#dissociative disorder

[caintooth]

seeing people my age talk about how scared they are of memory loss, which they only associate with old age, is so surreal to see as a 24 year old who has actively experienced memory loss for a long time now

there are causes for memory loss besides dementia and alzheimer’s, i hope y’all know that. dissociative disorders, trauma, brain injuries, thyroid problems, even just stress and lack of sleep can fuck up your ability to store, process, and access memory. and that’s just a few of the many causes i can think of off the top of my head right now.

please stop treating disabled people like some scary “other” that you might become only in the distant, decades-away future. we are your age, too. you may become one of us sooner than you know. stop acting like memory loss marks the end of a life, when so many of us have so much living left to do!

[midnightmothnest]

if you can’t eat a whole meal, eat half. you ate, that’s what is important.

if you can’t get out of bed, try and sit up instead of lying down. it’ll be better for your back and your blood pressure.

if you can’t shower or have a bath today, try and brush your teeth and clean your ears. it’ll keep you a little cleaner, and we often forget those areas. 

if you can’t get dressed today, change underwear and use some deoderant. it’ll leave you a little fresher until you have the strength to change fully.

and remember, i’m very proud of you. your best will look different every day, and that’s okay.

[fallingmaddlyinlove]

when you're heavily dissociated and people are trying to talk to you

[chaos-in-one]

Friendly (or unfriendly if you're against this) reminder that this blog is supportive of ALL disorders. This blog does not think ANY disorder inherently makes someone a bad person, and is against any disorder being demonized. This blog wholeheartedly believes that a bad person having a disorder, yes, even if things that are also symptoms of their disorder are part of what caused harm, does not make the disorder a "bad" or "evil" disorder or excuse ableism and demonization directed towards the disorder.

Yes this includes personality disorders

Including npd and aspd

Yes this includes all psychotic disorders & disorders that cause psychotic symptoms

Yes this includes paraphilic disorders. All of them.

Yes this includes disorders that cause, or are even characterized by, attention seeking

Yes this includes disorders that directly have lying as a common symptom

Yes this includes dissociative disorders

Yes this includes any disorder with "gross" symptoms

Yes this includes physical disorders too

Yes this includes disorders that can cause loss of control of any kind- control of speech, control of body movement, etc.

Yes tis includes disorders that make someone "look scary"

This goes for literally any fucking disorder. There are not exceptions.

[growing-home]

i feel like we don’t always talk about the smaller ways that having a dissociative disorder (and not being “out” about it) can really disable a person— i’m in a choir, and idk how to explain to the musical director that SOMETIMES i am a soprano and have no trouble hitting high notes while other times i feel like i physically cannot sing that high. or how sometimes my guitar feels like an extension of my body but sometimes i don’t even remember how i’m supposed to hold it properly. or in art therapy when i only sometimes have access to my adult level of artistic skill while sometimes i have the skill level of a five year old. my dissociative disorder very much disables me, and this is something i don’t see people talking about outside of the ways that PTSD disables those with dissociative disorders. what i mean is that sometimes i do not have the ability to do very basic tasks. dissociative disorders are developmental disorders, and i am very much developmentally disabled much of the time.

i don’t plan on ever being publicly out about my dissociative disorder in a non anonymous setting. i have a hard time even talking about my parts in therapy even to the clinician that diagnosed me with DID. it feels unbearably vulnerable and not safe to tell people about my parts. i feel like we’re seeing more and more people on tik tok start talking publicly about their DID, and while that may be very helpful for them, i honestly can’t imagine ever being fully out with it like that. keeping it secret is what has kept me safe, it is how i survived the last twenty years of my life. my experience with DID also does not line up with most of the DID content i’ve seen online— and i don’t mean this to invalidate those whose experiences are different than mine, it’s just that it can feel really lonely and isolating to have a dissociative disorder that doesn’t fit with the worlds preconceived image of what a dissociative disorder looks like. this is part of why i typically just say that i have dissociative disorder instead of DID.

tldr: dissociative disorders can really impair basic functioning and i feel like people forget that when they focus so much on the parts of DID that are more sensationalized in the media.

[mimikyu-chr]

Some days, DID looks like constant spacing out and never seeming fully there. Missed bits of conversations and a memory that doesn’t seem like it wants to work.

Sometimes it looks like talking to myself, constant internal noise and heightened sensory sensitivity.

