Alter in love was a mystery to me

I'm so sorry you're going through this Una...
curiouser and curiouser! as Alice would say. I hope you can resolve this soon. The friend I wrote about on an earlier post...I haven't spoken with him since that last time when it just seemed like he was attracted to me...but come to think of it his actions weren't really any different than always, I just, for some reason...seemed to be triggered by them differently for some reason??? And it sucks when you really are not attracted to this person in the least bit!!! I mean, I don't want to look like I am sending signals to him; if I am the signals are so involuntary!

Una+ wrote:Well, this week it has all been a new alter in lust. On Monday the feeling was almost overwhelming. And it all started with the intrusive thought that [...]

What a difference a week makes. My journal entries show the intensity of my feelings a week ago yesterday, but now I can barely remember those feelings. They are gone, gone, gone.

hi everyone,first for any one reading my posts ,i'm not diagnosed with DID ..i was first diagnosed with PTSD ,then i have a bit of everything as my T said! and now depression and psychosis...I started to open my eyes on things i was not aware of and relate to many of u ...all i know i love being here and i don't care what my label is regarding the diagnosis...

Una+ wrote:From another thread:

Una+ wrote:Here is a conversation that took place yesterday, between me and a very close friend who has been listening to me talk about my crisis from the start, first PTSD then DID. My crisis began when an insider fell in love with a stranger.

Friend: "I still don't know what you see in this guy."

Me, shrieking and sobbing: "That's exactly the point, I don't know either, it isn't me who is in love with this guy!"

carpediem46 wrote:Haha, I've had the exact same problem Una!
Sophie fell in love with someone I had no idea about, so when I was me, I'd feel this overwelming feeling of lust but had no idea who it was aimed at!

2 years ago i liked someone very much to the extent we were going to take a further step and marry! my friend used tot ell me like your case:'I still don't know what you see in this guy'....i myself didn't know becaue we were TOO different! then i remebered i had a silent conversation with myself thinking what i'll do about it as i was very confused ..i thought of everything and said to myself ofcourse he would be the best husband ever and i decided i want to run and see my parents and tell them about my desision...then out of no where a voice in my head says:'NO' ...i start over and thingk of that person again and then i hear again'NO' happened like 4 times that i thought to myself am i crazy!!!
btw i only noticed recently there are voices in my head! I was definite before and alwasys answered with a no to the question wheather i hear voices,,,i was not aware of it....also these voices stopped for some time now and i'm not sure what's going on

Intra-psychic conflict over relationships sure does make us feel crazy, when actually we're sane, just unaware of DID and therefore confused. Who wouldn't be confused?

As best I can tell, none of my known alters were present when I courted and married my husband. I don't post much about him here because he doesn't trigger my alters. Teen Girl was a little freaked out at first to find herself (me) 30 years older and married to a stranger. No, wait, Alter 1 knew him, was passively present with him before my crisis this year. The more aware insiders have guarded me and people around me for decades. I just didn't know it. Although some of my lost time has happened in front of him, as far as I know none of it happened because of him.

Johnny-Jack wrote:

Patient and therapist observations concur that the resiliency of the host personality, that personality in ostensible control of the body most of the time over a period of time (3), is a major determinant. If the host is fairly robust, relatively few external stimuli will overwhelm it and prompt the emergence of specialized alters. Furthermore, a powerful host, resilient in the face of stressors, may be able to suppress others for long periods. If such an arrangement is fairly stable, there may be no overt evidence of multiple personality disorder for many years on end. It stands to reason that in many patients, the openness of their multiple personality disorder may fluctuate with the degree of stress in their lives.

Sad, sad, sad. I ranked very low on the dissociation scale, whose proper test name I cannot recall. 30+ being likely DID and I scored 34 I think. Unfortunately I was a robust host who was able to suppress the others for decades and very diligently went about reducing the scope of my life ever smaller so that stress would be absolutely minimized. Much to my detriment. Powerful, functioning hosts out there, those who appear mostly to "have it together," let this be a warning. Don't sweep it under the rug. You run the other way at your own peril. Because the underlying damage must be addressed if there is to any hope of real health, happiness and peace of mind and soul.

I've also been a very resilient host. Indeed, I suffer from depersonalisation/derealisation, which detaches me from most emotions, so that almost nothing would touch me. Only in recent years has this emotional detachment started to crumble somewhat.

