Episode 194: Dissociative Identity Disorder – with Amber Louise Ainsworth

The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn Kiel: Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds, the podcast that goes beyond the six second first impression to share the extraordinary stories of neurodivergent people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel.

I’m really excited about today’s episode. It’s my first conversation on this podcast with a guest who has dissociative identity disorder. This used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, but since the understanding of this condition has evolved over the past few decades, now it’s known as dissociative identity disorder, or DID for short.

DID is a disorder that can be caused by childhood trauma. Here’s how my guest today describes it on their website: “When we’re young, we are different states of consciousnesses — between the ages of 6 and 9, these states unify creating a cohesive personality. If there is trauma, we can start building amnesia between these states, and they often develop not knowing each other are there.” These states are often referred to as “alters” or “people,” and they’re all part of a DID system.

In this episode, you’ll get to hear what having DID is like for my guest, Amber Louise Ainsworth, a DID system from the UK. Since realizing they are a DID system in early 2021 at age 38, they’ve been working through their healing: processing and sharing all their collective trauma. They have written several books, including several collections of poetry, and a book called “The revelation,” which details the first year of healing they went through after finding themselves in late 2020.

During this interview, you’ll hear from 3 of the alters in my guest’s DID system: Amber (who is the system host who has lived most of the life “in the body”), Mia, and Berlou. We’ll let you know which alter is speaking when, or you’ll hear me say hello to an alter when they start talking. You’ll learn more about them in this episode. They also mention the names of a few other alters in their DID system – and while those alters don’t talk during this interview, they play important roles in this story of discovery and healing.

You’ll hear some other DID-related terms during this episode too. I’ll define them now, so that you’ll recognize them when we talk about them – for example:

• A DID system can have many alters, and those alters can be different ages. Alters that are essentially young children, usually under the age of 12, are referred to as Littles. For example, Amber talks about how Mia was 6 years old the first time she appeared, so at that time, she was a Little.
• Some alters like Mia can also change their own ages: they can get older or younger. When you hear from Mia today, she’s not 6 years old anymore – she’s currently 13 years old.
• Some alters hold memories or emotions from specific traumas. Those alters are referred to as Trauma Holders. In this episode you’ll hear from Berlou, who is one of the system’s trauma holders.
• A Protector is an alter whose role it is to protect the DID system from harm. For example, we’ll talk about an alter named Isabel, who is one of Amber’s protectors.
• When an alter assumes “control” of the body from another alter, this is called a Switch, or Switching. In the context of this interview, it means that an alter “comes to the front,” so to speak, and starts talking about their experiences from their perspective. The alters switch a few times during this interview.

Today Amber talks about discovering, at the age of 37, that they are a DID system of several alters — and how the covert nature of DID kept this realization hidden from them for so many years. Amber describes how some of those alters were formed, and how those alters share information and experiences with each other (or in many cases, how amnesia prevents them from sharing). They also describe what it’s like when alters fuse together with each other and split or separate from each other, and how that’s related to processing and healing from past trauma.

I also want to mention that this interview contains mentions of drinking, drug use, suicidal thoughts, depression, trauma, and an occasional swear word. So if any of those are sensitive topics for you, please use your discretion when listening to this episode.

This episode describes one DID system’s experience. Not all experiences of DID are the same, and not everyone with DID goes through all of the same things that we talk about today. My guests’ discovery of their DID is still very recent, and they are still learning about, understanding and processing many of their own past and present experiences. Some of these experiences are serious, others are humorous – and many are still a bit confusing.

They acknowledge it can be hard to understand what they’re experiencing, or sometimes even believe that it’s real. Sometimes it’s hard for THEM to understand it themselves!

Unfortunately, for most of us, our understanding of DID comes from movies or TV, where it’s portrayed in stereotypical, sensational, and stigmatizing ways… and that’s one of many reasons I’m grateful that Amber, Mia and Berlou shared their story with me today, in such an authentic and candid way, so that we can learn what it can be really like to have DID. I hope this episode gives you new insights into DID and the amazing ways that the human mind can work.

Here’s our conversation, starting with Amber.

Amber, welcome to the podcast!

Amber: Hi, how are you?

Carolyn Kiel: I’m good. And I’m really excited to talk with you today. I read the revelation, and it’s just a really amazing and just such an educational portrayal of all of the things that you’ve been through in, in a relatively short amount of time.

