#didproblems

Me: We need to make a video about dissociative amnesia. It's a popular topic….

system is the singular most used word in the english language, technically, its used in so many different contexts and for so many different things.

Archie: *shoots forward to co-con*

*The body’s vision suddenly blurs*

Me: “Oh oh, I uh can’t see....”

Archie: “Ohhp yeah sorry!”

*dashes backwards to his inner world residings*

(faintly from the background): “I’VE LOST MY GLASSES”

Me: *outwardly laughs in the presence of family members because he sounded like Will in The Inbetweeners Movie*

TW: talking about my childhood trauma

They don’t have a term for the type of trigger/trauma I experienced to develop DID. I wasn’t sexually abused. I was medically tortured. They did experiments on me starting around 18 months old. They tested “treatments” on me that are now banned in almost all countries. Growing up in a hospital, being in pain, talking to adults and comforting them, that was my normal. That was where my many Mez were needed. Being told to hold still through painful experiments, tests, and treatments. “So you don’t make it worse,” “So you don’t have to start the whole thing over again.” Alters who’s only purpose was to find ways to be ok in pain levels considered above tolerable thresholds (meaning I shouldn’t have been able to stay conscious, not go into shock, etc).

That was where we grew up and where all of our memories begin. Protecting the body from the torture in the name of medicine. Where the adults were only doing their best to find a way to treat my conditions, when the medical field for these diseases was only created just before I was born. I was one of the first patients of the “founding Grandfather” of this area of medicine.

They had to understand why and they decide to do so by invasively investigating my person and invasively trying new testing and treatment ideas on me. There are only a few other kids who experienced what I did during the formation of this medical field. I don’t know how they lived through it, a lot didn’t. But I do know if I didn’t have all of my Mez I’m not sure if I’d be among the names of dead children.

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✅Alters could be abusive.

✅Alters could try to kill you. Inside. Or outside, by killing the body.

✅Alters could harm the body in many, many ways: because they wanted to harm themselves, or harm you, or any other alter or just don’t understand what is going on.

✅Alters could harm people around you, sometimes even the ones you love.

✅Alters could try to bring you back to you abuser.

✅Alters could lie to you.

✅Alters could change or erase part of your memory.

Actually, they could do anything that any other very close person could do. And even more because they have access to your mind - to their mind - to your common mind.

And sometimes it’s fac*ing difficult to be Plural. Sometimes we want to be just us.

And yeah, when I said that we are family I mean exactly this. Families are not fairytales. They could be good, they could be bad. And some family members could be awful, could be abusive and dangerous. And you could hate them.

But it doesn’t mean that all family members are bad if one of them or a couple of them is bad.

And the fact that many families are bad doesn’t mean that all families are bad or families could be good.

There are top 5 for our System.

💎Deemon and person connections in His Dark Material (both books and TV show) really look like alter’s connection in many ways.

💎Trills from Star Trek. I mean Trills with simbiots who also have the former Hosts. This experience is especially close for Ayman’s (our main hosts) new co-hosts, because in the co-front they suddenly started to have Ayman’s (and sometimes other co-hosts) memories and access to their experience and emotion regulation.

💎Alien and Human “coexistence” in Stefani Mayer’s “The Host”. Especially accurate if we are talking about co-front with an alter who is abusive/behave like a persecutor/don’t like you/don’t want to be a multiple.

💎Any stories about Telepathy. It’s about inner-world experience and connection between alters. And if this telepaths are faced with discrimination it’s also about ableism in our society.

💎Stories about tweens, especially Siamic tweens. This is the closest real-world experience that has not such a bad representation in mass culture that looks a little bit like ours.

Technically I'm a refugee, but I don’t feel like one.

Refugees often miss their countries.

Refugees often like to read or hear something about their motherland.

Refugees often want to communicate with other people from their countries.

If refugees have family members that left in their homeland, they miss them.

Refugees often have a proper past, something good in their past before all their refugee experience started.

Me, on the other hand…

Well, sometimes I couldn’t name my home country. I used to say “Russia” not because I sometimes forget that my home country exists separately or because Russian culture and Ukrainian culture are similar… Well, they are almost similar, but this is not the point.

I knew that I would have a strong flashback if I would only hear the Ukrainian language or see some photos from my hometown Donetsk. It’s not safe for me to even think about the country and city where I was born and spent my first 18 years of life.

But I still see Donetsk in nightmares. This is what Donetsk is for me. A nightmare city that I have always hated. Since I was three years old.

And I don’t want - no, I literally couldn’t- hear or read stuff about Ukraine and especially Donetsk.

I don’t have contacts with people in Ukraine. At least not with people that I remember from Ukraine (all my Ukrainian contains are

contacts that I started to have when I was living in Russia). I have no idea what happened to my relatives in Ukraine. And I don’t even want to know.

My parents are still in Russia. And I think I have a granny in Ukraine. They are part of my nightmare dreams.

I want to save my little brother. But other relatives… sometimes feel that it's better to die than speak with them even again. I am still really afraid of them.

And of course I’m avoiding any people from Russia or Ukraine in the U.K. I'm even scared of Russian-language people in the shops!

I don’t feel that I have any kind of life before I leave… no, not Ukraine, but Russia (and I was living in Russia after Ukraine). All these years in Ukraine and Russia was kind of one long disaster for me.

So I have as much in common with most refugees as I have with the British Royal Family.

I feel more like Holocost survivor who lived in Nazi Germany, or sexual slavery servival, or Ghunatanamo survival. Like a person who was living in constant fear and almost no one could understand their experience because almost no one spent two decades of their life in such conditions.

It’s really difficult to explain to other folks that I meet in the U.K.

And I feel so lonely because of this experience that no one understands.

-Ayman

(Abu Umar’s selfi)