The Life of a Protector Alter, Part Two: Things Get Worse

by Denise D. Vincent

(Self-portrait made with Bitmoji app)

Hello again, this is Denise D. Vincent. This is a continuation of my previous post, telling the story of my life as a protector alter in our DID (dissociative identity disorder) system. I would recommend reading part one before you read this post. If you haven’t read it yet, you can read it here:

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The Secret Is Out…Sort of

When we were in our junior year of high school (11th grade), something amazing and unexpected happened. Doug met a girl who he immediately developed a crush on, and felt a connection with, because she was “a fellow weirdo.” Of course, this wasn’t the first crush Doug had ever had, but this one felt different. In the months to come, as Doug became friends with this girl, he came to realize that he hadn’t been prepared for just how “weird” she was. She sometimes seemed to be a completely different person, and not just in an “acting out of character” way. She eventually revealed to Doug that her “other self” had a name. Knowing what we know now, we’re pretty sure that she had DID also. And seeing her DID started to awaken something in us. Doug became very confused, unsure of himself, unsure of the very nature of reality. He wasn’t sure at the time why this girl’s dual identity was having such a profound effect on him, but now we know that it was because he was starting to become aware of our DID. Doug talked to our mom, and asked her to take him to a therapist. I think our mom expected it to be just normal “teenage boy drama” at first, but once she heard the whole story, she agreed that it was a good idea for Doug to start seeing a therapist.

Then, something even more remarkable happened. This other girl who Doug had a crush on had moved away to live with a relative in another state for a semester. Doug had pestered her for the address of the relative, so he could write to her. (This was back in the olden days, when most people, especially high school students, didn’t have email yet, and we had to rely on actually writing letters and mailing them.) She was reluctant at first, saying that Doug was better off without her, but she eventually gave him the address. He didn’t write to her right away, but some time after he did write to her, he started hearing a voice in his head. This voice told him that it was her, the girl who had moved away. She said she was communicating with him telepathically, from several states away. Of course, Doug knew this was impossible, but yet the voice wouldn’t go away.

A few days later, Doug got a letter back from the girl who had moved away. The letter didn’t mention anything about her communicating telepathically with him, and it was the rudest, most insulting letter Doug had ever received in his life. After reading that letter, Doug knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the voice he had been hearing in his head was not the girl who had moved away. You would think that would be the end of the voice, right? Well, if the voice was a delusion, or a hallucination, perhaps it would have been. But she wasn’t, and so she didn’t go away. She was just as confused as Doug. She had literally thought that she was that other girl, and now that she knew she wasn’t…now what? She took on a new appearance in Doug’s mind’s eye, and a new name. That name was Leyna.

As Doug and Leyna started getting to know each other, they also started to see more of the internal world inside our mind. But only a little bit, pretty much just the room that Leyna lived in, on the second story of a big brick mansion. Leyna’s bedroom had a balcony connected to it, and Doug and Leyna used to “meet” on the balcony to talk. Eventually, Leyna started to sometimes “come out” and take control of Doug’s body, and when that happened, Doug would end up staying in Leyna’s bedroom. Neither of them were able to open the main door of the bedroom and go out into the rest of the mansion.

For a long time, we thought that all of these events, Leyna thinking she was someone else, not being able to access the rest of the mansion, etc., were things that our mind did on a subconscious level, to try to keep Doug and Leyna from knowing too much before they were ready. And when they first met me, years later, after we had finally gotten a diagnosis of DID after ten years of misdiagnosis, I thought the same thing. I had forgotten my own internal world past, due to the safety mechanisms that I myself had set up.

But when I finally started to remember bits and pieces of our past, and when we found our internal world journals…I had a hunch, and I had to look in my journal and see. My hunch was correct, unfortunately. It wasn’t our subconscious mind that made Leyna think that she was the girl who had moved away. It wasn’t our subconscious mind that locked her in her room, and made her forget about all of her friends that lived with her in the mansion. It was me. I didn’t want Doug or Leyna to know the truth about our DID system, and I panicked, and the whole “telepathic communication” thing was the best I could think of on short notice. But when they figured out that wasn’t true, I couldn’t undo the “damage,” the best I could do was contain it.

