late summer, 2023…writing to exorcize my experience watching the miniseries “the crowded room”.

it has been about the same amount of years that i have worked in forensics and was diagnosed with DID, around 1983. as a novice to both, i was sensitive and struggling to find my way…not knowing at the time what either would entail. for work, i was initially knocking on door of clients where childhood abuse was suspected. at home, i was journaling, reliving, negotiating, and meeting alters as they arose (last count 83). when asked, i would say that my work and my life story being parallel was a coincidence… no longer do i believe that. something knew where i belonged and as my career progressed, i found myself in jails, prisons, courts, maximum security hospitals working with people who have committed the same crimes i had suffered from years earlier. i was being given the opportunity to navigate my history through my profession. thinking back, without my system forming and revealing and cooperating, it would not have been possible to do the work at the intersection of psych and “criminal justice.” blessed with several alters who accompanied me/ the host/ the prominent part, we worked as a team of three. this was left undetected for my entire career. judges, lawyers, defendants, clients with psychiatric disorders, families, kids were in the company of three, seeing one. it has been 38 years or so, mostly retired, again my focus has turned inward.

thus i should not have been surprised by my difficulty in watching this miniseries. it was offensive. leaving me angry and wondering why we are at a place yet again of fictionalizing, exaggerating, and using DID as a commodity. the reality is mysterious and brilliant enough without the need to twist, meld, confuse and alarm the audience. the struggle is real. the reality causing the struggle is typically horrifying. just ask, consult and then honor those of us who have been forced to hide, then perhaps choose hiding so that we aren’t stigmatized and ostracized for an adaptive, artistic method to survive an early hell.

in my opinion, tom hollands acting was good, but not as a portrayal of someone with DID. perhaps the script failed him. there was no evidence in his acting that switching/shifting/regressions/ triggers were taking place, although there was opportunity for this throughout the series. he found himself in unbearable situations that would likely have caused shifting, none evident in his facial expressions, behaviors, thought process, responses…only the arrival of what appear to be other characters in the movie.

if one wants to understand the experience of having DID, one needs to be privy to the internal process. it would have served the viewers well had context been given, had internal processing been exposed, had internal dialogue been shown. instead, the system is exhibited as characters in his life, outside of himself. they seem random and without purpose, until it is uncovered at its end. co-consciousness is not addressed as it manifests in those diagnosed with DID. instead it is shown as characters talking to each other about the host. criminal responsibility, a legal term, could have been more thoroughly explained which would have led to the data indicating that the “insanity plea” is typically not used and not successful when an arrested person is diagnosed with DID. furthermore, if found Not Criminally Responsible, you are first found guilty.

my opinion….

response to a new york times article 7/24

i don’t know what it is about stories of suffering and the route to find my way back to before or beyond to after.

it feels physiological, as if i know, partly from my own experience, partly in camaraderie.

the before and after as reference points do not align with my experience. i had no before, only during… and the after is still going on, sometimes with the shade of the shadow lightening where the story, the reality, the truth recedes.

i didn’t know that was possible. i didn’t know that could be a desire. my spoken perspective was “this is the hand i was dealt, being a victim.”

that, i now understand, not only allowed me to remain a victim, but allowed me to continue to use the “defenses”, the protections that developed when i needed them, still thinking i need them.

it was a replica of events that intersected, combined, flashed me back to and wanting me to control for a different outcome this time, in my 50’s.

instead i crumbled as i imagine i stayed in my youngest tears, in an exaggerated terror, living as if i was three, in the mind of a woman who analyzes for a living…this time i could not find my way out even with my intellectual capacities, and my incredible skills of ruminating to lead me beyond the torment.

and this time, i was conscious of the trap, as an adult in an adult body and an adult world.

i wonder now whether the trauma of early life, because it was early, was less terrifying.

then i recognize the answer as “it was different”, not easier, which calls me back to “duh”, as i gently talk to myself. that earliest time resulted in dissociative identity disorder which is the direct result of prolonged hellishness … so there is no doubting there.