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Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Over: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to longtime listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 1:This is Doctor. E, and one of the things that I wanted to talk about is dissociation versus psychosis for two reasons. One, when you don't understand what's going on with dissociation, it could very easily feel crazy or overwhelming. It can feel crazy and overwhelming even when you do understand what's going on. And two, from the outside, there are times when it can look crazy or what they're describing sounds crazy if you don't understand what's going on.
Speaker 1:So it's important to understand the difference between dissociation and psychosis. There's several things about this and the way perspective is changing and the way research is changing as well. So for example, the old school ways of differentiating between and dissociative identity disorder were pretty simple. It had to do with whether the voices were coming from inside or outside the person and whether, for example, if the voices were heard made sense in context of the person's stories or memories or need to keep safe as opposed to command hallucinations, for example, that were incoherent or did not make sense in a reality based way. Last week, however, in the Mad in America article for science, psychiatry, and social justice, there was an article published, I guess in May, by a social worker that talked about distinguishing dissociative disorders from psychotic disorders and compounding alienation.
Speaker 1:And I will provide a link to the article in the blog, but the article itself was interesting and there was a lot of discussion about it online. So I wanted to talk about it on the podcast as well. There are several things to know about the article. For one, from the very onset of his thesis statement in the article, he makes clear that his approach is that of both psychosis and DID being an illness. This is important because while it is true that when there is trauma, although there are some systems that say that they are not trauma based, but generally speaking, when there is trauma that has caused, a lack of integration of the personality and development or further dissociation because of ongoing trauma and neglect, then that is a developmental and trauma response, which does cause changes in the brain.
Speaker 1:And so there is that pathology if you're looking at it from a perspective of what has gone wrong. But as we pointed out in the podcast when we interviewed Doctor. Ross, that pathology of looking at what is wrong is different than saying you are wrong as the client or as the consumer for mental health services or as the person with DID. There's a difference between the pathology of this is wrong and the story of what happened to you. So the example Doctor.
Speaker 1:Colin Ross gave in episode nine of our podcast was in an emergency room when someone has been in a car accident and is brought to the emergency room for a broken leg. The pathology is the broken leg, that's true, But the cause is the car accident, not the person. So we have to be careful when we're talking about pathology and how we assign that to a person because it's one thing to say, this is not working and is not functioning, and another thing to say, you are not working or you are not functioning or you are unwell or this won't work for you at any level ever or you can't work in this way. Like, it's a very delicate line and balanced just from that piece. So when he starts his article and the quote is, between dissociative disorders with their roots in trauma and psychotic disorders, which are definitely illnesses of the brain.
Speaker 1:So it's unclear because it sounds like he's referring to psychotic disorders as an illness of the brain and dissociative disorders with their roots in trauma. But the way it's written, it also sounds like he's saying both are definitely illnesses of the brain. So that was the first sensitivity people had, and I think that piece maybe was just a misunderstanding of the phrasing of the sentence because I do think he's giving, because he has that clause between there, I think he is saying that dissociative disorders with their roots in trauma, and then separately from that he's also saying psychotic disorders, which is an illness of the brain. So I don't think that he meant it the way a lot people took it. I think it's unfortunate that the reading came across that way, and I understand why people were upset about it.
Speaker 1:Then the next piece of his article that I think was confusing for a lot of people was when he talks about a person recognizing alien parts of themselves and how for a dissociative disorder that alien may be perceived as an actual alien or alien as in just foreign, that it's something separate or different than who I am. And so that could be attributed to different personalities, which would be appropriate for dissociative disorder. But if someone is seeing those alien parts of themselves because of being literal aliens or demons or CIA agents talking to them through a brain implant, then they would be diagnosed as psychotic. So he's trying to differentiate again based on the reality and likelihood of what it is that's happened. And so he's saying most commonly people in the general population who are not well educated about DID, much less like anything like RA or any kind of ritual abuse, that they would not understand what to do with that and rather than being diagnosed with a dissociative disorder, they would be diagnosed as psychotic.
Speaker 1:The next piece is that the author goes forward in saying that professionals in the field could do a better job of acknowledging what the person has inside them and what they are going through, and that regardless of how this is described or presented, that it could be very well a human response to difficult circumstances. Or he says, quote, a very human response to very difficult experiences, and the brain may simply be responding to those experiences. So he's saying clinicians make it harder for people with DID or even psychotic disorders or people with DID that is misdiagnosed as a psychotic disorder. That professionals make it harder for these groups of people when they don't understand what's going on and don't listen to the story that goes with what people are describing. His approach however, was sort of the fourth point because he's speaking clinically.