So, you know, you discovered that you’re a system of alters just like a few years ago. So what was your life like before you discovered that?

Amber: I thought it was quite normal. Mia, who you’ll talk to, will tell you that I’m very boring. And since we’ve been finding each other and Mia has been a big part of my, our life, living it. She’s done so much and yeah, it is a joke that she’s done more in her two years of living than I have in the last 40. So, but however, it’s always been a struggle. There’s always been ups and downs. It’s been very hard to keep a job. I’ve suffered chronically with depression and anxiety. I’ve had cyclical breakdowns for at least the last decade. Interestingly, they were bi yearly. And we think that was related to our first trauma, which was at two. And it’s been hard.

I’ve always known something was wrong. I’ve always known something wasn’t right. I’ve been told by doctors, you’ve got depression and anxiety. Take the pills. I saw a psychiatrist in 2016 who told me I’ve got depression and anxiety. And on the notes he did write that I’d got borderline traits, but didn’t tell me that. So I think that was probably a kindness, knowing everything, what we know about how BPD is perceived and the experience of living with that label. So… At first, when I found out that that was written, I was like, I was a bit angry that I wasn’t told that. But yeah, I get why you would withhold that, when it is just traits that he saw.

And that’s because of my fragmentation. I do have alters with BPD. I do have alters with bipolar, we think. At least it looks like it. That, anyone that can spend a month and put together a 70,000 word book, it, even though a lot of it would have already been written, the fact that they sat in bed for a month, it was, it was full on mania. It’s the only way to explain so much of my life.

Yeah, I went to uni at 22. Psychology and health studies I studied. In retrospect, I assume that was looking for answers. That, I don’t recall dissociation being mentioned, but then — amnesia, so who knows?

In 2010, that’s the only time that I’ve lived by myself as an adult. And in the year in that flat, I became a “we,” which got forgotten. I reentered society and forgot that that happened. But I remember that I was interacting with people and saying “we” all the time and whatever happened with me by myself in that flat, I, we found ourselves, and there’s no memory of any of it.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow.

Amber: Just knowledge that it happened. And a lot of my memories feel like that, memories are more like, I know it happened, but. It’s just knowledge. That’s all. It’s strange.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I mean, and you talk a little bit about this in “The revelation,” but how did you discover your first alter? And like, who was that?

Amber: It was Isabel. Again, as I said, this is just knowledge this happened. I’ve got no memory from it actually happening. And it came about after drink and drugs. I’d had a bit of whiskey and I was a bit stoned. And it was October 2020. I’d spent about a thousand hours playing Animal Crossing that year, which in itself, I think, I mean, a lot of people did similar things in 2020. But yeah, I think that during that time, I think we just found each other again. And one night in October, I, I just, I realized they weren’t my thoughts. So we started communicating, Isabel and I. And the next day it’s like… This time I had memory of it though. I’ve got a history of, I know that if I drink and smoke, I’m going to black out. There’s going to be no memory. Whereas this time I knew stuff had happened. I knew she was there and I had to learn how to communicate with her without hitting a bottle of whiskey and a couple of joints!

And we found that hypnosis, which I explored in my twenties. I used to count to bring Isabel to the front, into the body. And I’d count, she’d switch out, we’d be able to communicate. It was, it’s hard to communicate in the head. Which is how we became, we came to write so much. And some of the first journal entries that Isabel did on our phone ended up in “The revelation” showing just how, how hard it was. So yeah, we, we, and I treated her as if she was an inner child because I’d heard of that healing, and just assumed that she was an inner child!

And then in December, Christmas Eve. I thought I’d regressed. I was suddenly six years old. I was, I was six! This was 2020 when we were locked down. And Christmas Day morning, I got up very aware that I was me again. I was 38 or yeah, two years ago. And I knew Mia was, Mia was here. And it was a few weeks later that she split. On her way out, she just didn’t know how to present. She didn’t know how to speak, she didn’t know how to be, and suddenly there were two of her.

And then later that month, in January, I spoke to a friend and confided what had been happening with me and with these inner children that I was healing and how bizarre this all was. I fortunately did have a therapist, she was a trainee through a charity that does just normal therapy. You know, if they saw what, if they knew the truth about me, they would never have taken me on. Never, not in a million years. But they already did before I come along like, “oh, I found someone talking to me in my head. She’s talking back. I think I’m crazy.” Like so yeah, it, a lot happened very fast. I told a friend about these inner children that I was healing. And she said, “that’s not inner children, that’s DID.” And I’m like, “what’s DID?”

