“I’m not what society deems as the perfect and pristine victim.”
I have a diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder and and have been told that I meet the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder. I wanted to keep the latter off record due to the vast amount of stigma out there.
I have very little memory of my life. From what I’ve been told I was a manipulative and difficult child that did not play well with others. Apparently I was seeing therapists since the age of four.
I’ve been diagnosed with many mental health issues that simply didn’t make sense to me or seemed fitting until my diagnosis of DID in 2019. I had entered an extremely abusive and violent relationship and nearly lost my life as a result. It was as a result of the extreme abuse that I could no longer ignore the others, or alters, as I know now them to be called. I went as an outpatient to a psychiatric hospital and received my diagnosis after assessment.
My entire life is filled with blanks. There are years missing. I have had people come up to me in social situations who apparently know me well, but I don’t have a clue as to who they are. I’ve had a feeling of other people in my head, dictating aspects of myself and how I present to the world. My style, opinions and even sexual orientation shifts drastically.
It’s an open secret that there was a lot of sexual abuse in my childhood. Generational trauma is how I’d describe family dynamics. I’ve faced quite a bit of discrimination as a result of living openly with DID. I’ve lost friends and have been harassed and even physically assaulted.
I’m currently no longer receiving therapy as my ASPD always gets in the way of that. I’m at times still a manipulative and confrontational person. Once you declare to a therapist (in my experience) that you live without conscience or regret, they view you differently and become negligent in their care.
I’m not what society deems as the perfect and pristine victim. It’s a cognitive dissonance that gets most people. I’m a traumatised sociopath.
Some days I revel in this and other times, I am weighed down by the sheer enormity of what I’ve been forced to face in a life that seems without direction and painfully predictable.
In regards to the DID, I have I think about eight alters that I’m aware of. There are probably more. I’ve a close friend who understands the DID and has pointed out to me there may be some I’m not familiar with at all. It seems that the ASPD is a common co-morbidity among all of them which is probably due to genetics and the environment I grew up in.
Most people don’t have a pleasant or understanding reaction to the DID. I’ve had people try to debate me about it without them knowing even basic psychology. Others treat me like a freak show.
To explain DID, it’s a trauma based illness where splitting occurs at a young age (before the age of nine I believe) due to abuse which tends to be sexual. Not everyone who has been abused will develop it though. One of the main symptoms is amnesia which is a huge issue for me. It’s a protective coping mechanism that protects the brain from horrific memories. As one gets older symptoms become harder to ignore and rationalize so diagnosis tends to be in a person’s late twenties or early thirties. For me it was around this time that the alters started making themselves known in a way that I couldn’t ignore.
The alters or other personalities can have different functions such as a child alter that holds memories from the past, a protective alter etc. I have moments of complete amnesia, or I’m semi aware of what’s going on, as though in a dream like state.
