I Want Friends, Not a Support Group

During college, I put myself in a situation where I didn’t have any offline friends and had no idea how to make new ones. Without being able to identify as a system openly, I felt like a cardboard cutout of a person, stripping away personality traits to give off the presentation of one, cohesive individual. When I asked my therapist for help making friends, she sent me to a support group for mentally ill people. When I clarified that my queerness mattered, she sent me to a support group for disabled queers.

Even when I wasn’t desperately clawing for something that would save me from my isolation, I still got told to go to support groups for problems that would not be as big as they were if I simply had friends. Binge drinking because there’s no one to spend time with when you’re crushingly depressed? Go to AA. Switching too easily in the wrong place, too focused on internal relationships because there are no external ones? Go to a DID support group. When you’re insane, every part of your life is medicalized. A lack of friendship and supportive family is seen as a lack of necessary care in order to be stable. This is technically true for everyone, and yet the same logic isn’t applied to a sane person who is lonely. Because I was seen as mentally ill, all the suggestions I was given for where to start were centered around treatment.

None of the support groups I went to were good places to make friends. You sit around in a circle for an hour while a few people talk about their problems and a few people stay quiet the whole time. The leaders and/or supervisors of these groups often have medical degrees to ensure that you discuss things in a manner that doesn’t destabilize others. The “support” exists solely within the group setting, not one-on-one with the people you meet there. If you do become friends with someone, the expectation is that it’s a friendship that revolves around the two of you recovering together. Friendships with friction because you’re dealing with the same exact problems at different rates get broken up by the group leaders.

The reason I needed offline friends more than ever was because my standing in the DID community on Tumblr was, to put it lightly, fucked. Prior to the public backlash, I had already lost all my system friends but two and was hanging on by a thread, hence the alcoholism. I was further devastated by the loss of my community, but even more than that, I felt powerless as I watched a narrative I’d been fighting for years take over with little pushback. When I first joined the community, I noticed a stark divide between systems who were fixated on psychiatry’s view of DID and systems who ascribed so much personhood to their alters that they thought fusion was inherently like death. I tried to bridge the gap as someone who was very into psychology research while also seeing my system as multiple people in one body. Around the time I lost my right to speak on the matter, a small group of systems started dominating the space with very aggressive anti-personhood rhetoric, frequently citing what they considered the most reliable resources for understanding systemhood: books written by singlet specialists, never the autobiographical stories of DID systems themselves.

When I met with the only DID therapist in my hometown that would take my insurance, she used the word “rape” during the intake appointment to intentionally trigger me. This is not uncommon with specialists; they want to see whether you actually have what you say you have, and the fastest way to find out is to make you switch on purpose. She seemed to think that the alter who came out was the one that was destabilized, but in reality, the word only upset me specifically and retreating just made my co-host front by default. After I came back, I explained to her that when a child alter fronted in a public place, they usually just went somewhere private to cool off and wait for an adult to front again. This therapist stated that she couldn’t do trauma work with me until I was stable enough to not be switching like that. Her recommendation? I needed to go to a PHP, get an entire team of medical professionals on my side, and attend a support group for people with dissociative disorders at least once a week. Not once did she ask me about what my home life was like, not once did she ask if I had any accepting friends, but even if she did know about how bad things were in that regard, the advice probably would’ve been the same. If a sane person is completely isolated, they need ways to make friends. If an insane person is completely isolated, they need to be made less insane so that they can make friends.

Thankfully, I didn’t take this therapist’s advice beyond attending a PHP. Instead, I made friends with a group of (mostly) singlets that were accepting of me and allowed me to be plural around them without trying to force better mental health practices down my throat. I got more stability from my non-judgmental chosen family than I ever would’ve gotten from medical professionals that see me as an other. In fact, if I were to have the things this therapist recommended on top of my affirming friendships, I think I’d still be pretty unstable and miserable today.

My system is not solely the result of trauma and my alters don’t play the protective role that DID specialists assert that they do, but because I continue to have multiple personalities with dissociation and amnesia as part of the mix, they will always see me first as someone with a disorder. Having every single part of my life medicalized down to my very identity itself made relating to others impossible. At times, it warped my perception of self to conform with what a medical provider thought was best for me, regardless of whether it made me feel genuinely happy or not. I was seen as unhealthy and separated from society for identifying with systemhood, but no psychiatric diagnosis can ever truly strip a person of their fundamental humanity. What brought me closer to my (mostly) singlet friends is knowing that we all have the same wants, needs, and right to autonomy. I got better because I did not have to stop being crazy in order to be treated like a human being.

Last week, I had to look at an archived version of the DID subreddit from around 2019-2020 for research purposes. Back then, most of the posts were systems venting their frustrations about singlets not understanding that they’re literally different people. I still believe that this is how most DID systems see themselves when there aren’t medical professionals breathing down their necks, telling them what recovery must look like. I only needed to know about the Reddit DID community during those specific years, but out of curiosity, I looked at the rules of the subreddit current day. The difference between then and now is staggering. What is supposed to be a community for people that are victims of the worst psychiatry has to offer parrots the rules you’d see on a handout from a research psychologist in a dissociative clinic. It’s really sad to see how much power increased scrutiny from specialists has over the lives of these people when they feel that their identity is intrinsically tied to the DID diagnosis. In pursuit of professional validation, online communities sacrifice their authenticity to become another support group.