I don’t know about that specifically, but autism goes from a cute quirk to a disorder around when it starts affecting your life or the life of others negatively. Not sure how you could have multiple personalities without it affecting anything negatively, though…
It’s like any neurodivergent situation where certain things just take work. There’s specialized apps that allow alters (personalities) to communicate and co-ordinate things like scheduling. From folks I have talked to there’s a lot of masking involved where folks with DID will collaborate across different alters to try to appear to be contiguous. A lot of the time from the outside they just seem kind of forgetful in a similar way that non-DID people can be. The source of DID is often severe trauma where the different personalities are created via partitions of memory so that no singular expression of self remembers everything all at once. This allows the whole to function as each peice has functionally a job to do. It’s at it’s core a coping mechanism taken to an extreme but it still functions as a coping mechanism.
Often times you really don’t know someone you’ve been around for years has it because they are scared to tell you. DID has a fair bit of stigma behind the condition.
I’ve known a few plural folks that seem to get on just fine. In all their cases it arose from trauma and was pretty disharmonious and confusing to begin with, but with time and awareness their alters work better together and by the time I met em I wouldn’t have known if they didn’t tell me. I don’t know if they’d say it never affects them negatively but they certainly didn’t need to be freed of it. If anything, plural identity seemed to be more of a solution than an active problem for them.
Personally, I can say I’ve been functioning better by discarding the idea that I should be one consistent self, because that idea caused the stress of choosing who my one self is.
Makes complete sense! Just like any other matter of identity, having to mask the true self(ves) in order to fit what the outside world expects is… draining and pointless. Not having to put up the front means so much more mental energy for everything else.
Appreciate your perspective in this thread, cheers!
I don’t know about that specifically, but autism goes from a cute quirk to a disorder around when it starts affecting your life or the life of others negatively. Not sure how you could have multiple personalities without it affecting anything negatively, though…
It’s like any neurodivergent situation where certain things just take work. There’s specialized apps that allow alters (personalities) to communicate and co-ordinate things like scheduling. From folks I have talked to there’s a lot of masking involved where folks with DID will collaborate across different alters to try to appear to be contiguous. A lot of the time from the outside they just seem kind of forgetful in a similar way that non-DID people can be. The source of DID is often severe trauma where the different personalities are created via partitions of memory so that no singular expression of self remembers everything all at once. This allows the whole to function as each peice has functionally a job to do. It’s at it’s core a coping mechanism taken to an extreme but it still functions as a coping mechanism.
Often times you really don’t know someone you’ve been around for years has it because they are scared to tell you. DID has a fair bit of stigma behind the condition.
I’ve known a few plural folks that seem to get on just fine. In all their cases it arose from trauma and was pretty disharmonious and confusing to begin with, but with time and awareness their alters work better together and by the time I met em I wouldn’t have known if they didn’t tell me. I don’t know if they’d say it never affects them negatively but they certainly didn’t need to be freed of it. If anything, plural identity seemed to be more of a solution than an active problem for them.
Personally, I can say I’ve been functioning better by discarding the idea that I should be one consistent self, because that idea caused the stress of choosing who my one self is.
Makes complete sense! Just like any other matter of identity, having to mask the true self(ves) in order to fit what the outside world expects is… draining and pointless. Not having to put up the front means so much more mental energy for everything else.
Appreciate your perspective in this thread, cheers!