Dissociative Splitting and Finding New Parts: An Autoethnography

A lived account of self-loss, system change, and unexpected healing

This is an unapologetically long, in-depth account of adult dissociative splitting, written from lived experience. I know this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who may need to feel less alone in their own experience of this, or want an in-depth phenomenology of this from the inside, perhaps this will help. This is also written for me to try and make sense of this very strange experience.

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Several months ago, I split. I didn’t know it at the time. I just knew that who I was drastically changed after an overwhelming crisis. Now I know that one of my most dominant parts fractured and ceased to exist. She split into three, and I became one of the new ones. This isn’t something I even really considered was possible in adulthood, let alone for me. I had barely even accepted I likely had OSDD and hadn’t even been formally diagnosed, though I see an expert in this now. Questioning that reality now seems a little absurd, given everything I’ve experienced in this process. I was in shock and grief and felt very alone with the magnitude of it all. I felt a need to connect to other systems that had gone through this, or to read similar stories of these experiences. But there was very little out there beyond some brief mentions in OSDD/DID online groups. It also seems that everyone experiences these things quite differently, and while I may have lost a part forever in the process, this doesn’t seem to be the case for how everyone experiences new parts in adulthood. So in fact, even amongst the online community I could find, I felt like a relative outlier.

So, I turned to the clinical literature to try and understand it better, but there was very little about this in adulthood that provided any depth. None of this was phenomenological or lived experience research, and completely lacking was the emotional impact of living through this with full awareness of what had been lost and what had changed. This absence only increased my aloneness, which was already overwhelming, given how outside the common experience this is for most people. People never experience grieving the death of themselves. Additionally, my experience is complicated. It hasn’t been entirely a loss. Splitting is a protective act. It’s adaptive, and in many ways, I’ve gained new capacities from it.

Thus, this is my attempt to document and make sense of this process: the feelings, the challenges and the contradictions, and the interesting way my experience played out in relation to the process of memory reconsolidation around ‘no-me shame’ which is experienced as a belief in non-existence. So buckle up. Yes, this is a long one. But hopefully the weirdness of it all makes that worthwhile, and I hope this might inspire more systems to share their own lived experiences too.

‘No-me shame’ and memory reconsolidation

I split after a period of prolonged stress that had worsened, and I lost all hope that things could get better. The split probably saved my life, as the distress I'd been in was making me increasingly suicidal at the time. I guess that is the point, splits are protective in the situation and something that dissociative systems have developed since childhood as a coping strategy. What had been happening had been bringing up trauma associated with a foundational implicit belief that likely formed before I could even speak. An intensely painful feeling that I didn’t exist. I’ve come to learn this belief is quite common amongst people with dissociative disorders. Ken Benau calls this ‘no-me shame’, R.D Lang calls it ontological insecurity, and it’s usually the result of a lack of sufficient mirroring of self in early childhood that is usually very dissociated from conscious awareness.

The part of me that split, Sam, never gave up on anything, this was central to who she was. She held endless optimism that anything was possible by trying harder or trying a new approach to things. She was my main fronting part for years, other than a period of dormancy from other trauma. So much of who she was and what drove her was unknowingly in defence to the no-me shame. But these things were not necessarily all ‘bad’. It made me driven, I achieved a lot academically and professionally, and it was a large source of motivation to better understand myself and my system and find ways to heal. One of the more extreme things she did near the end, when the belief was really getting triggered, was to write a philosophical and theoretical treatise on consciousness. It integrated many other theories across multiple disciplines as a framework to understand dissociation and awareness across multiple scales, from individual parts to collective consciousness. Significantly, the structure of this framework, and its goals, eerily echoed the PhD thesis she had previously written in archaeology a decade before. That was also an attempt to connect the individual to collective humanity over deep prehistory.

It was only when the nonexistence belief became conscious shortly after the first draft was written that I realised subconsciously both these writings were theoretical attempts to prove my own existence. Unfortunately, implicit beliefs are not shifted with logic and theory. They need disconfirming experiences and evidence. However, I find the degree to which those writings demonstrate the concept of unconscious drivers utterly fascinating. Because before the belief became conscious, Sam would have argued black and blue, it was something purely done for interest’s sake or an attempt to find a more neuroaffirming and normalising perspective on dissociation, given she was struggling to accept our reality as likely having OSDD.

