There is a lot myself, my dad, and my family never brought up on this site. The closest this place got to ‘the real’ was when my dad and I each wrote books about our real life experiences, and of course, when dad died. Dad wrote about my seizures briefly when they happened, and some of our money problems when the house foreclosed, but a whole human life doesn’t really fit on a blog. It’s hard to know how much to share, when to share, and how to share it, especially with strangers, even in a place of familiarity. It doesn’t take rocket science to read my dad’s autobiography and know there is some very deeply set generational trauma in our family. Dad always tried to write kindly about people, but also be entirely truthful, and I really admired his ability to balance both of those things even when they felt mutually exclusive.
I loved and admired my dad, but I was also very much abused growing up, those things also feel mutually exclusive. But if my dad taught me anything, it’s that they aren’t. Someone can make a valiant and honest effort to do better, and still fail. Dad never spoke from a place of anger about his own dad, even though he had every right and even reason to. My dad was a live-in absentee father, and my mom is now entirely estranged from myself and my brothers. There can be sad and horrible without cartoon villains. I won’t speak much on mom, since she’s very much alive and able to be affected by things I make public, but just know things are better for everyone this way. No need to prod the nest or play the white knight, the dust has settled and we are all much better off. I hope she is too.
From the title of this post, some of you may suspect what I have to say. I suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder. We’ve known this for years, long enough that dad knew about it, and it was honestly shocking we didn’t notice earlier in life than when we did. We spent some time as a medical anomaly as a child, because of it. After our seizures we lost the memory of our last two years of life; things would come back in blips, but always with debilitating headaches. It should have been brain damage from the symptoms, but there wasn’t any. For a brief period after, we tried to get people to call us ‘Ray’. No one liked the nickname, so it didn’t stick, but it was weird by all accounts because before the seizure we’d been apparently trying to go by Emily.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is triggered by repeated trauma experienced before the age of nine, which is around when one’s personality begins to fully form, in children who have the innate tendency to dissociate already. We don’t fully know why we are a system, but it’s clear to most that it happened around the age of four. It seems to happen when fight and flight are no longer enough, and the child simply cannot handle life as it is anymore, and they can only imagine someone stronger and more capable to survive it. This goes far beyond imaginary friends, though, as the person they ‘create’ is just a part of them, isolated with memories intended to help them navigate the situation. These ‘alters‘, as they’re often called, can be ‘trauma holders’, designed to ‘hold’ the unhappy memories so the child can function, ‘protectors’ which are alters designed to take over when situations are unsafe and scary, and many, many more. Once one is created, more can be made. Instead of the usual fight, flight, fawn, and freeze, they can also split and switch, switch being to change who is ‘fronting’ (being in charge of the body), and split being to make a new alter entirely. A group of alters is called a ‘system‘, as in ‘we are a system’.
Experiences vary a lot from system to system. Some switch easily and smoothly while others have harsh and abrupt switches. Some systems have alters that primarily all get along, others may have constant arguing and trouble communicating.
Some systems remember things between switch-outs pretty well, others have firewalls of amnesia between them. We are the latter. This is not a pretty disorder, I can look an old friend in the eyes and have no idea who they are. Haircuts and tattoos have to be agreed on by an entire group of people, and the societal understanding of systems is very poor. “Are any of you…evil?” Is a common question, which really takes the fun out of parties. None of us are evil, we have a stick-in-the-mud, if that counts, but he’s working on it.
There is no cure, and the most common treatment until recently was re-integration (therapy to become one person again), which can sound appealing to non-systems but ultimately isn’t for everyone. First of all, you’ll forever have DID and can split again in the face of trauma. Second of all, what if I suggested you became someone else tomorrow, someone you’d never met. For the Doctor Who fans, would you choose to ‘regenerate’ and become someone else entirely, with different wants and needs, or would you rather stay you? For some systems reintegration is the answer, for us, probably not.
