i can only explain how we feel right now with photos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0ShYd5ruB8

Thought I would post this, I saw it on my friend Winter's group for DID and it explains things so well

WHAT IS DISSOCIATION?

Dissociation means the separation of things that were, or usually are, together (e.g., associated). In their minds, people usually remember a whole event, including sights, sounds, feelings, and meaning. When dissociation occurs, the remembered event may be devoid of meaning or feelings, which are separated and stored in another part of the mind. In other words, the different parts of the memory are recalled separately, not as a congruent whole.

Strictly speaking, dissociation is a mental process, a way of recording and storing informa-tion. It is one of the mind's ways of operating. Some information may be dissociated, while other information is stored as a whole.

Sometimes you hear "So-and-so is dissociated." This is shorthand for saying that their mind uses dissociation. A person is always a whole person regardless of how their mind works. Nobody stores their feet in one place, their nose in another, and their mind someplace else, even though some days it may feel that way.

WHAT CAUSES DISSOCIATION?

Dissociation occurs when a person experiences extreme stress or stimulation. Under these conditions, life is experienced differently, and the memory of an event is stored differently in the mind. Research is suggests that the brain operates differently when experiencing or recalling stressful and non-stressful events.

Here is a personal example that many people may be able to relate to. I remember skidding badly on an icy street. As the car skidded, colors seemed brighter and time passed very slowly, I was enveloped in total silence even though the radio was on and I experienced no thoughts or feelings whatsoever. I was aware of only the visual part of this experience as it happened. Later, the emotions hit. I was so frightened that my heart pounded and my legs shook, but I could no longer call up the visual memory.

When a child is severely abused, extreme stress occurs repeatedly. Many events are experienced in a state of shock, stored in a dissociative state, and recalled in fragments.

If a child dissociates extensively, even memories of less stressful events can be dissociated. Perhaps the child is still in shock, perhaps the child's sensitivity to stress is raised, perhaps the mind comes to store all material in a familiar way.

There are innate temperamental differences between people. Some people probably dissoci-ate more easily than others or require less stress to change over into dissociative mode.

WHAT IS A FLASH-BACK?

A flashback is a dissociated memory that returns to consciousness. It can be a smell, a taste, a sound, a picture, an emotion, or all these things together. It can last a moment, or linger on for weeks.

People describe smelling alcohol or perfume when none is present, hearing a phrase over and over again in their heads, feeling panic or dread for no logical reason, or seeing pictures, like snapshots or movies behind their eyes. All these are fragmented memories rising up into consciousness. They can be extremely vivid and can appear to be happening in the present. The more fragments come together at the same time, the more intense the flashback.

Flashbacks are terrifying if you don't know what they are, and if you don't realize they will eventually stop. Experiencing flashbacks doesn't mean you are going crazy - it means that you are at a point in your life when you are able to deal with things that you couldn't cope with earlier. They tend to lose their intensity when you have assembled the fragments into a coherent memory, talked about it, cried about it, and absorbed the memory into your life.

WHAT IS MULTIPLICITY?

In some children, the mental fragments are organized or arranged into 'personalities' which seem to have a history and a life of their own. Often the personalities are so separated that they are not aware of each other's existence. This is called an amnesiac barrier.

Imagine a child with a mother who is loving one moment and cruel and sadistic the next. The child will obviously react differently, depending on the mother's mood. The child will learn different ways of responding to the "good" mother and the "bad" mother. All children do this, to some extent, because no adult is perfectly consistent.

Now imagine that the child is so stressed out that memories of interactions with the "bad" mother are dissociated. When the "good" mother is around, the child has no knowledge of the "bad" mother, or of the "bad" child. But as soon as the mother turns nasty, the child switches, and knows exactly how to react. That's multiplicity.

WHAT IS AN ALTER?

An alter is one personality of a person with multiplicity. The personality who is "out" most of the time is often called the host personality, and personalities seen less frequently are called alternative personalities, or alters. Some people have only one or two alters, others have hundreds or even thousands.

