#did.log

[merisms]

hey !! do you have any tips for starting system mapping ? my therapist has told me the basics, but i'm stuck on exactly how to organize it all v_v

thank u in advance if u reply, wishing the best for you 💫

My suggestion is ask yourself what makes the most sense for you and what you're struggling with.

Eg: if you frequently have trauma parts that cause day to day disruptions with adult tasks, you might track those parts and parts that work well with them (caretaker/protector/etc) first. Your initial system mapping might look something like "trauma parts" "protectors/caretakers" "other", with notes on who works well with who and what things help calm them down.

Some people do visual maps of their inner world, but that would probably be useless to someone who doesn't have a very visual overview of their inner world. Other people organize by timeframe, others organize by location, etc.

Once you have that figured out for what makes the most sense for you, then you can decide what details would be useful for you to include. This is Also dependent on your issues and what you find useful. Examples would be parts more likely to self harm, parts who have eating issues, parts who handle adult tasks better than others, specific triggers a part has, etc.

If you are having a hard time deciphering what is a new separate part vs an old part just having an off day, I personally just write down the trigger and the symptoms and track it that way without assigning those things to any specific part.

If you need a specific site/app to play around with, you could try SimplyPlural which lets you have folders and other organizational methods and is parts-focused, or @lighthouse-app which is more journalling focused and is encrypted. Alternately, regular journal, spreadsheet/digital document like Word or Google Docs, or journalling apps like Daylio, Daybook, Notion, etc.

Sorry if this was really vague, so much of it just ultimately depends on what makes sense to you and for your own issues.

[merisms]

Happened upon a book published in 1991 on DID, talking about different presentations based on abuse type and dissociative ability.

[merisms]

@zettelkaestchen I am not sure what you mean by contradicting studies?

They generally gather participants who openly identified as endogenic in some way, and either survey them or put them through some psychological testing.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00938/full

This one I've had saved and it found that the participants who ID'd as endogenic or otherwise not-DID/OSDD multiple either fit DID/OSDD criteria, fit some other dissociative disorder, or had identity disturbance issues.

[merisms]

how do you decide what is a good study?

I'll try to elaborate more after finals week is over but essentially:

1) use CRAAP test. Eliminates most problems people get when doing surface level research. Like I said before anything 10+ years old is considered outdated, some fields it's 5+ years old.

2) understand rules in research. Ethics in research prevents scientists from studying certain things so you will not find studies done in laboratories about it, for example. Also super important here: if other studies cannot replicate it, it is Extremely Questionable. This is why when I cite stuff I offer multiple sources, because some dude publishing a paper with wild results that somehow nobody can do again is bad science.

3) understand basic principles in research. If a study's sample size is 50 people or only college age students their stats are not anywhere close to representative for the whole population. If a study is a survey you have to keep in mind things like how do people respond. If a paper says something that seems hyperspecific it is because it is, it cannot be generalized outside of that context. Check out WEIRD acronym in research.

4) understand what you are looking for. Case study is good for some things, metastudies are good for other things, lab experiments are good for some things, survey is good for some things, observation research is good for other things. They all have pros and cons. (This is mostly the section I may elaborate on after finals)

5) understand biases. Is the study about psych meds funded by a pharmacy who makes those meds? Etc.

6) understand what the researcher is actually saying. This one is just practice and reading comprehension, and knowledge of the field. Despite researching lots of things for fun, in my one course I still have to ask my professor for help because the data points look like nothing to me since it's all chemistry and graphs I don't know how to interpret. That's just me out of my field thing. I can still glean the basic idea from the paper but it's hard to figure out the data itself because I don't have that knowledge. But things like pos/neg correlations, how something is phrased, etc.

