#best of luck with your healing and treatment journey anon i hope you find someone that works for you

[ever-go-on]

hi!! absolutely NO fucking pressure whatsoever to answer this i know it’s a very personal question but. what did the (vague) road to professional treatment/acknowledgement of DID look like for you? i’m in a place where i can start therapy soon and i’ve suspected for three years that Something Is Up but i don’t even know what that process would begin to look like

honestly id struggle to articulate my entire journey because of what a mess of dead ends and lost paperwork it is but this has been my journey with my current therapist (long post):

i originally found her going through a directory of trauma-informed psychotherapists in my area. although nothing on her page said anything about dissociation, she specialised in complex PTSD.

this was super lucky for me. DID specialists are incredibly rare, and DID treatment derives from CPTSD treatment, so ultimately your best bet for finding DID treatment in my opinion is a therapist trained in (C)PTSD / a therapist who has experience treating trauma & its associated symptoms.

i thought, fuck it, even if she can't do anything about the alters, maybe she can help me with my attachment issues, emotional dysreg, self esteem issues, flashbacks, etc.

i spoke to her for a preliminary session and she seemed decent enough. no immediate discomfort. always a plus.

always trust your gut. no point having a therapist you don't really trust / like, even if theyre "objectively good". a large part of trauma therapy is building a trusting relationship so you can feel safe in the room. don't be afraid to shop around if that's an option.

a few weeks/months in i finally plucked up the courage to articulate that i had conflicting parts with conflicting personalities and senses of self. she asked me to explain, and i did. it would take a while before i felt comfortable enough to run through them with her, but she was open to what i communicated.

green flag. it's very important that your therapist doesn't make you feel judged.

on the topic of bringing up parts, i would really recommend you use your own words to describe your experiences. "i have DID" could mean absolutely anything: it doesn't tell them what your understanding of DID is, what your specific experiences are, or what symptoms you most struggle with. explain what your experiences and symptoms look like for you in your own words, so they can trust your judgement better and get more information.

a year or so into working with me she began to seek training in treating and understanding dissociative disorders, and offered to (attempt to) refer me to my country's leading dissociative hospital. i did decide i wanted to stick with her, because our tolerance and life-stability work was going quite well, but it would have been an option to put me through some assessments, land on that waiting list, and then see Proper DID Specialists for some rigorous work. i just figured i was happy at the pace i was at.

she actually now has a qualification in treating DID that she uses to understand and treat my symptoms.

this is just because my therapist is a boss. and another reason why not to be intimidated by a therapist who doesn't yet have every specialism you need: they are also people who are learning, and if you're lucky, they will acknowledge the places their knowledge fails and attempt to make it right.

you'll notice i haven't talked about diagnoses yet. this is partially because my diagnostic history is a blurry mess of lost paperwork (including my initial DID dx... grumble grumble), and because while diagnoses can open up the door to specialist psychologists and clinics (and insurance to cover the costs?), there are many therapists who don't need that paperwork, and will just offer you treatment for decent chunks of money.

so that's my insight based on what's worked for me and landed me here. trauma-trained therapists who click with you and are open to learning are the way to go.

shes helped me reduce my depression and anxiety levels significantly, raise my tolerance (so i dont dissociate, switch, or split as much), work on my impulse control, understand and partially overcome my attachment and relationship issues, and in turn i have never been so integrated. i can communicate with and i feel like i really understand the majority of my parts; i have not split an alter in over two years and my numbers are record low because of several fusions that naturally occurred as my life developed and got better. im now finally at a stage where i might be capable of processing trauma.

its a lot and its taken a long time, but it's worth it to me.

ty for the ask anon :)