𝚁𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚋𝚎𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚘𝚠𝚒𝚗𝚐
This is not the typical "system" "syscourse" "plural" account. I'm not calling myself a system, I am not calling myself plural, because I'm not personally comfortable with those community terms.
I have experienced heavy dissociative symptoms since I was young—and a lot of those symptoms DO correlate with things I am already professionally diagnosed with. However, during high-stress periods, when confronting triggers, when working through trauma—that dissociation tends to present very differently in a way that is no longer congruent with what I am diagnosed with.
I had a consistent therapist for a few years up until about four years ago, where we reached an impass. With the help of my psychiatrist, I had been cycling through different medications to treat what I am diagnosed with, trying different therapy methods, EDMR, trauma-based DBT skills—but nothing seemed to actually improve the dissociative episodes, the lapses in time, and while I got better with managing my triggers, I still experience a lot of dissociation around those triggers—and that dissociation does come with differences in the way that I think about things, how I process information, how I react to certain scenarios, how I present myself as an individual, and how blurry my sense of individuality gets.
The impass with my therapist—he confidently told me that he has done everything that he can for me, but encouraged me to seek out a different specialist who does have more experience with dissociation, complex trauma, and depersonalization, since he does not specialize in those areas. I never followed up with his suggestion due to falling into substance abuse and "system spaces" due to a friend at the time.
I was confident in the fact that I had DID, especially considering how the substance abuse was increasing my dissociative episodes and the friend at the time who was spoonfeeding me misinformation about "innerworlds," "phantom pains/limbs," "in-system dating," and all of that junk that has been debunked time and time again by qualified professionals. I always had a very overactive imagination, so imagining all of my favorite characters in my head to rationalize what I couldn't explain myself became a coping mechanism—but it also became a psychosis episode that lasted for nearly two years.
As of now, I am two years sober, I am back in therapy, and I fully expected the heavy dissociative symptoms to leave once the psychosis episode gradually faded out and pulled me back into reality, but it didn't. Of course, I am not experiencing things like "in-system dating" or "innerworlds" anymore, because those things TRULY require a certain level of delusion that I was only able to reach with the help of abusing schedule 2-4 drugs.
I went back to managing my dissociative episodes the best that I could, but the last two years have been filled with traumatic setback after traumatic setback, which is making my symptoms present in that peculiar, unfamiliar way again—making me go back to suspecting that I was either misdiagnosed, or have yet to be diagnosed with something that is congruent with dissociation itself. I'm not claiming that it's DID, or OSDD, or even ID (BPD), DA, DPD/DRD, etc. I'm not self-diagnosing myself with anything here, and I do not wish to, because I don't want to fall back into psychosis.
However, my current therapist did suggest that it would be a good idea to keep track of my symptoms, how things change before, during, and after those dissociative episodes, to try and identify the changes in identity that I DO feel in order to pin-point those feelings of change in therapy and connect them to triggers—so that I can hopefully work through that trauma and get to the root cause. That is what this account is for, since posting about it is a more compelling feeling than hiding it away in a notes app, and I also need to work through the feelings of shame around this issue I have.
I'm not "fictive heavy," my differences in identity are not "dating" each other, there is no "innerworld," I do not have 5000 "alters," the different parts of myself do not have 1000 xenodenders each, I do not believe in "endogenic" or "stressgenic" or "tupla" bullshit, none of them are "holders" of anything, there are no "doubles," there is no "source heavy," none of them change my sexuality or gender—and I can recognize, without a shadow of a doubt, that each difference in identity—is me.
They are not separate individuals. They are not their own people. Everything that they "like," everything that they "say," it all ties back, to me. The differences in individually during dissociation, they ARE me. They make UP me, and I refuse to fall into medical misinformation again. I have absolutely no desire to participate in "system spaces," 99% of you are the worst and most toxic people to cross this earth, and I want nothing to do with it.
There is no "we," there is no "system," there is just I. Me. And this account to track my symptoms to later bring to my therapist each month.
