I spent a lot of time looking at this website going “okay, so do you mean all adults with a dissociative disorder?” before I decided to join. I’m still hoping this counts. I’m in a system, but that’s not actually what this is about, it’s more for ease and comfort of talking.

We have OCD. It’s genetic, every person on one side of the family has it, and so we’ve been on the OCD spectrum since childhood. Another parent liked to posit existential questions to us – stuff like “How do you know we aren’t living in a simulation?”. It was meant for fun and to get us to think, but to our little brain, we thought about it a lot more than people should. How do we know we’re real? How do we know others are real? Is this a simulation? We’d ruminate on this for hours.

It’s also a chicken or the egg situation when it comes to our multiplicity. It might have come from this, or it might have actually worsened it. As a system we also disagree on how exactly this might have worked. Being a multiple system without realizing and going through a lot more identity struggles than a child should probably didn’t help.

We did go through trauma, but it happened after we experienced these symptoms and even experienced hints of being a multiple system. This trauma made our brain go “Why should I engage with a painful reality I don’t know exists?” and start to dissociate as a coping mechanism, to the point there are several years in our teens we can’t remember.

We didn’t realize this even though we’ve known about being a system for almost a decade now. Dissociative resources are heavily skewed towards DID/OSDD, and thus, are almost always claimed to be trauma-only. So we noted we experienced dissociation but never really looked into it because, based on how our trauma happened later in life and we could not find anything about it happening earlier than that, we didn’t think it could be that serious. Then when we finally got access to a therapist and described what we thought were lesser dissociation symptoms got us a long look of concern and the realization that is not normal, we looked into it.

Lo and behold, existential OCD can be directly linked to DPDR and can be a cause of it. Even if our trauma worsened it, that matches up completely to how we experienced DPDR early on, and how we still experience dissociation. Switching and fronting for us is actually when we feel the most grounded, and none of our dissociative triggers are tied to it anyway. Our dissociative triggers are anything that triggers those existential obsessions. Though being a system, of course, doesn’t help with that when “do you actually exist” is the only topic anyone seems to care about. Plus with how rampant fakeclaiming is. Spending our questioning teen years being relentlessly grilled lead to… so many issues we’re still unpacking.

So I wanted to join this while we explore our DPDR and dissociation. Discord is too fast paced and not private (and, uh, based on that fakeclaiming article probably not a good idea for us to join), social media dissociative communities are absolutely awful towards systems like mine, and there’s not really much else I could find. A slower blogging and forum website like this works a lot better. I understand it’s more gears towards DID/OSDD and trauma-based dissociation, so I’m a little worried about joining, but I really think being around other dissociative adults might help us and I want to try.

-Didi