#very possible ctpsd

[olliegolliegee]

I have a mentally ill Mexican Jewish mother who had a mentally ill Mexican Jewish mother who had a mentally ill Mexican Jewish mother. Of course she guilted me so bad I quite literally have flashbacks!

[fenmere]

Let's elaborate on our own personal experience and why we think it is possible our own DID is not caused by trauma.

By the way, we shouldn't have to do this to make any sort of argument, and nobody should. We're doing it anyway to really drive the point home.

The only time we have exhibited all the fully disabling symptoms of DID was between 2012 and 2016 when we were married to the daughter of conservative Christians living two doors down the street, working full time for the first time in our life (in our late 30s), juggling five different social circles, and either still in the closet about being trans or dealing with our early transition.

What alleviated it all was being fired, coming out as trans, our wife divorcing us and kicking us out of the house, and then us coming out to ourselves as plural. There was a lot more trauma in that series of events, too.

Almost immediately, the blackout amnesia, the huge shifts in personality with situational amnesia, the hour long fugue states, the dangerous impulses and intrusive thoughts, all cleared up in about two weeks. Because the stress ended.

But what didn't end was our CPTSD triggers, and we've had to work long and hard to clear our life of those and to slowly desensitize ourselves to them and find medication to help with that (propranolol - we recommend it!).

And when our CPTSD gets triggered it can disable us almost completely for up to six weeks, making it harder for us to function in almost every way, while also making us more sensitive to all our CTPSD triggers. But what it absolutely does not do is bring back the blackouts, intrusive thoughts and impulses, or fugue states. Not even light amnesia. Not unless we get triggered repeated, daily, for weeks on end.

Fawning, a CPTSD response, certainly seemed to trigger our amnesia a lot here and there. But once our amnesia cleared up we kept fawning without triggering it.

What does bring back our amnesia, though, is prolonged situational social and functional stress. Also, sensory and emotional overload, but repeatedly and daily for weeks on end. (This sometimes happens with CPTSD, but does not always happen with it - and it frequently happens without it.) And what clears it up, immediately, is an end to that stress.

And we're autistic. And ADHD.

Which means that our neurology gets overwhelmed by stimuli. In fact, it can get overactive all on it's own, sometimes, from just thinking too much. And you know what is a great and effective way of handling too much neurological activity?

Dissociation.

We've had a lot of trauma in our life, from very early on. We can't rule out that our DID was caused by trauma.

But it sure doesn't act like DID that was caused by trauma. It acts like DID that is part of Autism.

It's still DID, though, because it meets all the clinical criteria for it. When the symptoms flare, they are disabling in the same way that DID is for other people who have it. Practically speaking the term is useful to describe what completely fucked up our life between 2012 and 2016, because it gets the effects of it across.

It just turns out that our only effective treatment for it is to completely disengage from employment and other social obligations. As if that's a reasonable thing to expect of anybody in this world.

Let's just say we're pretty fucking poor right now, and dependent on others. And it sucks. But it is not as stressful as our life was before, because people who love us work hard to keep it that way.

I need folks to stop arguing that DID is not a trauma disorder.

It's not in the DSM; it is a dissociative disorder highly correlated with trauma, and I think trying to be petty and semantic is not going to win any hearts or minds.

I think it's fairly obvious that edge cases are just that: edge cases. There is a degree to which the same process of alter creation might not be considered pathological because it doesn't meet sufficient distress or dysfunction criteria. Almost all cases of DID still include trauma.

I am of the opinion that dissociation and forming of dissociative alters are on a sliding scale; after all, if you can be functionally multiple, I don't see why someone can't achieve that without going further down the scale through a non-pathological degree of dissociation. I think there are non-dissociative ways to be plural too, we consider our Collective to be one of them.

You can argue for the existence of endogenic systems without trying to undermine the amount of literature strongly correlating DID with trauma. You can even argue for edge cases! But when it comes to actually talking about DID, giving the edge cases equal importance/emphasis to the main cause just doesn't make your case stronger.