As a mental disorder, DID is especially insidious because it pulls at us from every direction. At first, we think we’re imagining things. Once we accept something is wrong, we’re terrified to let anyone know because of how they might react. When we do tell someone, they tend to look at us funny all the time. If we’re lucky enough to find a therapist who believes in the disorder and has experience treating it, we can feel overwhelmed at having to share the most intimate details of our life.
I just described how DID affected me. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of waiting twenty years before telling someone the truth about my blackouts and missing time. While not everyone who has DID have thought and reacted the way I did, I’m confident we all have one serious problem above and beyond the disorder itself: trust. I’m not talking about people trusting us—that could be a topic by itself. I’m referring to us trusting others.
Face it: our disorder has the “freak factor.” Once others discover we have multiple personalities—a term non-DID people probably understand most—they treat us very differently, even if on a subconscious level. They stop inviting us to parties. They don’t write to us as often. They tiptoe around asking us questions. They blame us for things we can’t prove we didn’t do. They accuse us of making things up. They don’t believe anything we tell them. They pack their bags or leave. They kick us out. They institutionalize us.
They stop trusting us, which forces us to stop trusting them and their motives.
Those things don’t happen to all of us, but it’s common enough that it pisses me off. It gets to the point where we can’t trust them. And that’s the real struggle.
People approached friends of mine several months ago and asked them to participate in a reality television program. Of course, they promised my friends nothing, including how the show would be edited and presented to the public. That’s a problem. We’re already under a microscope because our disorder is “weird,” “strange,” “unbelievable,” etc. Combined with the reality TV’s penchant for shocking audiences for ratings, our “freak factor” guarantees that my friends’ home life would be distorted and presented unfairly.
We can’t trust the media, period. From reality television to news programs to podcasts, we have to be careful about anything said or done. I recently started a podcast called The Mangled Mind where I interview people with DID to discuss their daily lives. When I conceived the idea, I knew trust issues would make it difficult to find interview subjects. That’s why I promise the subjects that they’ll get to hear the podcast before it airs, ask for changes if they have a problem with something, and kill the podcast episode outright if they want. Will that help people trust me? I hope so, but I can guarantee you that nobody else in the media will promise that.
I wish we didn’t have trust issues. One of the reasons I started the podcast and website was to put a face on our disorder. Maybe—just maybe—that could help change the way people view the disorder and us. Even though my expectations are a bit delusional, we have to start somewhere. It seems the general public has always preferred to brush mental illness under the rug—out of sight, out of mind. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fully trust those around us and not expect ulterior motives in everyone in people who approach us?
It probably won’t happen in my lifetime—I’m sixty-four years old—but the seeds for change are always sewn far in the past.
Let’s start now.