u/CaramelIndividual537

So, back when I was in the process of getting diagnosed, I was informed it was very likely I had Prosopagnosia. I essentially cannot recognise people by their faces reliably, at all, even people like my family or friends I have known and seen frequently for many years.

The thing is, my lack of recognition is not fully linked to switching with my dissociative parts as “I” am still fully “me” and I am consciously aware of these people’s existences (unlike some of the less involved parts) and their significance in my life. I also retain all memory of these incidents after the fact, which kinda rules out the idea of this being a switch I haven’t noticed, due to my current amnesia barriers.

But their faces just cannot stick in my brain at all, and sometimes I literally will see them as a stranger, as if my brain cannot put two and two together as to who they are. Like, it causes serious issues at work, as I’m sure you can imagine. This also worsens with dissociation.

I was wondering if this was a common thing for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The literature on the comorbidity I can find on it is scarce to say the least.

Do you experience a degree of face blindness? How does it present for you and what do you do to manage it? Thanks :)

Good evening!

Myself and my alters are genuinely awful at being honest about anything in any medical setting.

For us, this comes from years of unspecialised or otherwise incompatible therapists who fumbled around us in a way that has inadvertently really hurt us in some way or another. And now, most of us are just kind of really sick of the idea of being vulnerable.

We are now seeing a therapist who is a specialist in complex dissociative disorders (a not-so-fun tidbit: our previous therapist claimed the same thing but silently removed this title from her online profile after a couple months of starting to see us. Ouch!!!) and we just cannot trust her at all despite her doing nothing wrong.

We have been seeing her since about August and we have not discussed anything deeper than… Work drama!

And then we lie about having a “great week” and do it so convincingly that she actually believes us, because we know what to say to make people believe we can actually remember what happened in the space between sessions, which often times is a bold-faced lie.

Not only this, but we are hyper-aware of her facial expressions and tone, and most of us seem to really seek her approval. She seems happy for us that we “had a good week,” so it gets harder for us to say we haven’t. Her eyebrows furrow just the slightest bit when she hears an insinuation we are not doing completely fantastically, out of concern, and suddenly we backpedal and top it off with exactly how we are going to fix the problem (lying) and how we’re actually prepared with the right tools to get through this by ourselves already. We like being her easy client. We like being someone she doesn’t have to do hard therapy work with.

And she has tried, she has honest-to-god tried to get into the details of our disorder and how it impacts us, but when we are in front of her, we deflect and we lie about being perfectly fine and we mask convincingly pretending to be just one alter every time we talk about our disorder, and our disorder is noted on our last referral to our psychiatrist as “well-managed” when we are absolutely not. This is so unbelievably frustrating because I’m aware of how unhelpful it is for all of us, but we cannot seem to stop.

Since we physically cannot stop deflecting when we are in front of her, what exactly should I do to get ourselves to even be slightly more vulnerable? Because I understand that this is just my traumatised brain trying to protect me, but I am still very frustrated in the way it’s trying to do that.

TLDR: I can’t stop lying to my medical team about our disorder because:
1. We don’t trust medical professionals.
2. We’re subconsciously seeking her approval.

Any help would be great, or stories if anyone has gone through anything similar would be just as great. Thank you!