- Dissociative identity disorder, or DID,
is so often misunderstood and stigmatized by people online,
which is why today, I'm going to explain what DID is,
}why it happens and offer four ways
that we can better manage it.
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Let's jump into the video.
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When trying to figure out
if someone has dissociative identity disorder, or DID,
we first turn to the DSM
to look at the diagnostic criteria.
Now, for those of you wondering what the DSM is,
it's basically a guide that mental health professionals use
to help us decide what mental illness someone has.
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The first symptom someone must have
is a disruption of identity,
characterized by two or more distinct personality states,
meaning that we have multiple personality states
that are very different from one another
and it's noticeably different from who we were
before we had these various personalities.
And this is essentially why it used to be called
multiple personality disorder.
The second criteria is that we have
gaps in our memory of everyday events.
We can think that we're just being super forgetful,
but this type of memory loss
isn't consistent with normal forgetting.
For example, no matter how hard we try,
we can't recall what we did yesterday.
It can be uncomfortable, not to mention jarring,
and similar to all dissociative disorders,
when we are dissociated,
remember our brain kind of pulls the ripcord on reality,
we're just kind of spaced out.
During that time, our brain is gonna have
a very difficult time forming memories,
or allowing us to recall any information.
And we can have these gaps in memory,
they can last for hours, sometimes days.
And for many people, even longer than that.
Now, the third criteria, and the final one,
is that these symptoms must cause
clinically significant distress or impairment in social,
occupational, and other important areas of functioning.
Now, the key piece of this is that it causes distress
meaning that I'm bothered by it, right?
If it's happening to me, I'm bothered by it,
or it impairs us, right?
So it's causing distress or impairment,
and impairing us means we can't do what we need to do,
because I often hear the question from my patients
and other members of our community,
"Katie, if it's not bothering me,
"then why do I need to work on it?"
The answer is because it's getting in the way
of us being able to live a healthy and happy life.
So you can see why the distress
and impairment is an important piece.
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And I've found a really helpful explanation
on a mental health blog called Sane Australia,
where one person shared their experience.
And they said, I quote,
"For starters, my voices are inside my head.
"They are not external sounds.
"They're more like conscious thoughts
"that you have in your mind.
"However, my voices don't sound
"like a conscious thought pattern.
"They have their own sound.
"It's similar, if you listen to people
"around you in a restaurant.
"They're distinctive, like when your partner
"or boss talks to you, you know the sound of their voice
"and can tell them apart from other people.
"This is the same with my voices.
"I can tell most of them apart when they talk."
There are a lot of misconceptions about DID,
which I think makes it harder to understand.
For example, I hear from a lot of people
that they think DID means
we have like complete alter egos,
like different personalities,
like a whole different person is coming forward
and acting on my behalf.
Almost like I don't have any say or choice in the matter.
But DID is more like I'm split into parts.
I think we can all kind of agree
that the me that shows up for work to be a therapist
is different than the me that meets my girlfriends
out for drinks on a Saturday night.
Or let's say I'm really frustrated,
I've had like a total shit day,
that person, like agitated Katie, is gonna be different
than like sitting watching my favorite show,
gotten everything done I needed to get done that day, right?
Those emotional states can even be different.
And I like to think of DID like that,
because these different parts of myself,
irritated Katie, or like protective Katie,
and more passive Katie, or work Katie, right?
Those are all kind of parts of who I am.
And these different alters or personalities
are often just like those different parts.
It's just that one part will kind of be the front runner
or the one that's leading the charge.
Now, later in that same blog post,
the author writes, "A major thing at home
"is doing things I don't remember,
"moving things in the house, getting blamed for things,
"receiving groceries I don't remember ordering,
"and regularly changing what I'm doing.
"I mean, I have to tape most TV shows
"because I would miss too much if I didn't.
"For example, 15 minutes into a show,
"I may find myself up walking to the laundry
"because a voice remembered the washing.
"No sooner as the washing hung out
"than I'm in the kitchen putting the kettle on.
"Next, I'm back in the lounge to rewind
"and watch what I missed on the show.
"But then 10 minutes later, I'm back up
"because the other voice wants the cup of coffee.
"That's just a typical dysfunctional day,
"and it's very exhausting."
It's these gaps in memories
that I find make DID really debilitating.
And the reason many of my patients
have reached out for help for it.
Imagine not knowing what you've done at work, or at school,
or what've said in your relationships.
Imagine coming to and being in a totally different place.
and you have no idea how you've gotten there.
I can't tell you how many of you and my patients
have told me they'll sometimes like wake up driving a car.
That's so terrifying, not to mention just exhausting.
If we don't know what we've done or not done,
and we keep redoing or sending that same email,
people can think we're losing our minds
and it can feel that way,
and I find this component, that second diagnostic criteria,
the gaps in memory to be the most debilitating.
