Quora - July 21, 2023: Faking it
What is it about dissociative disorders that make you feel like you are faking it? And how do you work out what is real?
For us, co-consciousness, co-fronting, and co-hosting are what help us understand and delineate each individual self (or system) in our system.
So, when we are co-con, or co-fronting, or co-hosting we can see and feel that our reality is composed of multiple identities. Although at this stage we don’t really know how many we have, and who many of them are.
When this happens, we can talk to each other, hear each other’s thoughts, feel one another and their feelings. There are lots of clear evidence of how crowded our brain is.
Sometimes, however, we switch into a system that does not have any of that awareness. There is no co-whatsit … In these situations we have come to the conclusion that reality doesn’t change. Members of that system still do all the micro-switches and finish each other’s sentences, and share functionality. But it is done in a way that the host orchestrates everything without anyone knowing. Not even the host is aware of this fragmentation.
We have done experiments doing CBT and DBT on ourselves to dig into these systems, and when we bring awareness to them, they just work like the others.
But when there is not awareness of these inner workings, we feel like we are faking. When we switch into these systems we don’t feel, hear, or even sense the others. We feel like a singlet.
And to be honest, now that we have such a good relationship with everyone in our inner fam, feeling like a singlet is scary. It’s lonely. And that adds to the feeling of being fake. Which lingers …
But it is a weird feeling. Because we know we are missing something, but we don’t know exactly what … it’s a knowing … very unsettling. And some systems are aware that they are missing something, they are the ones that think they are faking it. But some other systems are completely unaware of our multiplicity and oblivious to its implications.
So, this feeling fake thing is rather frequent. It is reassuring in those stages that we are co-con because we tend to know who we are, and have at least some memories. And we are not alone.
💜
