r/OSDD

what plural apps are you guys using?

i feel like since the death of simplyplural, everyone has been so spread out in different apps. i wanted to know what apps you guys have been using, as i've been testing a few and i have my gripes with each of them.

parallax is nice, but barebones. pluralspace is perfect, but it's a web app. open plural is also a web app. plurallog and plural star are offline (i have a partner system and we like to use the friends feature to see who's fronting, i also like to add my system friends). what apps are you guys using? if you know any ones similar enough to simplyplural with an online friend feature, please let me know!

thanks!

- zai ⚰️

u/mykolahohol — 14 hours ago

Can the core change to fictive?

Hi im john and for my whole life I've been the one identifying as the body. Id see myself as the body. But up until early April this year I've felt diffrent and started to heavily fiction kin john egbert. But I go by his name and i love when people see me as him. But it dosent feel like fictionkining anymore. It feels like i am him. Like a fictive. I dont know its confusing. Like I dont know and id like some help on this. I've had source memories and I miss dave alot. And I used to see myself as body in headspace but now I see myself as John.

u/Key-Tart-6051 — 16 hours ago

▲ 45 r/OSDD

How many alters does your system have? (Including yourself)

There are a multitude of different systems and how they look! Everyone's system looks different so keep that in mind, it may change from day to day!

u/anon123466235 — 1 day ago

Ranting...

So rant....

So ive been here and in ossd for sometimes while getting my diagnosis. To clarify im not diagnosed with D.I D/OSDD I just started coming to these spaces because my therapist suspects I have something along the lines of it cause of my symtoms.

So you dint have to read this post and these are just my opinions so I already know this will be taken down and that's fine.

Ive come here to read and post sometimes on bith communities to see if anyone relates to the symtoms and im 30 now and been having these all my life and just now noticing it since 2 years ago almost. But Ive noticed people who comments or post on these communities have such a way with their imagination and im not saying you cant do these things im just saying majority of the people on here I cant relate too, it almost feels like a Role playing game with some of these post or Larping and not D.I.D or OSDD. When I hear alters I feel ashamed because reading these post on here make alters feel like friends or family when to me it feels less than that and more just me spit into different parts and nothing more. When I do see people who make senes to me they get down voted for no reason and that what confuses me...do I have to be so inverted with my own symtoms to get people to see my own struggles or relate to them even. I feel like so different with "this" that it feels like im there odd one out along with people I tend to relate to. The terms and labeling are also out of control in my eyes, its like people make it their whole personality and say things like "singlets" and other terms which I think it very weird to say to someone just because you have these parts of yourself. Im scared of my parts coming out because I want to live a decent and normal life and I praise anyone who doesn't make this their whole personality and take it to very extreme imaginative lengths that they can show themselves and get better. I just dont see whats so special about being stuck in your head at times, that scares me and I cant control it and when I see people who says they love not being here in the actual real world that also scares me because I know its hard to move on from these traumatic memories or even if you cant remember and have no will power on switching which im open about that as well but I also praise the people who keeps living their lives despite it and not this role playing, larping thing that feels so unreal....

u/Mad-dog107 — 1 day ago

▲ 17 r/OSDD

Question for people who experience non-possessive switching

We’re currently trying to figure out whether we experience non-possessive switches or possessive switches, or a combination of the two.

I was wondering whether any other systems could describe how non-possessive switches feel for you, because most of the OSDD/DID rep I see only has possessive switching so it’s hard to tell if I experience non-possessive switches or not!

u/Salty_Amphibian991 — 1 day ago

How did you figure out your role in your system?

Do you just like do a meeting and then be like okay yeah you do this and that and you do this and that. You deal the parents. You come out when the room is too big because its a trigger. Boom protector and ep.

How do alters even decide to change that? Do you just talk to them? Or did you come out knowing what you were gonna do?

Adding on to that, for the alters that hve a caretalking role and or was formed to be a sort of caring guide. Did you just burst out of the metaphorical did/osdd womb knowing that hey you were gonna do that role?

Any stories of how you figured that out would be great!

u/anon123466235 — 1 day ago

Could severe gender dysphoria alone cause OSDD?

