frightened!

Maybe you don’t realize you’re scaring me. Maybe you like feeling powerful.

Our society tends to talk a lot about the ways that post-traumatic stress disorder impacts mental health. But the illness has profound effects across people’s well-being ― including their physical health.

According to “The Body Keeps the Score,” a book on trauma by psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel Van Der Kolk, physical symptoms with no clear cause are pervasive in traumatized children and adults. Among other physical manifestations, “they can include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, spastic colon/irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue and some forms of asthma,” Van Der Kolk wrote.

In order to understand how PTSD manifests physically, it’s important to understand how PTSD is diagnosed. John Krystal, chief psychiatrist at Yale Medicine and a national expert on PTSD, said that the condition occurs “when exposure to extreme life events causes persisting and significant levels of distress and impairment in the ability to engage fully in meaningful relationships and work.”

me to myself: ok dude just. dont be weird. they dont wanna talk. theyre busy. thats ok. u still exist. they still like u. they’re not mad. theyre just. b usy. ok.

Listen. As helpful as it can be to have a community here, there are ideas that can make people expect things that actually aren’t common, or think that what IS common is a sign of something wrong, and these ideas permeate across the tumblr communities.

If you don’t know how many alters you have, that’s common.

If you have periods where you can’t tell who you are, that’s common.

If you have a blackout when normally you remember what happened, that’s common.

If you remember the basic idea of what happened but not details, that’s common.

If you find a lot of your alters behave similarly, that’s common.

If you can’t speak with your alters, that’s common.

If you have trouble identifying when an alter showed up, that’s common.

If you can’t figure out why an alter split, or what their job might be, that’s common.

If you find yourself behaving differently but having no control over it or didn’t switch, that’s common.

If you have trouble identifying key parts of yourself (things you like, your skills, your favorite things), that’s common.

The entire concept, the #1 symptom of any dissociative disorder, is that you have trouble connecting with the world around you, with your thoughts and your emotions, and your identity. This lack of self-identity (or lack of awareness of your self-identity) is a key feature of dissociative disorders. Because you never fully formed a complete concept of your identity and emotional responses to experiences, you do not have a stable concept of yoir identity.

This causes ‘fuzziness’ where you’re not quite sure about yourself. When you’re faced with the same situation twice, you might have very different responses. Your emotions don’t make sense to you and you aren’t sure why you feel them at all, or you aren’t sure if they’re real. Your thoughts go in different directions, even contradicting themselves, making it difficult to figure out where you stand on something, or what to do, or who you are. Your behavior changes, reacting differently to similar situations, or having drastic changes in interests and preferences, that you and others consider yourself unpredictable and hard to keep up with. You’re constantly second-guessing. You can’t remember very important information on yourself, but you know you must know it because at some point you did.

Dissociative disorders are a diagnosis for this very struggle, where your identity is a mystery, and you feel disconnected from yourself and your surroundings.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is having two or more distinct identities. They don’t have to have names. They don’t have to behave completely differently. They don’t have to have “jobs” or a reason they exist. They may not serve a function. But they are distinct enough that one can tell they’re almost two different people, and this disrupts the person’s life.

OSDD has multiple references. One is having switches in personality, with no memory loss. Another is having periods of blackouts, but no switches. Another is dissociation brought on by programming. And the fourth is for identities that overlap, but still distinct enough that some dysfunction arises.

Do all systems fit these categories? No.

Is it possible for someone to ‘lose’ their diagnosis if they learn to function? No. (You do not lose a previous mental diagnosis unless you are retested and it is confirmed you never had that disorder. You can learn coping methods, but you’ll never stop having ADHD, or BPD, or PTSD. They still affect you, but you know how to handle it. If you no longer had it, you wouldn’t have the symptoms in the first place.)

Can you have dissociation without alters? Yes.

Can you have alters that are blurry and have no defined identity? Yes.

Can you have times you don’t know who you are, but haven’t switched? Yes.

Can you have inconsistent personality changes? Yes.

Can you know who you are, but it feels wrong or fake, and you haven’t switched? Yes.

Can you and your alters ‘blend’ and be unable to separate each other’s distinct differences? Yes.

Can you have no idea what alter does what function or what their identity is? Yes, and it’s actually not common for an alter to have a decided “job.”

Can an alter’s identity shift? Yes.

Do not forget the “dissociative IDENTITY” in DID. This means you have no connection to your identity and it can change or become unknown or “wrong” to you. Your brain is all of those identities at once, and without a “core,” your identity will be fluid.

All the things you think aren’t common, really are.