A Thousand Shining Stars @wakethesparrow - Tumblr Blog

One day I will finish that system comic but that day is not today !!

💜🌸 | I pushed him into the snow because I hate him

Outfit is from our magical girl AU <3

#star stream draws #disventure camp #disventure camp yul

But, problematically, that act of allowing out the memories, the dissociative parts of the self that I had kept firmly in the box, brought with it a collapse of my previous coping strategies and my previous ‘logic’ for life. Things don’t work the way they used to. Life previously functioned a certain way, and then overnight, everything changes, and nothing is the same. As an analogy, a woman in her fifties goes to work in the morning and comes home in the evening and finds her husband dead in the lounge. Her life has unexpectedly been turned upside down. Suddenly, she can’t do what she was going to do that evening. She can’t make dinner and talk about her day and ask him to take the bin out and feed the cat. She can’t just get up the next morning and go to work and pop to Tesco’s on the way home and send a birthday card to her cousin. Suddenly everything is different. It’s a new situation. She’s got a funeral to organise, and she’s never done it before, and it’s overwhelming. She’s used to talking about her day with her husband and he’s not there. When she’s upset, she’s used to going to him for comfort and support, but at the point at which she most needs comfort and support, he’s not there. She’s not a married woman anymore; she’s a widow: it’s a change of identity. Her finances are different. She has to learn about the servicing schedule for the car and get someone to help her hump the Christmas tree down from the loft. Life is suddenly very, very different.

And when she goes a bit ’crazy,’ when she starts crying and can’t stop, when she sits and stares into space for an hour because she can’t figure out what to do next or how to do it, when she doesn’t want to go for a drink after work with her colleagues and can’t bear their jollity, when she can’t concentrate at work or remember what it was that she was doing, when she lies awake at night worrying about how to pay the mortgage… when all these things happen, no one actually says that she’s gone mad. Everyone understands that she’s in grief and that it will take time, perhaps a long time if the death was sudden and unexpected, for her to rearrange her life again so that the new normal becomes automatic and comfortable and comprehensible. And even then, for decades afterwards she may contend with the why? questions of sudden tragedy and life not being as sugar-sweet as the John Lewis adverts suggest. But when we have a ‘breakdown,’ when our dissociative coping strategy that has kept our trauma or abuse at bay for years or years suddenly collapses in the lounge and dies on the floor, and we find when we come home from work that it’s not there anymore, people don’t see our resultant behaviour as normal. Even we ourselves think we have just ‘gone mad.’ We don’t have a paradigm for it. And because there’s no corpse in the lounge, no funeral cortège, no life insurance pay-out and a bank statement in a single name, because it’s all intrapsychic and hidden in the undergrowth of our mind, then our outward behaviours do seem ‘crazy.’ When we can’t go to work the next day, and we can’t concentrate, and we keep bursting into tears, and we can’t bear to socialise, and we lie awake at night, and everything seems too much, then we don’t think, ‘This is normal.’ We think, ‘I’m insane.’

— Recovery is my best revenge: My experience of trauma, abuse and dissociative identity disorder by Carolyn Spring

writingwithcolor

Depicting Characters of Color with DID and OSDD: How may the systems of color be intersectionally represented?

@ladyeaslet asks:

Greetings, mods and followers of WWC. Given it’s my first time posting a question, I want to thank everyone for all the work you do. I’ve followed this blog for years and it really warms my heart how there is so much effort in bettering our understanding of the world and each other. Not only do I feel seen as a trans WoC but I really like being able to see others just as well.

In the interests of furthering discussion in this space, I’d like to ask how might aspiring writers ought to depict characters of color with DID & OSDD? Especially since this condition is not rare as popularly believed, being quite as common as redheads. Not all people with dissociative disorders or even just any mental illness are treated equally (racism, you are why we can’t have nice things). So I’d love to know how intersectionality plays a role when it comes to plural folks, especially.

I’ve looked through the archives on this site and I’ve only seen it being discussed as it pertains to Black characters, as far as I’m aware. I also took the liberty of reading a couple of articles, perusing a Reddit post and watching a video on that matter. So far, my understanding is that many systems of color do not appreciate white systems claiming their alters to be of another race because they don’t have the lived experiences. Another perspective I’ve seen say they can have alters of different races.

I ponder how different genders can factor in. That said, there could be more nuance to be had here, as I’m sure everyone’s individual system will be different. I imagine that various cultures may have different views when it comes to these identities.

I’m very honored should you take the time to answer me. As a singlet myself, I do apologize if there was anything I’ve said that was insensitive, and thank you for the feedback! Please have a wonderful day.

