Navigating DID Switching: Insights and Strategies for Interacting with Alters

Hey, it’s the shell. Try to record this video, but I ended up switching out in the middle of it. So I’m just gonna start from scratch. But one thing that we get asked when we tell people that we have the idea is like, oh, what do we need from them? And like how we should interact with each other. And I never know what to say. And it’s hard for us to kind of conceptualize like what we need as a system. We could go into why that is, but that’s a whole other story. But with this past week, we were on a trip with our mom and a couple friends. And at the beginning of the trip, because they all knew we have the ID, our friend asked, she was like, what are your pronouns? And that was a really nice questions that kind of ease in the rest of the conversation. So that was actually really helpful. And then they asked if they could ask if who’s fronting and shell was like, yes. And if you if they don’t wanna tell you who it is, they’ll just pretend to be me as in shell, the host. But that was also really helpful because sometimes some alters, when they switch, they don’t want people to know that they’re the ones that are out. And some alters, when we switch, we do wanna be recognized as like our own selves. And so it’s nice that we’ve figured out that the other person can just ask if we, who is fronting. And then if the alter isn’t comfortable sharing who they are, then they’ll just default to the host. And then throughout the week, as we got more comfortable with the idea of like, we don’t need to mask around everyone because they already know about us and our switches became a little more obvious. And even though our switches seemed more obvious to us, like it’s still a very covert disorder. So I don’t think they would have known something was going on if they didn’t already know about the did. But, so when we would be switching sometimes, like sometimes our switches can take a little bit and we kinda, I think like it’s been described that we kind of just like stare off or we get a blank look sometimes. I guess it can look like we have a headache and sometimes we yawn like the big yarn. And so when things like that were happening, our mom would just be like, are you okay? And we’d be like, we’re switching. And then she just leave us be, which was nice because a lot of times in social situations, if we’re switching, we feel pressured to keep it covert. And so we’re trying to rush through the switches and maybe like it’s a switch that would normally take a little longer and we’re like really trying to push it through so that people aren’t recognizing that something is off and that it can be really disorienting to do that because it doesn’t give us time to kind of settle into the body if we need to. And so we can be really confused about who we’re when that happens. So a lot of times in social situations, we won’t know who’s fronting because we’re trying to like over compensate for the switches and also we have to mask as the host. So it was nice to be able to say like over switching and then to just be left to let it happen. So those are just a couple of things that the people we were with did that helped us be more comfortable interacting with them. And I know for shell, it’s not as big of a deal because we default to her. So she never has to like pretend to be somebody else. But for us as the rest of the alters, we really appreciated it.