hello you're watching Jamie from
Multiplicity&Me a channel dedicated
to ending the stigma of Dissociative Identity Disorder with authenticity
at the heart of what we do
if you guys don't know me or this is
your first time watching, i am a
protector and caretaker of
the system and i've been around a lot
more lately
as we've been particularly poorly within
ourselves. But despite
our struggles we still managedto go
into work every day at our full-time
job, we still manage of course to look
after our little baby girl, and basically we still, on the surface,
appear to be functioning.
And that is the magical thing about
DID, as per the theory of structural
dissociation the ANP
parts like myself allow us to continue
to live our life without
the feeling of the effect from our past,
because we simply don't carry those
memories, but recently as soon as our
work is done for the day
and baby's gone down to bed, it's like
our brain recognizes we're in a safe
place to
let go and essentially the floodgates
suddenly open.
an EP surfaces over the ANP
an emotional traumatic connection is
made, and the body therefore responds
it's a little bit like schrodinger's cat.
so with did
systems, you equally know that you have
trauma and equally do not
and that allows the functioning of the
anp parts
while the ep parts hold on to these
memories this
basically allows a lot of systems to be
very functional
and we're very blessed that we've worked
through, kind of step one in safety and
stabilization,
we're at that level, but now basically we
are haunted
by the ptsd symptoms included within DID
because of course DID is a trauma-based
disorder,
which means that included within it are
the ptsd symptoms.
it's also however a brilliant defense
mechanism, as the apparently normal part
function allows us to get on with our
lives without the effects of trauma.
it's pretty amazing!  Alters can hold both
ANP and EP sides and we believe that
Ed,
Jake and Jess have these alignments: they
are both anp
and ep parts, which means even on the
surface level, if they don't remember
the trauma, they still carry that trauma.
we also have fragmented parts
that aren't the focal point of our
channel, and we believe that these guys
are the ones that hold
a pure ep role - so they hold a lot of
trauma - and a lot of those memories,
by doing that, those memories then
don't come across to us.
this is how a lot of people may never
realize they have DID until maybe way
later in life
because these parts are so well locked
down
from that age we began to get panic
attacks and flashbacks, now
when these flashbacks happen, we don't
actually kind of remember what they're
about, but all we know is when they're
happening they're
absolutely bloody terrifying, and i say
that from a completely disconnected
point of view, because while i
empathize with Ed, Jake and Jess
i've never personally experienced that,
so i'm very very lucky that i've
been watching it-watching everyone go
through it, is horrendous. i'm now going
to show you an example of flashbacks and
panic attacks happening
um just because this is a very private
and personal
thing to disclose, we decided for the
meantime that our compromise
was not to show the video footage and
simply audio footage
but the point of all this is really that
we wanted to kind of demonstrate
that the idea isn't about the alters,
it is very much about the trauma that
made us in the first place. please be
aware the following clip may be
quite upsetting or triggering and it
does include flashbacks and panic
attacks.
Jess: Gaz?
help please
it's just another panic attack
Can you help?
Please *flashbacks begin*
Gaz: we've got this hey come on we got this
it's okay just breathe in the nose come
on, Jess: i was literally just trying to talk
i was trying to talk my feelings out
but it just went wrong
Gaz: I was just going to say, what happened?
Jess: I was just saying about how I was feeling and it just went wrong...
Jamie: these horrible things were affecting us daily, and for the first time in three
years, we are now back on medication in
order to manage these symptoms. Some of
these panic attacks
were not lasting us minutes but hours
sometimes heading into the night and
that was a pretty miserable way to end
most of our evenings. these flashbacks
and panic attacks would happen
and then in the aftermath we wouldn't
remember what we were seeing. in these
flashbacks our front brain
so to speak and our back brain were
purely disconnected about the event and about what was
going on. our body was reacting,
our frontal brain didn't know what the
heck was going on, and
couldn't then communicate to our back
brain that there is no threat and
everything's safe and everything's fine
so uh as you can imagine then our body
just
ran on this high adrenaline energy
of panic panic panic something bad is
happening or about to happen.
Jess: sorry i have no idea what i'm
remembering um
my voice sounds shaky i feel
i can't move like i don't know
what i'm remembering right now, just have
to take some Diazepam,
feeling really out of it i don't know
what's wrong i don't know what i'm
remembering so
this happens often when the body and
brain are disconnected like
it's disconnected so the body is
remembering something or the emotional
brain, the amygdala, is remembering something
but it's not
in the frontal lobe, so that means
there's a part or a piece of me
the emotional parts that are
remembering stuff, or there's something
going on so fast...