So… in the usual disclaimers of no consensus on anything multiply marginalized, nobody is a monolith, etc, this is triply true of anything related to systems. Between the way there are perpetual witch-hunts for “fakers” from respectability politics (“if we reject x person who’s faking then maybe the system will accept us” is the logic), and professionals will even go on stage and diagnose people on the internet because they didn’t behave in ways that were thought to be acceptable around diagnosis (and this happened to a white person, so you can imagine how much worse it gets).

To answer the only real specific question you have: the answer is somewhere in the middle. Systems don’t choose how their alters look, as it is based on subconscious (usually childhood) logic, but those alters are not part of any racial group other than purely aesthetically because they lack the lived experience of existing with that skin tone. This doesn’t mean that this childhood logic can’t produce alters who are walking stereotypes, but that also doesn’t make the alter themself wrong (now, refusal to have a discussion about it, on the other hand…)

Most systems of colour I know are extremely private about it. Most of them have alters that navigate different aspects of racialized trauma, and usually have at least one who was created as a result of racial trauma.

When it comes to “how do”, this question is far too broad to have any sort of answer because of the huge variety among causes, locations, cultures, and races.

Some factors to consider:

Why the system split in the first place (this is a time I note that traumatic events are the most likely but are not required as per the DSM. Please do not litigate this issue in the comments section of this post)

Was the cause inside or outside of the family and how did the family handle it (e.g., much different if a split happened via tragedy befalling a family but the family was otherwise healthy vs a family member being abusive; also different if the cause was something like bullying at school)

How much danger existed in the immediate community—inner city children are far more likely to experience violence in their neighbourhoods

The cultural perception of “hearing voices” (the research on this is focused on schizophrenia having negative experiences in cultures where hearing voices is considered bad, but positive to neutral experiences where hearing voices is neutral), “possession”, and other things DID/OSDD is often mistaken for

Pockets of safety, available social nets (especially if the trauma is within the family and needing to escape), and other vaccine factors

General ACE (adverse childhood experience) score, which often determines physical health as well

Amount of fragmentation within the system and severity of amnesia barriers that impact functionality (some systems have all negative experiences locked away behind amnesia walls, some will remove emotions but the facts get spread around)

… Among others.

Hopefully this gives you some very broad strokes about systemic factors impacting systems.

We want to hear from you!

If any systems of colour feel safe adding to this, feel free to reblog or reply!

However if you use this to platform systems not being real, your comments will be hidden.

- WWC

effigy13

hey i’m really not trying to start an argument here because i have no personal investment in the discussion around whether or not you can be plural without trauma, but i really, really need to point out for the sake of education on DID and OSDD-1 specifically that the DSM does not say this at all.

“Why the system split in the first place (this is a time I note that traumatic events are the most likely but are not required as per the DSM. Please do not litigate this issue in the comments section of this post)”

the diagnostic criteria don’t mention requiring trauma to get a DID diagnosis. this is for many reasons, particularly medical professionals accounting for amnesia of past traumatic events, or should any be remembered, downplaying the events that they had gone through. however, the rest of the DSM’s entry on DID makes it incredibly clear that there is no other recognized cause for DID (and subsequently OSDD-1) outside of chronic childhood traumas & stressors.

please note the language used in these entries, how the DSM speaks about trauma and abusive families as if these things are a given in DID. it mentions 90% of people with DID had experienced multiple forms of neglect and abuse, then mentions the other forms of early life childhood maltreatment that people with DID experience. it only makes mention of traumatic events as a cause for DID and absolutely nothing else. the DSM doesn’t even try to suggest that some cases of DID may be non-traumatic.

it doesn’t matter what the specific events are, just that they are overwhelming enough and that the child themself is not supported enough through those events such that the only way they can cope with them is to dissociate.

other forms of plurality, like endogenic or mixed forms of plurality, are a different story that i really don’t care to argue about. but the DSM’s entry for DID (and therefore OSDD-1) only list forms of childhood trauma as the sole causes of these disorders. if there was an alternate cause, or trauma was not the sole cause of this disorder, the DSM would say that somewhere, because it’s a diagnostic manual for professionals on how and when they should diagnose conditions. it makes absolutely no sense not to mention cases where people have had DID with no history of trauma whatsoever, it just does not make sense no matter which way you look at it.

please be more careful with the research you’re doing on mental health conditions you aren’t familiar with or don’t have. it’s extremely easy to believe other people on the internet when they tell you that you should believe them because they have XYZ medical condition, but that’s why it’s so much more important to do in-depth reading on these conditions before you start making educational posts about them. just because someone has a medical condition doesn’t make them an expert on it, and it especially does not make them an expert at reading academic psychology jargon from medical professionals.

this lack of doing any kind of reading on the subject of a highly stigmatized and poorly understood disorder is extremely disappointing to see from such a long standing and well educated blog. i sincerely hope you take this criticism to heart and not as me trying to start an argument with you or incite discourse.

#some clarity on the previous post that we reblogged!