genuinely wondering, why do you—someone who does not claim to have DID, OSDD(1-4) or any other dissociative disorder—speak on them so much?
you claim you're a tulpa. whatever. i'm not trying to argue the validity of that. i just want to point out that what you are saying you experience is so emphatically different from a CDD, and yet you still speak on CDDs/the possibility of an endogenic CDD experience. why is that?
forgive me if i'm wrong in what labels you claim. i skimmed your recent feed & your pinned post & didn't do a deep dive—if you are claiming DID, feel free to ignore this ask. however: all i see is you, sophie, saying that you are a tulpa. and then speaking about dissociative disorders. does that not seem a little iffy to you?
you may be plural, sure. i'm not arguing that you believe you are experiencing plurality. but why are you—someone who isn't claiming to have DID or any other CDD—discussing disordered systemhood with the level of toxicity that you're using?
idk i'm just confused. what authority do you have to tell pwDID that they need to accept anything—when you are not a pwDID or a doctor?
Because if I don't, then who will?
Actually, that question has a pretty clear answer. That being people who are less informed.
I am not an expert. I do not claim to be or present myself as such. All I am is somebody who has an interest in plurality of all sorts, a blog, a pretty good handling on how to use a search engine to find the information I'm looking for, and the free time to read academic papers and share them with others.
I don't have a dissociative disorder. I can't tell you what it's like to experience one firsthand. At the same time, I have at least taught myself enough to see that a lot of what the CDD community passes around as scientific facts are closer to urban legends. Especially among fakeclaimers and those perpetuating pluralphobia.
If I learn something in my research that can help people with dissociative disorders, then I think that I have a responsibility to share it. Regardless of whether I have that disorder or not.
Take for example the popular myth that internal communication requires years of therapy and minors won't know if they have alters.
In my research, I found an article comparing voice hearing in schizophrenia versus dissociative identity disorder, and what that study showed was that a majority of DID systems experience voice hearing before the age of 18. They might not have recognized it as DID at the time. But the symptoms were present since childhood.
That same article also talked about how other hallucinatory experiences were actually more common in dissociative identity disorder than in schizophrenia.
Studies like these aren't common knowledge. But by spreading the results around, I was able to help dispel myths about dissociative identity disorder with an actual source. Myths that have been used to fakeclaim and hurt systems.
What if I hadn't posted that? What if I knew that the study existed but chose to remain silent about it because I don't have a dissociative disorder myself and decided that I shouldn't speak on it?
Would that have been preferable?
If somebody is fakeclaimed and they have read that study, they can know that the fakeclaimers are wrong. That the fakeclaimers are spreading misinformation and lies. If I said nothing, then maybe they would believe the fakeclaimers, and when they encountered those lies, it would send them into a derealization spiral, causing them to question their own system.
That's something that would have been preventable had I chosen to speak out about what I knew.
Maybe I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. But the actual psychologists and psychiatrists don't really have the time to be spreading correct information to the public because they are actually doing the research and helping patients directly.
And in the absence of actual psychologists and psychiatrists who could the spread correct and accurate information, we have armchair experts who have never read a single study in their life.
Or, in the case of dissociative-misinfo... Have read exactly one study in their life, which they use to fakeclaim systems and spread the myth of this vast number of people who are faking dissociative identity disorder. While also making just the most ridiculous claims, like saying that people with OSDD are not systems.
And in the absence of truth, more people will believe the lies and spread them.
Finally, you mentioned endogenic CDDs.
To me, this is as much about encouraging a culture of questioning as it is about the CDDs specifically.
Most doctors will never say it's impossible to have a CDD without having trauma. They will say that a CDD is heavily associated with trauma. They will say that it is virtually always caused by trauma. They will use a lot of words while acknowledging that they can't know for certain if this is caused by trauma 100% of the time. Because they can't know that. Because actual scientists are aware that there are limitations on what they can study and what they can prove.
Upwards of 90% of DID cases are associated with trauma.
That's a lot. That's more than most other disorders. And it is definitely possible that the remaining percentage are just cases where people have forgotten their trauma. That's absolutely a valid position.
At least... Until you start treating that as objective fact.
Sometimes in life, there just isn't going to be an answer where you know for certain. There is just no way to confirm for a fact that the cases of DID where trauma isn't reported is actually because the trauma is forgotten as opposed to not being there at all.
Science isn't religion. It's not dogma. And those that treat it as such are dangerous. Those who will hear a statement about how dissociative identity disorder is currently understood as a post-traumatic response and interpret that as saying that it is 100% scientifically impossible for somebody to have a dissociative disorder without trauma are of deep concern to me.
Not just because of how they view the science on dissociative disorders, but how they view science in general. If there's one thing that I think that people need to take away from this blog, it's that science is ever-changing. Our understanding of the world around us is going to be different in a decade than it is today.
When my host was a child, Pluto was a planet and velociraptors didn't have feathers.
You have to be open to the fact that nothing about our understanding of science is set in stone. This is a hill that I will gladly die on.
And I think it's equally important to think critically about how much of what we believe has actually been tested. Because some things scientists believe haven't been.
I mentioned the association between DID and trauma, but let me also mention that there are no similar studies with Partial DID. It's too new of a diagnosis. There have also been no studies into the trauma association of OSDD-1 without amnesia to see if the trauma association would be just as high as DID.
Without that critical research, it's possible that the association is primarily related to DID's amnesia symptom, and CDDs without amnesia wouldn't be as heavily associated with trauma.
It's currently an assumption that OSDD-1 without amnesia would be just as associated with trauma, but that assumption hasn't been tested.
And I think it's important to drive home that people need to be really careful about trusting assumptions like this when the studies haven't actually been conducted.
This is, again, not just about CDDs. It's about how we, as a culture, view science as a whole. It's about fostering open-mindedness rather than accepting our current understanding of things as dogma set in stone.