Speaker 1:He speaks so much from a pathology perspective that a lot of people who do have DID were really offended and hurt by the article because they felt that he was describing alters as a symptom. So in a way this is true if you're looking at the DSM and part of the requirement to have a diagnosis for dissociative identity disorder is having alters. That is part of the diagnosis, and that's where he's coming from, the clinical pathology piece. However, from the perspective of insiders or headmates or personalities or the alters themselves, however you call them, it was really offensive. And so many people with plurality as a community were really intensely discussing this because there were pieces of the article that were very helpful and pieces of the article that were a little bit confusing or easily misunderstood and easy to take offense about the way he presented things.
Speaker 1:His main point is here. Let me quote this. That the idea that professionals can define voices as more psychotic if people find themselves unable to talk to them also ignores the possibility of a spectrum. It ignores the possibility that inability to talk may be another function of the degree of alienation. So he then goes on to talk about how in any circumstances when there's something difficult to deal with, we have a harder time approaching it.
Speaker 1:And so just because someone who presents as psychotic has difficulty discussing the issue or discussing what's going on or describing the voices that they're hearing or what the voices are saying or doing does not mean that they're psychotic. It could just very well be that those particular voices are dissociative states that have more difficult issues that they are dealing with. And so in that case, rather than dismissing and medicating them, professionals should actually listen more attentively and work more carefully to work with those particular states. So I think that's his approach, and that's where he's going clinically. But it is a very clinical language.
Speaker 1:And so for just insiders who are alters being described as a symptom, that's where I think the offense happened and where some hurt feelings came in because no alter wants to be described as a symptom. An alter wants to be described as a person or whatever is true to their nature and how they present themselves. And this particular article did not leave a lot of flexibility for that. He did, to give him credit, he was trying to advocate for clinicians to improve their practice and he was supporting the functional purpose of dissociation. He even said, quote, There are times it is helpful and some degree of it is part of healthy human functioning.
Speaker 1:And then he even says, a particular kind of dissociative experience can also be part of a healthy human functioning. And then talking about how without help or organizing that or communication internally that this becomes more difficult. And then ultimately what he's doing is selling a CEU course that is supposed to help clinicians address these issues better. So in some ways his motives are very good and he's trying to actually help the client. But the piece that's off or felt misguided, I think, to a lot of people in the world of dissociation or the community of multiplicity and plurality, I think part of it had to do the way he talked about pathology and the way he described alters sort of from the outside rather than recognizing each individual.
Speaker 1:So there was some heated debate about this article online and actually asked one system to join us to talk a little bit about their perspective on this article and some of their position on this article and some of the community response to it. I will let our guests introduce themselves, and we will speak to two of the alters in their system, which they refer to as a sisterhood. They will also explain their own view of dissociation and multiplicity using the social model of disability. They make some significant statements about how coming out empowered them to find their own voice and relieve them from so much stress and energy they had used to hide previously. After discussing the article, we'll talk a little bit about community within the plural and multiplicity community, and why that sense of community is so important.
Speaker 1:We'll also discuss the trauma of having mental illness as a child, and how dissociation actually protects us from psychosis and then at the end after the article we'll come full circle we'll talk some more about differentiating between dissociation and psychosis I just wanted to include you in the podcast. Thank you for participating.
Speaker 2:No problem. Our pleasure.
Speaker 1:Why don't you go ahead I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourselves, and then also let us know who we're talking to today.
Speaker 2:Right. So thank you again for having us on the show. My name is Pride, and with me is Liberty. She'll come in, when she's talking. Otherwise, I can't get her out of the front.
Speaker 2:So a little bit of background on us. Our system is called new upsilonzi, and that's three different Greek, Greek letters. And in Roman letters, it's n y x. We see the goddess Nyx as kind of our patron goddess, and in a way, she represents the collective unconscious, and that is really where in our own kind of intersystem mythology, you could you'd call it, that's where we come from. Again, there's 18 of us.
