Drew showed up to therapy today and told our therapist they don’t think they have DID and asked her how you know if someone has DID. So my therapist pulled up a list of symptoms that are assessed for on the MID and started reading them out to them. And Drew admitted that they do think we experience a lot of those things, but that they don’t experience the feeling of “waking up” somewhere and not knowing how you got there. Our therapist pushed back a bit about how she’s seen switches during sessions where parts needed to be oriented to what was happening, and Drew was like, well but they know where they are.
So Drew was like, okay so. I remember all of yesterday. No gaps. I know what happened in the day. But also I had a lot of mood swings that kind of came out of the blue. Were those other parts? Or were those just moods? When you remember what’s happening, how do you know what’s a mood and what’s a part? And our therapist explained that generally emotions follow a bell curve. They build up, they hit a peak, and then they lessen. She said that feelings don’t just appear out of nowhere. She said that in non-dissociative people, that’s not a thing. Emotions don’t come from nowhere and that that it’s not typical to jump from a high level of anxiety to suddenly a high level of anger to suddenly a high level of sadness. She said that’s not how emotions work in people who aren’t dissociative.
So she said what Drew was describing, those aren’t mood swings. They didn’t just go from feeling calm and full of mastery in a work meeting to feeling enraged and hoping that no one would talk to us because we felt murdery. She was like, that’s another part. Even though you remember it all, that’s another part. And they’re stuck in a high level of anger so whenever they show up, that high level of anger is there with them. And you can tell it’s a switch because there was no bell curve. You didn’t come down from one emotion and then go up to another one. You’re just hopping from peak to peak and not having come downs or build ups and that’s not the anatomy of an emotion.
All of us listening in were really shocked to hear this. My therapist said that when people talk about mood swings or about going from 0-100, it doesn’t work the way I’m describing it. She said she has her BPD clients track their moods because then they can learn to identify the build up of the bell curve. But she said that doesn’t work for us because sometimes there genuinely is no build up and that’s how we can tell that it’s either influence from another part or a switch. But either way it’s a parts thing.
I think it’s probably more nuanced than this because I think triggers can result in a 0-100 emotional response, but I guess in the case of trauma triggers that’s probably all connected to some level of structural dissociation, even if you’re just activating one emotional part for someone with PTSD. It’s still like a structurally dissociated response I guess?
Kind of confusing to me but I did talk to my wife about it. She agreed that she experiences her emotions on a bell curve and she told me that that’s why we don’t understand her experience of just needing to ride out her emotions. She rides the wave of the bell curve and then the emotion settles. She said for us we don’t ride that wave because it’s either a part who’s stuck in the experience of one emotion because that’s their role (so therefore it’s staying at a high intensity for a long period), or because we just switch to another part who feels something else. She said it’s very disorienting for her how we go from extremely upset to extremely calm in one second and then act like nothing happened. She said it’s not a normal experience of emotions lol.
So anyway I guess we do have DID and I learned a fuck ton about emotions wow. So I dunno, I guess if any of my lovelies here are experiencing denial of like “are they just emotions or are they parts” maybe do some observation and investigation about whether your emotions rise and fall like a bell curve or if you’re jumping sporadically between emotions (including being numb) with no bell curve and/or no clear external trigger. If you have abrupt mood states hitting for no clear reason, like you were fine a second ago and now you’re really grumpy and agitated, that’s probably part activity. Because strong emotions don’t just “appear” for no reason with no build up, but parts certainly can just appear like that with their baseline moods intact! Good way to notice passive influence as well as co-conscious switches.
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