October 2024
One of the ways I like to think about my dissociative experiences is through the concepts of internal reality and external reality. I think of external reality as being the objective aspects of one’s external environment, including physical surroundings, social interactions, and events. On the other hand, I think of internal reality as being one’s subjective internal experience, which includes one’s thoughts, memories, and emotions. One’s center of focus is usually balanced between their internal and external realities—they are aware of and are able to interact with their external reality while simultaneously being able to perceive and connect with their internal reality.
conceptualization DID narrative reality symptoms
4 minutes
My experience taking naltrexone, an opioid antagonist
Before my dissociative symptoms intensified around 2019, I was actively engaged in life as a prolific student and researcher. But once my dissociative symptoms started flaring up in my adult life, I became dysfunctional and struggled to understand or engage in the external world. It’s taken me long time to mostly get back on my feet where I am today, but I can now definitely say that, along with therapy, naltrexone has enabled me to properly engage with and advance in life again.
data DID medication naltrexone
19 minutes
January 2024
Transgenerational food insecurity
On this site, I have frequently mentioned that I have cyclical patterns of internal experience and subsequent behavior due to my presentation of DID. It took me quite a while to realize this as I had not seen this presentation documented anywhere in the academic literature, although I now know that other people with polyfragmented DID also experience this phenomenon. Once I realized this was how I operate, my understanding of my internal experience grew substantially as it provided a framework for which I could apply my experiences to.
cycle DID food intergenerational narrative trauma
6 minutes
About three months into starting therapy, my therapist asked me a seemingly innocuous question: Does your handwriting ever change? This was something I had never thought about before. I replied by saying that while my handwriting was inconsistent, it was normal. She then asked me another question: Does your handwriting seem to change with mood? This question caught me so off guard that it plunged me into an acute dissociative state, rendering me confused and nearly unresponsive for the next several minutes.
academia DID handwriting symptoms
7 minutes
October 2023
This is as much of a question for you as it is for me1. How am I doing? Really, I feel fine. Good, even. And that is the problem. It’s hard for me to conceive that I am having any difficulties in my life right now, or that I could be considered “mentally ill”. And for large swaths of time, depending on which part of the cycle I am in, I’m genuinely not aware that my external life is actually falling apart.
4 minutes
September 2023
One’s early childhood experiences can majorly influence how they perceive the word. Because I experienced repeated trauma in my early years, my brain wired with the knowledge that the world around me was not safe and my experiences were not in my control. In order to cope with this, I learned to escape my external reality by curating my own internal reality—I created a world that only I could control, which was only limited by my own imagination.
conceptualization DID narrative symptoms
5 minutes
July 2023
Over the past several weeks, I have had a lot of change in my system structure. This often happens to me in times of stress, as I discussed in How DID affects my work. This rearrangement of my system usually comes with a new routine, a new set of handwritings, and a new outlook on life. It’s almost like a rebirth—a new attempt to take control of my life, every time with a slightly different strategy.
3 minutes
June 2023
What does it feel like when a trauma-holding part takes control?
I switch a lot on a daily basis, probably because I am polyfragmented. The vast majority of the time, however, I’m switching between parts who are familiar with one-another, so this kind of switching is smooth, with only a small blip in my conscious awareness. I typically call this kind of switching shifting, because, although I am changing between parts, it isn’t jarring and I don’t feel like I have a loss of control—I am able to hold a conversation and mostly remember my train of thought while shifting between parts.
amnesia DID polyfragmented symptoms
6 minutes
May 2023
Disowning different parts of self
One impactful symptom of DID that I struggle with is amnesia, which is significant enough for me that it impacts my daily functioning and severely affects my awareness of my life history. I not only have difficulty constructing a functional narrative of my past, but I also often struggle with day-to-day amnesia. The puzzling part of this all is that I seem to have gaps in awareness for things that are not at all trauma related.
3 minutes
April 2023
While I do experience what one could call “dissociative episodes” where a trauma-holding part takes full control of our body for a period of time, most of the time I experience momentary episodes of dissociation, where a part only takes control of our body for a few seconds at the maximum. However, these can still be difficult and disrupting to my daily life. These types of episodes are quite common for me—they occur several times a day, often clustered together in time.
3 minutes
One impactful but not immediately obvious symptom of DID for me is that I do not seem to have a continuous internal sense of time—my awareness of my life is shuffled. Because of this, I may have a hard time differentiating what happened yesterday versus what happened last week or last month, or struggle with remembering if, for example, I have leftovers in my fridge now or if that was from weeks ago.
3 minutes
March 2023
DID is very much internal disorder. That is, unless I tell you that I have it, you wouldn’t know1. One of the ways DID affects my internal experience is that I have significant gaps in my memory, both of my past childhood, and of my present adulthood. But amnesia is tricky—I don’t know what I don’t remember, so most of the time I don’t realize I’ve forgotten anything. I believe I experience amnesia in a few ways.
amnesia DID narrative symptoms
4 minutes
The parts I don’t know about still have control
Imagine if, without your awareness, your deepest, most repressed thoughts and feelings were displayed for the world to see. With how my DID presents, this is something that occurs quite frequently for me. Because much of my most difficult emotions are separated from the core me, I am usually unaware of them until they surface and they’re in the forefront of my awareness. Then, after they are over, I may forget that these dissociative episodes ever happened.
amnesia DID narrative symptoms
4 minutes