DID and Control (or the lack thereof)

Compared to most people with Dissociative Identity Disorder that I talk to I have a lot more control over what goes on in my head than most Plurals. I can use it to my advantage most days, and days that my mental health is well and I’m on the minimum of medicine I need. I craft and modify aspects of my headspace and inner world to make the inside of my head the most pleasant place I can make it for the people in my head. I can control when I switch… Most of the time, but not always who I switch into. I’ve even utterly summoned headmates into existence!

But some days it gets really hard… Some days the stuff my brain generates on my behalf gets out of control, and there’s only so much I can do. I’ll give tonight as my example: I had a switch tonight where the headmate couldn’t use the legs until they switched out, I had a new person form, I had memory wiped of my entire morning to the point I couldn’t remember anything I ate all day. An event that I’ve worked so hard to get under control relapsed on me again: getting beaten by a persecutor.

Persecutors are a tricky subject that a lot of people with DID go through, and I rarely ever meet anyone who has made as much progress with keeping the persecution under control as I have, but I still struggle – as I’m finding out – I’m not over it. For me it comes in the form of violence and rape; my body freezes and I can vividly feel what’s being done to me, even if no harm is being done to me. I’ve had this happen to me thousands of episodes since I was 13, and over the past 5 years or so I’ve mostly kept it under control. But the safe space I finally escaped the demon attacks is now riddled with another being that wishes harm onto me.

We call them the Jiglorblians, for no other reason than that’s what they call themselves. They’re smarter than the stupid monster beings, and a lot more human, and I don’t know if that makes it any easier to handle. We have a caste system in our head, with one caste being Warrior Caste, or the headmates that can fight and defend (healer isn’t a separate caste, you either have the ability to heal wounds or you don’t.) I was able to call for help and have them fought off tonight.

And that should be the end of it, if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened to the brand new headmate who is now shaking and scared shitless of what type of body they formed into. What’s in my control? We have a priestess we can give spiritual comfort to, and well we have pain medicine in my headspace. What’s in my control is reinforcing the barriers that keep the Jiglorblians at bay, but I ultimately cannot prevent the next attack.

It goes deeper than that, but that’s the surface level. Do I have a right to be traumatized by that stuff happening all in my head? Well that’s complicated to answer, because it’s not the episodes that are traumatic, it’s trauma that creates the episodes. The episodes are my brain’s way to process trauma, and that’s how my body copes with it. Being self-aware enough to recognize that this is what’s going on is a radical boon for me.

I may not have faced war, and my valor goes as far as 1 year in a Syndicate militia group, but my head is a warzone. In a body where assault and rape is so common I can’t even count how many times it’s happened to me, and the next trauma isn’t an if but a when, you wanna know what the sad part is? I prefer the worst of what goes on in my head than the best of my days living on this putrid planet.