Co-conscious?

I see a quick and wonderful recovery in your future. You are honest with yourself and accepting everything that is going on!

Kudos~!

I am so glad that we can have an intellectual conversation on this board and no one is getting upset! I LOVE It! Thanks to all of you!

tylas wrote:I see a quick and wonderful recovery in your future. You are honest with yourself and accepting everything that is going on!

Well, hopefully quick from here on out. It has taken me over 20 years to get to this point. Granted, that around 8 of those were taken off to go and live life for awhile until I was strong enough to come back and deal with the really bad stuff. It has been a very long and very, very painful road. But in the 6 months since I started doing therapy again, amazing things have been happening...

Proposed right now for the DSM 5
Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.

1. Amnesia for trauma events at any time does not count. After all this is not unique to DID. [/b]
2. Recurrent gaps in everyday events.
3. Personal Information

The cats meow -

I just wanna say that your post and description of how it is for you is beautiful!!

B

bourbon wrote:The cats meow -

I just wanna say that your post and description of how it is for you is beautiful!!

B

Thank you, Bourbon! I have struggled some with how my experience seems to not quite match up with what other people write about. There are a lot of commonalities of experience with those of you with DID, so I find it very useful to hang out here, but there are also a lot of differences. I seem to finally be reaching a point where I am becoming comfortable with my experience being what it is. All that matters is that I understand it, accept it, and find ways to use my understanding to help myself.

However, there are lots of us out there who is in the dissociative, but not quite DID part of the spectrum, and I would bet that other folks are just as frustrated as I have been at the lack of information that seems to fit. I wrote this hoping that maybe someone else will read it and say, "OK, that is close to what things are like for me, as well. I am not alone."

DID clearly has a wide range of how it is expressed in individuals. I have my suspicions that the C-PTSD/DDNOS part of the spectrum may be even more diverse in how dissociation and parts are experienced, and I would really love to see other people with non- DID complex dissociative disorders also write about what life is like for them.

tylas wrote:Proposed right now for the DSM 5
Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.

1. Amnesia for trauma events at any time does not count. After all this is not unique to DID. [/b]
2. Recurrent gaps in everyday events.
3. Personal Information

I am still working on this, but I keep getting distracted! I ran on to this however that is very interesting. We all know it, but it fits in nicely to this conversation. The text seems to be recent.

It also says that only 5% rather than 6% of those with DID have Florid DID like Tracy, me and others here have.

It suggests that DID overall in the population might be as high as 3% rather than just 1%.

This is the part that fits well into this conversation since it talks about amnesia, but it certainly does not give us the answers we are looking for - but it is interesting:

"Patients with dissociative identity disorder typically also have dissociative amnesia. They cannot remember important life events. They have blackout phases and also experience fluctuations in personalities and talents. Some patients actually have variable blood pressures, blood glucose levels, changes in visual acuity, and variable responses to drugs and treatments with the shifting of identities."
more
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/2 ... #aw2aab6b4

tylas wrote:

bourbon wrote:I don't think you can say someone has DID only if they have amnesia for present day,

Yes, we agree. That is why I am asking for definitions. I printed out a long paper on it that I am going to read tonight. I have no answers for this. The definition of time loss frustrates me.

I was wondering about this. For a lot of systems it is only the host that has time lost cuz someone took over without telling anyone. I especially would not lose time. I might not know what happened at a certain time if I was not out or coconcious with the one out but that is not a memory gap, if it were singletons would have the same memory gap cuz they do not know what happened at a meeting they did not attend

I spent the day with my LC....

I asked this and after hours of us debating it he convinced me. He is going to write it up so it makes sense.


I was wrong. All of us actually were wrong except maybe Becky. Also it has nothing to do with the difference between DID and DDNOS.

Only 1 part can EVER be out at a time - anything else we experience is rapid switching.
That was not the only shock for me today! I will write the other one on the post where it belong.

tylas wrote:Only 1 part can EVER be out at a time - anything else we experience is rapid switching.

What about blending?

The Cat's Meow wrote:One of the things that I experience and that I haven't really heard described elsewhere is how my parts can be flexible in terms of form, based on what my system seems to need at a particular time. So if I am getting anywhere near the memories, they fragment the experiences into manageable bits and the more directly I deal with a particularly horrible incident, the more it is fragmented. But if I simply need to comfort and support the child who experienced the abuse at age 10, for example, they draw together into a single child, so I can comfort them all at the same time. This isn't something that I have any sense of control over- it just happens.

I was struck in reading A Man's Recovery from Traumatic Childhood Abuse: The Insiders by more or less what you describe, the flexibility in the form and shape of the parts based on changing circumstances. It was clear that my alters are quite uniform compared to his various parts. He worked at times directly with John G. and Helen Watkins, the developers of ego-state therapy.

I have two sets of alters, half created by my gatekeeper, half by me. The former are more "separate." The latter, while still distinct alters, are ever so slightly more ego-state-ish, whatever that means. So whereas I definitely have DID, I relate to the descriptions of DDNOS and DDNOS-type 1 as well. It doesn't feel like a coincidence that all but one of the gatekeeper-alters (two, if you include the gatekeeper) have found themselves squished together with another alter in accidental blends, whereas only one of the John-alters has done that (the largest). Blends for us are not the same as flexibility in form and shape, they are two distinct parts finding themselves mooshed together, with a resulting overlap or blend in body language, energy level, accent, and to some extent emotion but with distinct thoughts and reactions to the blend itself.