Coming Out: A Lived and Professional Experience with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
In 2016 my life as I knew it took a deep dive into a dark undertow of the life my brain worked brilliantly to protect against. My world as I knew it began to unravel. Just a few years prior, a therapist I was seeing at the time casually mentioned the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID). At the time, I could not believe she would have the audacity to assume this about me. I, after all, was “perfect” as I had worked diligently to manage any image that my parents had expected of me.
I left that therapist and began again with a therapist that became the one therapist that could hold the space for the parts of me that were brilliant at
guarding against access to my internal landscape. Then my mother after just 4 months of being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer died, leaving me parentless and befriending alcohol in an effort to soothe my broken and abandoned heart. I was challenged by my marriage which was slowly falling apart, and I just wanted to die. I decided to stop drinking and it was then that the internal world of my many parts and the truth behind who my parents truly were and what my body had experienced for decades came rolling forward like a flash flood into my mind about being traded as a young girl to pay off my
father’s debts.
Different parts of me formally known as “personalities” were each holding onto pieces of the puzzle that was my life and all of them needed to be tended to and I devoted and gave everything I had to heal from and to accept that I was, in fact, a psychologist living with DID. It was as if my internal self-helper had guided me all along to heal and bring light to a very highly stigmatized and misunderstood psychological phenomenon. I am no longer willing to stay silent about my experience to be a voice for all survivors of trauma and more specifically individuals living with DID. So that we can all begin to move towards helping people with DID be “OUT” and stop the stigma of fear that has surrounded this diagnosis for decades. This is my story of recovery. I hope that coming forward and speaking about it brings light to a survival mechanism that developed as a response to survive extreme trauma, that healing is possible, and that a healthy
and successful life can be lived.
“Brilliant minds can do great things, dissociative minds can do multiple amazing things”
– Dr. Adrian Fletcher
Psychologist
DID: Lived and Professional Experience
About the Author:
Dr. Adrian Fletcher is a human first, therapist second. She is a trauma-informed psychologist, speaker, consultant and mental health warrior and advocate on a mission to dispel the myths and misconceptions of Dissociative Identity Disorder by sharing her lived and professional experience. She lives a happy and successful life with her husband and two beloved dogs in beautiful Sunny Arizona.
