An Introduction to my 'alters'

This blog may cause a trigger if you suffer with D.I.D.

If you're new to D.I.D or are reading this for educational purposes, you may be unaware of the creation of alters and why it happens.

People naturally have different levels of coping. What may have seemed like hell for one person to go through, might be nothing for another. People with D.I.D tend to go through something or a range of several events that they mentally and/or physically cannot cope with and bury the memories of the events to their subconscience. No matter how much we think we can just ignore something, ignoring it can make it worse.

In the mind of someone that suffers with D.I.D, we all generally have not wanted to live with a particular event or set of events; and as a way of coping with the events our subconscience creates an alter to deal with the event or future events like this one instead; hence why a lot of D.I.D suffers note that they have severe memory loss, particularly of their childhood.

Now some people with D.I.D suffer with the displaying of alters with no names. Currently all of my alters have names; I say currently because I never know when I'm going to get a new member of the family.

It's not like going to an orphanage and deciding you want to adopt a child and it's not like going to a puppy farm and selecting the one out of the litter you want. Some of us manage to understand parts of an alter before they ever emerge.

I currently have myself and 7 other alters. My latest alter refers to herself as "Jazz" or if she's feeling very hyper, "Jazzberries". I managed to understand that Jazz was going to be a new alter because I started hearing her in my head. A lot of people have different accounts on how they get a new alter, but personally for me, I normally start to hear a new name and soon a new voice.

Think of it like someone entering a conference room and the members already in there, start whispering the new persons name.

My alters have mixed genders and have a range of different thoughts and attitudes to social occassions and events. My alters like to engage in different activities, eat different foods, drink different drinks etc. Some times it can get confusing when I'm trying to eat something I like, and one of my alters start telling me that they don't like that food.

The majority of D.I.D sufferers will express the ability to hear their alters; and truth be told, they can be irritating. For example, I'm writing this now and my alter Sammy, a 5/6 year old little girl, is telling me that she does not understand half of the large words that I am using; and my "protector" alter, Zak, a 20 year old male, is telling me he finds it funny to see me writing so formly.

You'll have noticed I have referred to Zak differently, by labelling him as my protective alter. I wish to tell you more about Zak in a later blog (You may find it amusing that he is disappointed that I am not writing about him now), as I will need to go into a bit more depth about why he is identified as my protective alter.

You'll remember that towards the start of this post, I claimed that alters were created to deal with different events or events that may occur in the future. Putting Zak aside as my protective alter, I will now introduce you to my other alters.

Sammy, the 5/6 year old girl (I say 5/6 year old because she has a habbit of lying about her age to feel grown up) is deemed as my 'little' alter. Amazingly I cannot remember my past below the age of 13 years old, but Sammy can remember my very early memories of life, and we believe she may know some important things that I do not remember about myself and my past. Sammy tends to display herself when I am feeling vulnerable or scared.

Tom is an interesting character. He is around 55/60 years old (not sure, I've never found out!) and believes he is a male american. From what I've learnt, Tom believes he can deal with my finance and business like situations, so he tries to 'come out' to help out with those situations.

Riley is a 17 year old girl. She is a fairly new alter and I'm not sure of her trigger. What we do know is that she is a lesbian, but is struggling to come to terms with her sexuality, and therefore self harms to try and cope with the difficulty of her sexuality. You may be interested to know that I am a lesbian myself.

Jazz, as mentioned before, is a 14 year old girl, who is extemely hyper. We are not sure of her trigger yet, though I will inform this blog when I do know.

Now then, although these all sound like they are great for coping with my situations in life, there are the negative alters that make every day life very difficult to cope with. I have two violent alters; one named Bick who is around 40 years old and another named Rob, who I do not know the age of. I'm sure that during the time of this blog being written, you will soon find out more about these guys and some of the distress that they cause me, my family, my partner and my other alters.

Having 7 alters, may seem like a lot to someone who doesn't suffer with D.I.D and in some cases, it is very difficult to listen to 7 different people at one time; but I know that I am not in one of the worst boats of D.I.D at this stage; as some have accounts of dealing with more than 30 different personalities and some D.I.D sufferers deal with whats called D.I.D Systems; a whole different level of D.I.D where a range of more than 100+ alters can be seen.

All the extensions of alters will be brought up in later blogs as well.

So that for now is a basic introduction to my alters. I hope this has been educational or informative to you. If you have any basic questions which haven't been covered yet, feel free to post a comment and I will try to reply or write a blog response to it.

Willow xxx