Speaker 3:We refer to each
Speaker 2:other as sisters, not not alters or other terms you may hear more commonly. We have no central person, so it's broad essentially, you know, egalitarian here. So we've also got a high level of co consciousness, and what we use to help keep memories together is what we call the they call a shared I, and that's like the singular pronoun I, shared I. And that's where any one of us can use that to refer back to a time when it might have been someone else.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. That's kind of amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it it it just same nature for us. Our switching, since again, like I say, we're co present right now. So really the switching is just very, very smooth and blendy. I will typically, switch mid sentence while someone else is talking, whereas Liberty will just come crashing through almost like Kramer on Seinfeld.
Speaker 2:That's about it on as far as just to give Dion, you know, basic idea behind it. Again, we can do a disclaimer also is that we're not experts, and everything that we say is purely our opinion on the different topics.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Like I said, we wrote these down, so I was reading out of this. Okay. So so, again, as I said, my name's Pride, and I am not an expert, and this is purely my opinion. They reflect more or less my personal opinion and, in a way, our our general collective system opinions too. So first and foremost, we consider multiplicity and DID to be separate concepts.
Speaker 2:We see multiplicity existing as a part of and apart from DID. To us, multiplicity is a form of developmental adaptation. Growing up, one uses the tools available to them to adapt and survive in the environment. Some of us who have the ability to dissociate become multiple. Others don't.
Speaker 2:So, ultimately, we see multiplicity as being as a way of being in and relating to the world. I, myself, pride, look at DRD through the lens of the social model of disability. It isn't that multiplicity itself is disordered. It's that we live in a society that is hostile to the very concept itself, and liberty will go into this later. It's society what's broken, not us.
Speaker 2:Were society too accommodate for multiplicity, things would be different. We, our system, have the privilege privilege of working in a position that allows for us to be out and no longer remain in hiding. When we stopped out, when we stopped hiding, and we're accepted by our colleagues, our ability to function increased significantly. It wasn't about how much effort and energy went into suppressing each other and holding each other back and hiding ourselves from the world until we no longer had to, and I'll just break here. The best example for that is myself.
Speaker 2:I had to hide my voice for so long. And once I was able to just speak out to myself in different places, it is just an immense it is an immense feeling of relief to not hear voices, but to hear one's own voice.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Finally spoken aloud. And, again, it's becoming more and more accepted among our colleagues. We do work, like, in the behavioral health field, So we don't experience as much stigma or oppression or something as a system who worked in another field, would encounter. So we do recognize and acknowledge privilege that we do have. Oh, that I believe that ran out.
Speaker 2:So yeah. So so sorry.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I've been waiting for this. Hi. My name is Liberty.
Speaker 1:Hello.
Speaker 2:Good to meet you.
Speaker 3:So I am a writer. Okay? I I love writing. I am a wordsmith. And I have I have written about over 80 articles, almost 80, in a series of what I call talking back to Tumblr.
Speaker 3:And on Tumblr, there is a huge, huge community of systems that is just at each other's throats. And it's just basically social commentary on all that. So that's a little bit of a background on me. I was one of the last of the sisters to come out. I was so close to the front.
Speaker 3:I mean, people would think that I'm a I'm a core original person, but I'm a 23 year old woman, and the body is not. And I am nothing like it would be or anything else. So yeah.
Speaker 2:But anyway, I'm I'm seen as kind
Speaker 3:of this the mascot, if not spokesperson of the system sometimes, but I don't like that. So let me go into my response to that article. So I'm gonna build off what Pride was talking about, especially the stuff regarding, like, the social model of disability she brought up. So so mainstream psychiatry has done our community a huge disservice by erasing erasure. Not just multiplicity, but plurality in general, the experience of being more than one.
Speaker 3:And I would like to demonstrate this. I would like I would like to show this for you and your audience. It's very important for people in our community. If you've ever been curious as to why they changed it from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder, you might wanna listen to this. And I am quoting now.
Speaker 3:It begins, I couldn't rid DSM four of MPD because I had to follow my own rules, and there was no compelling proof that MPD didn't exist as a meaningful clinical entity. It was only my personal opinion, however certain I was. The best we could do to reduce the popularity of MPD and inspire caution in its diagnosis was to fill its text description with all the cogent arguments against it. That I am
Speaker 1:so sorry. Back
Speaker 3:to me now. Okay. That comes from an article in the Huffington Post entitled, multiple personality. Is it mental disorder, myth, or metaphor? And its author is doctor Alan Francis, MD, who was the chairman of the DSM four task force.
Speaker 3:He basically wrote the book, the book where it changed from MPD to DID. So as far as main when I say mainstream psychiatry has an issue with multiplicity, it doesn't get much more mainstream than the guy who wrote the book.