Some people with multiplicity experience each alter as a separate person. Others experience them as different from their usual self, but not as different people. Multiplicity is not exactly the same from person to person, and each person's experience of their inner reality is unique.

Often alters have names, have a distinct age, and have specific jobs to do. One may be in charge of feeling anger, another of going to school or work, another may be the one who decides which alter gets to be in control of the body at any given time. Alters may have a different gender from the body or a different sexual orientation from the host. There may even be alters who are animals, objects, or abstract ideas. Sometimes people have alters who are experienced as being dead or immortal.

The formation of alters is a natural psychological process, given extreme early childhood stress. Abusive adults who are aware of the process can manipulate and train the emerging personalities to their own ends. Some survivors of ritual abuse have alters trained by their abusers to do certain tasks and to behave in ways desired by the abusers. And some survivors have alters organized in elaborate patterns designed by the perpetrators, with strict rules about how the alters communicate with each other.

WHAT IS CO-CONSCIOUSNESS?

When two or more alters are aware of what is happening in the present, they are said to be co-conscious. When two or more alters share control over the body's actions, they are said to be co-present.

A person may have alters who are unaware of each other, alters who are always mutually aware of each other, and alters who are aware at some times but not others. Alters who are aware of the presence of other personalities know they are multiple, while alters who aren't in contact with other personalities firmly believe they are "the only one there." An alter may even be multiple.

WHAT IS INTEGRATION?

Integration is used to describe two different processes. One is the process of alters learning to communicate and cooperate and sharing their memories with each other. The other sense of the word is the actual merging (or fusion) of two or more alters to become one. Nothing is lost: all memories, talents, and personality traits are preserved, but organized in a different way. One survivor described integration as "falling in love with myself," rather than as the death of part of herself, as she had feared.

Some people do not fuse and find that their lives are perfectly satisfactory as long as their alters are communicating well. Others fuse partially, reducing the number of alters. Most people with many alters do this in stages, allowing for time for the system to stabilize and get used to the new internal organization. Some people "become one" for a period of time, and then either new alters are formed to deal with new life circumstances, or the former alters split off and become themselves again.

Living with being multiple is an on-going process, just like living with not being multiple is. There are choices to be made, decisions that make life easier or harder. There is no hard and fast rule about what the 'best" way is - each person's path in life is unique.

i remember in the beginning how scared i was of these voices, the flashbacks, the body sensations, all of it was so new to me and absolutely terrifying. i see people now going through these first steps in therapy and i just want to reach out and comfort them because there IS hope and even though every day is still such a struggle and sometimes it feels even worse than the beginning, i know im healing now and i dont feel completely left in the dark....the blanks are beginning to fill in however i will NOT accuse anyone of abusing me as a child if i did not know for sure if it happened. 

we're still working on that with the insiders...trying to accept, but first we need to accept us. last night i thought to myself,  i dont even care if i never get another memory back, but it seems now the more i focus less on filling in the blanks, the more the pieces are coming together. and im slowly, sadly  but graciously accepting these things as part of me my past and my life. im learning who i am by discovering what experiences i lived through that shaped me....that shaped us....all these parts of me, they are not some crazy wild spectacle for people to take advantage of (we've got at least 8 people up in here damnit! we sure don't miss a thing and can spot a dog gone liar a mile away!! sniff sniff, grrr) anyways, i feel like the doors are opening and its a little bit of all emotions jumbled together, just trying to make sense of where we are in the present moment, and how to continue to thrive with what we have. to do that requires gratitude, kindness, honesty, and most of all acceptance. i accept you all, i accept me, im ready to begin the real work to heal because beating around the bush by focusing on diagnosis' labels, stigmas, and anxiety over trying to hide all of my different parts, its stopping. to think that people "just know" on the street when they see me is partly delusional on my behalf. it's like how you cant tell a schizophrenic or a bipolar person or anyone with mental illness on the street. 

we dont have a big sticker on our head that says "HEY! IM A BUNCH OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE!" (even though i know we're not, this is really what it truly feels like to me, and I appreciate so much all the professonals who have shown so much respect and dignity to me and to my insiders. I can feel us all growing a little stronger on the inside. Clarity is quite becoming in my humble opinion :)

We are broken, but we are not forgotten.

