After watching a woman with a disability, talking about the need for awareness and acceptance of people's different lives and abilities, we have thought about us and our situation. Technically our condition is considered a mental illness. DSM 5. I guess they have to give it a category. DID can be very disabling, more for some than others. We have spent days in bed unable to function when alters are dealing with their trauma. Then there are the accompanying conditions that are often in co-existence with DID, such as, Complex PTSD, Anxiety and Depression. Plus illnesses like fibromyalgia, IBS, and other digestive disorders. These carry their own debilitating affects.
It is a complex web of conditions that can leave you overwhelmed just to think about them.
The woman on tv was born with her condition and although there is no cure, she has found a way to manage her symptoms and live a life she is happy with. To the point where she doesn't wish her disability was gone. (Accept for her constant pain).
I guess the key difference here is that DID is caused by trauma. For us, physical, emotional, sexual abuse and torture that went on for most of our life, especially under the age of 20 years old. This trauma has changed the way our brain functions. Because of it, we actually process information differently to others without the trauma. It's very easy to get weighed down with it all and get lost in a sea of flashbacks, body pain, Anxiety, depression and just pure terrifying fear. But there is one key to remember. DID is NOT technically an illness. It is a very sophisticated survival mechanism that ment we were able to survive horrific abuse and not die. We know many who never made it through.
We are survivors of absolute horrors. I don't know how we did it but we did.
We are now safe, but still fighting to survive. Fighting to learn how to live in this new way of life. Fighting to understand how to NOT live in constant fear. Trying to understand that there are people out there who will not hurt us. We are like a child learning for the first time how to walk.
Love is one of the most confusing things to us. Not sure we will truly ever understand it completely.
In all of this we are considered by the public to be freaks and creatures of horror movies. And to those who should understand the most, the medical/phychiatric professions, we are considered by most to be liars, frauds, and if they believe, just to bloody hard to treat.
We feel disabled, we feel broken and unwelcome. We feel unwanted by society. If only they could see the horror of what we survived and understand this was our only way to survive. We are survivors of torture. If only we could be seen through the eyes of empathy and compassion, instead of distrust and fear, there is a chance we could finally begin to heal.
Upon reflection,..... it's a horrible life that not many of us really even want to remember. For society to acknowledge such truths about itself is not easy. But we need to. The people who abused us are still alive, and there are many more generations, even our current generation of babies and children, who are living through what we did plus more. It's time to face the horrific truth.
These people are amount us.
