One of the alters, she was just so...
she wanted to hurt herself and us,
and she would try and burn me.
She would try and jump off a bridge, all this sort of stuff.
And that happened right up until I was diagnosed.
My friends had to restrain me
every time we came up to this footbridge
because she would fight them,
run and try and leap off of it every single time.
[BEN] Can you explain what DID is?
So DID stands for dissociative identity disorder
and it means that the identity or personality as a whole
has been fragmented.
So my confident side, or whatever, say,
has been separated from me and I don't remember that,
and she's her own personality.
They all collectively make my body, which we call a system.
So each member of the system has to work together
to make the machine work perfectly, like cogs in a system,
and alters make up the single members of each system.
The only idea that I had about
what this was, was split personality.
I'd heard that from Jekyll and Hyde,
just a movie I'd seen as a kid,
and this doctor with this evil side,
that one is so nice and innocent,
the other one is a murderer, he's gonna kill you.
And that's why I was convinced
that I had this evil side of me,
'cause she was so mean to my friends,
she would hurt my friends.
She would try and hurt me.
[BEN] When did you first realise there was a difference between you and other kids?
In my teenage years,
I noticed that I was losing a lot of time
and that I just couldn't remember
what was happening in classes
and by then I had all these people, my friends,
coming up to me and saying that I'd said this to them.
I'd called them this name, I'd been really horrible to them
or I'd stolen something
or I'd hit them or something, you know?
And I had no memory of it whatsoever.
And I just refused to believe that that was true.
I just refused to believe
that I was doing these things to them,
but then they would film it
or they would... like, other people that I would trust,
like, teachers would tell me, 'Yeah, you said that,'
or, 'Yeah, that happened.'
And that's when I start to realise
that something was going on - that I couldn't remember
or even know what was happening.
[BEN] What was your first memory of having alters?
I was definitely a loner as a kid.
I had a lot of imaginary friends
that, looking back at it now, are probably alters.
They were real to me as a child.
Even my family would say that I looked like
I was, like, talking to a ghost or something
because I just could see them, I could hear them.
They were so vivid as a child that I just spent all my time
in my head playing with these imaginary friends.
They started to turn around and tell me that this...
whoever was speaking out of me when I was blacking out
had a name, had an age, had personality,
had feelings and had thoughts and opinions.
And I thought I was just blacking out
and that I was either, like, falling asleep,
like, narcolepsy or something,
or that I just didn't remember it.
But the fact that people were telling me
that I was doing things...
Yeah, I just couldn't believe it.
[BEN] Would you mind taking us through how many alters you have?
I've seen before that you've talked about having a main... eight, is it?
Yeah, it was roughly about eight to 10
of them that come out.
There's me, obviously, Bo, the host.
I deal with most day-to-day life.
If you meet me, you're probably gonna meet me.
Then there is Texas, as I mentioned before,
she was around from as young as I can remember.
She believes she's a vampire from the 1920s.
We think so that she's completely distant from my family,
that she doesn't have to be related to them
or even connected to them.
She has her own family back then.
And she's very mean, very stoic, very opinionated.
There's Tracy, who's very confident.
She would go drinking, go out in very skimpy clothes.
Kiss random people.
Yeah, I would just run off on a night out
and my friends would have to find her.
There's Toast - don't know where the name comes from.
He's a teenage boy.
He likes video games, likes to swear,
likes to be boisterous.
There's Layla, who is a six-year-old.
She's forever six, refuses to be seen as a woman.
She loves Easter, loves childish things.
I am not a very, like, openly emotional person.
I might cry or be like that,
but I won't get angry
or start screaming or...
You know, I very rarely get, like, elated.
I'll just be kind of content in myself,
whereas those alters,
they kind of take those emotions and release them,
especially anger.
I don't get angry.
I kind of bottle all of my emotions in,
which then kind of bubbles and bubbles
and then Rosie will come out and just start smashing stuff.
It's her job to get that anger out.
So she just will punch things
and throw things and all sorts.
[BEN] Can you tell us what a switch between alters looks like?
So in my experience,
from the outside,
it can either look like I've fully passed out
and dropped my head down to the ground.
Or it can look like nothing.
It can just look like a blink.
I can be sat here right now
and then just blink and it would be somebody else
and you wouldn't even know.
I think that's kind of the same with a lot of systems -
you can either notice it or you can't at all.
It's very noticeable or not at all.
In terms of what it feels like,
it feels like falling asleep.
That's why I always thought that I was passing out.
That, you know, few minutes before you pass out,
when you go to sleep, you know, you don't remember it.
You start to, like, go fuzzy,
that weird feeling of your body,
like going in and out of consciousness.
It feels like that.
But then that final moment, when you drift off,
instead of me dropping to the floor asleep,
somebody else would start talking.
[BEN] What would trigger a switch?
So mainly it is either triggers,
like, say, positive or negative triggers
that can cause a switch,
which can be anything from a threat, to screaming,
to a car going past,
to anything that triggers off my PTSD response
of 'I'm in danger' can cause a switch,
but also in the opposite sense of something
that is so vividly linked to another alter,
like a smell or a flavour or something visual,
that can bring them forward.
But it can happen up to, like, a couple of times a day,
up to, like, a couple of times a week, to none for a month.
