*** QUESTION FIVE: Have you shared your diagnosis with anyone outside of your care team? If so, who and why?

I don’t have a care team, I have a therapist and that’s the only place my diagnosis is relevant. I don’t even tell other medical professionals. Neither my doctor nor my dentist need know, and PTSD/anxiety explains well enough for others to understand.

My spouse knows because of course he does, but DID is not a topic of conversation with friends, and DID is not my schtick. Regarding disclosure, my only answer is “Probably won’t,” and my advice to anyone would be, “Best don’t.”

*** QUESTION FIVE-and-a-HALF: How often do you switch? How often do you lose time? Talk a little about what dissociation is like for you.

Another answer that’s gone through a journey.

We still shift just as often, but we don’t switch the same way as before.

Defining switches was always tough. There were switches in the body, and in the mind, switches between alters, between subsystems, within subsystems. For us, switching was a frequent occurance; we had to switch in order to function well.

Now, our switches feel mostly internal, softer, and much more covert. Hard switches only happen under duress or after unexpected triggers, but still typically come with coconsciousness. Disorienting, time-losing switches tend to only happen during memory processing or therapy sessions, but this, too, is lessening.

Depersonalization is minimal and our derealization rare, and the general cloudiness only comes back in times of stress or intense emotional situations. I don’t know if we even have the ability to dissociate to the same levels as before.

We’re always sharing space, but rather than groups scattered around a central-I, the I now centers around all of us. We operate through that locus, and feel the presence of others, like a trickling down or a welling up. A hardening, a rearranging. An energy shift, a twitch, a gasp. A blending of differences, a mixing of paint, an adjusting of vibrations.

***

30 Days of DID survey credits go to tumblr user 'shihkas', and wordpress blogger 'catalyticconvergence'. Links can be found in the original post ("An Adjusting of Vibrations") on our website.

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