirmed the diagnosis of Autism in us later in adulthood put 'Atypical Autism' but she felt it was definitely Autism rather than Aspergers syndrome. (at the time we were diagnosed they were considered seperate conditions at least in our country). We had no awareness of DID at the time so no idea whether we switched ,I ('this me- yuna) don't remember the test at all.. I'm assuming given the date of the test it was either Bobby or Kit or both co-hosting.

I think in our system we have some that are much closer to each other and share memories when they front the memory gaps don't seem so big....if someone else was triggered who had no idea they were part of a system and just sent out to deal with a specific thing they would appear to outside world to have more severe memory problems because there would be bigger and complete blocks of missing memory.

With hindsight I can see how this could look odd to outside people and professionals and like we were possibly 'faking our disability' though at the time some genuinely had no idea there were others who were taking over the body and had different abilities.

For example a past social host 'Maddie' started to become convinced she was getting dementia...she was the last daily host to not have any knowledge at all about the system. .. She completely disappeared and has taken most of her memories of 'her' daily life with her. she hosted social interactions for over 10 years so all those connections were lost when Kit had to take over in an emergency. I think that would have been the closest we would have been to getting a DID dx straight off had we seen a DID specialist at that point.


Yuna

I don't think there's a perfect-ticks-all-the-boxes person for any issue be that mental or physical. Medical symptoms don't always all occur either. It's definitely more difficult to diagnose a mental disorder than it is to diagnose a physical problem... at least most of the time. Some diseases are real tricksters too. Anyway, it makes sense to diagnose the wrong mental disorder or have to adjust / specify later on.

My issue is with psychologists writing articles and doing interviews in which they state that mental disorders essentially aren't really a thing but only a classification of character quirks that happen to be a little annoying to us.

~ Grey

Grey@Triskelion wrote:They want to go to a time in which people don't get any labels or diagnoses, because we need to perceive these disorders as quirks -- I find fault in that. I think it's harsh to say that someone with autism just has some quirks that need helping with. There's a cause for it that I'm sure is at least in part in the genes.

I don't know, it just feels like they say we're whining and should grow out of it, which is a rather pessimistic approach to it on my part but it's this kind of attitude that makes it harder for me to go and look for help. If I'm just going to be told that there's no cause for my struggles and that it's just my personality then what is the point ?

Am I making sense ?

It does make sense. Refusing to label properly a disability or disorder is ableist, period. It's like saying the issue is the label and that making the label disappear will make the the issue disappear.

Grey@Triskelion wrote:I don't think there's a perfect-ticks-all-the-boxes person for any issue be that mental or physical. Medical symptoms don't always all occur either.

Exactly. In order to fit a diagnosis one needs to reach a high enough level of boxes ticked. I do not know of any mental issue where one needs to tick all of the boxes of the diagnosis criteria. Some people often tell me that I dont look autistic. So I explain that, first what they see on TV are autistic people with a lot of comorbid disorders (dysphasia keeps them from speaking, cognitive disabilities impairs them a lot, anxiety disorders make them more jittery...) and second that "autism is a spectrum" means like a sound mix table with tons of different categories. Once enough switches are high enough, one is diagnosed - but there are a lot of different possible switch positions possible and some people have it worse than others. Does not make them "less autistic". They just have it "less visible".

Grey@Triskelion wrote:My issue is with psychologists writing articles and doing interviews in which they state that mental disorders essentially aren't really a thing but only a classification of character quirks that happen to be a little annoying to us.

Any classification is arbitrary BUT it's made so that it's helpful. Clasifying tomatoes as "vegetable" is useful in the kitchen, wrong in botany. Classifying mental disorders puts the line between people who don't need help and people who do - and it says what kind of helps people need. It gives labels so that people with similar needs can find each-other and give peer-support and share ressources.

What we experience is real and really painful. But the line between "I'm ok" and "I need help" depends on the person and how the symptoms are intense and makes them suffer.

One could classify mental disorders with physical signs (brain scans, measures of brain chemistry...) but it's not always a good idea because brain plasticity allows some people to do well in a biological condition that would make another person flip their shirt. For the same reason, pain is measured according to how the person manages and experiences it, not according to the physical signs of the pain.

Some people would flip their shirt if they experienced 1% of the sleep paralysis that I do. But for me it's just a normal morning, I don't even have panic attack or hallucinations anymore, I just see I cannot move, welp back to sleep to reboot my brain I guess. So for me it's not "pathological" because I manage by napping it away. For other people it's pathological because they experience awful panics and hallucinations and it's very distressful.

A mental disorder is the symptoms and how we suffer from them. You need to take both together. And if somebody suffers from ""nothing"" they still need help, not bullying.