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Dealing With Alters
How to handle alters day to day
Having alters is a hallmark of living with dissociative identity disorder diagnosis. However, there seems to be a massive lack of understanding regarding the roles that alters play. There also seems to be a lack of understanding that you can form new ones throughout your life.
That’s what this article is about: what to expect and how to handle the formation of new alters.
What are Alters?
Alters (alternate personalities) are parts of yourself that have not coalesced as one complete persona. This does not mean that you are strange, as all people have alters; it is just that amnesic barriers separate your memories and behaviors while singletons do not.
You have alters because, at some time in your childhood, you faced repeated situations where you did not have control and felt trapped. Such emotions are usually a response to severe abuse like sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect.
Alters form in response to the abuse, often remaining at the age they were when it occurred. For instance, I was brutally abused at the age of three, and I have an alter who is three and holds the memories with their corresponding emotions for me.
Forming alters was the only ingenious method we had to hide from what was…
