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You know what has done the most damage to the image of dissociative identity disorder society-wide – the reason why it’s taught as a “controversy” and psychologists have a free pass to say they think it “doesn’t exist”?
Not people claiming to be multiple without trauma, or people refusing the labels of DID or OSDD-1. No, it was people claiming that having X experience means you must have experienced trauma, people with no memories of trauma being told “Well, they’re just repressed; you haven’t recovered them yet. But once you do, true recovery can occur!”
See, the thing that people seem to forget is, the memory wars was a very grassroots movement. It wasn’t just doctors Authoritatively declaring their patients were abused multiples, though that of course happened. It was self-help books with checklists claiming every possible sign of distress under the sun was a symptom of CSA and/or SRA. It was support groups wherein one by one people were recovering memories of CSA, and so if you wanted to fit in and have the discussion still be relevant to you, well, there had to be some reason for your pain, right? It was word-of-mouth – peers telling others “Hey, you might have repressed memories of trauma. No? Sounds like more repression to me.” until you had to believe them.
So when you tell someone that they’ve experienced trauma but don’t remember it – when the options you give to people are either “Your experiences (of multiplicity) are invalid” or “Your memories are invalid” – realize that this is a very well-trodden road, and we already know where it leads.
– Thomas
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