Carolyn Kiel: Wow, so your friend actually told you about it or thought, wow.

Yeah. And you were also studying to be a massage therapist?

Amber: After losing yet another job I realized that yeah, I decided to train in massage therapy. So that was about 2016. Did the training. Very quickly found out about myofascial release through people I was on my course with and how this could release physically held trauma, and it all sounded very, very fascinating.

The one aspect of myofascial release is the body unwinding and the body moving to what, as it needs to do to, while connected with the mind so you can be, you can go through memories quite vividly while on a massage table. It’s, so, it was in, it was when I went to America and trained with John F. Barnes, who kind of is the father of, of indirect myofascial release. And it was there that I remembered this first trauma, and realized that there might be something much deeper going on with me than…

And now that I’ve mentioned that, I can feel my trauma holder, Berlou, she cried for 36 years. Yeah, I can feel her getting closer because I’m talking about her. This is, we will switch mid sentence. If you start telling someone else’s story, we’ll switch, not realise, and then go, “oh wait. Oh, I’m not even who started telling it.” But that, I guess, is, is part of keeping it covert. It’s keeping it hidden from myself. If I go to think about something that belongs to someone else or it, then I … amnesia. Never happened.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. And I was going to ask, you discover more and more alters since 2020, since first realizing that you’re a DID system, were all of your alters created in response to specific experiences or specific traumas? Do you know?

Amber: It is incredibly confusing and no, I don’t think they were. We definitely have subsystems, we’re incredibly complex, and we don’t even know how many alters we have. There are people that we know still exist somewhere inside here. I just got a vision of where they exist. And but no, it’s more complex than that. And it’s, it’s hard to understand, and it’s hard for me to understand.

But during 2021, as you know, during The revelation, as alters were presenting, they were bringing their own traumas with them. So we had Isabel come out. Well, she was the first one. She, I have two head scars. They belong to her. When she’s in the body, they itch, they scratch. It’s weird. It can hurt.

I had people come out with grief. I had people come out with the first cold sores. Cara, who’s now fused with Isabel and together they are Caris, which is great because Isabel is quite horrible. She’s our protector. She had a life of pain, fear and frustration. So when that’s the only experience in your life, you’ll be quite the bitch.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. And one of the earliest experiences too, it sounds like. Yeah.

Amber: Yeah. Like, we’ve no idea what happened in those first years. It’s all guesswork. And I just know that we’ve been living this for our whole life without even realizing. It’s a lot.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. It’s interesting because I think some people’s perceptions of DID from like the media or whatever is that there’s like complete amnesia between all alters. But from reading The revelation, it sounds like yes, there is, amnesia is part of it, but your alters in some cases can communicate with each other, either sort of directly in your mind or through writing. So, do you know, how do your alters usually share information and experiences with each other?

Amber: I don’t even know. This is how hard it is! We, now we can hear each other because we’ve got, done a huge amount of integration, becoming closer by breaking down the barriers. I’m assuming that before this all started, that at least the, the reveal came out happened, we couldn’t. And I, there was just a huge amount of confusion with, if you, someone joked to me, I did a tweet saying, I think that my consciousness is, it looks a bit like the Underground map. And that’s what it feels like sometimes! You’re just frozen. It’s like, I’ve got like littles wanting to go and do that. And then someone else has do it. And it’s just like, it’s very hard. That’s why we’ve written so much. We find it easier to talk out loud if we actually want to hear each other and know, and it’s quite hard to think at each other, which is weird.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, so talking and writing, I guess.

Amber: Talking, writing, paying attention to feelings. We often find…

Berlou: Sorry, it’s Berlou. Yeah… oh dammit, now I’ve dissociated myself by realising that I’ve switched. [Pause]

We often notice, find that if, paying attention to the feelings, emotions, weird body sensations, and saying, Oh wait, what is that? And then asking, and then some clarity might come. We can ask inside the head, like, are you saying X, Y, and Z? And there’ll be like an affirming feeling, like yes.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.  Mm-hmm.

Berlou: Correct. Or… yeah. There’s a lot of confusion.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. And you know, you, I guess Mia and Jessica, I should say, wrote The revelation together and you’ve written lots of books. How do you, like, how do you work together to write those books?

