@sundropglass asked me a while back to talk about aspects of my disorders that I wish were better understood, and I’d like to talk a bit about something I think isn’t really talked about when it comes to DID.
There are a lot of posts out there dispelling common myths and stereotypes about DID, so I’m going to skip all of that. Instead I’m going to share something that I’ve found interesting as I’ve been in treatment.
Firstly, a disclaimer: Each person is unique, each dissociated system is unique, each therapist is unique, and everyone will find that different approaches in therapy work best for them. What works for me might not be what works for you, and vice versa.
But one thing I’ve found interesting in my own healing in therapy that I feel like might surprise a lot of people with DID on tumblr is that although we’ve been doing therapy work for DID (amongst other things) for several years now, we’ve spent very little time in therapy talking in detail about individual alters (I use the terms alters and parts interchangeably btw).
At first we definitely talked more about different alters, especially as we were first finding out about each other. And of course we’ve had to spend a good amount of time talking about our relationships with each other in order to improve communication, and certain symbolic aspects of alters like substitute beliefs have been talked about extensively. Several different alters have attended sessions at different times, although not all of us have. But the details of our personalities, our likes and dislikes, what we look like, etc. are rarely talked about, especially nowadays. I’ve been working with this therapist for 8 years and explicitly on DID treatment with her for around 5 years, and yet if I asked I doubt my therapist could name all of my parts (there are like 15 of us).
After working on some initial communication difficulties, parts have rarely been a focus of our discussion. Dissociation, trauma symptoms, coping skills, and active trauma work are the focus when it comes to my DID treatment. As we treat the underlying trauma, our DID has improved. For example, learning about my underlying trauma has allowed me to be more understanding and compassionate with traumatized parts, and has therefore improved our communication and cooperation. It’s the trauma work that matters, at least for me, not the parts work.
This is of course an oversimplification, a distillation of years of therapy into one post. We’ve definitely had conversations about parts, especially more traumatized parts, more dissociated parts, or parts who engage in more destructive behaviors. And obviously my experience will not be universal. Some people with DID experience significantly more difficulty in communicating than we do. Some people are unable to do any trauma work without doing extensive parts work first, simply because of the way their system is structured. But I wanted to write about this, because there’s a LOT of focus on DID tumblr on alters, and not a lot of focus on trauma. I also see a lot of concern about therapists working with alters, but not a lot of talk about the role of therapists for patients with DID working with trauma. But in my experience with treatment, the only way I’ve found to heal is to focus primarily on trauma, not primarily on parts, and having a therapist who specializes in trauma, not exclusively DID, has still worked wonders for my healing.
