These are a few of the symptoms described by Kathy Brody that I experience:
feeling completely blank the sensation of not having a body a sense of seeing through the eyes of other people an inability to recognize myself confusion about age and hyper-vigilance.
I have trouble
maintaining relationships connecting to others being touched and physical intimacy
I have numerous perspectives and completely opposing interests.
For every yes, there is a no; for every trigger, a chorus of reactions.
A sense of being alien in a world that makes no sense is one of the most painful and pervasive of my symptoms.
Life with DID is exhausting.
When I tell people I have DID, I expect them to believe it, but most people don’t, and some of my friendships fail because of it.
Kathy Brody describes recognizing or refusing relationships as one of the symptoms of DID.
People take the sudden loss of connection personally, and I understand why.
I do have close friends in real life, people I’ve known for most of my life, and I have a partner who loves and accepts me; I am blessed.
The worst thing a friend can do to someone with DID is act in ways that make the symptoms worse.
I have a relative who knows the history of my abuse and used that knowledge to trigger me, when I realized it was intentional I cut that person out of my life.
My rule for family members is if you say you love me but act in ways that make the illness worse; you really don’t love me and need to get out of my life.
It was a struggle to gain the insight to set limits because I was raised to believe that I was responsible for all of the bad things that happened to my Mother.
I was not allowed an opinion or a mind of my own.
The MRI shows the location of the patient’s alternate selves on her brain.
DID is not invisible, not even online.
Bloggers can’t see my facial expressions and mannerisms, but my blog’s long time followers are familiar with my various writing styles and images.
My skills come and go, such as the ability to write or build computers or make images.
I have different vocabularies and reading interests, and some of me doesn’t read at all.
The range and intensity of my emotional expression are more than most normal people can understand or tolerate; and I am frequently asked if I know how old I am.
The answer is no, and why does it matter?
What DID is:
DID is a childhood-onset disorder that begins as a result of extreme abuse.
DID is a symptom of a broader cluster of symptoms called Complex-Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.
DID is a psychiatric disorder that only improves with psychoanalyses.
What DID is not:
DID is not multiple personality disorder.
DID is not a bid for attention.
DID is not something my therapist is imposing on me.
DID is not borderline personality disorder.
DID is not pathological narcissism.
DID is not hysteria, an excuse for bad behavior, or the result of negative thinking.
DID is not a choice.
DID is not ‘clinging to or refusing to let go’ of the past.
People and governments that sexually and emotionally abuse children are evil.
It is not the past I can’t release; it is the confrontation with evil.
Please vote wisely this year.
(c) Rob Goldstein 2020
I am not a doctor, my experience with DID may not be the same as yours. If you think you have Dissociative Identity Disorder please seek professional help.
Distressed and bewildered by her behavior, he blamed Donald Trump, saying,” Trump is triggering people with mental illnesses” and I agreed.
“I generally believe he thinks black people are dangerous and Mexicans are rapists,” Arnold said. “He believes that. As he perpetuates that fear to America, watch out Mueller is lying; he is after me. And so, Americans are sitting home like Roseanne and her fans, are like, oh my God, what is happening out there? And they get anxiety.” Tom Arnold
In 1991, Roseanne Barr came out as an incest survivor with DID.
Roseanne Barr on the cover of People Magazine 1991
I knew she was telling the truth when I read this:
“It’s like living in a maze. It’s like that old woman who keeps adding on to her house … But the parts don’t get along and some of them have some real strange ideas about how to defend ” ABC News
When Roseanne Barr refers to her alternates as having ‘strange ways to defend’, she is referring to protector alternates and gatekeeper alternates.
Protector Alternates focus on perceived threats, and often find dependence, emotional needs and close relationships (attachment) threatening.
Gatekeeper Alternates control which alters take control of the body, and when.
Pathological Narcissists are lethal to people with DID; I’m talking about dishonest and psychologically abusive men and women who invade our lives with chaos and lies and expect us to love them for it.
found on GIPHY
Abusers use our trust to inflict damage on us and never apologize for it.
Abusers don’t want friends or lovers; they want hostages.
Tell me you love me
People with DID share certain primary symptoms but each of us forms a
unique system of alternates.
I have two protectors but one of them is also a gatekeeper.
When I’m not on the Internet, I am someone named Matthew.
Matthew is a devout Catholic who has faith in human nature.
Matthew thinks pathological narcissism is an illness.
Please note: This post is not a defense of Roseann Barr’s behavior or comments. Mental illness is not an excuse for bad behavior unless a patient is genuinely out of control and in need of emergency services.
Confabulation is defined as the spontaneous production of false memories: either memories for events that never occurred, or memories of real events that are displaced in space or time. These memories may be elaborate and detailed. Some may be obviously bizarre, as a memory of a ride in an alien spaceship; others are quite mundane, as a memory of having eggs for breakfast, so that only a close family member can confirm that the memory is in fact false.
Confabulation is not lying and people who confabulate are not deliberately trying to mislead other people. In fact, patients are generally quite unaware that their memories are inaccurate, and they may argue strenuously that they are telling the truth. Neither should confabulation be confused with false memory syndrome, the phenomenon whereby otherwise normal people suddenly “remember” supposedly repressed incidents of childhood abuse or other trauma. Confabulation is a clinical syndrome resulting from injury to the brain.Memory Loss Online
The primary function of the brain is the survival of the organism.