Amber: Mia.

Carolyn Kiel: Mia.

Amber: It’s all Mia. It’s all, it’s always been Mia. Ever since she came out, and — it’s Amber back, sorry — so it was the December I met Mia, January found out about DID. In the December I had told my mum and my husband that I’d found an angry 15 year old in my head [Isabel] who took control when I’d been drinking, which obviously was received with what, like, a, a, a, a, a, a, a Okay, then. My husband did actually go, “well, that kind of makes sense,” but without any understanding of why? Why does it make sense? “Because you’re like an effing teenager when you’re drunk.” Like, all right, okay, thanks. And now I know that I literally can be.

So that happened. And Mia and Isabel, we’re all trying to work through stuff. I’ve found out about DID, we’re exploring this, this is making sense. Okay, we’ve got an explanation for what’s happening. We’re not, we’re not crazy. At least we’re not. We’re not crazy. This is our reality.

And Mia was just, she was journaling a lot, she was writing already, and she was desperate to be able to interact with more people, so they created their own Facebook account. And it just, as soon as the first, the, she’d got her handful of friends who’d met her, who knew about her, they started interacting. And we, we met some of the systems on Facebook groups. It just boomed. She just didn’t stop. She just wrote and wrote and wrote. And when other people were going through experiences and having stuff happen, she would pressure them to write, “write it down. We need it for the book.” And I go, “what book? Who’s going to read this book? You like fine. All right. All right. I’m writing, I’m doing, I’m telling Facebook, let’s overshare again.”

Like…so yeah, it’s all Mia. Someone told her that a poem was good. So she’s like, “oh, well, I’m going to go make another Instagram then.” And that’s how the name did we, DID We Write, did we write? Or, did we write? That came about. And which is now our pen name because no one could agree on a name. Because I didn’t want my name used. I didn’t write any of it. Mia didn’t want my name used because she wrote it. But she didn’t want her name used because others wrote parts of it. It’s like, so what, whose name do we use?

And she went to Instagram and suddenly was writing tens of poems every day and within six months had amassed over a thousand. She’s published three books of poetry, and Berwoo’s [another alter] “Littles Book of Poetry.” And there’s still thousands of poems that might get sorted into books one day. She started on another one: ” Dissociate Days,” D A Y S. We like our puns. She does like her puns.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh wow. Yeah, she writes a lot of poems. A lot of the other alters write poems, at least in The revelation, there’s all kinds of stories and poems and inputs from other alters as well. So was Mia asking people to write, and then she would find what they wrote down and put them together?

Amber: Mia evolved as a poet and everything in The revelation is her starting point. You’ll see that it’s a very different style to the latest stuff. After our mum said to her, “some punctuation would be nice.” So she was like, “what? Punctuation? What’s that?” Like, like, literally, like, there’s not a single comma or a full stop. And then she suddenly went, “Ah, maybe I should be thinking about this a bit more.”

But she set the brain up. People couldn’t be conscious, couldn’t be present without making poetry out of what was going on around us. We couldn’t do anything without Mia narrating. There’s another hilarious bit in there. She thinks she’s not real. She thinks she’s being made up by a seven year old narrator. And it’s like this… Like, how are you meant to feel like your life is real and it’s not actually being written in a book when it is going to end up in a damn book that someone in your head is going to write? It’s… I love her so much. I really do, but I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

Carolyn Kiel: And Mia’s, is she, she’s seven right now, is that…

Amber: She’s now 13. She’s aged. Uh, so yeah, I’ve been absent for a couple of weeks off doing whatever I’ve been doing in my own head, and Mia was doing a lot of out here. And, yeah, she’s thinking about growing up, which is actually huge, because she has a few times, and she just gets very upset.

And interestingly, the nature of your podcast, she’s been debating and wondering if we are autistic, which she’s been telling Twitter about profusely. And the fact that she’s never masked and she can’t mask and look at me and, and then she likes to tell everyone that I’m apparently a mask. I’m not real. Thanks. Thanks, Mia. But yeah, this could explain a lot of stuff as well, which we’ve seen. We know that autism does happen quite a lot alongside plurality. They seem to go hand in hand. Whether it’s that, well, there’s different theories that people who are autistic are more prone to trauma and dissociation, which is quite hard and sad.