The they/them pronouns we use on the site are hilariously because we are actually plural. The images of us on the site are from ‘Pippin’ our only actually non-binary alter. We haven’t looked like Pippin in years, since not all of us were cool with the hair chop (which happened before we knew). The name Bay was chosen years ago by a long term host (someone who does most of the fronting for a long time). We all like it well enough to use it day-to-day, but we also have our own names independently for our loved ones to use. We have Jaxson, Pippin, Ava, Bay, Ella, Samantha, and Intern. We use Capsule as a system name, because when you use a gashapon machine you get a capsule, but which one? It’s a surprise.
We don’t know how to handle a site as a system, but we think it’ll be better if the site actually knows. There’s been a lot of writers for the Sims Overthinking series and it keeps changing tone depending on who’s hosting at the time, and we’re burning out trying to play normal. Seven people in one trench coat is a bit of a squeeze.
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Thank you for taking the time to explain the terminology and educate. There’s obviously a lot of misconception about this condition and it’s nice to learn from a primary source(s) about how it actually works. I feel like I’ve already learned a lot. I’m not sure how or if it’ll affect the site; for me so far it’s a ‘huh, that’s interesting’ moment. I’m a scientist at heart so there has to be more data for me to have any opinions on it. I do hope things are going well for you all.
Agreed on all points.
Thirded.
Fourthed
Fifthed!
Sixthed.
I will doubtless have more thoughts on this – and possibly further comments/questions – as I process what you’ve shared here, but for the time being I’ll just applaud your courage in sharing something so personal that has doubtless been a point of stress, contention, and emotional turbulence in the past.
Seventhed.
I will not pretend to understand what your life is like but thank you for considering it important enough for us to know that you’d publicly share what must have, like others said, been met with a lot of hostility and contention in the past. It is also a truth we must acknowledge that a person we admire in some respects, in this case your dad as a blogger, programmer and video game critic, can be less than perfect in other facets of their life and cause others harm even if not through any ill will on their part.
I studied Dissociative Identity Disorder 30 years ago as part of my training as a Behavioral Scientist in the Army. I wish an explanation like yours had existed back then. Your description really humanizes an often misunderstood phenomenon.
I am deeply sad that you experienced a level of trauma capable of creating a system. I hope that you are able to find peace and happiness – however that may look for all of you.
Now I need to go read your poetry again.
Our poetry is a mixture of Ella and Bay’s work, for what it’s worth. Bay tends towards the cursing and humorous takes, while Ella writes a little more serious and flowy. They worked together and edited each others often to try and pass as one, but their individual voices are still very much there. It’s a little funny, some of the things written about are very serious and have to do with trauma, so some of us can’t maintain the poems at all because that trauma isn’t theirs to remember. There’s at least two in these I personally can’t ever recall after reading, meaning I’ve read them each probably a dozen times only for them to get zapped over and over again. Vaguely reminds me of an episode of red dwarf where Holly is bored because he’s read everything, so he wipes his memory and gets to go read Agatha Christie all over like new.
In all seriousness it actually makes us a little nauseous when something gets a quick wipe like that, but I literally can’t read our own poetry book in it’s entirety, which if not ‘ha ha’ funny, is at least an interesting problem to have. – Samantha
What Bay describes is one thing, but another good and eminently readable overview of how DID can present in modern days can be found here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/multiple-personality-disorder-probably
I would like to ask that perhaps you do not share an article claiming that my siblings disorder does not exist in their very important explanation that they have this disorder and that it effects their entire lives forver. Especially one written by someone who is not a doctor and is largely speculating about it from a very biased dislike of tiktok culture. That is not an overview of how DID presents, it is not even written by a medical professional. And regardless of how you feel about it generally it’s considered rude to reply to someones very vulnerable explanation of something that genuinely affects their life by trying to claim they’re making it up.
