I told my husband that someone else was living in my body and he agreed

Like many people, I spent most of 2020 isolating on the couch. Pandemic. And that October I found Isabel.

Isabel is one of my alter egos.

I became aware that someone else was living inside my head and body, and Isabel brought with her memories of things that had gone before in my life. I thought Isabel was my inner child.

Now that I knew he was there, I worked hard to figure out how to communicate with him. I discovered that counting from one to 10 could be used to bring him closer, and we found that writing together was the easiest way to communicate.

We wrote to each other and began to process various traumas from childhood through our thirties.

That December, I confessed to our mother and husband, Ben, that I had found an angry teenager in my head who took control when I drank.

Understandably, they were both shocked; But Ben’s reaction surprised me. ‘That makes sense,’ he said, adding that I acted like a teenager when I was drunk.

Neither Isabel nor I knew this at this stage. dissociative identity disorder (or DID (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) and had no idea what was going to happen.

I started life as Amber in 1982 and thought I had lived my life for almost four decades. I’ve always been rocky sanity I experienced severe depressive episodes, anxiety, and debilitating crises throughout my teenage years and early adulthood; This meant I had to take constant breaks. antidepressants.

We only learned about DID after another identity emerged after Mia and Isabel.

I was talking to a friend about all these inner kids I was working with, and before she sent us a YouTube video about it, she quickly said: ‘That’s not inner kids, that’s DID.’

The currently accepted theory of DID is that we have different personality states when we are young, which coalesce between the ages of six and nine. If trauma occurs, memory loss and dissociation may develop between these identities and we may live separately but together for many years.

We knew we needed an expert therapy. Throughout 2021, many other selves have emerged, bringing with them their own memories of trauma—injuries, illnesses, grief, abandonment, and emotional pain, all crying their way out from the depths of our bodies and minds.

We went to our doctor and said we needed help. This was the start of an 18-month diagnostic journey that included many waiting lists, many phone calls and a misdiagnosis from a psychiatrist who insisted that DID was ‘too rare’ for us.

After a difficult evaluation, we were finally diagnosed with DID in August 2022.

Luckily after Mia explained this XHe was told he was being treated at the Complex Trauma and Dissociation Clinic (CTAD) in Cheshire. NHS Customers.

They accepted us in December 2023 and we started meeting with a therapist online.

We have been struggling for three years, but we got through this and have support for at least another 18 months. We’re lucky to have gotten here, and we hope it will be enough to stabilize us, but many people with DID receive very long-term, even lifelong, therapy.

Really, We’re not sure what we’ll do when our therapy is over.

Our mother learned everything about DID just like us and is our biggest support. My husband struggled, but like us he learned, is understanding and caring.

Life has become incredibly difficult since we found each other. It’s very tiring to live like this. We have experienced many ‘splits’ (the formation of new changes) and a trigger can be debilitating at any time. DID is rarely known, often misunderstood, and stigmatized media representations like the 2016 movie Even within the medical community DivideDon’t help.

I managed to continue working as a massage therapist on and off throughout 2021 and 2022, but eventually had to quit; It became too difficult to continue, and Mia and Berlou wanted to focus on writing and helping others. We were deemed worthy of the award at the end of last year P.I.P.After two appeals and a trial, we won.

Things are still tough today. We rarely leave the house except to shop and walk our dog. I don’t know how many selves we have. We are incredibly complex, we had hundreds of parts of us (little girl parts stuck in time) that we needed to awaken and heal.

This year we’ve focused on ourselves and since starting therapy we’ve started to feel a little more stable. While we ourselves strive hard to find our place in this world, we hope to help others by sharing our experiences.

Most of us live elsewhere, somewhere in this mind, but right now our lives are mostly lived by Mia and Berlou. They are determined to use our experience to help others and I supported this as much as I could; They, too, have the right to live and direct our lives as much as I -Amber.

In the four years since I found Isabel, we have self-published the story that revealed our system, four books of poetry, a book for little ones (child selves), and maintain our website where we share and use her own writings. as a platform where other DID systems can share their experiences.

Mia and Berlou have also recently linked up with a new charity, the Dissociative Disorders Alliance, and are excited to get involved with them as volunteers.

I’m incredibly proud of everything Amber, Mia, and Berlou have accomplished.

Despite the many challenges we face living with DID, we are still learning to live as ourselves, and although we hope it will get easier, we doubt life will ever be simpler again.

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