[merisms]

what do you mean by meds not working due to trauma being unresolved? how would that affect things, dissociation aside?

traumagenic disorders, especially complex trauma like CPTSD and DID, are notoriously hard to treat due to a lot of people being unresponsive to the usual medication

the issue being that psych medication is meant to adjust chemicals in your brain which assumes that the cause is an imbalance. if, for example, you have hallucinations, then your dopamine levels aren't in the right range, and medicines work in different ways to adjust everything to more ideal amounts. medicines are a very physical thing--it fixes things that are tangible and measurable, like chemical levels or boosting/suppressing your immune system

but when it comes to complex trauma, there is a direct and unresolved cause for your symptoms that is stored in the past and not able to be quantified or touched. you are having a flashback because your brain is trying to process an event but can't. you have anxiety around specific things because your brain still believes you're in danger. and so on. so medicines at their best work as a bandaid to relieve the intensity of it and allow you to work on the underlying cause, and at their worst they just don't work because there's nothing chemically to be fixed (or because someone is too dissociated to feel the effects of the medication which is a whole other thing)

https://medcraveonline.com/JPCPY/dissociative-depression-is-resistant-to-treatment-as-usual.html

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder – is a relatively common psychiatric disorder that ma

Objective Previous research has indicated a relation between obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), childhood traumatic experiences and higher

[merisms]

Do you have any experience with somatic experiencing? I don’t have did, only cptsd, but when one of my past therapists tried to do it with me, it made me dissociate harder than I ever have in my life and I spent nearly an entire week feeling outside my body and never wanted to do it again. I guess I just want to ask if you have any experience with it because I had a very negative/extreme reaction

i have personally avoided it because i know that it is too confrontational for me where i am right now in therapy

really any type of therapy can cause dissociation responses if done too fast/too hard/too quick/at the wrong time. what causes trauma is that our brain cannot process a traumatic situation and so it simply doesn't--often burying feelings, ignoring it, covering up the memory, etc all subconsciously. a lot of these very confrontational therapy types (EMDR, somatic experiencing, hypnotherapy, etc) that can have negative reactions cause those reactions because we are making our brain sit down and process the memory instead of avoiding it. it doesn't mean the therapy type itself is bad, in fact those reactions are WHY it works. somatic experiencing in particular is about taking the tension your body holds because it expects pain, and letting it just experience the physical sensation and realizing that nothing is going to happen. it's a very powerful tool. it's just that you need to be at a place in recovery where you can actually handle and cope with the feelings that inevitably come. if you're not, if it's applied wrong or applied at the wrong time, then it will absolutely fuck your shit 6 ways to sunday. my therapist likened talk therapy to breaking down a building brick by brick, and EMDR to taking a wrecking ball to it

trauma & the body: a sensorimotor approach is a good book to look into

the body keeps the score also touches on this

EMDR and Somatic Experiencing

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Somatic Experiencing are alternatives to more traditional therapy for PTSD and trau

[merisms]

What's perhaps most troublesome about dissociative process is that it erases its tracks as it does its work. We hide from ourselves that we are hiding. We have amnesia for our amnesia. We don't notice that we don't notice. Moreover, when dissociative processes clicks into place, it tends to continue until it's disturbed by new inputs or just rusts into ineffectiveness. It doesn't stop when the danger is over; it often goes overboard in its efforts.

- Richard Chefetz, Intensive Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociative Processes

[merisms]

While I definitely agree with the post, and have no arguments I’m just wondering where you got the most systems have 14-16 parts thing from? I’ve just never read anything that mentions an average number of parts in general and I’m curious where that comes from. Thank you!

no problem! it's not so much that most systems have 14-16. the average is between those numbers depending on the study you read, but that doesn't mean most systems have between those numbers (uh. to not turn this into a statistics lecture just look at averages vs medians and so on). there's lots of stuff that skews studies (small sample size, minors typically have more alters than adults according to studies, studies usually find that AMAB people typically have fewer parts than AFAB people). but depending on the study, most of them will list a number that is between 14 and 16 for average alter count. some aim much lower (there's one that lists 8 as the average number of alters in AMAB DID systems, and a few that cite 10 as the average number of alters)

http://namimi.org/mental-illness/dissociative-disorder/didfactsheet

https://opentext.wsu.edu/abnormalpsychology/chapter/9-3-dissociative-identity-disorder/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1819.1998.0520s5S111.x

https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/mental-health/dissociative-identity-disorder/related/dissociative-identity-disorder-statistics/

http://traumadissociation.com/alters#average