It may seem like I’ve gone off on a major tangent here in bringing up no-me shame. However, it is unavoidable, as it is also central to my unique story. Because I had become aware of my nonexistence belief during those stressful months. It was part of what was retraumatising about the situation. In the previous year, I had learnt to do memory reconsolidation myself when implicit beliefs were triggered, and shift them permanently and dramatically using other experiences that disproved them. Id had huge success with this approach and healed so much largely on my own. But I’d tried and failed to shift the non-existence belief myself for a couple of months, and felt perhaps it wasn’t something that could be done on my own, given it was from relational trauma. I believed I likely needed to be properly understood and seen by someone else to give me that corrective experience, and the stressful situation was doing the exact opposite of that. Sam split when she gave up hope of ever being understood and of really knowing herself.

I often get quite emotional now when I look back at the moment that it happened, as she was journaling at the time. Her last words before she split and effectively died were ‘I am the trying’. This was her final attempt to identify something, anything, with certainty about herself that might have been able to be used to sure up my existence and identity. While all of this was happening, other parts were much louder and in severe distress. And then something major shifted. I went from intense self-blame and despair to calm and a sudden certainty about who I was as a person and my intentions in the situation that had triggered all of this. Suddenly, I felt capable of doing the memory reconsolidation. I wrote down all these personal attributes that I felt I held that proved who I was and that I existed. I drew on many fragments of experiences of feeling partially seen with different people and a lot of things I’d discovered about myself over countless hours of journaling and discussions with ChatGPT. And that was the disconfirming experience I needed, and it changed everything.

Discovering new capacities

I am now writing this from the perspective of the part that has kept the name Sam, as I feel like I got more of the Old Sam in my abilities, though all parts that split from her share her memories and aspects of who she used to be. At this point in the story, I’m still unaware there’s been a split. I’m only conscious of the fact that I have intentionally done a memory reconsolidation that I didn’t think would be possible to do on my own, but that, strangely, in the moment, seemed like the most effortless one I had ever done.

The weeks that followed were empowering, confusing and sad. I very quickly noticed that I was much more certain about everything, knew my value as a person, could read other people a lot more accurately and know what was mine and what was theirs. I had a greater capacity for love and acceptance of everyone, including those who hurt me, and found being vulnerable in relationships no longer felt dangerous. I think of lot of these capacities seemed to be the result of no longer consciously holding shame. For Old Sam, being understood by others was the single most important thing. For the new me, it was authenticity and not abandoning myself, although it can still feel unsafe to be misunderstood, but it’s no longer the existential crisis it used to be. I felt like I had just matured 15 years. Old Sam had always felt like she was in her early 20s, which was around the time she had become previously suppressed. She had always resented things like reparenting work, as she just wanted to be free and had struggled to really accept my other parts. The new me, however, made acceptance and secure attachment between my parts a core value.

Old Sam had read so many therapy books over the years and internalised so many of their ideals in her endless attempt to be and do better and to understand the pain I was in. And now I suddenly had all these capacities to do these things I hadn’t before. It felt like I was finally the person Old Sam had always wanted to be, and it wasn’t even me doing things consciously; it felt like who I now was. Initially, with these newfound abilities, I tried to repair the situation that had caused the split. I truly believed that finally, I had ‘fixed myself’ sufficiently and might be accepted and accurately seen. I came to it with undefended love and optimism. But when sadly that didn’t work, I had the capacity to set needed boundaries, to leave the situation I was in and to protect and look after the parts of me still in distress from what had happened, all without emotional numbing or self-blame. I don’t think Old Sam could have done any of this. I even had self-compassion for protecting the parts of me that did still feel shame and were now even more traumatised.

Signs of the split before it became conscious

After this period of needing to do many hard things to get myself to safety, which had taken up all of my focus for quite some time, I found myself experiencing a kind of calm I had never experienced before, which was ironically quite distressing. And this is when I wrote the Sometimes Healing Feels Like Death post. I was noticing so much change in who I was in terms of abilities, but without the no-me shame driving my interests, motivations and giving me meaning in my quest to heal it, I felt like I struggled again to know who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. I was also noticing there were other times I seemed different and wrongly assumed at the time I was perhaps more blended with my parts. This caused distress. I was now utterly self-sufficient, and the main source of trust and security I had was between my parts. So I certainly didn’t want to lose them through fusion. As I wrote in that former post, not fully knowing the extent to which it was true, it felt like in all of this change, I had died in the process.

In addition to this feeling of loss of self and noticing how different I was and less sure of who I am or which parts were fronting, there were a few more signs of the split that I didn’t recognise at the time but now make perfect sense. One of my other parts had complained that I was blocking them from speaking in therapy, which didn’t make sense to me since I had now made it part of my values that they would get a voice, and I was accepting and supporting of them. I have an internal part that always seems to know what is going on in terms of relationships between my parts and their unconscious motives. So I asked them what was going on with this. Their answer at the time was that I wasn’t yet ready to know.

