February 2025
Amnesia in DID is really just disavowal
Dissociative amnesia is often seen as an unavoidable loss of memory, but it is better understood as an active act of disavowal—a psychological rejection of unbearable experiences rather than passive forgetting. By understanding and deconstructing the mechanism behind my amnesia, I was able to significantly reduce it. Healing has not been about retrieving lost memories but about dismantling the barriers that kept them inaccessible in the first place.
amnesia conceptualization DID mechanism narrative symptoms
7 minutes
October 2024
One of the ways I like to think about my dissociative experiences is through the concepts of internal reality and external reality. I think of external reality as being the objective aspects of one’s external environment, including physical surroundings, social interactions, and events. On the other hand, I think of internal reality as being one’s subjective internal experience, which includes one’s thoughts, memories, and emotions. One’s center of focus is usually balanced between their internal and external realities—they are aware of and are able to interact with their external reality while simultaneously being able to perceive and connect with their internal reality.
conceptualization DID narrative reality symptoms
4 minutes
April 2024
The two most dominant emotions that dictate my experience of the world are fear and shame. Upon processing this realization, I’ve come to the conclusion that while these two emotions may seem to be unrelated at first thought, they are actually quite intertwined in my internal landscape. Fear and shame are both uncomfortable emotions that signal a high degree of alarm—one needs to enact change to alleviate them. However, these two internal alarms are triggered by and about opposite circumstances.
DID fear narrative shame symptoms
4 minutes
March 2024
Falling in love with math again
In the fall of 2018, I began my PhD program with noble intentions—I had just completed my undergraduate degree and had become captivated by academic exploration and research. I saw no future path for me other than pursuing a PhD in my chosen field and decided to dedicate my life to a career in technical research. Since then, things have changed substantially. A lot of factors were thrown into my graduate school experience that I could not have predicted, including my advisor temporarily leaving my institution, a global pandemic, and perhaps most impactfully, my dissociative disorder, which I had unknowingly been managing mostly effectively up until that point in life, caused me to nearly decompose.
6 minutes
January 2024
Transgenerational food insecurity
On this site, I have frequently mentioned that I have cyclical patterns of internal experience and subsequent behavior due to my presentation of DID. It took me quite a while to realize this as I had not seen this presentation documented anywhere in the academic literature, although I now know that other people with polyfragmented DID also experience this phenomenon. Once I realized this was how I operate, my understanding of my internal experience grew substantially as it provided a framework for which I could apply my experiences to.
cycle DID food intergenerational narrative trauma
6 minutes
December 2023
The sensationalized conceptualization of DID
Dissociative identity disorder is often conceptualized through the dominant cultural narrative of “multiple people living in the same body”. However, this framework is not the only way to understand the disorder, nor does it reflect everyone’s lived experience. In this post, I critique the sensationalized portrayal of DID and explore how this narrative has been shaped by therapeutic techniques, social influences, and media representation. I share my personal perspective as someone with DID who experiences dissociation as a compartmentalization of internal states rather than as separate identities. By distinguishing between the disorder itself and the cultural framework often used to describe it, I argue for a more nuanced, individualized understanding of DID—one that allows for diverse experiences rather than reinforcing a singular, dramatized portrayal.
autism conceptualization culture DID identity language narrative
15 minutes
October 2023
This is as much of a question for you as it is for me1. How am I doing? Really, I feel fine. Good, even. And that is the problem. It’s hard for me to conceive that I am having any difficulties in my life right now, or that I could be considered “mentally ill”. And for large swaths of time, depending on which part of the cycle I am in, I’m genuinely not aware that my external life is actually falling apart.
4 minutes
September 2023
Do other people experience DID in the same way as me?