Jamie: so rewinding a little,
a couple of years ago we were doing our
postgraduate degree in cognitive
behavioral psychotherapy because we
wanted to help people
just like us who had been through the
same things we have, we were at the end of our second year and had our own clients
however then we were placed onto
a trauma course because we wanted
to specifically of course, work with
people who
have been through trauma to try and help.
so as a trainee psychotherapist we
figured that
if we can overcome this then we were
just fine
it meant to us, that our dissociation
would have pushed back our memory
solidly
and so long as there was no transference
we could continue our degree and our
placement and do our best to help other
people who've been through exactly the
same as we had
um however it didn't quite end up
working out that way...
so the very intense trauma survivor
course was held over a 10 week period,
every weekend as we were doing it, jess
felt just fine but
what we didn't realize is that
the damage was impacting us beneath the
surface, within this back brain, Ed was
going through these flashbacks every
evening
after we had attended this training, but
didn't let anyone know what was going on
that he was feeling impacted by
everything happening
in his words he wanted us to get through
this course
so he didn't feel broken
he felt that he could be strong enough
to get through it, which isn't a good way
to think
on the last day of our course jess did
her final session before working with
the trauma clients
- but then stopped. i couldn't rule out
transference and therefore we had to
stop
that is very important, that
self-awareness about being a
psychotherapist -
is that you're very aware of your own
transference and your own limitations as
to not affect your client
as disappointing as it was for jess, the
right thing to do for our mental health
and for the therapy of others was to
stop. Ed then had a fragment split
called Eli... and although we don't know
if Eli
is dormant or he has kind of fused with
Ed once more,
what we do know is that we now remember
more about our past
that perhaps again the whole point of
DID is to make sure that we don't
remember more about our past
and this is why we sought out specialist
therapy, to guide us through trauma
processing. it feels as though the trauma
is banging down the doors
ready to be heard, and it's kind of like
we needed somebody to come in and make
sure they were there to help us catch it
it was a necessary thing for us to do to
move from step one to step two in
recovery
because of this potential flooding.
We began this channel
wanting to shut down the notion that
people with mental health disorders
cannot be successful in life
and that you have to give up everything
now because this is suddenly the label
that you have, but you can have
good mental health or bad mental health
regardless of any diagnosed condition
and this can of course even change day
by day - we can have a disorder but be
mentally well or mentally unwell, we may
not even be diagnosed and be mentally
well or mentally unwell
and for us we're particularly lucky in
the fact that generally we're very high
functioning
you know, we have a great job, we're a
boss, we're a wife, we have a baby
and yet it doesn't take away the
disorder part of the disorder, because
every day
we're learning to kind of balance and
juggle, we've never really been brave
enough to demonstrate the darker side of
the idea so to speak
but we realize now more than ever that
society
understands more and more that people
like us
aren't monsters, but the abusers who made
us this way
are, we have to live a fractured life
through no fault of our own and we're
proud that we've overcome
so much and that's the thing - our life
doesn't stop there because trauma
happened to us that wasn't our fault, we
can still succeed
and be successful in life, the world is
very different from when we started our
initial youtube channel back in
2011. that's nearly 10 years ago we've
been doing the whole
'we don't look like a hollywood stigma'
kind of thing
and now i feel that we've kind of
achieved that the world is talking about
it, there's more openness about it,
there's
more understanding that DID is not what
it is in the films
and now i felt it was time for us to
start opening up a little bit more
about the reasons that this disorder
exists in the first place
it isn't a glamorous spectacle, it is
just life-  it is just life for us and it
is just
another ball to balance on top of
everything else and that
trauma- that unknown is a terrifying
necessity to explore
because without it we're worried that
one day our trauma will just flood the
gates open
and we won't be able to be functioning.
so with specialist therapy the idea is
to kind of trickle
in this memory one by one, piece by piece
and then we can kind of explore it and
process it
without it impacting our lives too much.
the bottom line is
i hope this demonstrates throughout the
lighter times that we
choose to put online, that the reasons
and
impacts for this condition should not be
forgotten
our suffering isn't always noticeable
because we don't feel comfortable to
share that,
that's quite an emotional and vulnerable
state to be in.
we really appreciate your understanding
however that people with did can still
live fruitful lives
despite the ptsd that may also be thrown
at us randomly and the triggers and the
flashbacks and the panic attacks...
it's a nightmare!... and those too, they can
happen too... and that
ultimately is another puzzle pieced
together - thank you so much everyone for
your support in helping us
end the stigma against this disorder- if
you are affected by any of those
issues that are coming up in terms of
ptsd symptoms
panic attacks, flashbacks or any kind of
anxiety with your mental health, please
make sure to visit a mental health
professional that can help you explore
those symptoms and give you treatment
options. so of course we really
appreciate that while we
laugh at the lighter times and our life
does not have to be doom and gloom with
this disorder
equally we have to respect and remember
the origins of where we all came from
because
all of that background makes us the
parts and the people that we
are today, because DID is a logical
disorder and
everything that makes us now is what
made us in our past.  okay thank you all so much
for watching you've been an absolute
pleasure
bye now
