Has it ever happened to you that, upon telling someone you have DID, they suddenly 'developed' it too? I've heard from a lot of people with DID who this has happened to. Do you know why this happens?
I want to start out by saying that this post is likely to be triggering as we’re discussing a sensitive issue. This subject could trigger feelings of denial and doubt.
I think sometimes this happens because most people have the wrong idea of what it means to have DID. I think just about everyone with DID has had the experience of having a singlet saying something dismissive like “Well doesn’t everyone sort of have multiple personalities? I’m a completely different person at work than I am at home.” And there is actually some truth to that. Everyone does have multiple parts of self, but we have dissociated parts of self and that is the key difference.
I think sometimes friends of people with DID can get confused and think that their non-dissociated parts of self are the same thing as having dissociated parts of self. So I think people not understanding exactly what DID is and then relating to their DID friend’s experiences is probably the most common reason.
I know this is a controversial and sensitive opinion, but when DID spreads through a social group I do think you have to at least consider the possibility of factitious disorder. Sometimes people do receive more care and attention from their friends when they have a mental illness and that can be hard for others in the social group who want that care and attention as well. I don’t think this is a particularly common problem, but I think it is something that sometimes happens.
Another possible reason is that sometimes people don’t “develop” DID after learning that their friend has DID, they finally have the right words to put to their experiences, or they finally start to realize some things out about themselves.
People tend to sort of gravitate towards other people who are similar to them, sometimes in ways that they don’t even understand or expect. For example, I was friends with a lot of “odd” “quirky” kids in high school. I never really knew what we had in common except that we were sort of the weird kids that didn’t really fit in anywhere else. It was the early 2000s in a rural area. I thought most of us were straight and cisgender, “trans” wasn’t really even in our vocab yet. Well nearly 20 years later, guess what? Even though none of us were talking about it back then, everyone that I was friends with back in high school is out of the closet now. All of us are LGBTQ+.
Sometimes I think maybe being traumatized is or mentally ill is a little bit like that. We gravitate towards each other even if we don’t know why. My partner and my two closest friends are trauma survivors. I didn’t know that when I met them. It’s not like I screen my friends and go “Hello, nice to meet you, were you traumatized in early childhood?” but somehow we find each others.
So it wasn’t a huge surprise when my partner found a ton of stuff from Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation relatable and had a lot of questions about whether or not she could possibly have OSDD. Somehow it was a surprise when my best friend told me that she might be a part of a dissociative system, but in hindsight it shouldn’t have been. When she told me, it was like everything that hadn’t made sense before suddenly made sense and I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.
Having experienced both a friend who suddenly “developed” DID after I disclosed my diagnosis to them, and a friend who realized she had DID because of her friendship with me, I can tell you that it was a very different experience.
In the first case, my friend’s behavior dramatically changed after he decided that he had DID. I didn’t recognize his “alters” at all. I had never seen them in his past behavior. They were strangers. None of it made sense. It was like interacting with TV tropes.
In the second case, very little of my friend’s behavior changed. All that changed was that I had names to attach to behavior that I’d seen in the past. Every time I met another alter I felt like I was just putting a name to someone I’d already known for a while, and it was like all the pieces were falling into place. Things started making more and more sense. Of course the dynamic of our friendship shifted a little and there was some adjustment, but my friends were still there.
So yeah... There are my three explanations for why that happens sometimes. Sometimes its legit and sometimes it isn’t. As always, please remember it’s never okay to “witch hunt” or call people out if you think someone is “faking” DID. If you think someone isn’t being truthful about having DID, just don’t interact with them.
