Note: Please note that throughout this article, I may switch between personal pronouns. This is on purpose, which will hopefully be explained by the article’s topic (Dissociative Identity Disorder). Typically, ‘I’ describes a specific alter, whereas ‘we’ is used for our collective system in this shared body. A glossary of terms used is at the end of this article.
Recently, I went on a date where we visited The Poetry Pharmacy in London. Books of all kinds lined the walls, making my childhood dreams of being a librarian bubble up, but it was the pill bottles on the countertop that grabbed my attention. Little bottles of tablets with labels reading ‘Hope’, ‘Insomnia’, ‘Christmas Joy’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Poemcetamol’. Inside? Tiny scrolls of lines from poems enclosed in pill casing. The final touch was your own prescription given when the item was gift wrapped in a pharmacy bag. Mine read: ‘Evelyn Patronus, take one a day with your tea’. Far more exciting than my 15 odd pills a day, forced down with a glass of water and rewarded with a bite of chocolate to take away the taste.
Why am I sharing this, albeit very sweet, anecdote? Well, because I truly do believe in the notion of healing through words and especially in the power of writing (in all forms) for those with DID. There is something about writing, making the unseen seen, penning the memories too traumatic to keep to yourself. There is something about the safety of seeing things in black and white, and knowing they can no longer harm us as actions, and that we can share them or burn them. No one need know.
Journalling is one of the best ways we have of writing and is essential to our communication as a system. I’m sure you have experienced the challenge of managing a group project at uni. You need to organise everyone, complete the task on time, and not fall out with your friends! Except the project is life and you share your body with almost 100 other people. This is our space to reflect and communicate with each other. We try to journal daily, partly because it helps with the amnesia to know what happened day to day. If someone asked you what was for dinner yesterday, you might not remember but you’d brush it off as something unimportant to recall; for us, if we forget our dinner, we realise everything else we have forgotten and panic. Forgetting what you ate for dinner is no big deal, forgetting your best friend’s name is.
We journal to process. Whether that’s our determination to keep a list to send to our therapist before each session, or the freewriting we do each night, or a daily ‘glappy list’ (a term coined by our senior school Greek teacher who tried to say glad and happy at the same time), all of these things help us to cope. When things are in words we feel safer and no one needs to know.
However, I am also a big believer in sharing those musings, even my 3AM ramblings. We are currently publishing our second poetry book, ‘Sylvia’s Daughter’ (I received the e-proof the night before writing this!) and while we fear our words being read, we also are excited. We write for ourselves, yes, but also for others. We write to externalise the pain, and to show others that survival is possible. We write to educate others and to learn more about ourselves.
But more than that, we write to escape. Last term, we wrote an article entitled ‘My Mother Always Said All I Knew How To Do Was Daydream’ which explored our inner world as a DID system. The statement is true. We’ve been storytellers as long as I can remember, and we’re excited to be applying for a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. We have written many poems to process, but even more stories to escape. Whether it’s a romantic story about finding love for the first time, or a dark story picturing our own death and how justice may finally be served to those who hurt us, we write to survive. We write for the littles, to soothe them and to help them tell their own stories. We write to imagine all the possibilities of how this could turn out, and I, for one, hope that it’s the love story and not the murder one!
Glossary:
DID: Dissociative Identity Disorder, previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder. A condition where a child’s brain, due to extreme and ongoing trauma throughout childhood, does not form the same way as most people, leaving a person with distinct identity parts and a level of amnesia between them.
System: the term people with DID typically use to describe themselves as a collection of alters.
Alter: a distinct identity part within the system. Others may call these parts, identity states, headmates, or simply people. Some still use the term personalities, though this is less common and can cause controversy. Alters can be different ages and genders, look different internally, use different names, and have different interests and personalities.
Dissociative amnesia: the loss of memories, skills, or knowledge triggered as a response to trauma. This goes beyond typical forgetfulness and is incredibly distressing. The person may forget basic information about themselves or end up in places or situations they do not know how they got into.
Inner world: for systems this is a place ‘in which they or their alters can manifest as themselves and interact’. For us, we have several houses, where we each have our own rooms as individuals, as well as communal spaces like the library (the safe place we created in therapy years before learning about our DID). Others have simply one room, others have entire planets.
Littles: child alters, who usually are stuck at the age of trauma. When a child alter is fronting, the body has the mental capacity of that age and acts and often talks like a kid.
Resources on DID:
FPP charity (legacy site) https://www.firstpersonplural.org.uk/dissociation/complex-dissociative-disorders/
@dissociation.info (Instagram)