Some days DID looks like being emotional for seemingly no reason, crying, laughing, anger over something I don’t know, emotional bleed-through from other alters.

Other days it just looks like severe PTSD. Avoidance, spacing out, needing help to ground myself. Flashbacks that I honestly can’t remember the triggers of, or remember the full event of, but that I know are flashbacks.

And sometimes it just looks like nothing at all. I seem put-together and relatively normal. You’d never know I had a dissociative disorder.

The day-to-day severity of my symptoms do not determine what mental illness I have. I still have DID and I still struggle with it whether you can see it or not.

[rin-and-jade]

Types of Amnesia

Diagram created by me

General criteria for amnesia:

Memory loss

Confusion

Inability to recognize familiar figures/places

Difficulty recalling names or places

Not remembering where you went

Worser ability to remember things that had happened

Generalized Amnesia Where a person completely forgets everything about themself and have no recollection of what, where, and who they spoke to. This can describe a blackout switch and may still recognize who they are.

Localized Amnesia Where a person is unable to recall a specific/series of event from the whole, which creates an incomplete picture of the situation. For example, remembering childhood but not the abuse.

Selective Amnesia Where a person only lost some and retain the rest, forgetting parts yet not all of them. This can describe greyouts as it grasps some information/sensory yet not enough to tell what exactly happened. One example is playing the phone and unable to recall what occured, only to jump its memory right to being at bed.

Emotional Amnesia Where a person has an intact memory and it's details on what had happened, but do not remember what the event feels like (e.g. was scared, happy, etc.). One description is that you're watching something that didn't happen to you, because you don't feel like being in the scene itself.

Continuous Amnesia Where a person fails to retain full parts of the event/day, for a set period of time (can vary from minutes to days) and create an accumulative, small bits of selective amnesias, continuously, leaving many gaps in a chronological timeline. This usually happens in times or stress, or abuse.

Fragmented Amnesia Where a person has an unrelated, and/or disjointed memories that does not go with the timeline's order, creating confusion and difficult to grasp the cohesive picture of what truly happened. Emotional amnesia may be present in this type. Bonus for systems:

Amnesia barriers Where a person fronting is not able to recall other alter's memories, which is a form of retrograde amnesia and compartmentalization. Because the fronter will only retain any information before switching out with the next one, the rest experiences anterograde amnesia as it cannot form and remember those memories, unless being coconcious or cofronting (even though, this is not always guaranteed).

Take notes that amnesia can still happen outside system things due to comorbidities like anxiety disorders or depression, this does mean systems are bound to experience more amnesia compared to non-systems folks out there.

Do you have any discussions about this? Or would like to describe your own way of seeing these different types of amnesia? Or have more to add? Feel free to tell them here!

- j

[allegedlysilly]

[thatonepersecutor]

Just a PSA. Just because a traumagenic system doesn't fit your idea or narrative of how a DID/OSDD system should exist does not mean they're faking.

We all formed from unique experiences. Whilst it might not be your truth, it is their truth and their reality.

There is such little data on DID and even less so on OSDD, so before you invalidate or fakeclaim a system, think about where that hatred comes from.

[evergreensys]

telling singlet friends about your DID who didn't know about it when you met is so weird to explain. like.

"right, so, you know me as Cameron. I went by that name for years, and everyone in the system goes by Cameron, but technically, I'm not Cameron at all and Cameron doesn't actually exist. Cameron was the previous host, who later changed his name to Juno. also I'm Phoenix, a fusion of the previous host and someone else, so I'm partly Cameron, but not really".

how the fuck do you phrase that.

[pinkxcloudz]

"start unmasking your symptoms!" mfers when people with schizospec disorders, personality disorders, paranoia, tics and tourettes, OCD, PANDAS, and dissociative disorders unmask

[evilsystem]

Heh... These guys don't even know the true extent of my power...! (tries to switch to my awesome demon wolf alter but instead one of my many Old Man alters appears) Where am i

[system-cypress]

A number of you need to learn this.

[bl0w-m3]

The sun: *goes down*

My brain: “you’ve done literally everything wrong in your life and let’s go through every major childhood traumatic event in great detail”

[a-place-to-exist]

[the-archenlandian-court]

My parents when pregnant with me (probably): We don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl. We just want a healthy child

Me: *is none of the above*