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.
The title is taken from a poem I wrote not too long ago and aptly sums up my childhood. I come from a family of scientists. I’m the black sheep (in more ways than one), nose always buried in a book, head firmly stuck in the clouds- no wonder I trip over so much! And yet, the question is, why?
Growing up in an abusive household, you learn to yearn for something greater than yourself. For me, that is both my Christian faith and my near-religious devotion to quirkiness, to truly being myself. Yet, the challenge was that I did not know who my ‘self’ was, which turned out to be a clinically diagnosable condition about which I have my own column: Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It turned out that I do not have one ‘self’, but rather many headmates with whom I share a body. I have child alters (littles) and grown-ups, those who love rock music and those who love indie folk, witches and ghosts… This is a real condition, and I believe my imagination is vast because of it (rather than, as unkind people often suggest, my condition is a ‘figment of my imagination’).
There is one quirk of DID that bridges this overlap between dreams and reality: the inner world, which is defined for systems as 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. This is largely determined by the size and complexity of your system structure. Yet, this is a place entirely our own, where our daydreams can become real! It is a place of safety we are able to retreat to when not fronting, and take rest and solace. We even have an inner world cat, affectionately known as The Cheesy Floof.
But the part of DID where our daydreaming has most impacted, is in our experience of introjects. These are alters which are based on people or characters from the external world: the brain has decided that there are qualities which that person holds which are needed in the system. For example, we have an alter who is an introject of Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series, another based on JJ from Criminal Minds, and another who is an introject of Evanescence’s lead singer, Amy Lee. We have, in some ways, become a patchwork quilt (a common metaphor for DID because of the analogous children’s book of the same name). We are a patchwork quilt of all those who are most dear and important to us. In the same way that we can only do Dutch braids (not French) because a friend taught us in primary school, or how we tell everyone ‘bless ya’ because our close friend in secondary school did, or how we type in all lowercase because of our once dearest and closest friend. We are an amalgamation of every good thing in our lives, and our DID is the same. We are a patchwork quilt of trauma, yes, but also of hope: we have subsumed those most important to us, people so wonderful we could only dream of being them, and we have made them our own.
My mother always said all I knew how to do was daydream and that has saved our life. Sadly, at some point, the safety of daydreams was overcome by the violence of nightmares. Nightmares of the memories which defined us, nightmares of things so terrifying we would rather deny ourselves sleep for days than risk shutting our eyes, nightmares which ultimately had to be medicated. The medication worked, but it also stole the ability to dream. Our inner world (as I said, not a figment of our imagination) has remained safe and comforting, but we have lost the ability to daydream and often to imagine and create. Instead, the pen bleeds with true tales of violence, only occasionally tainted with stories of love when our heart remembers how to hope.
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.
Headmates: another term for alters, often preferred as it avoids the association with ‘alter ego’ and recognises headmates as people in their own right.
Host: the alter in the system who fronts most often. For some, this is the alter who identifies most with the body; some systems do not have a single host or any at all.
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.
Introjects: alters that have a ‘source’ that they are based on. This can be a fictional character or someone in real life. These alters have absorbed qualities, beliefs, skills or even memories from significant figures in your life and take on aspects of these figures (both positive and negative). They are not a carbon copy of these people and whilst they reflect them, these alters are still distinctly themselves.
Resources on DID:
FPP charity (legacy site) https://www.firstpersonplural.org.uk/dissociation/complex-dissociative-disorders/
@dissociation.info (Instagram)