Hi from Sara - newly dx, lots of thoughts, glad to be here

Trigger - I use the word "angel" near the end - not intending any formal religious meaning - but the word might be a trigger.


I wanted to post for the first time to say hi to everyone - and thank you for being here. I've read all the topics on the DDNOS forum and have been reading the ones here - read from 1 to about 18, then started from the end and have been reading back! thank you to everyone who's shared your stories. I knew for sure that I had DID (or maybe DDNOS) on 28 May this year - and now I think of that as my alternative birthday - our birthday - the first day that I "met" some of the others unmistakeably, and realised who they were, and that they weren't just symbolic - I thought until then that they were pictures in my mind... Since then I've been reading and reading, other info as well but mainly this forum... learning, thinking over and again, "OMG - that's why I do that - that's why I've always felt that - that's what that is..." It's the first place where I've felt that other people know exactly - or more or less - what I've been going through. And it's wonderful to feel that support and understanding. Well, it's not quite the first place - with my emdr T was the first. Too long a story to write that much now, but I will. I don't know how much I can help people as this is all very new to me. It seems as though every day I learn something new that completely changes the way I understand things, and everything I know about myself - right now I really don't know who "I" am. I hope that just sharing my experiences might help others - it helped me so much to read about other people's experiences, and recognise my own - or something similar to my own. I know that everyone's experience is unique. But the commonalities make me feel that I'm not alone. Actually, I don't feel alone any more - since learning about the "others". I have friends inside and really feel I'm not alone - and I think they're starting to learn about each other, and they know that I know about them now - and I talk to them, and listen, and visualise them in the safe house my T asked my to create for them in my imagination, each with someone to listen to them. And the house has two swimming pools!

The crazy thing is that I'm a psychotherapist. And I've had two long-term therapies, while and since training - eight years with an integrative therapist - and more recently, three years with a psychoanalytic therapist who was amazing. I don;t know how else to describe it except to say that she loved me through the most difficult time of my life, when old memories and feelings were resurfacing - and that through the work with her - three times weekly for most of that time - my conscious self learned to give and receive, felt strong again, able to love and feel love, to want to live - I've never been in such a strong and good place. And maybe because of that, I was strong enough to be able to do this work now. 'Cause she never noticed dissociation - and I never noticed it - and I'm a therapist - I was even looking for it - used to wonder why I didn't have DID - knew I had CPTSD - and I did, but it was so well hidden, even from myself. I never told her the one thing that would have indicated dissociation for sure - because I thought it was something that talking therapy couldn't help. And the other signs were all things that I thought were "normal" - or could be explained in other ways. I know how people can be misdiagnosed for years - the only dx I could make of myself was "major depressive disorder". I didn't meet the criteria for BPD or bipolar, though a former girlfriend tried to convince me I was bipolar Now I know that she was seeing something - it just wasn't bipolar. I started emdr in Easter 2011 - and I think it was that, as well as a happy relationship, that brought the others out - the ones who held the trauma so that I could have a happy experience of the relationship - by the autumn, a year into it, they couldn't stay hidden any more. And no doubt having someone who knew they were there helped them to come out. My emdr T knew I had DID 20 minutes after meeting me. She worked with the "others", knowing that I didn't understand who they really were - and she didn't confirm the dx to me until I'd realised it for myself - and I think that was important - otherwise I might have thought that it was the power of suggestion. I asked her a direct question - "...was that an alter?" and she said yes. And that afternoon two of them spoke through me, and it was unmistakeable - more on that another time. But for the first few weeks I just felt happy, as I hadn't for a long time - I was in the middle of relationship break-up - and yet I fell asleep feeling happy, and woke feeling happy. That was when I felt I wasn't alone any more. And the dominant thought for a long time was how incredible the other me's were. I was just in awe of what they did - and still am. They took the worst of the pain so that I could survive, get out of there, study, achieve - and they got me into therapy and then therapy training - so that one day I would have the skills and understanding and strength and ability to love them, so that I could go back and find them and take care of them. I think they're amazing. There wasn't any help when I was a child, so they knitted their own therapist - isn't it brilliant? And of course, I'm not talking just about my "others" - all of your "others" are amazing for what they did.