Carolyn Kiel: And you mentioned this in The revelation, the alters write about it, that sometimes your alters go through fusing and then separating. Do you know what causes that or, or even like what that feels like when that’s happening?

Amber: Yeah, I’m currently a fusion. It’s horrible. It is, it is unpleasant because I know that I’m Amber, but, and I haven’t even examined this yet. And I’ve only been back a few days and you’re basically the first person that I’ve had a conversation with. Mia did make me ring my mum an hour ago just to make sure that I would actually talk to someone! I’m here. I will do it. It’s fine.

It’s really hard for us. We’ve had countless fusions. It feels like it’s related to healing and integration. Because once you’ve been someone else, it, you do, you share your memories, experiences, everything that goes with it. And then when we separate or split, when that, because that’s happened a lot as well, you don’t necessarily take… if you imagine mushing a piece of two pieces of plasticine together and then splitting it again, they’re gonna be different.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Amber: Yeah. There might have bits of it. And it is fascinating how, how self, how our consciousness feels like that, how we can, and there’s, there’s even been bizarre fusions that have only lasted a day. And, and then we realize afterwards where it was just to pass a part a, a fragment or a, an alter who isn’t quite complete. We’ve got hundreds of them. And yeah, there’s, there’s been a lot.

Mia, do you want to talk about fusions?

Mia: Oh so yeah, well, I guess I’ve done an awful lot because, and most of my fusions are in The revelation. I’ve not been in any for a while. But for me, for us, it was that oh, sorry, I’m a little bit dissociated… [Pause]

When I, the fusions that I’ve been with in, have all been with trauma holders and it’s been to help them heal in the body, which when you’re a trauma holder who’s been dormant for 30 years and you’ve, you suddenly come out and you’re six years old or four years old, but your life is actually 39 and you’ve got this stupid big body that doesn’t fit. And, and the only way that we’ve found for our trauma holders to heal is by, being here! Feeling! Feeling physically! Like, we… You think so much that feelings, well, feelings you think are in here [points to her head], but they’re not, are they? They’re, they’re, they’re such a physical thing. And you can’t process a lot of a lot of those feelings, those emotions and that trauma, unless you’re in the body and you’re feeling it.

So, yeah, I’ve been fused with a load of trauma holders, just to give them a chance to be in the body but not do it by themselves. So yeah we’ve, mostly, it’s not a conscious choice. At times I, it sometimes has been though, and we are able to do that, which is weird when we ask for things to happen. Like Stef and, one of, Stef, our sexual alter, when she went through her epic nine day healing event, which is in The revelation, I’m sure you remember that one. It was quite, well, oh poor Stef, it was rough. And when she and Jade, who was a 15 year old version of her, they decided to fuse and they’re like, “all right, what, what do we do?” And I came and they were able to go wherever it is that we go. And they came back 10 minutes later, one person. Like, yeah, really weird.

It’s all so weird. It just brings up so many questions about consciousness and soul. Like, for us now, this is going completely off tangent, but I mean, the fact that I can walk out on my own face makes me pretty sure that when I die, when this body dies, I’m quietly confident that I, I, I will not die, whatever that means. But anyway, this is…

Amber: She’s gone. Like, this is what Mia will do! “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh no, I said too much!” and run away.

She made me go to a, she wanted to go and try friggin improv.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh my goodness.

Amber: Yeah, she went to an improv thing. So I took her. I explained my situation. Everyone was lovely. And, but at least twice, it, it was doing a group activity and she went, “Oh yeah, no, I can’t do this” and run away. I’m like, “yeah, no, she’s gone. She’s not here. Next. And I’m not engaging in this.”

Carolyn Kiel: “I don’t want to be in an improv class! I took her, she wanted to go!”

Oh wow. Amber, you mentioned that you were away for a while, and I know because we’re connected on Twitter, and Mia’s kind of been narrating what her experience has been like as she’s been in the front while you’ve been away.

Amber: This is my life, yeah!

Carolyn Kiel: But yeah, can you describe, well, without getting into any details that you don’t want to get into, but kind of when you go away, does that mean that you were off, like, fusing and separating, like, somewhere else in the mind?