Additionally, the article also contains several pieces of outdated and/or straight up incorrect information. For instance, DID is not ‘more commonly referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder’. Multiple personality disorder is an outdated term, and is no longer used in diagnostic settings as it isn’t a good representation of what DID is. DID is a dissacociative disorder where the mind is trying to protect itself. It does not actually require heavy medication as he states. In fact there are no known medications that make any impact for DID. Which is why many people who deal with it who are misdiagnosed with ‘treatment resistant’ versions of shizophrenia, bipolar, and other such illnesses. Some people do need some medication to help with the PTSD that concurrently occurs with DID. Generally antidepressents and anti-anxiety medication. Along with various forms of therapy. Nothing nearly as heavy as what he’s implying. This article additionally tries to frame it as a misdiagnosed schizoaffective disorder. Which does not commonly develop as a trauma response. And is often hereditary. Which DID isn’t. If anyone wants further information from a source that takes from actual current medical understanding I suggest this article. Additionally this article gives another acessable explanation of DID as well as other related dissociative disorders. With the additional benefit of being intended to help families of the affected understand the diagnoses. Both of these articles additionally have the benefit of being written from an objective standpoint as opposed to a personal one.
I would like you to remember to ensure not to present un-cited opinion pieces as fact and/or reliable sources of information.
Thank you for your reply and for taking the time to find links discussing the topic. I’ll take this information under advisement.
Also, I realize how my initial sharing sounded. You guys don’t need more things making you miserable, and even without directly confrontational language, posting this here was rude.
I’d just like to drop in here to note that DID is, in fact, often called a “controversial diagnosis,” which many misinterpret to mean “a diagnosis which may not exist.” In fact, the controversy mostly concerns the actual causes: It can’t be only trauma at a young age, or or would be much more common, but the actual additional environmental/genetic/brain chemistry factors aren’t very well understood. (Some think it’s actually induced by well-meaning but incompetent therapists, especially hypnotherapists, like repressed memories (often) are, but that doesn’t account for people who definitely fit the criteria before ever seeing a therapist.) There’s also some controversy over the diagnostic criteria, such as an actual scientific/medical definition for a separate personality being hard to pin down, but it’s not exactly uncommon for things that are easy to define colloquially but difficult to define scientifically to crop up in psychology.
Oof, I am familiar with Freddie deBoer from other contexts, and the guy is very much a mixed bag. Sometimes he’s capable of some truly admirable compassion and magnanimity towards people who are treated as freaks or attention seekers by more mainstream writers. And sometimes, he goes after people with unusual-but-fairly-harmless mental quirks, accusing them of trying to “waste mental health resources” and opining that you personally must present with a mental condition at least as debilitating as his before you have permission to talk about brain stuff. For whatever reason, DID in particular seems to set off the second mode for him; I’ve seen him claim that DID systems were stealing hospital beds from schizophrenia patients when the systems in questions weren’t even hospitalized or seeking hospital treatment. On this topic I would pay him absolutely no mind.
There also was that Diecast were Paul and your dad talked about child upbringing and the story that you really didn’t like to be told what to do. But when when your parents gave you more control over your life you suddenly acted differently. Planing ahead, focusing on tasks and in general being much more organized. Nothing pointed toward DID though, just a teenager growing.
Diecast #301 is the one I’m talking about. Shamus used the words ‘suddenly matured like 10 years’.
Paul, reading the mailbag: “‘Both Shamus and Paul have been down this particular path several times before. And as far as I can tell … you both seem to have been highly successful in raising your children.’ Haha, well don’t speak so soon!”
Oof. With the context of this post and Bay’s writing since Shamus’s death, this is pretty rough.
This is the sort of thing I would have read about years ago and assumed it was some BS sci-fi idea, but I learned later in life how true it is. I haven’t personally met anyone with DID (well, that I know of), but I’ve learned of a few cases, and they’ve been described pretty much this way. Can’t imagine it’s easy to live this way but the reintegration alternative feels like replacing one issue with another rather than a solution.
The human brain is both a fascinating and scary thing even when it’s working within the limits of what we consider normal. When disorders occur it goes up to eleven in both ways.
For what it’s worth, I hope things get better for you, one way or another.
As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD at 6 years old, went off the meds at 15ish, then proceeded to have 13 years of really high highs and really low lows, I can honestly say that for many people, the brain is absolutely fucked.
And the fact that it has likely been an important factor in governing my life trajectory feels even worse.
I would write about my ADHD intermittently as an adult, but I never really obsessed over it because I assumed that my norm was someone everyone else’s norm.