Speaker 1:Right. Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 3:Okay. So back to the Mad in America article, though. Okay. So the the author suggests that the idea of being more than one, being plural, is comparable to a delusion. He suggests that hearing and listening to other people you share a life with, share a body with, share a brain with is comparable to hallucinations.
Speaker 3:And I'm sorry, but I am not a symptom. I'm a person. I I'm I'm pretty sure about that. I you know, fight me.
Speaker 1:Right. So
Speaker 3:when you remove multiplicity and plurality from the equation of, you know, the dissociation versus psychosis, when you remove multiplicity from that equation, the lines between what the author called dissociation and what the author presents as psychosis becomes blurred.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:Because when the author was talking about dissociation, he was really referring to the general experiences of plurality, but that's not the paradigm or context he was coming from.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:In the in the world he comes from, we don't exist. The author reflects in a very condescending, in my opinion, and passive aggressive way how mainstream psychiatry has come to view us, delusional singlets. Because to them, there's no such thing as plurality. You can just listen to the words they use when they talk about us on talk shows and in the media. A woman that claims to have DID.
Speaker 3:A man who claims to have multiple personalities. And then they bring in skeptical expert doctors to try and quote unquote debunk us.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3:Sorry. They treat us as if we're some kind of wheeling and dealing carnival sideshow trying to pull one over on the public. And whenever you talk about legitimately recognizing plurality as a valid way of being and recognizing the people in systems as people, they will come up with these bizarre quasi legal what ifs about criminal culpability. If a system member commits a crime, can you hold the others accountable? I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:Yes. If the people sharing a body with a criminal aren't able to prevent them from committing crimes, the body goes to jail. End of story. I think they'd be surprised to find out that this community highly values both individual and collective responsibility, probably more than they do. And we vehemently condemn people who hide who commit crimes and hide behind the my altered and it depends.
Speaker 3:So that brings us back to Pride's point about how society views us. It's either one, they don't see us at all. Or two, when they do see us, they have no clue what to do with us.
Speaker 1:And here's the best part.
Speaker 3:Here's the best part. Okay? Multiplicity and plurality have yet to be scientifically proven facts, but neither has singularity. There is no scientific definition of personhood, let alone a way to quantify it and limit it to one per body. So there's no science on their end either.
Speaker 3:For all we know, everyone could be multiple, and there's nothing they can do to dis prove it.
Speaker 1:How do you think that those kind of experiences in this culture shift of things being becoming less supportive of DID or of multiplicity or being plural or any of the perspectives, really, how that's driven some of the community, like the different groups and support groups and how much we need each other when there's no support anywhere else. And then following up on that, why is there why are there systems, like, attacking each other on Tumblr? Like, when we have no one else and we need each other, why is there not more unity across the spectrum, really?
Speaker 3:Well, to give the community some credit, the as it's called the system discourse really only exists on Tumblr. I've found great communities both online and many different places that are all inclusive. You have people who, you know, form from trauma, people who do not believe they did, people who but everyone is multiple. I guarantee you that I will I will only say that there is one system I know. Okay.
Speaker 3:There's only one who claims to have no trauma experience. So trauma is, again, it's pretty much typical across the board, but we respect people's beliefs about what they how how and why they see their system.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:The terms they use. Everyone is free to define themselves and each other. So with that, I want I'll I'll give you an example about how much our community needs community.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:We've been isolated from one another and almost actively kept from one another. Because for the for the longest time and still pretty much, professionals have been the gateway to one another. Right. We only have these, you know, big national conventions once a year or all these other things that are put on by people who are not multiple. And we have and and when we do get together, it's like in the context of support groups.
Speaker 3:In other words, there's no chance for us to just sit around, hang around with each other, and be normal without the outside the context of psychiatric treatment.
Speaker 1:Oh, I see.
Speaker 3:And to give it to illustrate this, us and two other systems just last summer were going around the kind of the East Coast holding it was two different conferences we went to. Holding plural caucuses. In other words, a session during, like, you know, kinda after after hours at night, where the only people who come are multiple or plural in some way, however they identify along that spectrum.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:The first one we did two of them. The first one we did, these two systems showed showed up. I I I'd say they were about in their late fifties, and they were just kinda sitting there giggling with one another. And we asked them, you know, hey. Do know do you all know each other?