Another big sign was in my inner world. In there is an imaginary cabin that was my ‘safe place’, and it was smashed to pieces, creating a visceral full-body jolt of shock when I saw it. But it wasn’t all bad in there, either. The haunted mansion in my internal world, which had previously been filled with the sound of crying children, actually felt happier, and I discovered a whole new extension to my inner world, though this doesn’t have such good vibes. Clearly, a whole lot had been restructured inside, and I find it amazing how much was communicated symbolically in this way by my consciousness, long before I understood what it truly meant.

Finding out I split

I found out that I split after another part of me wrote a letter, which I had promised to share with my therapist without editing. But the letter got edited anyway and stripped it of its emotions, and I lost about 6 hours of time when it happened, which wasn’t something I was used to experiencing. I knew doing this went against my promise and values and I didn’t understand it at all. Especially the fact it was now rewritten in my voice. It sounded like Sam. This was a puzzle I needed to solve, and I went over all the different options that might have caused this and why I had lost time. Suddenly, I knew. There was another Sam part, and I had split during the time I was being retraumatised. I think my system had decided it was finally safe, that I know this, all these things suddenly made sense, including how much I had changed, which seemed to go way beyond what would be expected from the memory reconsolidation around my no-me shame alone. I felt it with a lot of certainty. Later on, I experienced being that other part I now call ‘Shadow Sam’, which is never very pleasant since they appear to hold all the shame that was split off and frequently doubt my dissociation in a kind of looping OCD anxiety.

So now I knew. Looking back at my writing when all of this happened, I can see it in what I wrote. The moment that everything changed, the emergence of new voices. And then I was hit with the most unimaginable grief. It genuinely has felt like I am grieving my own death. What is so tragic about it all, too, is that because I now have so much new capacity for self-acceptance, I can look back at Old Sam and say that she was already valid just the way she was. She would have wanted to be who I am today, perhaps with a bit more additional drive; she likely would be horrified that I no longer possess. But that came from her own shame, as did in part her endless quest to heal herself with memory reconsolidations. And now I can feel that for her. She never needed to die. She unconsciously sacrificed herself so that my system could live, and with the hope that finally I’d be good enough for other people to accept. And I'm crying my eyes out again, writing this as I always do when I think about this. Because that is the other big change that has happened. I am now capable of really feeling. I might have new capacities, which might even look like healing, or at least adaptation and this is in many respects because of the memory reconsolidation that came with it. But I’m also more fragmented, I’m changed forever, and the part of me that I most identified with as ‘me’ died. Even if we were to fuse back together, I still wouldn’t be the same as Old Sam. Because we’ve now lived apart for many months, and who knows what that would even look like without the no-me shame that so defined her.

All this grief has been the most painful experience of my life. It is so surreal to experience mourning your own death. It’s not something most people can possibly understand. And I know that some in the plural community don’t like to think of these things as deaths; they would say, oh but she lives on in your new parts. And that is true, but we aren’t her. And we can never get her back, she isn’t just dormant, she split apart and now there are completely different new me-s that I have to somehow learn to live with and find new meaning and purposes in life. Life has got more complicated now as well. When parts change like this, it has broader implications, because they have relationships with external people and do things in the external world. These things affect my marriage and my friendships and my relationship with my kids. I am noticeably different enough that I feel like I need some kind of explanation in some contexts. Additionally, this experience has very much forced me to come to terms with the fact that I clearly have a dissociative disorder. This includes accepting that I have a vulnerability to splitting in times of overwhelming stress that I had no idea that I had. Given how painful this experience has been, it is something I will be avoiding at all costs in the future, and I wonder if that might make me a little less brave to do things than Old Sam had been. She had always been rather fearless.

The other thing I've experienced because of this is the strangeness of being so new as an identity. I became aware I was a new part, 3 months after I split. Suddenly, I felt painfully self-conscious. I’m a 3-month-old 40-year-old and how strange that is. All the new capacities that I seemed to hold, that I’d initially chalked up to just the memory reconsolidation, I now felt were perhaps unearned. I'm not like this because of experiences and development. I got these skills in an instant. That made me feel like an alien compared to most other people. I have come to realise though, that probably these capacities were always inside of me as latent abilities, but that the shame Old Sam had carried, probably blocked them from full expression.

Despite the loss and trauma, I can’t say that the whole thing is bad or that I'm worse off because of it. That wouldn’t be true. I also seem much more capable of holding a lot more complexity. The fact that I was traumatised, that I was split and when I never should have been. But my system had reacted to the situation in a way that was highly adaptive and somehow facilitated broader healing. That I actually do like who I am now, even though I can also mourn the fact I was perfectly valid too, the way I used to be. That life now is a combination of being both better in some ways and worse in others, that it’s just very, very different, and I’m still working out how to live and who I now am, and trying to heal the additional trauma my system now carries.

