Hello everybody, welcome back to DissociaDID.
We are a channel dedicated to educating people
about Dissociative Identity Disorder
and trying to diminish the stigmas that surround it.
I've been running this channel for a year now and something thats come up regularly is people seeming
to be quite confused about how aging works inside a system.
If you don't know about DID much yet, a system is
the name for the collective group of all the alters
inside one body. We get a lot of people asking
do alters age? Are they stuck at one age?
Can alters grow older with the body? How come some alters are
older than the actual body age? How does that work?
What about littles? Do littles age? The short answer is
yes and no.
It's different for every system not all
alters are capable of aging. Some are. Others are
trapped at a specific time period
or a specific age that may be
representative to them of a significant
event or emotion. This is going to be a Debunking DID
episode, which means you'll be able to find all of the
links to the research, studies, medical
journals, everything you need will be in the description box
below. So if you would like to go off and do your own research, we have to
encourage that, and you should be able to find
everything that we've mentioned in the description box
so don't forget to check that out at the end of the video. So first of all, what is
an alter? In 1998, Watkins and Watkins
identified alters in DID as being their  'own
identities' involving a center of initiative and
experience. They have characteristic representation
which may be different from how the body
is perceived to be. They have their own
autobiographical memory and can distinguish their actions and
their feelings and their emotions from that of the host,
the person who is in control of the body most often this means
that alters have a sense of ownership over their own actions,
thoughts and abilities, and a
disconnect form the actions, thoughts, and responsibilities
of those or other alters or the host in the body. So
alters can have their own skill set, they can
learn things on their own that won't be
accessible to other alters because those parts of the brain
dont connect properly. There's sort of a wall up
between them. This means that information can't really be shared
between alters unless they want it to be, or  it accidentally
leaks.
But alters can have different reactions to medication,
they have different preferences in food, different sex,
different sexualities, different gender, all that kind of stuff.
Alters are very much their own person. So what
about when it comes to age? Alters who are younger than the body especially
may feel like they're frozen in a certain point of time
or a certain age which could be
representative of a time where they experienced
trauma that caused them to be created, because DID
is a trauma related disorder. It's only caused
by trauma in childhood, repeated
trauma. Some alters will find it very difficult to accept
they're not in the time period they believe themselves to be in
and can be stuck in a sort of eternal flashback
where they re-live this traumatic experience  over and over
again. So some alters stay
in that moment in time and identify as the age
the body was when that experience happened and
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