Speaker 3:And they said, we've worked together for twenty two years.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:But they didn't know the other one was multiple until they both showed up at this at the caucus.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was incredibly moving. It was incredibly it really just was like, wow. That's how in you know, you to borrow a term from that's how in the closet we are.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:That we can, you know, hide it so much just from systems that we work with and are side by side with all the time. But then again, if you think about it, if yeah. If that's your normal, if multiplicity is your normal, and you're around someone else's multiple, you might not even notice it. That's how we found out we were technically, didn't find out we were multiple. We found out everyone else wasn't.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's really a good way of phrasing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we we did not
Speaker 3:know that not everyone had an inner family that took care of them, and that you took care of, and that they were the reason that you went to work, and you went to school, and you fed yourself, and kept yourself alive, because there were other people you had to look out for, but no one talked about any of this. Because if you did, people would think you were selfish, and that was a very shameful thing in our family to be, was to be thought of as selfish. And so that's one reason why it took us so long to figure out that, yeah, no one no one talked about it. But, yeah,
Speaker 2:yeah, this is different from
Speaker 3:everyone else. So back to the back to the story. But back to the story. Okay? The other caucus we had was so much larger.
Speaker 3:There were about, I would say, a good 60 systems there at this conference.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:At this caucus. You know? It was it was guided discussion. It wasn't a support group. It was, you talking on different topics that are relevant to ourselves, our community, our future, all those other things that we don't get to talk about together with each other because we're always being monitored.
Speaker 3:And then the coolest part was afterwards, we all a lot of us, about maybe 20 systems or so, went back to the condo we were renting and just had kind of a house party. And it was in pride's terms, and she'll come in in a second probably, the words that she used to describe that simple house party was extraordinarily normal. In other words, if you were just standing there watching what was going on and you didn't know anyone here was multiple or everyone here was, there was just one single was the spouse of one of the systems, You would not know that anything was different. There was no different.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:And we ordered we ordered pizza, and surprisingly enough to have 20 systems in the same party ordering pizza was surprisingly easy. That's funny. And you know what? No one went into crisis. No one, you know, just slept with each other.
Speaker 3:No one got in a fight. No nothing of those things happened. And those are always the reasons that docs say, oh, you shouldn't have them together. They'll trigger each other, and it'll just go all, you know, haywire and everything.
Speaker 1:That's that always baffles me a little bit because part of how we're built is to protect ourselves and each other. And so it kind of baffles me when that line of thinking comes up because it doesn't seem consistent with what dissociation is at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and so to give you an like an idea of what it was like, one thing that was really neat at the party was, you know, being able to switch openly and talk with each other and meet tons of new people. And so when psychiatrists say they shouldn't let multiples get together and socialize because it'll be uncontrollable switching. Well, you know what? When you're in a big group of people and you wanna meet new people, you gotta be able to say hi to them.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, people were switching, but it wasn't, like, out of control or anything. It was just, like, brightest, extraordinarily normal because it it's what we are not allowed to be. We are not allowed to be normal. You know, we're not allowed to just have these house parties and hang around and everything. So there are some systems who are really active, being doing some great activism.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. I would love to talk to them. Well and also, just going back to the story you told about the two people who worked together for twenty two years, that Mhmm. Is so touching to me. I I found out about the diagnosis, like, twenty years ago.
Speaker 1:Okay? Mhmm. And had been in therapy for almost two years and had no idea. And I went into very much denial, dropped it. Many years passed.
Speaker 1:I have a doctorate. I'm a licensed clinician. And then when everything fell apart for me and I had to finally recognize, okay, this is the thing, and this is happening. There was, first of all, no one who knew how to treat or help me in my area. There was no one I had not supervised and trained myself, and it was really difficult.
Speaker 1:And now we have a really good tea after working really hard and finding a good therapist. We have a good therapist, but she's four hours away. And so we drive every week four hours just to get to therapy and then four hours to get back home. And so I can only imagine. Well and then so then for me too, just me personally, there's this layer of I don't know better word like, professional shame.
Speaker 1:Like, I don't know better words to say for it because I think I knew enough to avoid, like, trauma cases. Like, I just would not accept trauma cases. I would not go there. Other people were interested, and they could take care of that. And I stayed away from that professionally.