There seems to be a dominant representation of DID in online discourse. Mostly, it seems as though people represent themselves as having a handful of well-defined parts, each with distinct names, ages, and characteristics. Perhaps because I am polyfragmented, I experience something very different, and do not relate to the vast majority of the experiences that other people present themselves as having online. Last month, I posted to the DID subreddit to see if anyone related to my experiences:
cycle DID narrative polyfragmented reddit symptoms
5 minutes
One’s early childhood experiences can majorly influence how they perceive the word. Because I experienced repeated trauma in my early years, my brain wired with the knowledge that the world around me was not safe and my experiences were not in my control. In order to cope with this, I learned to escape my external reality by curating my own internal reality—I created a world that only I could control, which was only limited by my own imagination.
conceptualization DID narrative symptoms
5 minutes
July 2023
Over the past several weeks, I have had a lot of change in my system structure. This often happens to me in times of stress, as I discussed in How DID affects my work. This rearrangement of my system usually comes with a new routine, a new set of handwritings, and a new outlook on life. It’s almost like a rebirth—a new attempt to take control of my life, every time with a slightly different strategy.
3 minutes
June 2023
I’m not perfect, and that’s okay
I am a perfectionist. For most of my life, I thought that was a good thing. However, I now see how much it has negatively impacted my life. In this post, I explore my understanding one aspect of that—I believe that the combination of my perfectionistic tendencies plus my capacity to dissociate to a high degree is a main cause of my difficulties in the present. Growing up, I strived to be the “perfect child”—I made good grades, never got into trouble, and was always submissive, smiling, and pleasant to be around.
academia amnesia DID narrative perfectionism symptoms
6 minutes
May 2023
When I began therapy for DID in January 2022, I had no idea how much my life had already spiraled out of control. Over the course of several years, I had gone from being a high-achieving student at the top of my class to being effectively unable to work because I was so triggered by the world around me. However, because of my severe internal compartmentalization, I was unaware of my dysfunction—I had no idea anything abnormal was happening, and, for the most part, thought I was still the successful student I previously was.
academia cycle DID handwriting narrative polyfragmented symptoms
6 minutes
March 2023
DID is very much internal disorder. That is, unless I tell you that I have it, you wouldn’t know1. One of the ways DID affects my internal experience is that I have significant gaps in my memory, both of my past childhood, and of my present adulthood. But amnesia is tricky—I don’t know what I don’t remember, so most of the time I don’t realize I’ve forgotten anything. I believe I experience amnesia in a few ways.
amnesia DID narrative symptoms
4 minutes
The parts I don’t know about still have control
Imagine if, without your awareness, your deepest, most repressed thoughts and feelings were displayed for the world to see. With how my DID presents, this is something that occurs quite frequently for me. Because much of my most difficult emotions are separated from the core me, I am usually unaware of them until they surface and they’re in the forefront of my awareness. Then, after they are over, I may forget that these dissociative episodes ever happened.
amnesia DID narrative symptoms
4 minutes
I was initially hesitant to write about anger, as it’s an emotion I am not used to feeling1. How could I write about something I know nothing about? But I now realize that the absence of anger in my life is significant in itself, and is indicative of how I operate. Anger is an emotion that I am simultaneously very sensitive to, yet not at all familar with—I am incredibly sensitive to the external display of anger in others, yet not at all familiar with how it feels internally.
anger DID narrative symptoms trauma
3 minutes
When I was 12, I stopped feeling anxiety. Prior to that, I was a child ravished by anxiety. Then, one day, it stopped1. And I have never experienced anxiety in the same way since. I now understand that anxiety is one of the experiences that I dissociated away—it’s a state that I did not enjoy experiencing, so I learned how to compartmentalize it and push it out of my awareness. This doesn’t mean I do not experience anxiety; rather, it means that when I do, I am so detached from it that I do not experience all aspects of it.
anxiety DID narrative symptoms
3 minutes
I have always been nerdy. From a young age, I immersed myself in academic work, as I enjoyed learning and the strict routine that school provided for me. I also had an intense need to perform well—my perfectionistic tendencies dominated my life as a child. While I often did perform well academically, there were times where I performed markedly poorly on assessments, so far outside the norm of what would have ordinarily be expected of me, despite preparing and knowing the material.
academia DID narrative perfectionism symptoms
4 minutes
Parts are created from trauma, not necessarily abuse
Pretty early on in my DID discovery journey, I realized that my handwriting was different depending on which part of me was writing. This was very useful information, as I had taken well-catalogued academic notes for years prior to starting therapy, so I had a solid bank of data of which I could look back on and see which parts of me were active at different times of my life.
autism DID mechanism narrative trauma
5 minutes