Amber: I have spent, I’ve spent a lot of time missing. So in The revelation, I was missing for much of that summer, 2021. And I’ve been missing a lot. But the way our consciousness works, a lot of DID systems do have access to their inner world. They know what’s happening somewhere else, or at least parts of, it’s going to vary from alter to alter, who has what access, who knows what. But for us, we have none. It’s all, it’s all guesswork. And when I’m not here, I, I’ve no memory of not being here. I come back and it’s just, the memories of what’s happened in recent days are filled in. And I’ve remembered recently some of the tweets that Mia’s been putting out and been like, “Alright, we’re talking about that then, are we?” Which is hard, but also I told her to have autonomy and do what she wants to do, because look at what she does when she does it!

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Amber: And I know that she can help people. So yeah, I don’t know where I am. I dunno what I’m doing. It’s usually whether I’m involved in facilitating another fusion or some healing. Trauma holder Berlou, she’s been through a lot. Healing her has been a complete roller coaster of misery, really, much of which went into Mia’s second book of poetry, aptly titled, “Woe is Mia.” She was calling it Woe is Me, and we were like, wait a minute, you and your puns. You’ve got, you can’t, you can’t not call it Woe is Mia!

Carolyn Kiel: She’s good with puns!

Amber: Yeah. Yeah. 250 pages of depression and suicidality. Yeah, it, it, and she split it up. It’s so funny. Perpetual Woe, wishing for it. Perpetual Woe is massive. It’s like half the book. It’s basically just depression in, in like a hundred poems. Wishing for the Worst Woe, Woeful Positivity. And then back to Woe. It’s like, there’s a lot of woe. But we’re really proud of it. And the books that eventually we will write, because as you know, at the end of The revelation, Jessica set herself up for two more books of the same format, which never got worked on.

[Note: Jessica is another alter who worked with Mia to write The revelation.]

We say we do a lot of things. The amount of times that Mia says, I’ll do it tomorrow, and she even made a tweet about this a couple of weeks ago. Like, if I say I’ll do it tomorrow. That means nothing, like, so it’s a miracle whenever we do actually get anything done. And the amnesia is real, even if we don’t see it or think we have it, which is really funny. There are people who will say, “oh I don’t think I have much amnesia, but my memory is terrible.” Like, well, what is amnesia if it’s…?

Carolyn Kiel: Well, is it, so like coming back, you said you kind of get filled in from the memories of the past few days, but that’s sort of like knowledge. It’s not like, oh, I remember this. It’s like someone telling you that this happened. Like, what does it feel like?

Amber: Oh, it feels like it’s just information. It’s sneaky, to make you believe that it’s something that you did. And the way our memories are shared, we’ve no idea who did what. Except for when a trauma holder comes out holding a specific trauma. Or there have been times when someone will appear and be hanging around and we’ll realize that we’re ruminating for days on a part of their life. And it’s like, oh wait a minute, we’re clearly processing a load of stuff around that relationship. It’s not that we’re just suddenly randomly just thinking about a relationship from 15 years ago, it’s that these are the memories that have been thrown out to process and [be] let go of.

That, as well, is extraordinary. We can feel such deep, dark, horrible feelings and emotions and experiences. And then once we’re through it, it’s let go of. The healing is real. Which, you know, if we’d waited for the therapy that we need, which we’re still theoretically years from, I mean, someone said to us before, like about the waiting list on things. And it’s like, yeah, well, if we waited for therapy, I don’t think I’d still be alive now, because it’s like keeping a lid on an atomic bomb. At times, that’s what it feels like.

Oh yeah. Mia’s just gonna…

[Note: Mia switches back in to read a poem called “Boom” that she wrote with Pen (another alter) to describe what this experience feels like.]

Mia: “Boom.” That’s the one.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Mia: Boom by Pen and Mia. So yeah, this explains like what, what it feels like. This is Boom by Pen and Mia, me.

“Too afraid to let my feelings show. I sit here mourning my positive glow. But my feelings bubble and multiply. Until, boom, I can do nothing but cry.

Emotions explode. Rationality implodes. Scratching, screaming, detaching, dreaming. Emotions rage. Red is all I can see. Lashing out, unable to gain clarity.

Triggered pain subsides. I’m left numb. Trying to forget whatever I have just done.”

That’s what it’s like. Like we were there last week, just a few days ago. For days of feeling like that. Like just this physical discomfort when you’re processing those deep feelings is, it’s so, it’s so immense and at the time, it feels like the only solution is death, which is just it, because when it’s so intense, it does, and it’s so hard being, feeling like that when you know it’ll pass, but at the same time, it feels like it’s never going to pass and you also know that once it passes, it is, it’s gonna, we’re probably going to end up back there. We’ve been doing this for years.