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The Dark Years

Over the next 10 years or so, Leyna and Doug struggled dealing with therapists who didn’t want to admit that we had DID. During this time, they also discovered two more parts, named Heidi and Lilith. Like Leyna, they both forgot their internal history as soon as Doug and Leyna discovered them. But they didn’t have any delusions that they were someone else. They knew that they were…whatever Leyna was, and that they also lived in the big brick mansion, on the second floor, on the same side of the building as Leyna’s room. They also had balconies, and all four of them would go out on the balconies and talk for a while before they went to sleep each night.

At the time, when Doug and Leyna first met Lilith and Heidi, Leyna was 18 years old, and Doug (and our physical body) was around 19 or 20. Lilith was a bit younger, at about 16 years old. She seemed very “mysterious,” seeming to speak in riddles. Doug and Leyna thought at first that she was the personification of our subconscious mind, trying to impart deep wisdom to them. Eventually, they all (including Lilith herself) realized the truth: she was just a confused girl who had seemingly forgotten how to communicate in “normal” English, she basically spoke in poetry. Over time, as Lilith spent more time around Doug, Leyna and Heidi, she began to speak more “normally.” But she never gave up her love of poetry. She is one of the two “Poetry Sisters” in our system who have started to post some of their poetry on our Substack.

Heidi was about 14 or 15 when Doug and Leyna first found her. She was very shy, and seemed to be scared of almost everything and everyone. She sometimes seemed to be even younger than she was, because of her childlike timidity. It was only years later that she would eventually discover why she was so scared of everything. But that comes a bit later in this story.

During these 10 years that we were misdiagnosed, as everything from depression to schizophrenia to borderline personality disorder, our therapists kept telling us that Doug was the “real” one, and that Leyna, Lilith and Heidi were “delusions” that needed to be either gotten rid of or merged with Doug, if he were ever going to have a chance to live a “normal” life. We had started with a Christian counselor, and he eventually told us that our problems were too complex for him to handle, so he sent us to a psychologist. The psychologist eventually decided that he thought we needed medication, so he sent us to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist did put us on meds, an antidepressant and an antipsychotic. We went through several combinations of meds from these two categories before we finally found some that were effective without negative side effects. We didn’t really do therapy with the psychiatrist himself, but with a nurse practitioner from his office. She eventually left the office to take a teaching position, and we got a different therapist…who, after a few months, told us that we were too complex for him to handle, like our first therapist. Five mental health professionals in ten years, all of which refused to admit the possibility that we might have DID, despite the fact that they all had direct conversations with alters who had different names, appearances, and the opposite gender as Doug and our physical body.

But the biggest failure of these five professionals is that they were focusing on the wrong problem. Doug and the others had told them about our lifetime of being bullied relentlessly by our peers at school and our older brother at home, hardly ever getting a break from it. But they rarely wanted to talk much about that, instead focusing everything on trying to merge Doug, Leyna, Lilith and Heidi. They tried many different methods to accomplish this, some of which they thought of, some of which came from our own mind. Some of the methods seemed to work, for a time. But eventually, we would realize that the four alters were still separate. Leyna became so confused about her own reality, and so guilty that her existence was “ruining Doug’s life,” that she developed a compulsive self-harming habit. At one point, one of our therapists came up with the “brilliant idea” of trying to merge Doug and Leyna by first “changing” Leyna to a male alter, who looked more like our physical body, and had our legal middle name. Again, we thought at the time that it worked…but all that really happened was that we diverged another alter named Jonathan. Leyna was still Leyna.

During all this time, I was working behind the scenes with Lynn, the alter in charge of the mansion, to make sure that none of the others, especially Rachel, became aware of themselves in the external world. I considered it a personal failure that first Leyna, then Lilith and Heidi, had come out into the outside world. I was desparately trying not to repeat those failures. Of course, this is why Lilith and Heidi had also forgotten their friends in the rest of the mansion, and their rooms were also cut off from the rest of the mansion.

