Living my Life in Complex Stories
How I Understood my Dissociative Identity Disorder for Three Decades
For the first three decades of my life, I understood my Dissociative Identity Disorder to be a giant and elaborate story that I was living in which I was all of the characters. The problem arose when none of the characters could remember any of the other characters and that the characters overtook who I was and created their own stories while I was clearly somewhere else.
I never could voluntarily pull myself out of the story, the character lived and told their story until they were done and then I’d come back for a while and then another would come. I’d often forget any of them had been around at all, except that I lost memory of long periods of time. I also knew parts of the stories, and I knew I’d actually lived the story except for the fact that it wasn’t actually me, but it was.
The characters, who we me but not quite me except that they were, all had their own lives, their own identities, their own names. They were, however, part of the central story of me. The story of each individual person was different, and once that person had gotten some of theirs told and acted out, I’d be myself for a while, until another showed up.
This could happen multiple times a day, some days I wasn’t really present at all except that I was walking around living in my body while clearly being someone else. I was constantly told to stop living in my head, and that I needed to be present. The reason that I lived in my head, as they called it, was because their abuse was so terrible that I dissociated.
As I grew older, the stories I lived in got more elaborate, and my parents would punish me for living those stories even though I couldn’t control it. The characters did what they wanted and came and went as they pleased. One day, my parents started telling me the same story many times over the years. It was a story they needed me to remember, because it was important.
They told me that therapists were evil people, and that one day, when I became an adult, someone might try to make me see one. I could always say no because seeing one would be a sin. I was told that all therapists were bad, and that they took girls that grew up in good, loving homes, and put them to sleep to tell them stories.
The girls were supposed to remember these stories when they woke up so that the therapist could have an excuse to accuse good parents of abuse. My father told me that I had a wonderful life and that I was the kind of girl therapists looked for to trick into saying these things. He said that I lived in my head too much and that therapists loved children who did that, as it was easier to plant lies.
After telling me this story many times, one day he told me even more, and even gave the story a name. The story was called Satanic Panic, and that I could look it up if I ever needed to so that I could tell people that multiple personalities didn’t exist. He was convinced I’d become a victim of therapist abuse, as he called it. He was trying to be the hero and save me from the bad people that sought out certain types of people to abuse.
If I let the therapist abuse me, the therapist might make sure that he went to jail, and I was his daughter and I loved him so of course I would never want to do that to my own dad, would I? He said that if a therapist ever tried to abuse me, I could come to him and he would make them stop. My father would be my hero in the fight against therapy.
I actively resisted therapy for many years, due to the fact that I believed my father when he said it was evil, and that I loved him and didn’t want to do anything that might get my dad into trouble. Both of my parents abused me equally, but it was usually my father that told me the story named Satanic Panic.
Meanwhile, I was still living my life in a story with hundreds of characters and I was all of them still. I hated the fact that I couldnt’ do what I was being asked to do, and that was to live in reality. They dished out punishments trying to pull me out of the stories, but I wasn’t actually capable of getting out of the stories, which frustrated me greatly.
By the time I grew up, life was a blur from all the different stories I was living, but I also remembered some things, or things would come to me later, or the characters that were with me in the same place but not taking me over would remind me of parts of the story.
If I ever told my stories to a therapist, they said, it would all be lies because my stories weren’t real, and the therapist would get excited and use me to tell the story titled Satanic Panic.