Meanwhile, things that are said by friends, family, and colleagues are resonating with each other, but they’re not resonating with me. There was definitely a disconnect I couldn’t understand. I still can’t fully understand it, and sometimes I do wish I could have some normalcy and common sense work better, but as far as I know, this is the only way I can think.
I suspect (but am not certain, there are other possible explanations) that I got involved with a system a few years ago. Unfortunately, they were an extraordinarily dysfunctional one; only one personality actually even acknowledged that they were a system at all, the others seemed to each insist they were the only person inhabiting the body. Worse, one of the alters was apparently a remorseless sadist, and one (possibly the same one? Impossible to tell from the outside…) was a megalomaniac with delusions of having been a goddess in a previous life. One was suicidal but had apparently “made a deal” with some or all of the others not to go through with it (but refused to admit the others existed, the deal was with an undisclosed person that I can only assume was some other part of the system) One was really pleasant and thought she(?) might be in love with me, but only surfaced very rarely, typically when their body was inebriated or in exceptionally relaxed circumstances (I suspect this may even have been the original core personality, but that’s mostly speculation or possibly just wishful thinking on my part), the rest either resented me, only wanted to be friends, or were indifferent. Needless to say, the relationship was doomed from the start, and the endless mixed messages took an awful toll on my own, already-fragile mental health because I was mostly being gaslit into thinking I was dealing with just one person. It was crazy-making for me to be involved with from the outside; I can only imagine how hard life must be for those on the inside of a system.
Sounds like a system to me, but I’m not their therapist, just someone on the internet talking to their ex. Some of the reason we didn’t talk about it for so long was because some system members straight up didn’t believe it was true. Jax took years to come around fully to the idea.
For what its worth, a ‘core’ personality is being pushed out of the common believes of the medical system, and we don’t really believe in them. Unfortunately, in our own dating life we’ve seen people claim that whichever of us they liked best (although never as severe as your case), was the ‘original core’, which stung in our own situation, but sounds nothing like yours.
I think it’s understandably hard from a singlets(non-systems) point of view, to have no core to think of. Having no one in that head that’s who the system would have been without the trauma, no ‘normal’ version. It’s a feeling of loss, on top of the not being able to reference your own experiences at all. It’s not surprising to me that core personalities are such a widespread thinking, even now as they’re being more and more removed from the medical worlds thinking.
I’m sorry either way that happened to you. Every system is different, and I’m sure they had major communication issues, but it doesn’t sound like they took enough accountability for their own actions and the effect it had on you, that’s not fair or right. – Samantha
Thanks for the sympathy; you guess quite correctly that most of their alters were extremely selfish, irresponsible and unapologetic, though I did get one or two apologies early on in the relationship. I’d imagine accountability and apologies are especially difficult and complicated for systems, because the situation might easily arise where whichever alter actually caused hurt or offence vanishes after doing it and then, unfairly, one of the others has to take over and deal with the fallout. It’s hard enough for most people to sincerely apologise for hurt they’ve personally caused, but having to apologise for hurt caused by someone else who was driving the body at the time… it’d probably feel a lot like going to court and being expected to take responsibility for a traffic accident when someone else was driving the car, and they didn’t even show up to court with you. Or maybe it’s more like the more old-fashioned sort of family (like, 19th century & earlier, I think?), and some representative of the family has to apologise even when another member of the family screwed up?
As for the lack of a “core” identity, that’s interesting, and makes sense considering how very early in life trauma has to occur in order to cause DID; I shall endeavour to update my thinking on that, and apologise for the misconception. Perhaps I erroneously came to think that way by analogy from learning a lot about NPD (I’ve had a couple of relationships with narcissists too), which is often characterised in terms of an “original” true ego and a narcissistic false ego that then arises to conceal it.
Hey, hi, hello, nice to meet you all, and also thank you for letting us know and also for providing this very accessible.. uh. DID 101? It is very much appreciated, and I do believe in y’all to handle the site just fine!
Huh. Noticed a couple of tone shifts in the Overthinking project, but just assumed they were because it had gotten too close to present day to go forward at the same speed.