As a kid, I always dissociated throughout school (masking due to GD + suspected ND?), to the point that, coming home, whenever someone asked me how my day had been, the memories of that whole day felt lost or deleted – it felt like the mask/persona that got me through the day was the part of me that retained those memories, the next day. this persona only really comes now out when I talk to other people, during which I feel like i take a bit of a "backseat" or autopilot

alone though, I struggle to feel like a cohesive self. Because of severe GD causing depersonalisation, my body feels like an apartment building, not "me" but the thing that holds the parts of my consciousness together. My whole life I have dissociated at least somewhat because of dysphoria, I dont feel connected to almost any of my memories and most feel as if they belong to another person. i cant say i have distinct alters, but different "selves" that come out when the whole feels threatened, which causes a gigantic mood swing

The issue is that i have nowhere near the level of trauma that would cause OSDD, no major trauma, though probably some CEN due to.... well, severe gender dysphoria leading to my emotional needs not really being recognised or met. Gender dysphoria was the worst thing to ever happen to me and destroyed my life and sense of self, Im not sure to the point of this severe dissociation, but it kind of feels like it

if anyones got experiences like this, I'd like to hear it

u/TumbleweedOk4146 — 1 day ago

since some apps are down /not serious post

honestly I'm writing this with an empty head and no thoughts at all, i had a long day but oh well i got curious now i thought I'd ask.

so i noticed some apps like simply plural and other things (by 'other things' i mean other system related apps. i think i once read that therapists were using them to track stuff but i don't process thoughts well rn so it might not make sense i have a bad memory anyway) are down now. i wasn't really using them because it always felt so forced. my question is more about your daily life. like were you using those apps if so how are you managing without them now and if you weren't using them, why not?

u/one_nocturnal — 1 day ago

▲ 95 r/OSDD+1 crossposts

Negative symptoms of dissociation

Most conversations in DID/OSDD spaces tend to focus on things like parts communication, internal meetings and system mapping, managing switches, dealing with fight and flight parts, hypervigilance, intrusions, flashbacks, and alters with names and ages and roles. That can be genuinely useful for people dealing with those, I don't want to take anything away from it.

But it only covers one half of what structural dissociation actually looks like, and I suspect a fair number of people are living in the other half without ever having come across a word for it.

A little bit of history

The definitions are straightforward enough. Positive symptoms are experiences that are present when they shouldn't be, so voices, intrusive images, flashbacks, emotions and impulses that don't feel like yours, noticeable switching, unexplained pain. Negative symptoms are functions that are missing when they should be present, so amnesia, emotional numbing, loss of skills or knowledge, anaesthesia, disconnection from the body, and blankness.

The distinction between positive and negative symptoms is often assumed to be borrowed from schizophrenia, but Pierre Janet was applying it to dissociation more than a century ago. His terms were mental accidents for the things that intrude and mental stigmata for the things that go missing, and his 1901 book was titled The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental Accidents.

The Theory of Structural Dissociation inherited the distinction more or less directly, and van der Hart, Nijenhuis and Steele cross it with a second axis, psychoform for the mind and somatoform for the body, which produces four categories:

Positive + psychoform:
Voices, intrusive thoughts, emotions that don't feel like yours, switching

Positive + somatoform:
Pain, tremors, tics, non-epileptic seizures

Negative + psychoform:
Amnesia, emotional numbness, loss of knowledge or skills

Negative + somatoform:
Numbness, anaesthesia, paralysis, no felt sense of the body

The interesting variation is in the ratio between these rather than in whether a given box is empty.

Why one half of this is loud and the other one is silent

There's a structural reason the online conversation is focused on positive symptoms, and it isn't that the negative symptoms are more rare.

A positive symptom tends to announce itself. If you hear a voice that doesn't feel like yours, or you lose four hours and find evidence that you did things you have no memory of doing, you know that something is happening even if you have no idea what. That experience of something being wrong is usually what sends people looking for explanations in the first place, which is why the communities fill up with that content.

Negative symptoms don't generate that experience, because the faculty that would register the absence is generally part of what's absent. Van der Hart and colleagues describe this in The Haunted Self, where they note that the part running daily life "usually has extensive autobiographical narrative memory" and can often "recall as much of the traumatizing event" as any other part, while lacking "the emotional and physical feelings that belong to the memory, and the sense that it happened to them personally."

