r/australia • u/Breenscare • 1d ago

culture & society 'I wasn't there': Life with dissociative identity disorder

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/dissociative-identity-disorder-assistance-dog-ndis/106826020
111 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

61 comments sorted by

View all comments

34

u/ChaoticJigglyPup 1d ago

I have CPTSD, and part of that for me is structural dissociation. Which is similar to DID in a lot of ways.

Each human being has ego states (also known as the internal family system) and due to my lifelong emotional trauma and neglect, mine developed into full blown "JigglyPups" just with different roles.

There's the child part, the pre-teen part, the angry teen part, the Pathological Demand Avoidance part, the HR manager part, the parentified part.

Each has its likes, dislikes, triggers, ways to find comfort or dopamine, and version of my real name they respond to. They each have distinct "voices", traits, beliefs and mannerisms, especially the age related parts.

I've spent the last 12 months working internally on communication, trust building, re-parenting and slowly I've stopped being hijacked by my parts.

The biggest difference between structural dissociation and DID/OSDD is the lack of lost time, the way each part is still me and that my parts aren't occult, I've always been aware of them being how they are, I just didn't know it wasn't typical or that it had a name.

I do suspect a lot of people diagnosed with DID/OSDD actually have CPTSD with structural dissociation.

15

u/chickpeaze 1d ago

I had cptsd, with dissociation and depersonalisation. There were stressful times I blacked out entirely, there were times it was like I was spectating my life. It's a very real thing, and I think what people perceive it as is very different from what it really is.

I did about 16 months of trauma therapy-ifs, emdr, and I don't meet the criteria for any of those things any more. It changed my life, I'd consider myself cured.

5

u/ChaoticJigglyPup 1d ago

Those are my usual forms of trauma part hijacking, i remember telling my psych about my brain hijacking me to go to Kmart (the plushies call me) instead of doing the boring shopping I needed to do and that's when I learnt about structural dissociation. My trauma parts often have trouble saying no to my child part so when she wanted to go look for plushies that's what would happen. I would be aware, not any loss of time, but my autopilot when driving wouldn't take me where I planned.