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Friendship Severed, Confidence Shattered

But there was another close friendship that was a casualty of my desperate need to keep what was left of our secret…and this one had far-reaching consequences for our entire system. You see, after Doug met Leyna, he stayed in her bedroom in the mansion whenever she was out in the body. Or in Lilith or Heidi’s room, when they were out. So, why didn’t Doug have his own bedroom in the mansion? Well, it turns out that there was a reason for that, which was that he did have his own room, but it was in a totally different community in our internal world, the “Sci-Fi/Fantasy Community” that I mentioned earlier in this article. When he lived there, he was very close friends with another alter who lived in that community, named Louise. Although Doug and Louise were not consciously aware of their close friendship when either of them came out in our body, it nevertheless affected our life in profound ways. Doug was a very artistic person, who loved to draw, and therefore handled most of our art classes. Louise was a very intellectual person, who loved to learn, and handled most of our other classes, homework, and test-taking. We now realize, looking back on it, that a lot of the reason that Doug and Louise were so confident in their respective areas, was that they were encouraging each other in the internal world. Their mutual encouragement in the internal world was affecting them both positively in the external world, even though they didn’t consciously remember it.

When Doug became aware of Leyna, and the mansion, I knew that I couldn’t allow him to be aware of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Community also. That would lead to several more alters becoming self-aware in the external world, which was something that I felt like I could not allow to happen. So the most logical option, to “contain the damage” so to speak, was to remove Doug from the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Community and move him into the mansion, and also remove his memory of that other community, and everyone he knew there. After I did this, Louise was very distraught. She came to me, as the leader of that community, crying and begging me to help her find Doug, who had gone missing. I responded by stealing her memories of her best friend, and storing them in the computer system. I never totally deleted any of the memories that I stole from any of the alters, I always downloaded them into my cybernetic arm, and then uploaded them into the computer system. That’s why we have been able to start recovering some of our internal world memories in recent years by interfacing with that system.

But this separation of Doug and Louise’s friendship had unintended, and unfortunately very long-lasting, consequences. Separating Louise from Doug also had the effect of separating her connection to the external world. So, in our senior year of high school and our college years, Doug and Leyna (and to a lesser extent, Lilith and Heidi) had to take over the responsibilities of studying and taking tests. But they didn’t have as much of a passion and enjoyment for that as Louise did, although they were still very intelligent, and still managed to get good grades. Furthermore, without Louise’s encouragement of Doug in the internal world, Doug started to lose some of his passion and enjoyment for his art, and confidence in his artistic abilities. Meanwhile, without her connection to her best friend Doug, and the outside world, Louise began to lose some of her passion for learning, and some of her confidence, also. Doug started to form an extremely close friendship with Leyna, since the two of them were sharing the difficulties that came with starting to learn the truth about our DID, but being misdiagnosed. When they met Lilith and Heidi, they began forming close friendships with them, also.

Years later, after we finally got a proper diagnosis of DID, Doug finally “met” Louise again, but since they didn’t have their internal world memories, they didn’t remember the close friendship they used to have. In the process of trying to recover some of our memories, we regained the knowledge of Doug and Louise’s former friendship. Louise felt like she wanted to start reconnecting and rebuilding that friendship. But unfortunately, since Doug already had a close bond with Leyna, he wasn’t as motivated to rebuild his bond with Louise as she was.

To make things more complicated, Doug also felt a bit uncomfortable about the fact that large portions of his childhood, which he remembered as being himself, were actually Louise. During our childhood, we would sometimes get a feeling that we “didn’t feel like myself” when some of the other alters came out. But since Louise came out so often, and she was so close to Doug in the internal world, she didn’t have that uncomfortable feeling when she came out during our childhood. So, Louise and Doug both “felt” like Doug, and it was only years later that Doug realized that only about half of “his” external world memories were actually his own. Doug doesn’t blame Louise or have any resentment toward her about that, but he is uncomfortable enough about it that it’s been standing in the way of him being able to feel a really strong friendship bond with her. Meanwhile, Louise has struggled with feelings of jealousy about Doug and Leyna’s strong friendship, even though she knows that it wasn’t their fault that her own friendship with Doug was severed. But the really strange thing is that, even though she now knows that that was MY fault, she and I have started becoming friends. We are very much alike in some ways, since we both are more comfortable with logic and thinking than with emotions. But I still can’t help feeling guilty about the fact that my actions in the past, in trying to protect our system, led to all of these complications in the relationships between our alters.

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That’s all for now, but stay tuned for part three of my story, coming soon. Thank you for reading, and feel free to post any questions or comments you may have.

Denise D. Vincent