I told my husband that someone else was living in my body – he agreed

Like many people, I spent most of 2020 on the sofa, isolating during the pandemic. And that October, I found Isabel.

Isabel is one of my other selves. 

I became aware of someone else living within my head and body, and Isabel brought with her memories of things that had previously happened in my life. I assumed Isabel was my inner child. 

Now that I knew she was there, I worked hard to understand how to communicate with her. I found that counting from one to 10 could be used to bring her closer, and together, we found writing to be the easiest way for us to commune.

We wrote to each other and started to process various traumas that had happened from childhood, through to our thirties. 

That December, I confided to our mum and husband, Ben, that I’d found an angry teenager in my head who took control when I’d been drinking. 

Understandably, they were both shocked – however, Ben’s reaction surprised me. ‘That makes sense,’ he said, adding that I did act like a teenager when I was drunk.

At this stage, neither Isabel nor I knew about dissociative identity disorder (or DID, previously known as multiple personality disorder) and I had no idea of what was to come. 

I began life as Amber, in 1982, and for nearly four decades I thought I was living my life. I had always had rocky mental health and throughout my teens and early adult life suffered from severe depressive episodes, anxiety, and debilitating breakdowns that meant I was on and off antidepressants.

It was only after another identity, Mia, and others appeared after Isabel that we learned about DID.

I was speaking to a friend about all these inner children I was working with, and she quickly said: ‘That’s not inner children, that’s DID’ – before sending us a YouTube video about it.

The currently accepted theory of DID is that, when we are young, we have different personality states, which unify between the ages of six and nine. If trauma occurs, we can develop amnesia and dissociation between these identities, and we can live separately, but together, for many years. 

This is what happened to me – or to us, as we now refer to ourselves. We know that we have many other selves (also known as ‘alters’, ‘parts’, or ‘identities’, though we prefer ‘selves’ or ‘people’) sharing this life. 

DID is a coping mechanism. It allowed me, Amber, to live a (relatively) normal life, unaffected by the traumas that happened during our childhood. 

I’ve since realised that many of my memories feel more like knowledge – I might recall something that has happened but it appears in my mind as fact, often without all the information and without any emotional attachment to the memories. 

Once we’d learned about DID, we assumed Maya was our trauma holder. 

Maya fragmented and split off from Mia a few days after she first presented – suddenly, there were two Mias, but where Mia was bubbly, fun and ambitious, Maya was quiet, shy, and anxious. 

Maya holds trauma, but she’s not the main trauma holder. It was several months before Berlou made herself known, bringing a trauma back into our consciousness. 

The first time we met Berlou, Mia had been fronting, and suddenly started crying: ‘I’m not Mia, my name is Amber, Amber Louise’. Isabel and Maya comforted her and took her back inside, and the next day, Mia was back, confident that she was Mia. We knew then that there was someone else inside, who was really hurting.

It was another month or so until we heard from Berlou again. This time when I heard her crying, we got her out and comforted her, explaining that we have DID, and why things are so confusing. 

We knew we needed specialist therapy. Many other selves presented during 2021, bringing with them their own trauma memories – injuries, illnesses, grief, abandonment, and emotional pains all cried their way out from deep inside our body and mind. 

We went to our GP and told them we needed help. This was the start of an 18-month journey to diagnosis, which involved several waiting lists, many phone calls, and a misdiagnosis by a psychiatrist who was insistent that DID was ‘too rare’ for us to have.

After another, difficult, assessment, we were finally diagnosed with DID in August 2022.

Receiving the diagnosis was a huge relief. It changed nothing about our experiences, but it gave us the validation we wanted and allowed us to access the help that we needed. 

However, we learned the hard way that DID treatment is incredibly hard to access, and there are only a handful of places in the UK that specialise in complex trauma.

We managed to secure funding for specialist psychotherapy, and applied for therapy through The Maudsley Centre, but then discovered the waiting list was two years long. 

Fortunately, after Mia vented about this on X, she was told that the Complex Trauma and Dissociation Clinic (CTAD) in Cheshire was taking NHS clients.

They accepted us in December 2023, and we started seeing a therapist online. 

It’s been three years of fighting, but we got through it, and have support for at least another 18 months. We’ve been lucky to get here and hope this will be enough to stabilise us, but many people with DID have very long-term, even life-long, therapy. 

Truthfully, we aren’t sure what we’ll do when our therapy ends.

Our mum learned all about DID as we did and is our biggest support. My husband struggled, but he too has learned as we have and is understanding and caring. 

As a system, we have had to learn how to process trauma and have found healing in art, music, yoga, and play. 

Writing was the best tool we found though. Mia insisted everyone document what was happening, writing hundreds of thousands of words and thousands of poems, much of which got sorted and curated into her book, The Revelation. She found that sharing our words was empowering, and finding that they can help others has given us meaning and motivation.

Berlou’s trauma has been the hardest to manage. Because we were so young, it’s not something we have tangible memories of and Berlou hid, undiscovered with that pain, for nearly four decades.

Mia went to the police about it, and it took three months before the CPS said they would be taking no further action. While it wasn’t the outcome we hoped for, there was a lot of healing in this process – if we hadn’t, it would still be hanging over us today. 

Since we’ve found each other, life has been incredibly difficult. It is exhausting to live like this. We’ve had several ‘splits’ (new alters forming), and a trigger can be debilitating at any time. DID is rarely known about even within the medical community, often misunderstood, and stigma-fuelling media representations, such as the 2016 film Split, don’t help.

I managed to keep working as a massage therapist on and off through 2021 and 2022, but ultimately had to stop – it became too hard to continue, and Mia and Berlou wanted to focus on writing and helping others. Last year, we were finally awarded PIP, which we won after two appeals and a tribunal. 

Today, things are still hard. We rarely leave the house, other than to shop and walk our dog. I don’t know how many selves we have. We are incredibly complex, we had hundreds of fragments – pieces of little girls stuck in time – who we had to wake and heal. 

This year, we’ve focused on us and since starting therapy we’re beginning to feel a little more stable. Our selves are trying hard to find our place in this world, while hopefully helping others by sharing our experiences.

Many of us live elsewhere, somewhere in this head, but it is Mia and Berlou who are mostly living our life now. They’re determined to use our experiences to help others, and I have supported that as best I can – they are as entitled to live and direct our life as much as I – Amber – am.

During the four years since I found Isabel, our selves have self-published our system reveal story, four books of poetry, a book for littles (child selves) and we manage our website, where we share their own writing as well as using it as a platform for other DID systems to share their experiences.

Mia and Berlou have also recently connected with a new charity, The Dissociative Disorders Alliance, and are excited to be getting involved as a volunteer with them. 

I, Amber, am incredibly proud of everything Mia and Berlou have achieved.

Despite the many hardships we face living with DID, we’re still learning to live as us, and while we hope it becomes easier, we doubt life will ever be simple.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]. 

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