I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, DID, formerly known as Multipl Personality Disorder and Autism

Boy, that's a long title. DID and Aspergers mix pretty well in that they produce similar characteristics. Both can lead to: isolation and inability to connect to others; low self-esteem and lack of eye contact; selective mutism or incidents in which one cannot speak; living within ones own unique world on the inside; difficulty making friends and forming intimate relationships; depression and high anxiety. It's a double-whammy on just about all fronts.
One of the things that I have to do is to separate my Aspergers symptoms, which are hard-wired and cannot be changed, from my DID symptoms which can be healed and transformed. It's a great deal of mental effort. I often find journaling, blogging and reading about both conditions in order to figure this out. It helps a great deal that I have an adult sin with Aspergers as I can look at his reactions and ways if thinking to more easily understand what my autistic issues are.
As an example, for most of my life (I'm about 54 years old) I thought that my low level depression was due to the years of abuse, my DID, until I witnessed depression in my teenage autistic son. It's odd but the more intelligent the Autistic, the more depression there is. It's like we are smart enough to see how great our deficits and struggles are. I'm guessing that I would be hard pressed to find someone with DID who doesn't struggle with depression on a regular basis.
These past few years as I've gotten older and a bit wiser, I can see that autism is a form of dissociation, in that it is one step removed from reality. DID is two or three steps back. Reality, being in the Now, isn't something I'm familiar with. I have to work or be completely engrossed in a subject or experience to be fully in the now.
Yeah, I guess you could say that I've never gotten over my childhood (no one can say that, in all honesty, as we are all living, breathing and repeating products of our childhood experiences good, bad or indifferent) as I carry around within my psyche pockets of repressed childhood memories, remembrances of various sadistic abuses that continue to be too overwhelming to bring out into the light.
It's time for me to start putting my...expertise in DID and Autism into words.
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