Disassociative identity disorder

I saw a post about DID and though I am not a therapist my wife is currently a few weeks away from receiving her masters in clinical social work. Which brings me to the topic at hand.

Back in October 2014, I was involved in a work related accident that knocked me unconscious, and I was transported to the hospital. The next 3 to 4 months after I struggled with speaking, the use of the right side of my body and losing almost a year of my memory. I went through tons of different tests with the doctors all scratching their heads, thinking I possibly had a stroke, but there was no evidence of it and it left a lot of unanswered questions. I had to relearn who my wife was and that she was currently pregnant with our daughter. It was a real struggle for her to take care of me. 1. I didn’t remember her 2. She was pregnant and 3. she was going to school while working part-time as a cashier. 4. Relearning to walk and talk.

There was a lot more that happened in between, and our life became extremely stressful, but I soon adapted, fell back in love with my wife, and eventually led my wife bringing me to a therapist. Over the course of a year and a half my therapist and I got into a conversation over disassociation. I had told her that I had the ability to be able to change the world around me. I’ll give you a for instance, doing the dishes becomes boring, especially when there’s a mountain of them, so I zone out. Next thing I know, I’m in World War II storming the beaches of Normandy. By the time the allies were successful in taking the beach the dishes were done, and I had a little to no recollection of doing them. Even got to the point where I explained that I could have full on conversations with each and every character in this thought process with my own thought on how to reply to them within these disassociative environments.

My therapist had come to know my family by this point and became concerned about diagnosing me with DID because of the current disability battle that I was fighting over my head injury. The thought was the State would send a social worker and have my kids removed as they might see me as unfit to care for them, by this time, my wife was never home due to a job change, internship, and school. I became scare, never talked about it again or even really thought about it until recently.

Now my wife is a social drinker. I however, haven’t drank since I was in my early 20s. My wife has been begging me for years to have a few drinks with her, so I finally relented and drank about a quarter bottle of whiskey and blacked out.

According to my wife, I became visibly drunk rather quickly, then abruptly became sober. My posture, voice, the look in my eyes all changed and introduced myself as ‘Lloyd’. Apparently from what was explained was Lloyd and I were more intertwined since I was a kid (my ‘imaginary’ friend who protected me during a very dark time in my life) until my accident in 2014 where he said he was thrown into the darkness of my mind and struggled to find his way back to me. He apparently governs the right half of my body, which is why for those 3 to 4 months I was barely able to use it. After finding his way back instead of being intertwined, where our thought process was as one, he became more of his own entity, finding himself more and more on the outside, governing my body as a whole. He mimicked my behaviors, took care of my kids and other daily tasks so no one would find out.

This caused confusion over the years with my wife, she would have a conversation with me and then hours later after bringing it up again, I would tell her I never had a conversation with her. We would often get into arguments with her saying it’s like you’re almost 2 different people at times or you’re just choosing not to listen to me.

As of right now I am not diagnosed with DID, but I am seeing a therapist who has done a disassociation test and has since referred me to a specialist. Truthfully, I’m afraid, especially because of the stigma about it. I have looked at some things, but not enough for all of it to make sense to me. The one common thing that I have seen are those who have DID suffer from chronic headaches. I have had chronic headaches since I was a kid. I have been on many different medications over the years from Ridellan, Adderall, tramadol, Keppra, Vilazodone, Sumatriptan. There are others, but I can’t remember their names.