Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder

Looking back on things as they unfolded, I sometimes wonder where I would have been had it not been for my Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It had saved me from things that I wouldn’t be able to recall for many years. Years of crippling pain, self doubt, and constant confusion.

For it really was our condition that kept us alive and functioning despite everything that had happened. This is not to say that it is some ‘gift’, but a natural progression of the wiring of the brain under certain conditions when pushed to its limits. There can only be so much abuse one [part] can take before being overwhelmed.

Though at first it had nothing to do with ‘sharing’ the burden. It was just an escape for the mind to get out of something it could not process at that moment. The idea that my father, who we only knew as the person who seemed to be there to provide for us in all the ways a young child sees, also was the one who was drunkenly raping me to the point of leaving me with scars that will forever remind me of what I once lived through on a regular basis.

What it had to do with is the fact that the ‘original’ mind could not handle the abuse that was occurring and created, in our mind, another person who was stronger and was the one being abused, not him. This person went on to spawn minds of its own in defense, as once a brain figures out how to disassociate, it starts to rely on it as a tactic.

The first went into a kind of hibernation, essentially comatose. From the first to be formed, Robin, came many others for different reasons. Robin created my former self, as a way of coping with the sexual abuse. He saw me as an older, wiser person who could hide in his mind well enough to get through things.

Though even I could not deal with things on my own, and in defense, we split into two separate individuals. Myself, Bran, taking the more logical route and my counterpart, or ‘twin’ as he is often referred to amongst us, Cloud, is the emotional. Together we can look at any situation and scrutinize it perfectly in detail, both logically and through empathy and psychology. When put together, this makes for one hell of a survival trait if I do say so myself.

There are many others to introduce, but their time will come. I might not always explain how they were ‘created’ as there are a few that we still have yet to figure out ourselves. There are still large gaps in our memory that we are waiting for the right trigger to align the neural pathways to allow the darkened memories to see the light of day once more.

Though we rarely look forward to such a trigger as once a memory is unlocked it isn’t there just to be looked over as if it were a bit of old film. We relive it, as best as our memory has recorded it, and that is never an occasion to get excited over. Though there are times that afterward, in between the sobbing and the pretending it never happened, there is the moment when things do fit in just right and you finally realize why something so out of place was the way it was…

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