Significant Distress - Rain vs The DSM
By Rain of The Dragonheart Collective (11/18/2021)
Significant Distress or Disorder
Thats a phrase that doesn't quite haunt us, but its one we keep coming back to.
We are plural, that much is obvious and certain.
We have significant and chronic levels of dissociation.
There isn’t anything to be done about it, it is good for us to be mildly dissociated because we have a sensory processing thing and that makes it bearable. Instead of something that hampers us, it instead keeps us functioning.
To consider our dissociation separate from the sensory processing from the autism would be to remove the context thereof.
To consider our plurality separate from the dissociation, however, is easier, ironically enough.
Switching and confronting usually doesn’t involve a whole ton of it, our worst dissociative episodes don’t line up with switching overmuch. To consider our plurality a dissociation thing from the linkage is to consider it an autism thing, for us.
The diagnostic criteria of OSDD1b is -to be very reductive- alters with no amnesia, its not a religion/cultural thing, its not because of drugs, and it causes distress or impairment.
We are plural, its not wholly for-sure spiritual related, we don't take drugs-
And we love being plural.
We are people and we love being plural and plurality has only improved our life. Our switching does not cause disruptive problems, we don’t have blackout amnesia so we aren’t forgetting important things, we can all act as our singletsona, our communication is plenty good, the only awkward or uncomfortable thing is when a depersonalization/dissociation whammy hits at the wrong time, and that doesn’t usually line up with a switch.
Its for this reason we say we are not distressed or impaired by being plural, so we are not disordered, despite likely being able to take the label if we desired.
Words are not my strong suit. Not really. Its hard to describe the shape of what I mean.
But heres the thing- We don’t drive without a separate body in the copilot seat because we worry we will highway hypnosis ourselves into an accident, we are adults in our twenties going to college and living rural so we need to drive, but we just find it such a massive issue of autistic-dissociative stress.
We have terrible memory. Terrible terrible memory. If it happened to us its an itemized list. Its bullet points and blurry screenshots for almost everything. Autism possible-adhd and trauma and dissociation. Its not because any of us have the memories that are gone, so its just Brain Broken Error 404 Not Found. Some memories only some of us have clear, some memories we can only access some of the time for all of us, but we don't have memory grey or blackouts because of fronting.
Wether we were there or not its all a fuzz.
The host will get random dissociation/depersonalization attacks that don't line up with switches and are quite severe.
We will switch sometimes without any control. I switched in while driving for some goddamn reason. And now im typing because its really fucking bothering me to be honest, this line of disorder.
And I think im stuck here for a hot second. I usually sleep a lot, Silver’s job and degree don’t interest me overmuch. Ill do them. I have access to that memory to do them, but I would rather sleep. Or play video games. Or bite people for being assholes, but thats illegal and against system rules. So I don't do that, just growl menacingly on occasion.
I've been here longer than Silver. I think im probably a tulpa? The original spun me real perhaps, though its not certain as our memory is foggy. I've been here since a very very young age. When I say ‘I remember being seven’ I actually do remember that as -me- the way Silver does not. I am not the host though, just the oldest.
I am anti-psych industry. We are pretty anti-psych industry as a whole, but I wouldn’t go to a therapist again ever if it was just my decision. I think the abuse the system carries out and especially the way psych wouldn’t treat me like a person or only lie about how they see me and the rest of us as people is disgusting. We are people and the only people who get to say we aren’t people is us. Fuck that.
This isn't an anti psych essay. Its just not.
But it kind of is, because its a major reason why I am so against saying ‘we are osdd’.
The dehumanizing language, the fucking structural dissociation theory, the way it decides we are disordered for the way we deal with stressors or exist.
The way it implies being a trauma symptom is the end all be all of my existence.
Fuck you in particular, person who changed MPD to DID, we know why you did that, to erase us from the DSM as much as possible, right from the horses mouth.
I think id *almost* tolerate MPD diagnosis over OSDD and DID.
Still a No, but a softer one.
We are deeply traumatized, this is true. We could spend all day detailing more and more things. Any one incident makes people make horrified noises. Some trauma was even before 9 to back the Structural Dissociation Theory I hate, but we were personality-identity fucked and thus likely plural before all of that.
The earliest memory of this body is looking in the mirror and deciding that ‘I’ as a concept did not exist at 4 and that our legal name was just a ill-fitting label assigned to the meat.
Is there more trauma and we are just ~traumagenic classic OSDD in denial~? Were we always like this? Does it matter? Does it really honestly matter how we were made if we are here now?
We don't think it matters. I especially don’t. We don’t use system origin terms actively anymore because the terms divide us more than they help and for us, we just do not know.
Silver could be a walk-in, or could be a dissociative split of the Original into Fawn and them, equally forged. I could be a tulpa or a traumagenic protector ‘alter’- how I loathe the term when used on me. Mell could be a walk-in or an alter formed in high school due to the trauma going on then. We don’t know and we can’t know and it doesn’t really change much of anything either way.
If pressed we say we are ‘quoi, but origin is the least useful information about us and how we work. How we are people.
We have considered OSDD before, we have considered but tossed it out several times, once when we were under the impression that was the only way to be plural, once when we were examining trauma, and again now.
But still, that remains a label we do not agree with.
To consider us automatically disorderly for simply reacting in a way that keeps us safe would be to pathologize our existence just because we aren’t reacting '''normally''' to stressors.
The worst part is, if we got diagnosed with OSDD, it would really only help legitimacy- we likely would not find help in therapy due to what the ISDD guidelines currently are re: Integration and what is helpful to us being irreconcilable. But fuck legitimacy. We don’t need street cred for the sysmeds, they don’t care if diagnosed systems call them out on their shit, they fakeclaim you anyway. Its much better to simply say we are dissociative and plural than anything else.
To take the label OSDD, though we arguably could squeeze mostly into the box when by our view we aren’t distressed by existing as we are, even when we disagree fundamentally with what is described as applied to us and how our personhood is erased by it, at best called ‘alter’ and at worst ‘part’? No.
To have that label forced upon us?
Mad Pride, jackass.
This beast has teeth.