hsphaven

Dissociative systems has become a bit of an interest of mine, and I am writing this post to take my mind off how much discomfort I am in physically. Most people will be more familiar with the terms “Dissociative Identity Disorder”, or “multiple personality disorder”, but “dissociative systems” is actually the term the community tends to prefer. The word “system” is used to describe the collective that lives in the one body, and the term is less pathologising. Many members of the community do not see this as a “disorder”. It is a highly creative and helpful way of dealing with unbearable trauma, usually starting in early childhood, and many members do not wish for it to go away. Attempting to treat it through “integration” is like murder.

I have attracted a lot of folk who are part of a system over the course of my life without knowing it. There is a lot we have in common such as high creativity, intelligence and spirituality. But the first person who came out to me about his diagnosis was my friend who I met during my 20s in a mental health facility. During this time he was 40 and had lost almost an entire life’s worth of memories. He was like a five year old child learning to navigate the world again, though the body still held procedural memories about how to do certain things. He didn’t really understand social stuff/cues and would talk my head off all evening when I was exhausted, or pick people he was not in a close relationship with up and hug them which made not only them uncomfortable but also the people he WAS in a close relationship with, like Okasha his spouse (who is also my friend, and in fact I was the match maker). I had a panic attack after he hugged me the day we met, perhaps because, being an empath, I could feel this overwhelming fear inside of his body. I had to see the social worker who was on duty that night. My friend probably could be considered manic, but there was also a naivety to his energy, like that of a child. Yet he could also be very mature and people often thought he was actually one of the staff members, not a patient. These age shifts are common in dissociative systems.

He’d sit up during the evening and do 1000+ piece jigsaw puzzles. He was a wizz at jigsaws and would often finish them in one evening. Little did I know he was also trying to piece together the fragments of his mind.

We instantly clicked, and he’d invite me to go outside and meditate with him early each morning. It turned out we had many mutual friends who were part of spiritual healing circles. Through them, we ended up keeping in touch.

He started having more and more “black outs”, as we call them, where he would go missing for days. There was once a newspaper article out about him being a missing person who disappeared with only a few crystals in his pocket. It is incredibly stressful for Okasha, who has now bought a house and had a baby with him. She feels like a sole parent a lot of the time, a carer to both her son and husband. He seems to go missing every week. He switches his phone off so he can’t be tracked. After a few days Okasha reports him to the police as a missing person. He eventually makes contact again, but is in a pretty shaken state. He has no idea where he’s been, his senses are shut down and he is unable to speak or even hear sometimes. Once, when he was found during an episode, Okasha described a scary, vacant look on his face. No one knows exactly where he goes, but it sounds like he goes to the same place: somewhere near the city and near his brother’s house where he hangs out with the homeless.

Okasha describes him as “up and down and when its down its bad”. I too have noticed some very wild swings in his behaviour and moods. He will go from a normally talkative character to somebody who doesn’t speak at all. I have seen him dancing, but during his episodes he becomes someone else entirely. I once went over to their house to be with Okasha while he was having an episode. He had locked himself in the bathroom, or one of their other rooms which they were renovating, I can’t quite remember. We tried talking to him from outside the door but he wouldn’t answer to anybody, even sweet Okasha. I wrote notes to him and slipped them under the door but he ignored them. It was probably a silly idea as he was beyond it. He couldn’t respond at all, even through writing, and may not have even been able to read. He was in his own world, too preoccupied with whatever he was dealing with. The Crisis and Assessment Team were there but were completely out of their depth. We stood around and heard all these noises from within the room, like he was working on something in there. He then formed an exit through the window or something, jumped out (even though it was on the second storey) and ran. He tried to jump over the back fence but his father grabbed him. I’m not sure this was the best approach, especially as his family contributed to his trauma growing up. The poor guy, or whoever was out, was obviously terrified and perhaps the kindest thing would have been to let him run. He was then chucked in an ambulance and taken to hospital, something that has been a mixed experience for him. Hospitals don’t tend to understand anything about trauma and dissociation. They will only diagnose dissociative disorders in extreme cases like my friend. Thankfully for him, he has not been given a diagnosis of BPD, and they let him stay longer than I’m ever given.

I am coming to realise that I experience something quite similar to him. It can get so severe that I will go missing as well, as happened during one private hospital stay. I would have had no idea if the nurses didn’t tell me. I was sitting on my bed using my laptop when a whole bunch of nurses came to the door extremely flustered.

“There you are!” they said. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you! We checked your bathroom, we asked the cook if you had come to dinner but he said you hadn’t.”

I genuinely had no idea what they were talking about. As far as I was concerned I had been in my room the whole time. This is when I realised that this thing can actually assume control over your own body without you even knowing. It can be scary because you are no longer in control. You don’t know what they’re going to do. Thankfully whoever or whatever it was, they got me back to my room in one piece. To this day I still don’t know where I went, but I was probably just like my scared friend and most likely left the hospital grounds somehow.

So, this is a little glimpse into the world of dissociative systems. These are very extreme examples, and not all dissociative systems will have amnesia to this extent, or identities that appear dramatically different, which is how DID is often portrayed. Some personalities only come out when we are alone as they have very bad social anxiety, or with certain people or situations. A person may only ever know one personality and never know that personality is part of a system who has connections with a whole lot of niche communities, like a secret life. Also, contrary to what many people, even those within the mental health field, think, those who are part of dissociative systems are not attention seeking and making it all up. So many members of the community question whether they are dissociative systems, and worry a lot about faking a disorder they don’t have. They downplay their trauma, telling everyone that it can’t be bad enough to have something like this. But dissociative systems is a very real thing. There can even be physical differences between the different identities such as vision, medication responses, allergies, heart rate, blood pressure readings, mental and physical illnesses, and neuroimaging results. I have come to be very reserved about talking about this stuff after I was shot down by the “psych cunts”, as I call them, at a regional hospital. I left the city to start a new life in the country, but had another break down, walked in front of traffic and ended up in the closest hospital. I thought I would be a clean slate there and opened up about the dissociation stuff. But all I was told was “that’s not what’s on your records”. I quickly realised my past life followed me and I could not get away from my diagnosis of BPD and all the stigma it carried even in a different location.

In another post, when I have more energy, I would like to talk about what it’s like to receive a massage as a dissociative system. Body work has so much healing potential for trauma survivors, but can also be harmful, especially if the therapist doesn’t tread lightly and build a sense of safety and trust first. Body work accesses a level that psychological and talk therapy do not, and it is possible to trigger identity switches through massage. This is something I felt during one massage with my physio when I arrived extremely exhausted and placid and my walls were down. I could sense a child coming to the surface. Members of the community have very mixed reactions to massage, from being completely against them (and also hugs), hating having someone in their space and describing it as “gross”, to finding great healing and comfort through physical touch. Our experiences, as one member pointed out, can also depend on who is “out” and whether they are holding trauma.