What that produces in practice is someone who can give a detailed and coherent account of what happened to them without any accompanying sense that it happened to them, and from the inside that generally registers as being calm and level-headed about the past rather than as a symptom of anything.

Richard Chefetz makes a related point in Intensive Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociation, where he observes that "dissociative experience is mostly subtle to an outside observer," and that many of the dissociative adults he works with have "no gross trauma history, their interpersonal trauma is hidden, sometimes via painful neglect."

As someone whose system is dominated by negative symptoms, I would add that my system actively dislikes discussing itself, so every time I do, there is a lot of resistance to overcome. Very few parts of my system actively push for self-exposure, and they tend to lose most internal battles, while several focus heavily on staying invisible. I think something along these lines is common for systems with mainly negative symptoms, which probably contributes to us being less visible in these spaces and everywhere else.

Screening tools come with their own challenges

This isn't purely a problem of self-awareness, because the instruments have gaps of their own.

The DES-II is the standard dissociation screener, and it does cover depersonalisation, derealisation and amnesia reasonably well. What it doesn't cover is the somatoform side. As van der Hart and Steele put it in Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders, the DES "does not address significant pathological dissociation that we associate with structural dissociation such as somatoform symptoms and loss of control of emotions and behavior."

That's part of why Nijenhuis built the SDQ-20, which was assembled from a pool of 75 clinically observed sensorimotor dissociative symptoms that showed up when dissociative parts were reactivated and that had no medical explanation. It asks about physical symptoms directly and without framing them as trauma symptoms.

I'd add one thing of my own here, which isn't from the literature. Screening items tend to ask how often something happens to you, and that framing assumes a baseline to deviate from. If emotional flatness or unreality has been your constant condition since before you can remember, there is no "sometimes" to report, and you may answer honestly in a way that undercounts you. That's my inference rather than a documented finding, but I know I am not alone in this.

What a negative-dominant presentation typically looks like

If you're trying to work out whether any of this applies to you, it tends to involve hypoarousal as the baseline rather than hyperarousal, so instead of persistent activation with occasional numb patches you get persistent numbness with occasional bursts of activation, which typically show up when something has loosened rather than when something has gone wrong.

For some of us, there are no inner voices, no internal visuals, and sometimes no inner monologue at all. Personally, it doesn't register as unusual because it's the only inside I am aware of ever having had. Autobiographical memory is frequently hazy or largely missing, particularly for early childhood, sometimes with a surprisingly late floor for first memories. Emotional flatness is usually there but rarely regarded as a symptom, since it isn't an event that happens so much as a background condition that has always been there. Many of us in this position also report not knowing what we want or feel or need, which is a different problem from being overwhelmed by wanting and feeling and needing.

Kathy Steele and colleagues describe the clinical version in Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation, warning that "some patients are so numb and depersonalized that they can recount trauma without emotion," and that this "does not indicate the presence of integration and regulation, but rather dissociation and hypoarousal." Being articulate about your own history is compatible with having processed almost none of it, which is good to know if you've been praised for your insight in therapy while nothing much has shifted.

Where this probably comes from

I've written before about the Developmental Salience Model of Threat, and this connects to it fairly directly. The prospective longitudinal work from Karlen Lyons-Ruth's group found that dissociation in young adulthood was significantly predicted by observed lack of parental responsiveness in infancy, while hostile-intrusive interaction "did not account for significant variance". Of the trauma types measured, only childhood verbal abuse added to the prediction (Dutra et al., 2009).

A couple of caveats

The positive/negative split is descriptive rather than causal, and as far as I can tell nobody currently knows what determines which pole a given person ends up at. Severity doesn't seem to explain it, since people with appalling histories land on both sides. My own guess involves the balance of deprivation against threat and how early it all started, but that is an educated guess.

Also, hardly anyone is purely one or the other, and these things can fluctuate over time. It is more about which side dominates.

The usual disclaimers apply more than usual here, because structural dissociation is one of the few things that genuinely cannot be self-diagnosed. The part of you doing the assessing is working from inside the boundary it would need to see past. I write these things so you have a chance of recognising a pattern well enough to take it to someone qualified for an actual assessment.

