Written by the CCP on 6/3/2025
“As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on the subject. Then, many years later, I came to know someone with this supposedly rare disorder, then someone else, and then someone else. It soon became apparent that what I had been taught was simply not true. Not only was I meeting people with multiplicity; these individuals entering my life were normal human beings with much to offer. They were simply people who had endured more than their share of pain in this life and were struggling to make sense of it.” - Deborah Bray Haddock, M.Ed.,, M.A.,, L.P., The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook (2001).
More than a decade later, this still holds true. I remember that during my time as an undergraduate psychology major, around 2020 or so, I was taught that Dissociative Identity Disorder was rare. That was it. Nothing about what its actual presentation is, or symptoms other than “multiple identities,” or why it forms, or its complex relationship to trauma, or if the people who had the condition actually exist in reality. There was nary a mention of DID beyond “it’s incredibly rare.” So I wasn’t working with a whole lot when someone in my head first started talking to me in 2022.
A lot of people may stop at this point and ask, “well, isn’t that also a symptom of schizophrenia? Or psychosis? Or some other disorder? How did you know it was DID?” The first thing I will say is that I’m not here to prove the existence and prevalence of DID to you. I know I sound defensive about it, but I’m tired of people’s first reactions to learning that I have a complex trauma-related disorder being skepticism and disbelief. If you’re not ready to read everything here with an open mind and a willingness to meet me at my level, then don’t read this. Or if you do, don’t confront me with accusatory questions about it.
Okay. Mini rant over. The second thing I will say is that the answer is quite simple: I had no idea that it was DID.
I have a friend who, at the time, was someone in between an acquaintance and a friend who had recently told me that they had OSDD (for those who don’t know, OSDD is a diagnosis very similar to DID such that the differences aren’t relevant to discuss at the moment). This was the first time I had met someone who disclosed that they had “multiple identities,” and at the time, I was skeptical. My initial reaction to being told this information was “isn’t DID incredibly rare?” and “I’m pretty sure DID isn’t real.” Well, that’s an asshole thing to assume, but I can see the thought process behind it when I consider all the pop culture and pop psychology being fed to me at the time. It’s hard not to react to skepticism when all you’ve been told about a topic is that people tend to lie about it.
So here I am, barely knowing anything about DID to the point where I thought it probably wasn’t real, hearing a voice in my head calling herself “Celestia (name changed for privacy purposes)” and telling me I should sabotage all my relationships with my friends and loved ones. Pleasant. My first thought was that I was having a delusion, but my understanding of delusions at the time was that you can’t recognize that you’re in a delusion when you’re having one (I would later find out that this is not necessarily the case, but c’est la vie). I said some things to my boyfriend at the time that worried and concerned him, especially since he wasn’t equipped with the knowledge of how to react well or help. I would frequently call myself “crazy” or “psychotic” or “delusional,” partially because I was ashamed of acting in a way that I perceived to be absurd or unreasonable, partially because I had no other language in my vocabulary to describe how I actually felt. I would feel strong urges that weren’t mine, such as urges to hurt myself or get angry at a friend and yell and break things. I would also feel urges to clean, to get shit done, or to get out of the house and do errands and grocery shop. Whatever the urge, I would get the persistent feeling that this was someone else, not “me.” I felt like I was being possessed by some other entity at the time. I’m not spiritual in the slightest, but I suspect that if I were, I would have attributed it to some sign from God of…I don’t know, something.
The understanding that those incidents could have been DID came much later. I also later learned that while DID forms in early childhood, it can be quite covert — unlike those “come to Jesus” moments I felt like I had when I started recognizing certain urges as something not-me. DID symptoms can also suddenly get more intense when your life circumstances change drastically — something that had just happened to me when I moved out of my abusive household into an apartment with roommates for college. At the time, I chalked it up to me being mentally ill and crazy, and tried not to think too hard about it otherwise — which, as you know, obviously works out great 100% of the time.
My willful ignorance didn’t last long, however, because I had a pretty damn good support network at the time, and I was secure enough in my personal relationships to feel somewhat safe about reaching out for help. It didn’t change the fact that I was embarrassed and ashamed about my symptoms — but I could at least suppress the urge to hide long enough so that I could explain to my friend-acquaintance that I thought I was exhibiting symptoms of psychosis. They were the only person I knew who had experience dealing with psychosis — a topic that I had only vaguely heard about before I started experiencing psychosis-like symptoms. With their help and guidance, I learned more about psychosis and how to cope with my distress with various coping techniques. They would walk me through exercises where I wrote down my thoughts and feelings and figure out ways to reword and reframe them. These exercises are particularly helpful for psychosis (at least for some), but they can be very helpful with general distress as well — the idea isn’t to treat the disorder itself, whatever the disorder might be, but to manage your symptoms in a way that makes it less distressing for you to experience them.
Slowly, I learned to be okay with experiencing scary and weird urges and hearing thoughts that weren’t mine. All I had to do was accept that they were present, that I was feeling bad, and that I didn’t have to act on those urges or emotions. I could feel like sabotaging my relationships and not actually call up my friend to tell them I’m leaving them forever. And if the urges I felt weren’t actually telling me to hurt anybody or anything — I could simply act on them if I wanted to. If I felt a sudden strange urge to clean the entire kitchen, I didn’t have to react badly to the fact that it wasn’t my urge. I could just…do what the presences in my head wanted to do, and clean the kitchen.
It wasn’t all easy, obviously. In fact, most of it was quite difficult — I spent a lot of my time trying to sort through my thoughts, trying to figure out which ones were real or not real, which ones were mine or not mine. It was scary. It was exhausting. But for the first time since I’d encountered the fact that I had severe mental illness, I felt like managing my pain and symptoms was doable. That’s something that becomes somewhat of a theme in my life, or perhaps always has been — some things can feel impossible or insurmountable, but when you actually end up having to encounter them in your life, you’ll find that most things are doable. Not simple, not painless, and certainly not easy — but doable.
Now, the actual epiphany of DID didn’t come until months later. But that’s a story for another time.