wearepolyfragmented-blog

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trauma sucks in general but childhood trauma that happened either a) before you could form actual memories or b) in such small tiny constant ways that you have no solid memories of it is…a special kind of frustrating

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i mean this in the nicest way possible you guys but you NEED to take better care of yourselves online. getting severely anxious about mass quantities of horrible things you cant change every single day is normal considering the internet’s ability to educate on worldwide issues, it shows that you have empathy and that you truly do care. but relentless knowledge of constant suffering on this scale is NOT something humans are psychologically equipped to handle. it’s okay to shut off. it’s okay to just take a break and enjoy yourself for a while in your own localized space

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I just wanted to warn you all that the user therapist-with-things-to-say is following mentally ill people (including me) and that she has reblogged several people to call them out on being self-diagnosed. 

I am not self-diagnosed and I don’t advocate self-diagnosis on my blog, but I also don’t advocate causing distress to people who are experiencing the symptoms of mental illness, whether they are diagnosed or not. 

@therapist-with-things-to-say herself said in one post that self-diagnosed people’s symptoms are valid, even if their diagnosis is not. So I think it’s really disgusting that she, a person who claims to be a licensed therapist, is online spending her time shaming and harassing people who are experiencing the symptoms of mental illness. 

So I’m advising anyone who blogs about mental illness of any kind, particularly DID and Autism (since she seems to be targeting those) to block this person before she targets you. 

Even if you aren’t self-diagnosed yourself, protect your followers and other people you interact with. 

I just find this behavior really disgusting and upsetting. I expect better from people claiming to be therapists. 

(I’m tagging this ActuallyAutistic because she targeted people there and I want to spread the word. I hope that is okay.) 

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I’ve said this before in more words but I just want to reiterate the danger with inclusive plural communities/endogenics and their focus on just the alters is they heavily misunderstand what DID/multiplicity is. If it’s defined by just feeling like there’s more than one person in your head, then get this: I don’t experience myself that way at all most of the time. I don’t feel like i have more than one in my head, I don’t feel like there’s others around. I don’t even interact with my therapist like a system, we talk to them like we are a singlet because our body just naturally hides the DID. But I’m still diagnosed with DID because I have alters and lose time and have every textbook symptom, but despite that the majority of my alters and myself, we only experience ourselves like a singlet with a bad memory and cPTSD which was why we didn’t know we had DID until adulthood and we figured it out through symptoms like amnesia over, alters...

For us being DID isn’t about the alters at all most of the time and obviously for some that experience is more front and center and that’s valid, but the point is...

Defining multiplicity with DID as just “feeling like there’s more than one in your head” really does alienate the majority of those who actually are multiple because alters are only one facet of the experience and usually the one most people will fail to pick up on. It’s not about feeling like there’s other people in your head, it’s a collection of symptoms caused by long term childhood trauma to survive. It’s really not the same thing as having imaginary friends or practicing religious/spiritual things with the concept of more than one sharing a body.

Still don’t understand what plural communities fail to comprehend about this. So many people will never realize they have DID/OSDD-1 by the way they define plurality.

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

Do any other abuse victims sometimes feel like obsessive creeps because they struggle to let go of the past and move on from people who hurt them due to, uh, literal PTSD? Like I try so hard to not think of people who hurt me and focus on the now but all it takes is a trigger and suddenly i’m reliving the immense and completely consuming pain from what people in my past did to me, and the fact that they get to control so much of my life emotionally involuntarily while they probably never think of me.... and knowing they could paint me as obsessive just because I “fixate” on them when i’m not really doing that as much as just re-experiencing immense pain constantly by triggers and being re-traumatized

This is rambly and not as articulate as I’d like but does anyone else get what I mean? And the shame that comes from being traumatized by the actions of others and how that is usually shamed by people around you because you need to “move on” and “get over it” in their eyes

I dont know

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i mean lets be real, DID is about survival. anyone who treats it like its just alters doesnt know real DID. its about surviving at its core. its about mutilating your consciousness to outlast your experiences. alters are a side effect. my EXISTENCE is a side effect of a desperate attempt at living. so yeah im a LIL INSULTED when ppl use the disorder as an excuse to rp lmao

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

Hey those with DID/OSDD

Our amnesia has been so bad and we dont’ even know how to track the time loss due to most parts being fragments? It’s like we’ll for example watch an entire season of a show but remember virtually nothing about it immediately after or will be trying to work on a task and have to constantly make the same conclusions about how to do said task over and over and get trapped in that loop instead of completing it because we forget how to do the task so all our time is spent trying to figure it out only to forget again right after, etc.

It’s something we plan to talk to our therapist about but we don’t see them for a couple weeks, does anyone have any advice on how to manage this severity of time loss?

Our amnesia is just abyssmal to where we struggle to function at all and writing in journals etc hasn’t really helped with day to day life amnesia just understanding how we feel about things and why. Does anyone have any tips for alleviating this?

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

Avoidance via inner conflict about trivial clashing preferences.

-Boone, Steele & Van Der Hart, Treating Trauma Related Dissociation (2015)

I’m sure as shit having some inner conflict about this chapter.

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

only you can decide your limits and boundaries. they are not for anyone else to decide but they are to be respected.