Why any of this matters

The standard route into recognising structural dissociation runs almost entirely through positive symptoms, so if you don't have many of them you can spend a very long time in mental health services accumulating diagnoses that nearly fit. Depression, because you're flat. Avoidant personality, because you withdraw. Treatment-resistant something, because the treatments keep not working. The underlying structure stays unnamed throughout, and the negative symptoms get read as your personality rather than as anything requiring attention.

If you've read the DID and OSDD material and concluded that it obviously isn't you because you have none of that, you may well be right – or you may be at the quiet end of the same thing.

u/FlightOfTheDiscords — 2 days ago

▲ 5 r/OSDD+1 crossposts

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u/Sea_Dust_6999 — 2 days ago

▲ 6 r/OSDD+1 crossposts

OSDD

I am suspicious about having OSDD for some time. But I am frustrated because I think we still miss sources about this disorder.
I dont know where it is the difference between OSDD and cPTSD.
I feel like I dont have too strict bariers between my parts so its more difficult to recognise the dissociative patterns, parts etc.

Please, do you have something helpful?

u/mai_asaurus — 2 days ago

▲ 25 r/OSDD

Buried panic attack

Sometimes I forget that having osdd means my body can be experiencing two very different things at once. I have this new job that is not going well because my mental health is really bad and I’m underperforming for the first time in my life. I overheard my boss saying that someone was getting fired today and I’ve been expecting it so immediately I’m like oh that’s me.

Instantly I go into “well that’s life, I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do” mode which i usually due in crisis. But like five minutes later I had a client meeting and I was totally normal throughout the whole thing. Except at one point I looked down and I’m violently shaking and I notice my chest hurts and my heart is absolutely pounding in my chest. I didn’t feel anxious but I was exhibiting all the physical symptoms of a panic attack.

Later I learned it wasn’t me that got fired (yet but I could have sworn that my boss said “she” when talking about the person getting fired and the one who got fired was a man, so it’s probably still imminent). And like 30 minutes later I felt like I had been hit by a bus like I would when I have full panic attacks and flashbacks. Crazy stuff, not a fan.

u/beautifulprincess666 — 2 days ago

▲ 10 r/OSDD

Split frequency?

I seem to split EXTREMELY frequently. I would say the majority of our system is fragments with very little distinguishable personality and most hold very specific emotions or things. Our head count is ridiculously high.

However, I have been going through one of the worst periods of my life throughout the past two years as well. (Psychosis, abuse, family and medical issues, addiction, ED, etc). Everything has been back to back and constant and I have had no breaks. I was unsure if this kind of thing would wear down my split tolerance to the level it is or if that wasn’t a thing that happened? Am I faking? I have been extremely worried and guilty feeling about this, even though I’m sure I’m not consciously faking any sort of disorder.

I am very disassociated most of the time and I often do not notice said fragments. I think they end up fusing or going dormant most of the time.

u/Hot-Bug-9933 — 2 days ago

I don't even understand how my alters work

I just find myself randomly ending up in places and situations sometimes and I don't understand how I got there... I don't understand my alters and I don't understand how some people understand theirs so well like I don't even know which alter of mine is talking rn and I know I'm going to forget this conversation and post soon when another one takes over

u/Possible-Elk-919 — 3 days ago

Does anyone know if theres a reason behind afab w/ male heavy alters and vice versa?

Is there a certain reason behind it or scientific studies or smth? As a afab fictive heavy she w/ male heavy fictives I really wonder 🤔

- Janus (writing for Blitzo our body owner)

u/Reasonable-Cow-7258 — 3 days ago

▲ 53 r/OSDD

What even is switching?

Certain you've seen this question a million times, but let's make it a million and one.

Investigating OSDD alongside my therapist. Process involves tracking dissociative episodes and switching. Dissociation is easy to notice when I'm paying attention. Switching, not so much.

I can't figure it out. I always assumed I (the host or whatever) would feel myself move out of the front seat and into another, either passenger or back or hell even trunk. Like, my perspective and consciousness would be moved in the same way my perspective moves when I stop being the one driving.

But I'm having these moments, like right now, where I'm questioning a switch without any movement in the vehicle. I haven't gotten out of the driver's seat, I've just changed how I'm holding the wheel and how aggressively I'm driving and suddenly gotten road rage. And maybe now I hate the snacks that I brought for the trip or the music playing on the radio. But I'm still the one driving, I guess. I haven't changed seats.