Oh, wow, that sounds a lot more like “pop culture” portrayal than I thought DID is. I’ve never looked deeply into DID but sometime along the line I’ve developed a misconception that in real life it doesn’t happen with separate personas and internal councils and such. Guess I was wrong, eh?
Being you sounds like such an experience. Probably not fun most of the time, but still…
Regarding the pop culture portrayal, you’re probably thinking of what I linked in my reply to Leslee above.
It varies heavily from person to person, just because one blind guy has the glasses and cane doesn’t mean all blind people do. I happen to experience something more of what people think of, but that isn’t the predominant experience. Every system is a little different. We don’t have so much an ‘internal council’ meeting so much as an overwhelming feeling of wrongness when someone is unhappy with a decision. The amount of times before knowing that we went to declutter things we don’t use anymore, worked passed the feeling of grief throwing it away because ‘Well, I haven’t even thought about it in years’, only to be inconsolable six months later when the rightful owner turned up. The internal council is more listening to that gut feeling a little more, and putting things aside for later, where the alter in question can decide what to do with it.
Whole article on the front page, bosses.
This is gold!
Sounds complicated af.
I can definitely empathize with having trouble reconciling a parent’s good qualities with their abusive behavior. Some things still leave me bitter when I think about them years later.
Thanks for taking the time to educate us (me, at least) on the background on DID as well as its impact on you. As someone else said, it sounds immensely complicated.
Naively, until you presented the possibility I couldn’t conceive that someone with DID would not want reintegration. I had to chew on it for some time to come to grips with it, but I think I’m coming to an understanding that reintegration would be preferred for cases where the system is not stable, the alters disagree, and the whole has no path forward; for cases where the alters have reached a stable equilibrium, reintegration would now be the riskier path for both alters and system. Without attempting to put you on the spot, am I understanding your state more or less correctly?
If so, I guess I’d never conceived of a stable equilibrium that still maintained the separation; I’d just assumed that to achieve stability would require removal of the driver and the removal of the driver would automatically remove the barriers and reintegration would “just happen”. And like all assumptions that no more work would be needed, it’s wrong. :) Removing the grain of sand doesn’t remove the pearl.
The human mind is a strange and fascinating place. Somewhat neurodivergent myself, it took me a long time to realize that others weren’t seeing the world as I did, and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand everyone else. Hope I haven’t overstepped by doing it in public here.
I can’t speak for someone specifically or DID people in general, not that I’d expect that to be a uniform group on the topic, but I feel like the big part of the problem a lot of people have with the current generation being more open on the mental health and neurodivergence subjects is that they move the discourse from “treating” to “managing”. But for a lot of people it’s a case of “why wouldn’t you want to be normal (as I define myself and lalala I’m not listening), you’re clearly faking it”, or the fact that you’re not ashamed of your hideous mental deformity and try to hide it must mean that you’re, again, faking it and seeking attention.
I do think the shift from “treatment” to “management” and talking about “improving the quality of life” over the idea of forcing people into some kind of predefined “normalcy mould” is good. It should be up to the individual to decide to what extent they don’t feel good with their mental state, even if that is not always an easy choice to make. Like, personally, I know I’m always weary of the extent that I want to seek professional help for, among other things, my anxiety. I have the underlying worry of “treating it too far” and that it could “make me not me” anymore. On the other hand every experience in your life changes you and change can be for the better, but on the gripping hand who is to define what “better” is in this case, especially in advance and with such unpredictable thing like mental health… and that’s how you get anxiety about your anxiety.
I think therein lies the rub – it’s more than just a case of wanting to treat and cure, which is certainly a ill of our society in general, wanting quick cures for everything. But I often think a good analogy is that when a toddler falls to the ground, he sometimes looks to his parent to see what reaction he should make, if the parent is shocked and concerned and upset, then perhaps he will cry, and feel worse than if the parent had smiled and encouraged him to get up. And this principle appears to carry over into the general experience of adults – so naturally people are wary of the line between accepting someone’s descriptions of his own issues being a positive step, vs that self-description being a form of accepting ailments in such a way that is detrimental to a person’s own wellbeing. The problem seems to be how on earth can we define such a line :/ It’s something we know in ourselves that we battle with – understanding where that line is, so naturally we are suspicious of other people’s ability to judge it, especially if someone says it adamantly. Not just from an impulse of “why can’t you be normal so that it doesn’t affect my understanding of the world” but from an impulse of wanting to help as well.