To that end, the brain will use all of its resources.
I did a Google search for Rachel Dolezal and got pages of outraged commentary along with video of her recent interview with Matt Lauer.
Crazypants is a descriptive word that means weird or insane, not insane in the sense that it means cool as in crazy cool or that’s totally insane! Crazypants means insane as in a mental illness. The Urban Dictionary
Crazypants is an N-Wordfor people with mental illness
Dolezal’s parents on TODAY denied charges they were abusive parents, calling the claims a “dramatic change” to what they knew of Rachel growing up, who always wanted to introduce them to her friends.
“We still hold out hope that we’ll be able to be reconciled someday,” Lawrence Dolezal said.
His wife added, “And we hope that Rachel will get the help that she needs to deal with her identity issues. Of course we love her, and we hope that she will come to a place where she knows and believes and speaks the truth.”
They say they were not abusive and they hope that she gets help with her identity.
How curious.
I decided to experiment and Googled Rachel Dolezal Abuse.
Within that story is this nugget: Hours after their daughter told NBC’s “Today” show that she identifies as black, Rachel Dolezal’s white parents went on Fox News to dispute several elements of her interview. For starters, Ruthanne Dolezal told the cable news channel that her 37-year-old daughter’s claim that she self-identified as black starting at a very young age is a “fabrication.”
Rachel Dolezal told “Today’s” Matt Lauer that as a young child, she “was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon and the black curly hair. That was how I was portraying myself.”
The 37-year-old said she began to identify with the black experience at age five.
Her parents went on Fox News to accuse their daughter of fabricating the way she remembers her childhood drawings.
Did you show everything you drew as a child to your parents?
There is no safety for children with abusive parents-Image found on Pinterest
This is where the story becomes painfully familiar:
“In 2013, Joshua was charged with four felony counts of sex abuse of a minor. The incidents, according to an affidavit obtained by the Post, happened at his parents’ home in Colorado “in 2001 or 2002.” The victim “was 6 or 7 years old,” and Joshua Dolezal was “19 years older.” Dolezal allegedly made the victim perform oral sex on him twice and he performed oral sex on the victim “7 or 8” times, allegedly telling the victim “Don’t tell anyone or I’ll hurt you.” The affidavit also lists another allegation of abuse in 1991 of another victim that had a racial element.”
Joshua is an English professor at Central College in Pella, Iowa.
The same article describes the family from Joshua Dolezal’s autobiography, Down from the Mountaintop: from Belief to Belonging:
“Joshua Dolezal watches his mother praying while listening to his father read an entire chapter of the Bible before dinner, “as is customary.”
“Down from the Mountaintop chronicles a quest for belonging. Raised in northwestern Montana by Pentecostal homesteaders whose twenty-year experiment in subsistence living was closely tied to their faith, Joshua Dolezal experienced a childhood marked equally by his parents’ quest for spiritual transcendence and the surrounding Rocky Mountain landscape.” WorldCat
When I read Joshua Dolezal’s author comments, I felt that something terrible must have happened to him as well:
“From my earliest school days, when I wore handmade clothes to kindergarten and carried a fringed leather lunch satchel, I knew that my childhood experience in the mountains of Montana was different from everyone else’s. I write essays as experiments in explanation, efforts to make what was and is foreign in my life comprehensible, maybe even familiar, to a reader. In Down from the Mountaintop, like many memoirists, I try to make sense of my past.” Iowa Center for the Book
“What was and is foreign in my life.”
That’s an odd choice of words.
In an interview, Rachel Dolezal’s Mother states that the sibling that Joshua Dolezal is accused of abusing suffers from Reactive Attachment Disorder:
“… A condition in which a child can’t bond with a parent or caregiver, and “seeks to cause trouble in the family.”
She goes on to say she never left the child alone with her son.
“The aligning with Rachel on this is a very bad combination,” she says. “Our son wasn’t even home a lot of the time it was alleged it was happening,” she says, “and I was a stay-at-home mother and very attentive to the kids because of her disorder. I never left her at home with our son or anything like that.” People.
Why would Ruthanne Dolezal be that specific?
Why insinuate that the child is “disordered” and “out to make trouble”?
She says she was a stay at home Mom and attentive to all the kids because of this one child’s “disorder.”
She never left the child at home with her Son. Why?
Why does she describe the child as aligning with Rachel?
It all sounds so damned familiar because these were the kind of lies told
in my family.
The strategies survivors use to survive seem normal to us; even the act of becoming a different race is normal and possible for an abused child of five with an active imagination.
“Alters within the same patient may be of different ages, genders, races, and even species, including lobsters, ducks, and gorillas. There have even been reported alters of unicorns, Mr. Spock of Star Trek, God, the bride of Satan, and Madonna. Moreover, some practitioner’s claim that alters can be identified by distinct characteristics, including distinct handwriting, voice patterns, eyeglass prescriptions, and allergies. Proponents of the idea of multiple personalities have also performed controlled studies of biological differences among alters, revealing that they may differ in respiration rate, brain-wave patterns and skin conductance, the last being an accepted measure of arousal.” The Scientific American
If I told you my name is Mateo and I am a Black, would you call me a lying crazypants?
Probably.
It sounds to me as if Rachel and Josh Dolezal are trying to make sense of a past that they can’t fully remember, understand, or escape.
Art by Rob Goldstein 