I have no clue what that is. I guess I can wait til my next session to ask my therapist if I should count it, but tbh I've been disregarding these episodes as me being in a "weird mood".

I guess I'm just confused. Alters appearing is always described as switching with someone else, but this feels more like morphing into someone else.

Idk

u/mar_im_o — 3 days ago

Headspace gone quiet

Why am i not switching and why did everyone go away, i wasnt supposed to front, they suppressed me and everything was fine but then i came back and they all disappeared. Its like a ghost town in there, theres only 2 alters in there now, why? We are very stressed, we have recently got hurt in ways i cant say, and i am trying to recover, we are going through a tough time, if thats helpful at all

u/Neto-workio505 — 3 days ago

what do you do about prosecutors?

recently discovered system here, host talking.

how do you guys feel about them? how do you "deal" with them? i don't have any gatekeeper in my system, so i feel like they kind or just run wild. which wouldn't be a problem but they're really mean to the people around me, even if they mostly keep it to themselves, and it puts me in difficult situations. some of them are self destructive, so they front to do stupid things, and it makes me afraid that we are a danger for the people around us. deep down they're not bad people, i think they just need a lot of love, but im just not sure how to go about them...

i do not have any (professional) support system, just my friends, so i can't help them heal through therapy. im really attached to them but they don't like to listen to me a lot. they push me around a lot. (also they're not an introject of a past abuser or anything like that, from what i know???)

u/yumidorie — 3 days ago

▲ 10 r/OSDD

I’m trapped in this diagnosis

I‘m so unbelievably certain that I don’t have DID. I can see all the symptoms and I can even see denial itself as a symptom but it doesn’t change that I 100% believe I don’t have it.

I got diagnosed twice. I sought a professional assessment by a specialist after being diagnosed by a general psychologist. I guess I have an overt presentation and I was immediately told I obviously have it after another alter walked into therapy one day.

There seems to be no way out of this. I asked my therapist multiple times to find a different diagnosis because it cannot be DID. But then I get told I’m the denial alter and it’s normal for me to feel this way but I’m just trapped. I’m trapped in this diagnosis believing I’m a liar and insane.

I’m not sure why I can’t believe it’s DID. I don’t know what to do. Any advice is appreciated.

u/Slow_Blackberry_1291 — 4 days ago

How do your alters communicate?

My therapist and I are in the early stages of evaluating me for OSDD. I get this feeling a lot where I feel my mental state kind of "shift", some things feel kinda blurry, and I kinda feel like Im in the "back seat" but still controlling things. I do have some amnesia problems, but I feel like I always have one continuous stream of consciousness.

I've heard of people "asking around" in their head to their alters, but I don't seem to get a dialogue from them. What I've been doing so far is trying to recognize and take note whenever I feel my mind "shift". I belive there is me (the host? Or full stream of consciousness) and 5 others. The past couple times that Ive "shifted" I just kinda felt a name pop into my head each time, and if I tried to change the name that I was thinking of, I'd feel some kind of "no" or "correction". But, there's never any sort of monologue or dialogue between me and whoever might be there, just kinda general feelings.

The most common shift is whenever Im doing a boring/tedious task or something where I have to be confident. My thoughts is that they're some sort of protector/my emotional rock. I start to feel more masc and confident whenever they're around (in charge?, steering?). They seem to be the one who does things that Im too borded to do (usually stuff at work) or takes care of things when Im emotionally vulnerable (ex standing up to someone). The name Sam felt correct for them.

I've noticed that when "Sam" is present, I usually want a soda, energy drink, or snack. Today, I was at work and I "felt" that Sam was present and then I felt that I wanted cigarettes. Which is really weird cause I have never smoked before. My reasoning is that usually these wants are "Sam" asking for something in return for taking care of stuff for me.

I know this post probably seems kind of erratic. Usually, people make it sound like their alters are having a full verbal conversation. I can't seem to get any of mine to "talk" to me, and I don't wanna force them to either (I wouldn't be able to tell if its really an alter or me purposely coming up with a conversation). What's it usually like for you guys when your alters communicate with you and what do you guys think I should to to try and communicate with mine?

u/Electronicoranges — 3 days ago