Better late than never? (first post)

[57thomas]

This is my first post here. I'm in my 50s, and am just starting to realize and deal with this. I've spent most of my life trying to fit in and NOT let anyone know how weird I am inside. I've always avoided even the subject of psychology, terrified of where it might lead. I only started looking at my childhood (which I always just considered to be in the distant past and better forgotten) last winter, and started realizing that how screwed up I was might be because of how bad that was. I guess before that I always thought it was the other way around. I entered therapy last spring for PTSD, and my T started talking about dissociation, but never suggested DID. I only started looking at that (let myself look at that?) about 5 weeks ago (after starting EMDR), and the framework of DID made everything make sense. When I showed my T my journal about what I had been thinking about, and the conclusions I came to, I was really hoping she would say "don't worry, it's just your imagination, you don't have DID", but instead she just seemed like she was relieved I finally saw it, and that was the source of my memory problems that we had been focusing on. She got me a referral with a psychiatrist on the 2nd to get something more concrete, a lot of the time I'm still trying to convince myself it isn't real. But the evidence grows daily as I pay more attention to what is happening, and remember the things that other people have said to me over the years.

I guess I've always been a world-class space-case. I learned early that I could "disappear", or "change scenes" or "skip forward", when things got bad, and got really good at it. I never realized that part of me was still there having to deal with whatever I couldn't. Now I just feel like a coward.

This is all still really new to me. I can't tell you "who" is in there, I can't call them up. I talk to myself hoping someone is listening, but I don't have a clue if they are or not. The switching just happens, and I don't know if I'm causing it, or they are, or something else in me is.

As a kid I used to explain suddenly finding myself in a different situation by telling myself I was a space alien (since I wasn't like anyone else), or time traveler. Later on I realized that if that was true other people would react differently to my sudden appearance, so it must just be my memory was fritzing out, from time to time. And when stressed it happens a lot, and I can't even keep track of what is going on. I'll be talking to someone about X, then my mind drifts for a second, or I have a brief sharp headache, and then when I continue talking about X, they look at me funny and ask "What???" When I fill it in with context about X, they say "but now we are talking about Z. If I say "Oh, I didn't catch that, they say, "yes you did, you had some good ideas about Z", but I have no memory of it. So I've learned to just keep my mouth shut a lot of the time. Better to be thought a fool for being silent, than to speak out and remove all doubt.

I've also always had "facts" in my head, with no logical explaination for them. I "know" I did something in the past, but have NO memory of being there, or doing it, yet I know it's true. And those "facts" always end up being true, so I just trust them. But if someone asks me about them, it's like I read it in a newspaper or something, I wasn't there. And so much of the time I don't even have those facts. I thank my partner for mowing the lawn that I had been meaning to get around to but hadn't yet, and he tells me he didn't do it, he just got home, etc.

And then there's people coming up to me thinking I'm someone named Bob. "Hey Bob, how ya' doing?" "Um, I'm not Bob, sorry." "Quit clowning around, Bob, I know that's you. You're wearing that same shirt you were last week". I used to think I had a doppelganger named Bob, and really hoped he didn't rob a bank or something, or I might get blamed for it. I guess I've gotten really good at hiding the obvious from myself, lol.

When I realized Bob might be an "alter" I knew nothing about, it scared the crap out of me for awhile, but then I realized I didn't have any reason to think Bob was a bad guy, if anything he seemed to keep company with a better class of people than I did.

So, I don't even know where to go with this. I went to a NAMI Connections support group last week, hoping I might meet someone else with this, just someone I could talk to who knew what this feels like on the inside, what I'm going through. My T is great, but it's still second-hand to her. And yes, I did meet someone there - someone who's actually got it all together and is even working on his Phd in Psychology. He told me about a Peer-to-Peer group they have, and I've signed up with that. Other than my T, he's the only other person I've ever talked to about this stuff - not even my partner of 23 years, and I don't have a clue how I could ever do that. I've spent my whole life trying to appear as normal as I could, the thought of being treated like sort of freak-show is more than I can handle. And yes I'm dealing with more depression and anxiety now than I can remember in a long time. But I am in a hypno-therapy group for anxiety and that is helping a lot, even though I've only had two sessions so far.

I'm sorry if I violated any of the rules about what to talk about, I hope I didn't trigger anybody with this post.