Hello everyone! Jules here from the Many but One system.

I had a really big moment with my therapist last Wednesday. Something I've actually written an article for The Mighty about but is awaiting approval. It is the topic of shame and overcoming it. In therapy I had a huge realization that for the first time since finding out about our abuse, I do not feel shame for it. I am not ashamed of the trauma, I am not ashamed of the DID, none of it. Our brain did what it did for survival. It was easy to be angry at the brain at first, but then I realized it saved me. It saved US. I am much more thankful and feeling much less shame than before. It has been so, so freeing!

Something else we spoke about was me wanting to educate people on DID, from the perspective of someone living with it. I want to be able to help people who are early in their diagnosis, people who know people with DID and want to understand them, doctors or therapists that don't know a lot about DID, and people who just plain don't know anything about it other than the problematic stuff Hollywood churns out every once in awhile. I realized doing these things brings me great joy and has also helped me with accepting the disorder as my own. Accepting these experiences as my own. Understanding that the alters or parts of me are not as separate as I thought--they are all ME. We are Many but ONE. Being able to fully accept all parts of me has been huge, and assimilating it under "this stuff happened to me" rather than constantly othering myself from trauma has also been healing. VERY difficult, but really helpful.

My therapist was absolutely excited that I feel this way. We have a LONG way to go in terms of therapy and healing. Like, so long I really can't see the finish line, but I know that it's there and I'm ready for it. However, being an advocate for people with DID is difficult. Being public about it would likely open us up to a lot of shame and ridicule. Even if we did not speak on our trauma with any detail or substance, our abusers would know we were speaking about them and that worries a lot of us. I want to be able to be open, probably not in a social media way. I don't want to be the next big DID YouTuber, because a lot of folks know how dangerous that road is. However, I am very much wanting to be able to share my experiences and let people know they are not alone. Not to mention break down stigmas for people who don't know a lot about it, so for example, if a manager at a company has an employee with DID, they will at least vaguely understand the situation and what to do for their employee. Or a teacher or professor with a student with DID or literally any other combo of people who may not be educated that desperately should be. A biography has come to mind. However, I am not really sure how that process works. I know for a fact I would have to change names, appearances, locations, everything relating to our abusers because while we do have an open report on them, they could and would sue us for defamation if it could even sort of be found out that they were involved.

If anyone has written a biography, edited a biography, or knows the process of something like this, that would probably be kind of "memoir-like" and sharing of our experiences as a DID system, I would really appreciate it! I am also going to speak about it much more seriously with my therapist because I am very sure that I want to do this, I just don't know how to go about it. I want to share what DID is the way it ACTUALLY is and not sensationalizing it. While it can be exciting or "weird" at times, the reality is that we're just highly traumatized individuals with pretty mundane lives that are just trying to Get Through It. Of course the biography itself would probably read much more exciting than I'm saying now, as these experiences are not "The Norm" so a lot of non-systems would probably be quite interested in hearing about it, but it's definitely not like Split or Moon Knight, to put it bluntly!

Any questions, comments, concerns, and advice are greatly appreciated and welcomed.

Happy healing,

Jules, host of the "Many but One" system

#DID #DissociativeIdentityDisorder #CPTSD #PTSD #Childhoodtrauma #biography #writingadvice