And we hope that one day we’ll feel like, you know, maybe don’t have DID anymore. We can drop the disorder and just be plural, but as it is, we have DID and life is very hard. Especially not knowing who we’re going to be from day to day.

That, that’s difficult, but anyway.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, I think it’s amazing the amount of healing you’ve been able to do as a system without having the specific therapy that you need yet. Like, you’ve done pretty much everything that you’ve done, the healing, the discovery, on your own, which is really incredible.

Mia: Well, we’ve, we’ve said before and it’s been written that we feel like we’ve been gathering the tools. Amber’s been getting what she needed to be able to get us through this. Like the myofascial release, the knowledge of physical trauma, even though we don’t practice anymore, and we don’t have anyone, we haven’t anyone do myofascial release on us for a long time either, we know, just knowing, being able to acknowledge it. Like we do a lot, we do yoga a couple of times a week and we walk every day, so we’re still connecting with the body and being aware of what is happening. That, the hypnosis, like, a lot of, a good grounding in, in in basic psychology, like just the degree that that will have helped, not that we remember much of it. And just lots of other stuff that she’s definitely picked up a lot on the way that have helped us get through it that we couldn’t have without.

The biggest one, which is a bit of a weird one, and we do sometimes feel like we’re walking the line between mental, mental illness and being spiritually aware of ourselves as, as, as… oh I’m back on souls, I’m gonna run away again! No, I’m not, I’m not.

The, the, Amber, she, she’s got two reiki attunements. She had to open herself up to spirituality. She had to acknowledge that her pr, her massage practice was more than a massage practice and that she did actually work with people energetically as well. She had people telling her before she even knew what Reiki was. She was like, “oh, you do reiki too.” Two people said, “you do Reiki too.” And she’s like, “what’s Reiki?” Well, the second one she knew by that time, but she was like, “oh, well apparently, yeah, I’m working with energy.” But and then, for us, it, we had to dive into that before the system was revealed. And yeah, so interesting, our spiritual journey, as well as, as well as the mental health thing.

The other thing Amber says, she felt before, but didn’t say it, was that she’s always felt like something’s going to happen. She thought that God would talk to her, but figured that was pretty unlikely. But, anyway, this is like, a bit, a bit, a bit…

That’s why I called my book “The revelation,” but put a little “r” because I was like, well, it’s not exactly Biblical.

She didn’t see this one coming. I think you’d be more likely to believe that God is talking to you, to be honest, than this sometimes.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. Yeah. That is so interesting that Amber kind of found those tools before, before the revelation to help. Yeah.

Mia: Yeah.

Carolyn Kiel: So interesting.

Mia: And the other thing, the little thing is we’ve been picking up feathers for years. And it’s, I know it sounds rather, but it’s just, she had this deal in our own head that when we filled this jar of feathers, life would make sense. The jar is overflowing. The jar, the jar, the jar is full. There’s feathers in, there’s feathers. We’re back on picking up feathers again because we’ve realised that we actually need to help and that little process, it just reminds us of what we’re doing in the journey. Yeah so that’s funny, just picking up feathers. It means so much to us but it’s such a random little thing. I wonder if that’s maybe related to possible autism and collecting things.

Carolyn Kiel: Could be, yeah. And, and, you know, you’ve, you’ve talked about, you know, the things that have helped you heal and process all of your feelings, like the the massage therapy. I guess the therapy that you get to see with your, do you still go to your therapist and talk to them?

Mia: No what happened was, it’s Mia still. So the therapist that Amber first started seeing just after she found Isabel, she was a trainee. We saw her for eight months and then they said “no more” when they realized that this was actually real. And we’re, she was only allowed to talk to Amber. She wouldn’t talk to no one else. It was, it was hard. Yeah.