Speaker 1:So that was the boundary I set sort of protective for myself and other people. But there was no way to get help and no way to fight my own stigma that the rest of the time I'm advocating against.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? And so Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. That makes
Speaker 1:total and complete sense. Of community that you're sharing is just so touching to me because I keep finding more and more people who were clinicians or in the field in some way and saying, it was hard for me too. I couldn't find help either. And I was alone in it or felt foolish for not figuring things out sooner or not handling it better when I did or all these things, like, are all our own coming out stories become a part of this. I just think that community piece is so important.
Speaker 1:So that story of the two people who met and had been alongside each other all along is just so touching. And the movement, there's several different people doing movements, like you said, sort of to unite us together as systems that I think is just really powerful and has its own healing involved in it.
Speaker 3:And we've got some great allies out there too. There's one single his name is, I can shout out to Jim Bunkelman. He's the widow of Rhonda, and they were a system. And his story and his, allyship and everything else has been just incredibly, valuable. They there's a group called Plural Activism.
Speaker 3:It's a Facebook group, but it's also a Yahoo group. But Yahoo groups are kinda dying out.
Speaker 1:Right. We used to all be there. I remember that back in the day.
Speaker 3:Oh my god. Oh my god. Yeah. We we got our start. I mean,
Speaker 2:we did not come into the community through any of
Speaker 3:the other avenues, like, you know, other kin, you name like, soul bonding or anything like that that a lot of other people have. We just came straight into the multiple the multiple community, the plural. And if you don't mind me talking about again, we've been multiple since we're children. Our theory is that early childhood onset bipolar that was untreated, people don't talk about the trauma of actually having a mental illness. Oh.
Speaker 3:And so when you're alone in your head as a child and you are feeling things that are not your feelings and thinking thoughts that are not your thoughts that you don't want
Speaker 2:to think, it helps to be
Speaker 3:able to put some distance between that thing, whatever that other thing is in there, and yourself. And if you can do that, if you are able to dissociate, that's just what you'll do. And so from a young age, that's just what we thought was normal because people told us, no. You don't have you don't have this. You don't have that.
Speaker 3:You know? And it was just it was manic depression at the time, now called bipolar disorder. But growing up, eventually, things started to fall apart. And when we were about 17, we started seeing the therapist. We've been seeing her for now, I think it's twenty years.
Speaker 3:We are incredibly fortunate to have her, especially because we we never knew until much, much later that she actually was specialist in dissociative disorders because we had no clue about our multiplicity until, you know, in our thirties. And she said that when we first walked into her office at about, like, 17 years old, she knew we were multiple.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:But the reason she never said anything until we discovered it for ourselves was because she did not want to influence us.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Was really respectful.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Oh, and we've we've thanked her for that, but she said, yeah. I know. You know? And so it's it's been incredibly, incredibly helpful.
Speaker 3:I mean, we really wouldn't be here without her, but we know that's not the norm to have a say the same therapist all that time does know what you're going through, who has that experience, and who is open to it and can recognize it and validate that is not the norm.
Speaker 1:That's pretty special. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we have to
Speaker 3:we do recognize and acknowledge that a lot of what we experience is from privilege and that this is not always the norm. And we do, when we, you know, disclose to people, we do mention that that there are our sibling systems out there who really are struggling. And some of us actually believe that with the DSM five is actually a good thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 3:Because if you look at it, what they've done is they've taken multiplicity itself and separated it out from all the rest of the stuff that makes it a disorder,
Speaker 2:like
Speaker 3:amnesia and anything else. And it has to be causing a problem in your life. You can't just walk into a therapist's office and say, hey. I'm multiple. I need help.
Speaker 3:It'll be okay. You're multiple and. You know? So that way the folks who do really need help aren't are are able to access it. And the folks who don't like us, we just go in for bipolar related stuff.
Speaker 3:I I mean, you know, having one mental illness and sharing the same brain, it all affects us very, very differently. But it's not DID. It's not the multiplicity that is, disordering or disabling for us. That's actually it's multiplicity has actually been what has saved our sanity in many cases. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because that's what dissociation is, and the and multiplicity as its end result, that's what dissociation is. It's a defense mechanism. But people don't really ever mention what it is a defense against. And in our opinion, our non expert, it is a defense against psychosis. It is a defense against going crazy.
Speaker 3:It's a way protect your mind, to protect, oddly enough, protect the integrity. It's not to shatter or anything. It's to protect your sanity. And so that's why when I read that article about, you know, dissociation versus psychosis, from my perspective of the whole thing, I just couldn't really understand, like, why is this confusing to you? You know?