It's also important to know that DID
is primarily due to trauma, especially childhood trauma,
which makes sense if we think about it
because when we're traumatized as children,
we often can't fight back or get away from our abusers.
So we go into the only other option, our free state,
and we know trauma's born out of that free state, right?
Now freezing can cause us to disassociate,
as a way of getting through the trauma,
without having to be fully present.
That's why I call it our brain pulling the ripcord
because it kind of gives us the space between ourselves
and what's happening so that we're almost
like outside of our bodies, watching something take place
versus being present in our bodies, feeling it, right?
It gives us some distance between what's happening
and the pain that we're feeling in the moment.
And just to offer another example of how DID can feel,
here's a comment from our community
about their personal experience with DID.
And they share,
"Living with this disorder is incredibly hard.
"We have good days, and then bad days.
"Days I can't recall important information,
"and I've ended up in strange places and panicked.
"It has destroyed relationships around me.
"Some were toxic, but others not so bad.
"And these alters or personalities I was unaware of
"until about two years ago.
"After a stay in the hospital
"and a therapist finally followed up
"with correct medications for my symptoms.
"We feel that we might get somewhere,
"but some of my alters are older.
"I have a child, and a male.
"And day to day it's a struggle figuring
"between who's fronting, et cetera.
"And I could go on and on,
"but dissociative identity disorder is incredibly hard,
"but it has also saved my life at times
"from the abuse that we've been through."
Now, you can see how these symptoms,
especially the struggles with cohesive memory
can make it very difficult to live the life that we want.
And that's why it's so important to find ways
to better manage it.
And with that, let's jump into four tools
that can help us better manage our DID.
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My first tip is to identify the triggers
that cause us to switch personality states or alters.
This way, we can be prepared with coping skills
ahead of time to kind of calm our nervous system.
Now, these coping skills may even distract us enough
so that we don't switch when it's not convenient for us,
like maybe during a presentation at work
or something like that.
And this can help us stay present
and in control of what we say and do
during an argument, or during a stressful test, for example.
Knowing what to look out for ahead of time
gives us those important minutes to take action
before our DID symptoms take over.
My second tip is to learn a few grounding techniques.
If we can feel our alter or voices coming on,
maybe we feel, I don't know,
like a sense of overwhelm or anxiety.
Maybe our palms get really sweaty,
we may wanna go in the bathroom really quick
and splash some cold water on our face,
or try to count colors in the room.
And the way that we do this is just by looking around
and counting how many things in the room are brown,
and then black and blue, et cetera.
And a similar method I like is also the alphabet game,
where we look around trying to find something
that starts with the letter A,
and then we move on to the letter B, and C, and so on.
Doing anything that keeps us present
will help us better manage our DID.
My third tip is the use of medication.
Since DID and other dissociative disorders
often don't happen on their own,
like for example, DID often a accompanies PTSD
which could also come along with anxiety or depression
or any other slew of mental illnesses,
a medication to help treat those other mental illnesses
may be to your benefit.
So if this is of interest to you,
talk to your psychiatrist and see if medication
could help you on your path to recovery.
And my fourth and final tip is to work with a therapist,
and if possible, one who's a trauma specialist.
Most trauma specialists understand DID
because a lot of what they do is helping people work
through trauma that has caused us
to develop symptoms of dissociation,
which DID is a dissociative disorder, right?
So a mental health professional overall can help us
better process that past trauma or whatever the cause was.
Again, getting to kind of the root of the root.
I've talked about this in the past
that we can sometimes treat--
Let's say it's a plant, right, that we're talking about.
We're gonna treat kind of the things that we see,
maybe the flowers and the leaves that are above ground,
but really we know for any of my gardeners out there
if you just like cut a weed off, it'll grow right back.
If you don't pull the root out.
And the same goes with a lot of mental illnesses
and a lot of trauma-based mental illnesses.
If we don't dig down and figure out what the root of it is,
and pull that root out, process it, figure out what it is,
where it came from, how we can stop it from happening again,
it will just keep growing back.
And so, finding a therapist
who not only understands dissociative disorders,
but also trauma can help us actually dig into that root,
pull it out so that we can move forward,
without any undesirable symptoms.
In general, there's a lot of misinformation
out there about DID.
And I want you all to know
that everyone's experience is going to be different.
And from my patients and other members of our community,
who have told me about theirs,
this switching isn't often so abrupt or noticeable,
it can be often very internal experience.
Just like the blog post I was reading
about the person saying it was a voice in their head
and they just all of a sudden popped up,
helped them feel calm, on they went with their day.
That could be your experience too,
which is why it's really important
that we don't just look out into media and online resources
to figure out if we have it or not.
We're gonna need to see a professional
to ensure that we get properly diagnosed and treated.
I hope you found this video helpful.
As always, if you think I missed something,
or you wanna share your own experience with DID,
please feel free to do so down in those comments below,
and I have other videos
about dissociation you can check out.
I hope that's helpful, thank you so much for watching,
and I will see you next time.
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