We are lost, but we are not gone.

I really dont know what to do. I'm feeling scared. These body memories are too much and i feel like im being swallowed whole. i woke up so late today (which has been happening a lot lately) but id forgotten i was up really early in the morning crying and holding my stuffed rabbit and tossing back and forth. im pretty sure it was Janie i was co conscious with. i could feel everything she was feeling. i couldnt see clearly but i could feel physical pain, emotional torment, and such shame that i just wished so bad i could have broken free to protect her. im trying to really hold myself together. i keep getting these feelings of such ANGER and then sadness, pure grief.

Scattered Parts

Broken hearts, divided parts, they all live inside of me.

How many times can they divide my mind?

Broken hearts with divided parts scattered throughout my mind.

How many times can they wipe me out before I come back no more?

Can they instill a will in me that is not mine?

They broke my heart too many times and divided all the parts, then scattered them through time. Some are good and some are evil.

How many times can they split my mind?

The lights, needles and pain went on much longer than we can explain.

Did these things happen, or is it what they wanted me to believe?

Does God exist or is it what I want to believe?

Does the store house exist where the computer is?

Are there computers in me that help split me?

Scattered parts, broken hearts, where do I exist?

Is there a castle built inside? If so, what person am I?

Lights, needles, and pain goes on today, or is it lies that are made up in a mind split far too many times.

Broken hearts, divided minds, scattered throughout time.

I don’t want to mislead you.

Did the experiments work?

And they split me too many times?

Lights, needles, and pain.

They can wipe me out if I try to explain. Butterflies, butterflies, lots and lots of them. I lay down at nights with them.

I wrap up in a blanket made of them. I hear their hum as they lead me to the lights, needles and pain. The needles and pain make it so I can not think.

I get so sleepy, but I can not sleep.

The pain races through my mind and splits it one more time.

I have forgotten more than most will ever know.

The computer will show how many times they can split the mind, break the heart; divided minds scattered throughout time.

How many times before I can come back no more?

I found this on a blog I was reading earlier and I really liked it. I remember when a select few members of my family would say that we were "faking it." And a lot of people out there don't even think DID is real. It's very real though, and its no where near as rare as people think. 1% of people are affected by DID, so that means about 68 MILLION people have it. We're not as alone as we think.

D.I.D & Recovery: You're doing it wrong!

“You can’t have D.I.D because those “alters” aren’t human”
“Your system is too small/large”
“You can’t have D.I.D because you talk about it openly”
“You can’t have D.I.D because the way you say it is for you isn’t like it is on TV”
YOU DON’T HAVE D.I.D BECAUSE YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!
Identity, according to dictionary.com, is the condition of being oneself… and not another; the sense of self. Why then wouldn’t Dissociative Identity Disorder be different for everyone? Although people share many similarities, no two people (not even identical twins!) are exactly the same, nor do any two people have the same identity.
Even if two people go through exactly the same trauma and experience exactly the same things at exactly the same time, the impact of those events will not be the same, the way they cope and the way they deal with it will always be different. That is why no two systems are the same. That is why there are no set rules for D.I.D. If someone needed 2 dragons, a cat and a purple blade of grass to help them survive who are you to judge them, to say that that was the wrong way to survive?!
I am constantly amazed by people who feel that they have the ability, the qualification, the right to tell people that their D.I.D is wrong. That someone else is faking – especially when they were not there, and do not know the full story of what that person experienced and survived.

Even when people accept that someone has D.I.D, they usually then criticise their recovery goals. Again, who are you to decide how someone else should recover?! There is nothing wrong with giving advice to someone, but there is a very, very big difference between advice and criticism. At the end of the day, you will not have to live that persons’ life, or deal with the consequences of their decisions, so why should their recovery choices be any of your business?