Speaker 3:Why why why are you even confused by this? You're comparing apples to, you know, not apples to orange. It'd be having to like apples to tomatoes or something. Tomatoes still a fruit. Sorry.
Speaker 3:Sorry. But you know, the comparison sorry. The comparison, didn't make sense.
Speaker 1:That's really significant though, I think. I think that's really powerful what you said about dissociation protecting us from psychosis.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yes. I mean, because we've never been psychotic. We've got bipolar. We've got it pretty bad.
Speaker 3:It's pretty intense if not treated. You know, right now, we're we are, like, on five different medications, and they are very, very helpful for us. But, yeah, we have never been psychotic. We've been to the brink. We've been to the edge, but it's always dissociation or some form that has brought us back.
Speaker 3:So I I mean, that's that's our understanding of the relationship between dissociation and psychosis is that dissociation is there is to prevent it.
Speaker 1:I think that's really powerful. Thank you. Thank you for
Speaker 2:sharing with No problem. Thank you so much for having us on.
Speaker 3:This has been great. Thank you.
Speaker 1:So before we sign off, there's a little bit more I want to share about this. I want to go back to some of the things that Doctor. Colin Ross shared when we interviewed him and things he has said in other presentations. I can provide a link to some of the videos of him presenting where he talks about this very thing dissociation versus psychosis and differentiating between them. But one thing he points out is that the National Institute of Mental Health has decided to stop funding DSM categories because now they only fund things with a biological basis, which means there's no actual direct funding or research into dissociative identity aspects of research are not all appropriately conclusive.
Speaker 1:So one example Doctor. Ross gave was the BRCA gene that indicates when a woman is high risk for breast cancer. This is not actually true. Testing positive for the BRCA gene means that their body has a low capacity to repair damaged cells, and this is more prevalent in groups of people who have been traumatized. So for example, the Jews who survived the Holocaust and their descendants have a higher rate of not only cancer, but also this particular gene, which I think he did not say this, Doctor.
Speaker 1:Ross did not say this, but I personally think that's some powerful imagery, like symbolically there's something going on that breast cancer was not as prevalent or a thing the way it is now before that population had to literally wear stars on their chest or broke or their hearts were broken by the torturing and killing of their families. It's a physical grief. Now I'm not saying that this group of Jews are the only ones who have breast cancer or who have gone through that, But it's when Doctor. Ross talks about that and gives the Burkitt gene example, he's talking about a specific study that was done on those descendants. So that's why I'm referencing it.
Speaker 1:But I thought it was such a powerful image because there's significant historical trauma in that population. The other thing that Doctor. Ross points out often in his presentations is that dissociative identity disorders or even dissociative disorders in general are not in the same category as psychotic disorders. However, there's a high rate of people with dissociative disorders who are misdiagnosed as psychotic. So how does this happen?
Speaker 1:So one thing that we need to understand if you don't know the clinical language is that when we talk about symptoms for a disorder, there's two kinds of symptoms. Negative symptoms does not mean you test negative for the symptoms. It means it's a symptom that is there because there's something that's missing. Positive symptoms mean there's something there that shouldn't be. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So negative symptoms mean something's missing, and positive symptoms mean there's something extra there that shouldn't be there. So what Doctor. Ross points out about negative symptoms and positive symptoms is that the negative symptoms for psychotic disorders such as a very flat affect or being disconnected interpersonally are also the positive symptoms for attachment problems that are caused by trauma and neglect. And in the same way, the positive symptoms for a psychotic disorder such as hearing voices are the same symptoms that are positive for dissociation. So what he's saying is there's such a high rate of misdiagnosis of dissociative disorders as psychotic disorders in part because clinicians don't understand what they're seeing.
Speaker 1:And when they see symptoms that are positive for dissociation, they're interpreting them as positive for psychotic disorder. And when they're seeing symptoms that are negative symptoms that also indicate psychotic disorder, what they really are are positive symptoms for attachment problems caused by trauma and neglect, and that this is how it's diagnosed. So that's why I wanted to add that piece at the end and include it, in this podcast because I think that explains a lot of what happens clinically when clinicians and psychiatrists are not understanding dissociation and that this is how they misinterpret and misdiagnose dissociative disorders as psychotic disorders, which are not the same thing at all. I hope that's somewhat helpful. We can talk about it more in-depth in the future, but that was what I wanted to share today.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together.