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The Pandemic and DID

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The pandemic with stay-at-home orders can be difficult for anyone. Articles are appearing all throughout the internet on how to cope with being at home. There are multiple levels of difficulty at this time. Single people who are feeling alone, Mothers who are dealing with their children 24/7; Unemployment, difficult marriage situations and so much more. Add to it households where the virus is present. And in our world of loving someone with DID, we may not really know what is going to happen until we are in the thick of it. None of what I am writing in this article is applicable to all individuals with DID, not are my thoughts conclusive nor prescriptive. I hope however that they are helpful.   Stop for a moment to consider what the possible feelings and thoughts are that come to the forefront if you are DID. Like many others, the fact that we are basically ‘trapped’ at home can lead to some very difficult feelings in someone with DID. The likelihood that they fel
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When will it end? Living with DID and hoplessness

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Whether you are in the thick of the daily ups and downs of a life with a DID or you feel things are going well, there is an underlying question that seems to haunt with a subtle undertone. When does it end? You’re tired, you’re frustrated, you’re hurt, you are probably even confused and second-guessing your own internal compass. Living with someone with DID can be quite challenging. As your loved one bounces from part to part, you feel like you are being jerked around with no true sense of gravity. This may cause your frustration levels to rise. Even after your loved one has integrated there are still days where it’s hard to tell what side is up and which is down.   It’s a reality we live with. This is why self-care is so very important. You need to find a way to get away, to find balance, to tend to your own mental health. You need to find a way to restore your own soul. Additionally, it helps to understand your loved one’s situation. As difficult as it
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Surviving Halloween for SO’s

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It’s Halloween again. You loved one has been increasingly anxious, moody and frightened. It is that time of the year again when you can feel it. It feels like your loved one is building toward an eruption. My advice, arm yourself and love your DID to pieces. You need to be aware of what may be happening. If your loved one was abused ritually, then Halloween was likely one of those days. They have been feeling the arrival, like one awaits the coming of Christmas with anticipation and excitement, only with an opposite and horrendous dread. This is time for you to be sensitive and loving but also to be taking care of yourself. Don’t let the parts that are emerging entangle you in fruitless arguments, or endless fights. Stop and listen. Love and empathize. Halloween will be over soon enough and the fall out will settle. Breath, but don’t let down your guard because the Thanksgiving and Christmas are close behind. These are holidays that are packed with emotion, wheth
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Integration, 3 years later

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I am fully aware that there are multiple opinions about integration. I know there are some strong objections to the idea of taking this path in DID. I have also received some strong pushback about it. But this is not a discussion about whether or not integration is right or wrong, good or bad, this is simply an update about our experience after my bride made the choice to integrate. After 10 years of therapy and working toward integration (and actually successfully integrating), my bride decided to take a break from all that counseling. She was worn out, tired, just plain sick and tired of fighting, and our financial situation did not allow for more therapy. So she took a break. That break left her with certain deficiencies and unable to deal with the new life that presented itself to her. We had been warned by her then therapist that she needed continued treatment for at least “adjustment disorder” if not for PTSD and abuse recovery. DID therapy does not often address these
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Your true Identity

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Identity is an interesting thing. We all struggle with our identity somewhere. People will walk through life ‘knowing’ their identity to be a loser, fat, stupid, ugly, useless, crazy. Maybe their identity is steeped in being the best, a jock, cool or a class clown. In my experience, everyone has been saddled with an identity. If you are told that you are something long enough, that identity sticks, usually to our disadvantage. This is why I think it is most unfortunate that the health profession chose to change Multiple Personality Disorder to Dissociative IDENTITY Disorder. Think about it, if you have been diagnosed with DID, someone has successfully placed an identity on you. Your identity is “DID”. At least this is what I often see in people who struggle with this disorder. I must confess that my wife and I both have lived in this unhealthy perception of the state of things in our lives for too long. She and I both have lived in the perception that her true identity was
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BODY MEMORIES

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Have you ever heard the term, “Just like riding a bike”? The meaning behind this expression is that once you have learned to ride a bike, you really never forget how.   As a musician, you may get rusty, but if you have ever learned to play an instrument, you will always remember how to play it. Or think about the last time a sound of a bird or the smell of food took you back to some place and time. This is the same concept with body memories from abuse. Your body, remembers everything from sounds, smells, touches, tastes and most significantly abuse. The memories are held in your body connected with some memory inside your mind. As a survivor of abuse, you, or your loved one may have been too young to remember certain things consciously, but the body still holds that memory. As someone with DID, you or your loved one, may have dissociated and so have no conscious memory of the event while your body does. Maybe a alter remembers but has locked it away in a deep dark cellar. B
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The Bourne Identity and DID

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In an ongoing agenda of the Hollywood making, we find movies which seem to serve only to trivialize the reality of some devastating issues in this world. For instance, “Eyes Wide Shut”, portraits the sick and twisted privileged world of power and lust acting out twisted fantasy. It’s real! ‘Split’ on the other hand portraits DID as a series of homicidal, psychotic episodes expressed through multiple personalities. Split is a total distortion of the truth. It’s no wonder that society has become so desensitized to the true nature of what might actually be going on around us. Movies, like the Jason Bourne series, the Manchurian Candidate and The Long Kiss Goodnight, make for great entertainment. But is that all they are? The main characters in these movies display something known as a psychogenic disorder called “Dissociative Fugue”. In each of these stories, a person was subjected to some type of programming that put them in an amnesic state. This state is characterized by
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