One of the hard things

One of the difficult things about DID is maintaining a consistent belief that that's what's going on. This makes sense, of course, if not all of my parts are willing to accept it.

The hardest part of this is that, so often, I have these nagging fears that I'm just making it all up, for reasons that I can't discern. No matter how often I tell myself, or other people tell me, that it's really happening, I worry about this.

I think some of this comes from a simple fact. DID, more than anything else, is designed to let me cope with my life, despite anything that might be going on. And it worked surprisingly well for years. There have been times when my ability to cope has stumbled, but it's really only been over the past year that my coping skills have fractured so badly that I can't maintain a convincing façade of being all right.

And it's also hard, because I remember, fairly clearly, making a decision after I was in the hospital last February. I decided to stop blocking out all of the things that have been making it difficult to cope for the past months. I can't say it was a bad decision. I made it because the alternative was to know that I would definitely go through other periods of feeling suicidal, and doing so without the resources to break away. And the parts of me that watched that particular suicidal depression, doing everything it could to keep it from happening... they pretty much decided it was time to stop blocking everything out.

I spend a lot of time trying to sort out whether my perceptions of the world come through the lens of DID, or whether I'm just exaggerating things that happen to everyone. And even though I'm mostly confident that this isn't caused by my therapist (for instance, I was thinking this was what was going on even before I first saw her), I do worry that the way I present myself misled her into thinking I have DID.

I can rationally say, "There's absolutely nothing I gain from faking." This is true. But I still have those voices in my head that accuse me of lying, of making things up, of just being too lazy to maintain the ability to keep all of the voices and impulses under sufficient control to do the things that have to be done, to be the person I need to be at any given moment.

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In a related note: sometimes, I wish I were able to trust members of my family if I were to talk about all of this. I came very close to saying something to my next-older sister the other day. She's the one who, ten years ago, told me her therapist had diagnosed her with DID. I doubted her at the time, but the further I move through my own process, the more I'm starting to wonder.

Anyhow, she was mentioning headaches, and said something about getting bad migraines several times a week. I know that my own headaches, which have been diagnosed as migraines, are closely related to doing a lot of switching. And I've found that as I establish better internal communication, the headaches have reduced in frequency and severity. So I nearly mentioned this to her... but I stopped myself, and I think it's for the best.

Despite the fact that, clearly, my family has taken the philosophy of not talking about things to a high art, somehow, none of my family seems able to keep a secret. And I know my sister would inevitably talk about me saying anything about DID, and all that implies. And it would be unsafe. If I were at a point in my life when I was willing to give up contact with my family, I might go ahead and talk about it. But I'm not.