You know, it can be anything.
It just, yeah, depends on the triggers that are around you.
If I spend a whole month in my house
and then nothing's happening,
then nothing will probably happen.
Whereas if I'm out in London, say, it might cause more
because there's so many more things
or new triggers or whatever.
Sometimes I can try and, like, fight it off.
Like if you're fighting to stay awake, you know,
you can keep your eyes open
and you can keep pushing your head back up
if you are dozing off,
but eventually you might pass out, you know?
But it's exhausting.
Like, if I am ever fighting it,
I'd get really, really spaced out.
I just get really, really tired.
It's, like, a mental strain
to try and keep yourself consciously here.
[BEN] What causes DID?
So most people believe that...
Like, I don't wanna say anything definitively,
but most people believe that DID
is caused by repeated childhood trauma,
which can be anything from mass disasters,
to a murder in your family,
to childhood abuse, to anything
as long as it's repeated childhood trauma.
[BEN] Do you know you’ve had trauma because it has been described to you by somebody?
Yes and no.
Like, I have the weirdest memory that I know it happened
and I know what happened,
but I don't remember how many times
or how often or what ages.
I just remember that it was routine
and that that was the normal for me as a child.
It's definitely scary,
like, knowing that I've had trauma and that I don't remember
a lot of my childhood, that it could have been anything.
[BEN] Can you talk us through how your teenage years were after leaving school?
Well, the majority of it happened
in, like, secondary school.
That's when it all kind of kicked off with them
just doing things, talking to my friends.
One of the main issues with it was that one of the alters,
she was just so...
she wanted to hurt herself and us,
and she would try and burn me.
She would try and jump off a bridge, all this sort of stuff.
And that happened right up until I was diagnosed.
Yeah, every time I would come to this footbridge,
she would always desperately try and claw herself off of it.
And to the point where my friends had to restrain me
every time we came up to this footbridge,
because she would fight them, run and try and leap off of it
every single time.
[BEN] Is that alter still present?
Yeah, so she's around.
She's been around the longest, I think.
She's got, like, high delusions
to think that she's not part of my family.
As a teenager, I used to burn me all the time.
I'd come to, all the time, with my hand under a hot tap,
and have to yank it away before it would burn.
[BEN] Was it a relief to be diagnosed?
When I got the diagnosis,
I was like, 'Oh my God, this makes sense.
This is incredible.
All these things that have been happening to me for years,
I know what they are now.
I'm not gonna kill anybody.'
You know, it's nice having somebody turn around and go,
'You know you're not crazy, this is a real thing,
and it's happened because you had a bad life.'
And then...
but then you turn around and you go, 'Oh God, no,
but that means that I have had a bad life
and I have got this disorder,' you know.
If somebody turns around and says,
'You have a very severe trauma-based disorder,'
then you know that you've been through that.
And I think a lot of people,
especially on social media nowadays,
seem to think that it's lots of fun
and that it's friends in your head
and that it's... pick and choose cool alters, you know?
Yeah, they seem quirky and cool,
like, a vampire and a trendy 19-year-old or whatever,
but I don't know anything about them.
I don't know what's happening when they're out.
I'm not gaining any of the good parts
of them being forward, per se.
[BEN] Is there actually a cure or medical way of dealing with DID?
So...
Yeah, so there's two main ways of coping with DID.
The main one that everybody knows is integration or fusion,
which is working through a lot of trauma,
working through a lot of therapy to realise
why you have these alters, what traumas they hold,
and then fusing them into one big personality
as a whole final person,
as what this human was supposed to be.
Or you can live functional multiplicity.
So you can learn to work as a team, learn to communicate,
learn to share time, learn to, yeah, work as a team
for whatever you need to do at your job,
or be a parent or whatever.
You know, you learn to do that as a whole group
instead of kicking the rest of them out and working as one.
The idea of switching and letting go and letting them out
is so scary to me because of everything that's happened.
But I don't know if I wanna just get rid of them all.
I think I probably do eventually,
but I'm not at that stage yet.
'Cause I don't remember. A lot of systems if they switch,
they might remember,
or they might have a little bit of memory leak through,
or at least know where they were,
or who was out or something like that.
But because mine is so completely black-out,
I need to build up that communication first
before I can even think about getting rid of them.
If I was to fuse,
it would probably be all of them kind of fusing into me
and I would have all of their memories.
I'd have all of their personalities.
So I'd have Toast's boisterousness or Tracy's confidence
or Texas' mean edge... you know, that would all be in me
as one human.
[BEN] What advice would you give somebody else thinking, 'I think that's me'?
To not be scared, I guess. That was one of the things
that really affected me, that I was just terrified of it.
To get as much support as you can,
to get as much information down as you can.
I think I'm quite blessed in the fact that mine
will sit and record a video,
which is very easy to get the information across.
Whereas it might not be that easy for other people.
[BEN] What does the future look like for you?
I'm hoping to go to uni.
I hope to be a parent eventually.
Yeah, I worried before that this might be a problem.
You know, if I had an evil side,
would they try and murder my baby?
But I've seen now that it's not the case at all -
that people with DID can be incredible parents.
Like, loving parents as a team,
and that it's not gonna be something that stops me
from going to uni or becoming a parent.