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2:35am October 9, 2014

clatterbane:

I didn’t think to say explicitly earlier, but the fact that there really are people trying to cope with repressed memories of abuse is one of the things that makes me angrier about that therapeutic fad of the late ’80s-’90s.

I mean, not only were a lot of people who had legitimate troubles there no doubt also treated in the same ways, the history of unethical and outright abusive “therapeutic” approaches would get their legitimate problems taken even less seriously.

Some of the ways I got done would no doubt be more distressing and harmful if you really did have a history of the kinds of trauma they were focusing on. And I have seen some examples of “skeptical” running way too far in the opposite direction, and deciding “there were a lot of abuses; therefore this was never even a real thing for anyone.” Supremely unhelpful.

Similarly, a lot of people have decided that there’s no such thing as being plural because of the “DID fad” that went along with the “repressed memory fad” and resulted in a lot of people misdiagnosed with DID (including some plural and median systems who never would’ve identified with DID in the first place, and I suspect a lot of people with temporal lobe epilepsy got misdiagnosed with DID).  Note that plurality has been known to exist, outside the DID/psychiatric paradigm, for centuries.  DID is only one form of plurality and only the kind recognized by (some) psychiatrists.  Plural people who don’t act like “classic DID” aren’t faking anything and have been documented for literally centuries.  Just wanted to add that in since so many people think they know what they’re talking about without having done any research into the history of the phenomenon of many selves one body.

(I’m not plural, but I was persuaded to act like I was, in the nineties.  But I have a disproportionate number of plural friends, some of whom identify with DID and some of whom don’t, and I can assure you they are very real and were not made up by therapists, some of them have never even seen a therapist, many started asking to be called many different names by the age of five.)