For the first few weeks - and still now - I just tried to talk to them as well as listen, I told them that I knew about them now, and that they would never be alone again. I asked them to give me back their feelings - ie the split-off feelings that they've been holding - because they were once our feelings, and I wanted them to be our feelings again, so that we could deal with them together, and the feelings could go - once they were fully felt, and understood. I told them - and still tell them - that I thought they were amazing, and thanked them so much for what they'd done. I read somewhere on these boards, I think, that the "others" gave their lives for us, so the least we can do is listen to them now and try to give them everything they need in order to heal. That's what I want to do now. And it;s been a little hair-raising. Today I was sitting with my own clients with a non-stop headache, literally seeing double, just feeling generally BAD; vaguley remembered feeling like this in childhood and teenage years, and thought, no wonder I had to split - there's no way I could have studied and achieved anything at all while feeling this. Do I really have to work, feeling like this? I tried to ask the gate-keeper - more about him another time - to herd the others back - he said once that it was like herding cats - make sure that each had an angel to listen to them etc (I hope the word "angel" isn't too triggering - I don't mean any connection to any religion - just a being of light - and I'm not sure it makes any difference if I think of them as "real" or imaginary - they're loving beings whom I can imagine taking care of the "others" in our safe house) - but I don't think he quite could. My T replied to my txt saying, "you can get thru today because you're a professional" - and I did - and a few hours later felt much better - but for the first time today, I thought that maybe I really wouldn't always be able to control it - it might get too bad - she doesn't know for sure, and wants me to take time off to process some of this - and I am, five weeks from the end of July. An emdr holiday! I'll see her every weekday, if she has the spaces, and not have to hold my own clients and students in between sessions.

More to share, and I hope that some of this will be of some help to others - right now I have one overwhelming feeling. It comes when with my T, when she calls me, "you, as host" - when she asks, "Who am I talking to?", and I hear one of the others speaking in my voice, with a different accent - when she says, "I want to say this to everyone" - these classic phrases that I know so well - and I realise that she is saying them to me, that this really is real, that it applies to me - and the only word I have for the feeling is grief...

Hi, and welcome!

Hi and welcome to the forums. Wow if you had a hard time figuring out your dx....being trained.....well, just wow! We look forward to hearing more from you.

Hey, and welcome.

Hope those 5 weeks off allow you to make lots of progress with this. Sounds like you have a great T there

B

Thank you for the welcome! I want to write more - is it better to start new threads, or to reply on older threads that are on the same subject? Some of them are from a while back. I know that if they were mine, I would love it if people replied on my posts. What's best? Also - to the moderators - how do I get to posts that I've started then saved as drafts? I haven't yet found them! Thank you for replying.

We personally answer old & new threads alike depending on what we feel like. So I'd say feel free to choose for yourselves.

And the important part: welcome to the forum!

- Lin

Hi, Sara, I enjoyed reading your post and could relate well to it. A year ago I had to keep it together while going through the shock, dissociation (though not switching), and flashbacks at work associated with newly discovered -- or finally confirmed -- DID. I don't know how I did that except that I had help, mostly internal. Things were infinitely calmer after a period of higher stress and instability. For others out there, this seems common. You discover/acknowledge you have DID, things become unstable (maybe more unstable), then things get better than they were because communication and understanding begins to grow.

I, the host, am not a therapist but a manager/director at an academic institution. I lack appropriate educational credentials but have interpersonal and, I guess, coaching skills that have made up for that lack. I also did a lot of psychological and introspective working in addition to years of intermittent therapy before I/we realized what this was. It rather stupefies me that I could have done so much of that without getting that the real issue was abuse and DID, not all the other explanations I had, usually depression.

I would love to hear about and from your gatekeeper. I have a rather classic unemotional one and he learns from how other gatekeepers differ. There are posts here where my gatekeeper got into a discussion with other gatekeepers and I IM with a friend where our gatekeepers frequently comment. The experience for me is rollickingly freaky.

I'm also doing EMDR and it hasn't provided the miraculous results I had no right to expect but it's been helpful. You yourself haven't treated anyone with DID, have you? I can't imagine how that would go before yours was confirmed.

I want to write more - is it better to start new threads, or to reply on older threads that are on the same subject?

Either works.

Also - to the moderators - how do I get to posts that I've started then saved as drafts?

Go to "user control panel"
[then under the Overview tab(default window)],
click on "manage drafts" you should find them there.

Just wrote a long reply and somehow it vanished! I'll try to recreate it!

Thank you, Borg, for the practical help. And lifelongthing, for your welcome. And Johnny-Jack - I wrote you a long reply, and it all vanished - and I just can't recreate it right now! I will do soon.

Oh - crying now - who hit the wrong key, not wanting me to reply? Someone did! I wrote a lot about my gatekeeper, as well as another one - ok, someone in there doesn't want me to write so much - I'm sorry!

I will do soon.

Sara

Welcome to the forum!

I took two psychology classes in High School, and there were a few times I wondered about DID, but I never made the connection... even with all the odd stuff that was happening around me! Sometimes, even when we have things right in front of our faces, we still miss it. It happens.