I’ve met a few systems here and there. Reasonable to put it out there. Always good to see it explained again — different systems explain it in different ways.
That’s quite interersting – in your experience do you have a sense of overarching consciousness, or do you experience each other in the first person individually (and simultaneously)? And how is Jaxson pronounced? The same as Jaxon or Jackson would be?
Same as Jackson, he usually just goes by ‘Jax’.
And…as for the conscious, it’s different from alter to alter, and how they work together. Myself (Bay) can’t really second-hand anyone, and I have a very hard time even recalling things the others have done or are thinking, I have gigantic memory blank spots which I almost don’t notice unless I look too close, then it freaks me out. Meanwhile as far as I’ve been told, Samantha and Jaxson, for instance, can sort of ‘pass the controller’ back and forth, like they’re playing a game, and see what the other is up to. The thing about DID is the brain is covert about it, it’s a disorder built for a need of survival, not attention, and many alters can be made to specifically not see anything wrong. Maybe someone with less firewalls will be able to answer this later, but in my case it’s just…normal, things feel normal, I’m not particularly aware of what others are doing, even though even just yesterday someone else was fronting for a good couple hours because the bills got paid and someone made and ate my least favorite dinner.
Thanks for the response :)
It’s a shame that this comes about as a result of traumatic experience, and I’m sure anyone with afflictions doesn’t like them cast in a disingenuously positive light… but perhaps this is a case in which one might consider the response to trauma as being a form of hardship making one stronger, in some ways. An example of the sheer capacity of the human brain – one which most never really experience or utilise. Maybe that’s one way to look at the mental malaises which anyone (and to some extent everyone) experiences – an inability for our conscious brain to deal with the complexity and power of the computer that it finds itself equipped with. I hope your situation is one that you can find/make an agreeable one, that’s all that matters really.
I don’t know what it says about me, that my first reaction to this post is to crack at least 5 (not mean-spirited) jokes–probably at least 90% you’ve heard before–followed by asking about a half-million questions.
How comfortable are you with people with questions stemming from genuine curiosity?
As long as they’re in good faith, I like answering questions. If it wasn’t a condition we also had we’d be fascinated.
People with DID have some truly interesting symptoms. For instance (and this sounds like total bullshit, I know.) people with DID can have Alters who cause the brain to go dark in the vision centers when they’re fronting. Systems can have alters that are literally blind, when the body isn’t. One of our alters is deaf in one ear, to the point where we had diagnosed hearing loss and a hearing aid, but we and those around us were baffled at the fact it seemed to come and go. Bay is mostly deaf on the right side (only able to hear specific higher-pitched sounds) but the rest of us aren’t. What the fuck is the human brain.
Thank you for writing this. It was amazing to read. Every so often I get on a kick and it’s an odd experience to realize that Shamus is gone. I remember when Mass Effect 3 came out and feeling the ending was lackluster, then found Spoiler Warning and followed along your dad’s content until the end. I rewatched his mourning service on youtube and then figured I’d poke onto his website to see what’s been posted since. Got to read this article and it was an eye opening read. By my nature I will always be curious for all the details, just like I’ll be curious for the details of Shamus’ early passing, even though there’s plenty of posts about his health on this site.
It was interesting to see the way you phrased certain events that I recalled reading from Shamus’ life posts. Just looking at things from a different angle.
The Minecraft post made me think it might be helpful if you created separate accounts for everyone. That way you won’t have to preface every “odd” post with an explanation.
That’s a very good idea, I’ll see if everyone would be down for that.
It is great that you feel free to share this. Increased awareness will not only help followers of this site treat you with dignity, it will help them understand others in their lives as well.