Something you may wish to consider if you haven't is that DID is not the only dissociative disorder. For example, Depersonalisation disorder (DPD) is another one. I've long known that I've suffered from this, and I took my score on the dissociative experiences scale as evidence of DPD rather than DID.

Even though my personality seemed full of paradoxes and contradictions, I never even suspected that I might have multiple personalities, and did not consider DID until the end of 2009, when I had an alcoholic drink and seemed to have experiences that could best be explained by split personalities.

Johnny-Jack wrote:I just finished watching True Blood, the HBO series about vampires. Vampires are already dead but when they are finally destroyed, they experience the true death, i.e. they won't be coming back. I'm just trying to make sure that what I've been experiencing the past couple decades isn't the true death, because I will tell you, although I appeared to have a life, in fact I was the walking dead. And sadly I knew that. Sorry not to end with something uplifting, but it is what it is.

I have often thought of me as being dead on the inside, largely because my emotional detachment and blunting gives rise to what might be described as a purely intellectual or theoretical personality, without feeling.

Amanda(?)

Projective identification can occur in any relationship. However, people with DID are said to be extraordinarily capable of generating projective identification in others. Here is an example reported by a male therapist ():

Loewenstein (pp.66-67 in Kluft and Fine 1993) wrote:I had the following experience in my early work with an MPD patient who had previously become overinvolved with several therapists. During a fairly routine session, I momentarily became flooded with an insistent visual image and tactile hallucination of touching the patient in an intimate manner. Although I felt intensely disquieted and disoriented by this experience, I managed to inquire neutrally if "something had shifted" within her at that moment. She replied "Yes, the sexy one is here now. And do you know what? She's a child!" As this personality emerged and began to talk, my hallucinatory experiences ceased.

We were then able to discuss more openly various alters' fears that I would become involved with the sexual alter, who would be unable to refuse my advances. Also, we were able to discuss this alter's previous exploitation in several prior therapy and nontherapy relationships. The patient's more executive alters had been unaware that this alter was a child. Clarification of this led to better understanding of the particular sexual predicaments in which this patient frequently found herself.

My Alter 1, who longs romantically for the other man, is an infant. In all likelihood, the alter who lusts for him is a child. This is so not fun.

This forum currently has 24,877 posts and only one (my previous post) mentions projective identification. This is a really important phenomenon, especially in the context of DID because it may be at the core of so much of the confusion we experience in our relationships with others. The host alter may be thinking, feeling, behaving in one way with another person, while at the same time another alter may be projecting stuff into the other person, causing the other person to behave in a way that is ego-alien to the other person and both inexplicable and unwelcome to the host.

Wikipedia: Projective identification

Fascinating. I would love to know more. I will be reading that wiki page.

Now that Alter 1 and I have integrated, all the feelings for the other man that I used to experience as not mine now are mine. I love him. Even now I hardly know him, yet I love him. I know that this feeling is love because I love my husband and my children, and this feeling for him is in the same category. My husband is just amazing; he is unperturbed by this new development. I guess he was expecting it, and for him my loving someone else is much less threatening than my being in love with someone else.

Una wrote:Now that Alter 1 and I have integrated, all the feelings for the other man that I used to experience as not mine now are mine. I love him. Even now I hardly know him, yet I love him.

This week my T and I discussed this at length. She asked me the same question my friend asked me many months ago, way back at the beginning of this thread, and my answer is the same now as then. I still don't know what I see in this other man! Only, that's not exactly true. My alters saw him (!) and now that I am integrating I believe that somehow he saw them too. I feel known by him in some important way. And that feels wonderful.

My T says she begins to understand me, that my marriage is very far from conventional, and that it is unlikely the other man would even imagine this possibility. She advises me to be painfully direct and say to the man that I will neither leave my husband nor be unfaithful to him, but that outside my marriage there is room for me to love this man. She says that in his universe there may appear to be only two options: conventional marriage "forsaking all others", or divorce. In that universe, any movement toward me may seem likely to end in divorce for him. I don't want that. I do want him to know that my few contacts with him have changed the course of my life.

T also says that in her experience I am unique. No other client, DID or not, has presented so purely emotional and somatic symptoms.

During the day after I wrote the above quote, I had another experience of merging, this time with my Alter 4. I was reading The Flock and while reading about a spontaneous integration I had a sudden intense pressure inside my head, on right side. Pressure and other sensations there are a signature of Alter 4. Then a sensation of the pressure bursting and a hot liquid flowing into the rest of my head, and Alter 4 and I were one. This lasted only a few hours, but in the week since then there has been some blending.