Honestly it pisses me off when people explain DID as a disorder caused by "intense (repeated) childhood trauma", bonus points for "[...] childhood trauma before the age of [arbitrary number]"
First off, I feel the use of intense can very very much lead into "trauma olympics" where people hear that and go "oh so it has to be like extreme physical or sexual abuse every single day" because that's what they think of when they think "intense trauma". This then leads to fakeclaiming or denying of people's systemhood based on how "intense" their trauma was (or rather, how intense it seems to the fakeclaimer/denier)
We were a social outcast in school for years, but was never outright bullied (aside from one year). In fact, most kids were just acquaintances, often friendly acquaintances in elementary years. And yet the sheer isolation that came from our anger issues, general inability to relate to others, and lack of social skills was traumatizing for us. Traumatizing enough for us to develop DID
Yet when a lot of people hear "intense childhood trauma" they'd think that's not possibly "intense" enough to develop DID
Second off, every time someone gives a number as to what age the trauma has to be from or what age it develops, it's just... so stupid. There's always research that denies it. There's no set specific age for when the trauma cut off is or when DID has to develop, and if you do enough research you will fucking see that
"Trauma before the age of 9" "before the age of 11" "before the age of 5" "before the age of 18" so so much conflicting information on when the cut off is... because there is so fucking cut off!!! If you do any research instead of just taking what one or two articles say and running with it, you will see how much the "cut off age" changes between resources. Because it's not possible to set a specific age to the "trauma requirement"!!! It's just misinformation!
Thirdly, my final gripe with people explaining DID like this is why is that the first thing you explain about it? Why is our trauma the most important thing to bring up first?
What I'm talking about here is not people asking how does DID develop or whatever, I'm specifically referring to when people ask "What is DID?" and the very first thing that is mentioned is that it develops from trauma
This is partially sparked from a page I saw on a fandom wiki that brought up systems. Particularly, it mentioned things relating to alters and introjects. They had a little thing at the start of that section titled "What is DID/OSDD?" I edited it to give more information, but before editing, all it said was:
DID is a dissociative disorder caused by severe childhood trauma, but it can also be caused by disorganized attachments to caregivers, such as when a child's parents did not comfort them when they were upset, or when their caregiver was unavailable or unwilling to meet their child's needs.
THAT IS NOT EXPLAINING DID WITH THE CONTEXT NEEDED FOR THE TOPIC OF THE SECTION!!!
The section is about alters, and DID is a dissociative disorder with alters, and yet the explanation didn't say a SINGLE THING about alters!
What it did say, though? An in depth explanation of the trauma that causes the disorder! Because, yes, it's totally fine and normal to define the entirety of a disorder by the "extremely awful"* trauma that causes it to people who need context for your wiki page. /sarc
Now all that these people know is that if someone is a system they experienced the most "EXTREME"* trauma as a child, and they also still don't know what alters are (which was, again, necessary context for the section). Good job guys you did great /sarc
Tangent aside, my point is, why are you defining our disorder by our trauma? Why is the first thing you want to say when explaining it to someone is that anyone with the disorder has "intense"* childhood trauma? Rather than explaining what the disorder is, the symptoms, what dissociation is, or what alters are, you just put people with DID's trauma on display and nothing else
*(In quotes because as explained earlier I don't believe in referring to trauma as "extreme"/"intense"/etc because of the implications people get about it)
Well anyway that's been my syscourse rant of the day. I'm just really tired of this shit. At best it's a poor "explanation" of DID and at worst it spreads misinformation and encourages trauma olympics