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Moms b like.... I’m gonna give you trauma and then live the rest of my life in blissful ignorance and get upset anytime you bring it up

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The 20 year old child in me pleads “Protect me, please. Make me feel safe. I just want to be worthy of empathy, kindness and protection.”

The 11 year old adult in me explains “We can only depend on ourselves for protection & safety. Others are not to be trusted. The way to survive in this world is to be self-reliant.”

We have not found a compromise yet.

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

1. Gender is a social construct hence why even though gender dysphoria existing can be seen as a mental illness because it can be impairing, it is not needed to be trans inherently because gender is a non tangible thing that you explore via feeling it out and there are no physical markers of it.

2. Alters are inherently formed from childhood trauma (overwhelming experiences) and literally affect how your brain physically forms and are actual dissociated self states and have been detected with literal scientific tests. So even if you “feel multiple” if it doesn’t involve having dissociated self states then you literally do not have the same thing as people with DID/OSDD-1 and should just make your own community for your own beliefs/spirituality/fun game instead of claiming a place in and speaking over the DID community.

So the two are not related and the comparison of transmeds = not supporting non-trauma systems is not ok to make especially because a lot of people with DID/OSDD-1 who feel this way are not transmeds and it’s just vilifying and throwing innocent people under the bus. But I don’t expect anyone supporting non-trauma systems to actually comprehend this because they think their personal feelings are more important than the safety of a community. But funny how none of you pull this with mental illnesses like BPD, PTSD, etc. that don’t have “fun” symptoms. You can acknowledge those experiences are mental illnesses, so what makes DID so different? Is the identity confusion in BPD or the regression in PTSD (the less extreme dissociative versions of what help make up the existence of alters in DID/OSDD) not fun enough for you?

Also please never use the word sysmeds ever again ew

anti👏endos👏and👏transmeds👏aren’t👏fucking👏comparable

-sincerely, a tucute ex-transmed anti endo. and yes, im a system.

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

About that “study” on non-trauma multiples…

I’m not going to reblog the other person talking about it, but kudos to them for providing a source so I could read it for myself. 

Let me give you some fast facts about this “study”. 

The hypothesis of this study can be boiled down “Multiplicity as a social construct exists separate from Dissociative disorders”. 

The researchers feel their data supports this hypothesis. 

The study DOES NOT say anything about DID/OSDD systems forming from trauma in later ages. That other post misunderstood. 

It included a total of 6 participants. (That is very small)

The participants were found by searching the word “Multiplicity” and “Multiple System” online and recruiting people from Tumblr, Twitter and Google+. 

The participants were uncooperative in participating in the original measure created (a questionnaire) and so only the information from the interviews was included. 

The study consisted of interviewing these six people. That’s it. They just asked them why they identified as multiple and if they had been diagnosed with any mental health conditions. 

Several of the participants did experience trauma but identify as “naturally” multiple for other reasons

One participant is diagnosed with DID, another admits they believe they likely have DID

The other part of this study came from the researchers reading people’s blogs on social media sites (like tumblr) and making generalizations about them, which is not fantastic scientific evidence.

Here’s the conclusion of the study: 

With the increasing popularity and spread of the Internet, various forms of self-organized support groups have emerged. Multiplicity is a relatively new concept that encompasses people who consider themselves multiple by nature; that is, they have a group of individual selves who share the same body. It can be concluded that multiplicity is a label and a self-organized support group for people with severe identity disturbances, in some cases with symptoms of dissociative disorders. Further research is needed to assess clinically the underlying motivations, functionality and long-term changes in individuals who consider themselves multiple.

So the gist of it is basically that there are some people on the internet who say they are naturally multiple and sometimes they also have dissociative symptoms, and maybe psychologists should look into that some more! That’s the entire conclusion. 

They are not validating natural multiplicity. They are not legitimizing it. All they did was interview six people who claimed to be natural multiples and then they recorded the data and said “we should look into this some more because this seems to be a thing that people are doing!” 

All this paper says is “Hey, some people think they are naturally multiple” and we already knew that. 

Side note: that other post about this paper is continuing to perpetuate some misunderstandings about the age cutoff of DID/OSDD. DID is caused by trauma that occurs before the ages of 6 to 9, but people may perceive their system to form much later.  My perception was that my system formed when I was 12. Other parts of my own system disagree with me and have differing opinions on that! What is important is that our trauma happened during the critical period. 

Anyway, read the paper for yourself here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00938/full

Feel free to ask me questions about it. Research psychology used to be my jam! 

[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

One of my hobbies is growing succulents. I’m in an online group where people show off their succulents and ask for advice on caring for them. 

Sometimes people post photos of their succulent arrangements where they have put many different types of succulents in the same container. Echeveria, burrows tail, aloe, and sometimes even lithops. 

People are usually kind. They’ll say, “It’s lovely, but you need to replant the lithops in another container. They can’t thrive  with the others. They have different watering needs.” 

See if you keep lithops in the same container as all your other succulents and water them all the same, they’ll rot and die. They might look like they are all just succulents, but lithops have different needs. They can’t thrive and grow if you put them in the same container as the other succulents. 

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[wearepolyfragmented-blog]

ppl have this idea that DID makes you interesting and thats why ppl fake it for attention but in reality when you have the diagnosis no one gives a shit