How are people so open about having DID? Especially in real life how do people actually tell people and talk about it and actually go and get a diagnosis, how are they not absolutely terrified and deeply ashamed? I'm not saying they should be but for us any time someone brings up DID in conversation we panic even when it's nothing to do with us. We deeply regret telling the people who do know even though nobody ever brings it up to us anymore.
We go to a sewing club once a week it's mostly older women we're the youngest who goes but there's a new person who's not much older than us who started coming. Last week she just ever so casually mentioned how she thinks she might have DID and nobody said anything. Nobody told her she was faking, no "oh but that's too rare there's no chance you could have it", no treating people with DID like they were dangerous monsters they just believed her and went on as normal.
And for some reason that broke us, well the host, we live in fear that people will find out we suspect we might have DID or OSDD that they'll judge us or not believe us especially people we know and are close to. But maybe it didn't have to be that way and maybe people would be normal, and believe us and still care about us. But I feel like we've been ashamed for so long we can never come back from it.
Even just talking about it to our mother who actually came to us saying she thinks we might have DID a year or two?? (Time is hard) ago makes us want to curl up and die we've just shut down at every mention of it. But I don't think we can keep going on like this, we need help and we're not going to get it suffering in silence.
Does anyone have tips on how to tell people? Maybe in ways that less involve speaking since we have selective mutism and It seems this sort of thing triggers it. -Rey