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.
When we were in year 8, we had a guest speaker visit. In trying to demonstrate that we hold onto bad memories more than good ones, she asked for a show of hands about whether your first memory was ‘bad’ or ‘good’. I remember feeling utter panic as we scrambled to try and remember anything from our childhood. We were 12, and the earliest thing we could remember was our first operation at the age of 8. Our entire childhood was a blank.
Dissociative amnesia is one of the essential diagnostic criteria of DID and is what differentiates DID from other dissociative disorders such as OSDD (Other Specified Dissociative Disorder) or derealisation/depersonalisation disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states the following must be present for a diagnosis of DID: ‘recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.’ In other words, amnesia that is intrusive, destabilising and causes a significant impact on your life. It is also a universal amnesia, and we are affected by amnesia of traumatic and non-traumatic events. We don’t get to choose to keep the happy memories and forget the trauma. If anything, as that guest speaker posited, you are more likely to have the traumatic memories return than the happy ones.
I don’t know how early your memories are meant to be, but I do know that remembering nothing of large portions of your life is utterly terrifying. Our body is 23 now and, collectively, we have memories from about the age of 3 onwards. The difference is that, now, I would give anything to forget, to draw a blank, and for the worst thing that ever happened to have been ‘just’ an operation. I sit and wish in my childish naivety that a well-meaning wizard would perform an ‘obliviate’ charm on me and return me to the place where ignorance truly was bliss.
Instead, I am assailed by flashbacks, day and night, that my medication only barely controls. I have the physical memories overwhelm me as it feels like I am four again and being assaulted time and time again. I am ten and being taught that I must never tell. I am still stuck at 19 and remembering the torture I endured on my birthday that year. I am 20 and in the hospital every week, fighting for a life I didn’t want to live. I am 23 and praying that I would stop remembering.
Flashbacks are a unique type of hell; there’s something about being confronted with the past in the spaces you feel safest in. Something about the pain of home infecting the sanctity of the life I have built in Oxford. Something about being forced to rewatch the worst days of your life whilst still writing essay after essay.
And yet, even when I am not stuck in those painful memories, I still deal with the consequences of trauma. Can I remember what essay topic I am working on this week? Can I tell you who my best friend is? Do I even remember my own legal name? No. The amnesia that was created to protect me from trauma has gone one step further and taken all stability from me. Some things are in what we call our ‘shared’ memory, which for us is a filing cabinet in the inner world with all the important information that is shared between alters. Now, this is more developed and I probably can remember who my best friend is and usually someone in the system has a vague clue what is going on at uni (shout out to our lovely alters Electra and Liza for handling all our academic work!), but still the forgetting creeps in. I go to the pharmacy, rattle off the ten odd meds that I am expecting to collect, but draw a blank when asked for my name and date of birth.
Can you imagine who you would be without your memories? All the memories that shape who we are are suddenly lost. You read about it after freak accidents or in psychological thrillers, but we live this on a daily basis. I tell you, nothing is more terrifying than wanting to forget what you remember and wanting to remember what you forgot.
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.
OSDD (Other Specified Dissociative Disorder): presentations in which symptoms characteristic of a dissociative disorder that cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning predominate but do not meet the full criteria for any of the disorders in the dissociative disorders diagnostic class. Often differences are that there is not a clear distinction between alters, or that there is not total amnesia.
Derealisation/Depersonalisation Disorder: Depersonalisation is where you have the feeling of being outside yourself and observing your actions, feelings or thoughts from a distance. Derealisation is where you feel the world is unreal. People and things around you may seem “lifeless” or “foggy”. You can have depersonalisation or derealisation, or both together.
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.
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.