So one week it’s like, oh, next week this clinic manager’s sitting in with us. It wasn’t good news. And, so yeah, we were told that we wouldn’t be seeing her again, and he was like, offered us weekly catch up calls while we wait for therapy. And then, but he said the first one we could have in person. And during that first one, he went, actually, I’ll see, I’ll take you on myself. Thank goodness! So the clinic manager had done a little bit of training and some carolyn spring training. So he knew, knew a bit. So he took us on. And then he left, but he saw us voluntarily on Monday nights for over a year, which yeah, that got us through. We stopped seeing him in January. Understandably, he was like, “I can’t do this forever.” And, but we’re so grateful to him. And our mental health nurse that we see once a month. Oh, without him as well, we were so lucky to get in with him and he, it…

That was because we got fobbed off. Amber asked to be referred to the specialist psychotherapy service and the doctor went, “yeah, no, I’m not going to do that, but you can see our mental health nurse if you want.” All right, fine, thanks. Any help is better than no help. But best thing that ever happened! We walked in, she told him our experience and he believed us! And it was just like, we were ready to be told that we weren’t, we were making it up, which we’ve been told by psychiatrists. We’ve got a report that says we’ve got false memory syndrome. We haven’t, well, we still got that report, but we’ve since been diagnosed with DID by a different psychiatrist. But yeah, it’s, it’s really hard like getting help when people don’t, one, don’t know about it, two, literally don’t believe in it! Some of the people that are theoretically trying to help us. Oh, I could rant for a while. I’ll stop talking now.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. That makes it, that makes it so challenging. Oh, absolutely.

Mia: And everyone likes to have an opinion, doesn’t it? Sorry, but if you’re not plural, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t be speculating. Like there’s enough of us out here sharing our experiences on YouTube and everywhere, writing books, doing everything to show people our truth. And yet people like, like to sit and speculate and fake claim and tell us it’s not real. Like, well you go and live this and tell me it’s not real. Ooh, I get a bit, I get a bit angry about those horrible people. There’s a lot of them out there, but anyway.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. There’s just, yeah, there’s so much misconception and stereotypes and ignorance around DID and a lot of other, you know, neurodivergences and mental health conditions and, yeah.

Mia: There’s a, there’s a Facebook group that is just for mocking people with DID that’s got 40,000 people in it. I won’t say its name because I don’t want to give them some more traffic, but like, pretty much every day that, that knowledge upsets me and I wish I could just not know.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s why I think it’s so important for you to share your experiences. There are always going to be doubters and people who just like can’t have their minds opened, but for people to know what it’s really like, you know, it, it helps people. It helps people understand themselves and maybe understand some other people they have in their lives who, you know, may be having DID or similar conditions.

Mia: That’s the other thing, one to 3%, it’s as common as red hair. And we we do wonder if it’s probably higher than that, because we got to 37 with no idea. How many people live their whole lives? If you don’t have the information and the opportunity to recognize it, you’re not gonna, are you? You’re gonna just, you just keep living being confused, not understanding why you’re behaving like you’re behaving and, and everything else.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. And how many people have other diagnoses? Like you said, you went through life being told that you had anxiety and depression and that was it. Some people just, you know, never get the revelation.

Mia: It can look like schizophrenia.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Mia: The assumption is quite often if you’re hearing voices that DID would not be the first thing that people go to.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Mia: And if you are treating DID as if it’s schizophrenia or, or another psych, or psychosis or something, there is no healing happening because you’re just burying it!

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Mia: If you’re taking a drug that is preventing communication with your alters, like, yeah, well done. You’ve dealt with one aspect of it, but you’re just burying it for later, and it’s gonna bite you in the butt harder when it comes back, when we come back.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you so much for sharing on my podcast your experiences and for all the wonderful books you write about your experiences to help everybody. Like, how can people either, like, find your books or connect with you online on social media if they want to learn more?

Mia: Oh, thanks. Oh, well, it’s been amazing. Thank you for inviting us. Honestly, we’re absolutely made up. We love it. We’re really happy.

So we’ve got a website, DidWeWrite.co.uk, all one word. And then we’re on most social medias as “did we write” as well. I’m pretty active on Twitter at the moment. I do mostly my Instagram is just of my poetry and stuff. We also like, we want to help others share their stories. Like we said, we’ve got this blog that we are sharing stories from. And so, yeah, if anyone does want to share anything And we like, we, we like the idea of sharing art and stuff as well that other systems have created. So yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn Kiel: Awesome. Okay. Yeah.

Mia: Thanks, Carolyn.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. Thank you so much. I’m really grateful for you to come on my show. I’m so glad that you were excited to come on and that you said yes. And I’m glad that we connected on, on Twitter too.

Mia: It’s been great.

Carolyn Kiel: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help me spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend, give it a shout out on your social media, or write a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of my episodes and sign up for my free newsletter at beyond6seconds.net. Until next time.