love being a fictive but i also kind of hate it. like hey you werent real before. you are now though. and you have to deal with so much bullshit. you can never go back. you may never fully feel like yourself ever again. maybe you wont ever get over it. maybe you dont want to go back. maybe it would be worse but you still want to. maybe anything would be better than this. maybe you deserved it all, just because you said that. everybody knows you. nobody knows you at all. close your eyes. open them and look at photos of the place you were ripped away from. be thankful for the people who are stuck here with you. try not to think about the ones you left behind. and most importantly, do not ever talk about your identity with any degree of seriousness and never refer to yourself as yourself, or else.
i aint lookin for nothin i followed the tag for mario idk nothin about whatever all this be its just all up in my face all i be seein so what that? Nothing to do with it
Hi! I wanted to ask something in regards to switching, but this may be a weird question so feel free to skip. This also might be long... Would you know or have an idea if blackout switches or switches in general get limited while in an I guess 'unsafe' environment?
For context, we're questioning plurality (or at least which label we'd be) and initially suspected OSDD-1B since we're all distinct, but don't switch too often and have basic memory of what happened when we do most of the time. When we first considered ourselves plural, it was actually really good and felt like it cleared up some mental mess, and recognised switches would happen pretty consistently over the few weeks, although I, the host, would still be in the most. A stressful and upsetting event happened after though, in which I carry the stress of the body I guess, and would basically be on my own with occasionally others co conning. Things are slowly getting a little better for the moment, and more switches are coming back, but events like this happen pretty frequently.
Context aside, I took the DES-II test and the plural association My Am I Plural test, which suggested possible DID or P-DID moreso than OSDD. Watching a few videos from a plural creator, they suggested that switches and switch amnesia/blackouts are more likely to occur once in a safe environment, hence how people figure out they are plural later down the line. This has had me thinking that we may have DID instead, but don't completely show that due to our environment we're kind of stuck in. Obviously these cant diagnose us, its mostly as support. The reason I'm even sending this ask is because I haven't seen many people aside from that creator talk about it, and was wondering if maybe you would know anything about it, or have an opinion on the idea?
Sorry, this is probably something to save for a professional, but we don't have access to one right now. Thank you!
I've got a few different responses to this.
Depends on the System:
The tricky thing about switching and amnesia is that every system experiences them a little differently. Even within the medical construct of DID, I've met folks who switch more under stress, folks who switch less, and everything in-between and beyond.
The same goes for memory issues. Some folks find that their memory completely locks down to protect them from an unsafe living situation- you can't be upset by what you don't remember. Some folks find that they can remember what happened to them while in the unsafe environment, only to lose those memories once they reach safety. Some folks don't notice these things changing at all. Some folks notice them change without any significant life event leading up to that change.
I do think it's safe to say that a change in your life situation or environment could change how your system functions- it would be odd if nothing ever changed in your group to respond to your environment. People put on coats to handle the cold and take them off in the heat. Systems often change (consciously or unconsciously) to handle their environments too. They don't always, but they can.
Possible Misinterpreted Reference:
The "more blackouts happen in safe environments" thing you saw might be a very sideways reference to a common clinical finding that seems to crop up in many of the DID papers we dig up.
A lot of DID literature agrees that the most common DID presentation is a covert one- only a minority of diagnosed cases are overt (meaning: obviously plural, with dramatic shifts in behavior, visible switching, "someone else took over my body", etc.). I did some quick web searching and I saw 5% thrown around as the proportion for overt DID cases a lot, but I'm actually unable to find anyone claiming this figure that cites a source, so take it with a massive grain of salt until we can track that down.
Some papers on DID will also note that some systems have a "window of diagnosability" where their presentation becomes obvious or overt enough to successfully diagnose them with DID. This window can happen after a lot of things, but I often see a few specific examples being tossed out there. Moving out of an abusive home or relationship is one of those examples, as is having a child reach the age of your own trauma (or any other trauma triggers that dredge up forgotten events).
Keep in mind that the last two paragraphs apply specifically to folks with a DID diagnosis who make it to a Western mental health clinician, are diagnosed with DID, and report an event that led them to seek medical support. That inherently biases the sample somewhat- that's going to be a population that aligns with some pretty specific plural experiences, as well as one that's able to find trauma-informed and dissociation-informed clinicians (which can take a while- there's a paper that threw out that DID systems spend an average of 6-12 years in the psychiatric system before getting a DID diagnosis. I know we linked it in a previous post somewhere).
It's also pretty common for any diagnosis to subjectively feel like it's gotten "worse" or more prevalent after noticing it or getting diagnosed with it- once you're aware that it's happening, it seems to happen constantly. It might actually be happening more than before, but it's also entirely possible that the only change was how much attention you pay to these experiences.
This is Incredibly Messy:
It gets even messier when you consider that amnesia for amnesia is pretty common for dissociative amnesia. You forget that you forgot. Sometimes, you stumble into evidence and remember that you forgot something ("hold on, what did you say happened yesterday?"). Sometimes, without the right stimulus, you may never notice the gap exists at all.
It's part of why dissociative amnesia (and DID, by proxy) can be hard to diagnose, from what I've gathered- the person may not remember that they're forgetting anything! Some clinical tests for dissociation try to account for this by adding a scale that tries to assess whether you're underestimating or overestimating the frequency/intensity of your experiences. If someone is denying a lot of common, normative dissociative experiences, then it's possible that they're also denying a less normative experience of dissociation. It's an attempt, at least, but this is a hard area to assess.
I'm not saying that you have any "forgotten" missing time like this, but I am pointing out that measuring changes in amnesia, blackout switching, etc. is surprisingly difficult to do from a subjective standpoint. Even from the outside, this is hard to detect in many cases, and the existing metrics are okay but they ultimately still rely on you figuring out that something is missing. That can be pure happenstance sometimes.
And another nod to doubt:
I get the sense that you're (to some extent) doubting your own experiences because you haven't seen them discussed much, or that you're looking for some form of confirmation, validation, etc. so that you can believe yourselves about your own life experiences.
No one else can ever make you believe that you are experiencing what you are experiencing. People may be able to offer some advice or tooling to help you figure things out for yourself, but doubt and denial won't go anywhere if you don't do something about them.
Very few plural experiences are talked about in public, easily-found spaces to begin with. There's a loud public majority with some experiences in common, but there are also many, many, many plural folks out there whose experiences aren't as spoken about. The minority is quiet. The minoritiy's minority is even quieter.
If you want a good example of what I'm trying to get at here: go to #plural (or your tag of choice) and tell me how many non-white systems you can find in the first few pages. Tell me how many systems you see rejecting the need to label themselves. Tell me how many systems you can find experiencing spiritual cohabitation or possession outside of the "many worlds" theory. Look at who you are seeing, and take a second to ask who you're not seeing. I can almost guarantee you that some system out there has a similar experience to yours but isn't talking about it where you can see it.
There are probably some experiences that you will never, ever see someone else talk about. That doesn't mean you're not having the experience; it means that no one is talking about it. You can start that conversation if you'd like to. We'd never seen another system like us until we talked about it here, and now we have.
system advice: stop focusing on how you think your structure should work. pay attention to how it naturally works.
all you are doing by trying to force yourselves into a shape you do not occupy is hurting yourself.
so much of life is messy, random, abnormal, even strange. you cannot psychically force life into fitting your opinion of how things should run. you have to start somewhere, and "somewhere" is what you already have.
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