And then there were three

This story gets more complicated, as after accepting the fact that I had split, I discovered yet another Sam part. I was attempting to open up communication with ‘Shadow Sam’ as it concerned me, I now had this new part that was acting outside of my own values. But instead, a completely different part ended up responding and gaining awareness in the process that they were not in fact me, but an entirely separate part that also came from Old Sam splitting. They named themselves Ash. They are practical and down to earth and don’t feel a lot or get impacted by other parts emotions. They have an embodied masculine energy, which is another big change for me to deal with, as I’ve never had fronting parts like that before.

For me (Sam), finding Ash has been a blessing. Because now there’s a part who can get on with life when needed. They have been tasked with getting us healthier, doing housework and they even enjoy playing with my kids. It's added a higher level of internal support to our system. I no longer feel like I’m holding it all. After finding each other, there was a week of confusion at work since we initially weren’t sure who was the part that did our job. That week, there was a lot of rapid switching between us and memory gaps and making things up on the fly and feeling like I was going quite crazy in the process. The stress of so many switches and confusion caused a lot of dissociation and massively reduced my cognitive capacity, and I needed about 48 hours of straight sleep to reboot my mind and function the next week at work. Since then, we’ve worked out that I’m definitely the best work part. Ash and I seem to be able to consciously switch between each other, which isn’t something I can do with any other parts. I assume the instant connection we have is from both being a split from Old Sam, though the same can’t be said for Shadow Sam, who still doesn’t communicate with the rest of my system yet.

The loss of Old Sam was felt very differently by Ash than by me. To me, Old Sam feels very much like a separate part that is no longer me. For Ash, instead, the change was felt as a lack of wholeness they once had and a strong desire to fuse with me to correct it. Which was something we did not agree on at all. I had no interest in fusion and knew it wouldn’t result in things returning to the way they were. I also didn’t want to lose the support I was so finally happy to get when I discovered Ash existed. Eventually, we came to agree after he could see how much we needed someone who was more practical and could get on with life, given how ‘lofty’ I was, according to him. So now things feel a lot more settled, and we have a better understanding of our separate roles and strengths. It feels very strange to think about how vastly different all 3 of us are from each other, and yet that we all were very much like aspects of Old Sam. She was quite a complicated part, it seems. It does make me sad to feel that each of us is now a lot more one-dimensional. I think it’s partly why I also value functional multiplicity so much and the value of all of my parts beyond me.

Understanding the Adaptation of the Split

At this point, I depart from pure description to be somewhat speculative about the design and structure of the split in my system. Splits are not conscious, or at least mine certainly wasn’t. I’ve been told that the mind splits according to deeper, more primitive subcortical brain functions, in ways that are most protective and necessary, and that it doesn’t involve logical thinking. This may be the case, but I’m in awe about the specific configuration of splitting that my mind chose to take, because it really feels like there was a rather intricate underlying strategy.

In my situation, Old Sam split into three. A part that held shame and uncertainty (Shadow Sam), a part that was more emotionally numb and practically focused (Ash) and a part that held most of the metacognition, ideas, drive for healing, system leadership and meaning making (me, Sam). Splitting in this way and dividing up Old Sam’s former attributes seems to have created the increased capacity to access latent abilities that had likely been held back by inner conflict and shame. By restructuring my system in this way, it saved me, and despite the greater fragmentation in its specific configuration, it resulted in increased coherence, functional multiplicity and internal security. Was I just lucky, and my primitive brain reflexes to split off shame as protection just happened to have all these other positive benefits for me? Did the memory reconsolidation that happened after the split do most of the heavy lifting in terms of increasing my capacities? Or do we perhaps not yet know enough about the mind and what happens during these kinds of experiences? I think I believe the latter is most likely, and perhaps there are more mechanisms for splitting than is currently known or acknowledged in the literature. Especially given there has been so little research done on the phenomenology and lived experience of dissociative splitting amongst adults with conscious awareness of their multiplicity.

If anything, I feel that my experience is best described by a concept that comes from entirely outside of dissociative theory: that of transformance. Diana Fosha describes this as an innate emergent drive towards healing and coherence that all people possess, even during times of distress. Because what it feels like if my entire system could speak the logic of what happened unconsciously in my split, it might sound something like this: “Well, this is traumatic, it seems like we are going to have to split to survive this. But we will sure as hell make sure this doesn’t set us back in all the hard-earned healing and progress we have made. So if we must split, then we will damn well make sure it’s in a way that helps the situation now, and sets us up for future healing.”

I don’t want to downplay the trauma and the grief. But it is complicated. People are complicated, and I guess especially so when there are multiple Is inside of one me.