My First-Person Case Report on Stress Cycle Completion

This might be the only time I put a trigger warning on my stuff - this involves suicidal ideation

I’ve been going through a tremendous healing process that has spanned decades. Everything accelerated in 2020 which led to the DID diagnosis, turning attention inward, and focusing on collaboration. It’s taken years, and resulted in a larger integration that happened in April of this year and ever since I’ve been working through some of my bigger emotional wounds. Last week, on October 28th, I felt a familiar pained feeling that accompanies suicidal ideation rise within me. So, I sat on the ground and put myself in my own mental back seat and simply observed what was happening in my body. This is that first-hand account, because I’m pretty sure my central nervous system finally let go of a life threatening freeze response that was initiated when I was a young child.

October 28, 2024:

Tonight, I experienced a physical phenomenon I’ve only ever seen in this video demonstrating the sympathetic nervous system response to mortal danger. The mortal danger? My suicidal ideation. It’s been coming in waves over the last 6 months, since nearly dying and having one of my worst fears realized. I’m still not ready to fully tell that story, but it’s a wild ride so I promise I will.

But I’d been having a great day. It was my new name day, and I’d just been filled with this inner peace and joy. Like when you feel the world soften. Then my husband and I started watching something on youtube that triggered that inner “I’m a failure” feeling (over something super mild like wishing you had the artistic talent you’re seeing on screen) and once I noticed that quasi-jealous feeling, I turned my attention to it. I paused the screen and started sharing what I was feeling in the moment. These last few months have been so transformational for me; I feel like an explorer in the depths of my mental jungle. And I’m fortunate to have a partner who is comfortable stopping everything, too, and just letting these intense feelings do what they need to do.

Once I began verbalizing the feelings I was experiencing, they began to shift and soon other thoughts piled on until I started to feel the pattern familiarity. It was the sequence of feelings that caused the internal storms preceding suicidal desires. And I knew exactly where it was leading me because I felt myself stand up without consciously thinking about it, and the urge to sit on the floor came forward. In the same spot I’d last sat and wept with these feelings a few weeks prior.

The last time I sat on the floor with these feelings was after an entire day of trying to stay positive despite how emotionally heavy I felt. I’m pretty sure I woke up with the heaviness. Finally, I’d given up trying to keep myself positive about it and sat on the floor and let the pain in. I lived in the torment until I heard myself wimpering “I can’t stay here and feel like this, it’s too painful.” Once I said that, the whirlwind of pain continued for a moment before I took a big, unconscious breath. Then another. Then a flood of tears and the sensation of relief, of love, of internal pats on the back. At the time, I was in awe of how quickly that storm had passed. That overwhelm, that darkness - I’ve sat in it for months at a time, on and off my entire life. And here I was, able to get to the point of feeling peace in the span of a day? Mind-blowing to me.

Last week’s emotional storm passage already gave me hope, but what happened to me this evening made me believe in miracles. Which are really just natural occurrences we have yet to fully understand. Just like how the medical field only realized that germs exist 150 years ago. And how doctors would perform an autopsy then deliver a baby without washing his hands, then get offended at the idea that a doctor would be somehow dirty. Yeah, the field of Psychology is pre-germ. I’m fairly sure of it. And based on what I’ve been experiencing, Somatic Experiencing is at the cutting edge. EMDR just retraumatized me horribly, until I was able to get connected within myself. I rarely did it after my diagnosis, but I honestly wouldn’t recommend it beyond a couple of sessions. It’s useful to know how to sit with your pain. Like, INCREDIBLY useful. Some of the pain we all are carrying is just too fucking scary and hard. Your brain will intervene because it’s too threatening. So at least learning how to go there, how to experience your trigger and head towards healing, was an invaluable piece to my puzzle. My brain learned the neuroplasticity cheat codes so it could apply it to heavier shit. Then, Somatic Experiencing exercises gave my body it’s own cheat codes in the other direction. The two met in the middle, possibly jump-started by my own near death experience, and I’m here on the other side now able to transmute severe trauma into healed stories.

Back to tonight. So, I followed my body’s lead and sat on the same spot this evening. The moment I did, I began to narrate my inner sensations out loud. Somewhat for my husband since he was getting triggered by what was happening (again, the near death experience I’ll talk about later), but mostly for myself. Almost like hearing it out loud would make it feel less crazy. I felt a big swirling ball of energy in my chest and a weight along my back that felt oddly like a piece of armor. After describing what I was feeling verbally, my arms squeezed in tight as I felt the sensation lower to my stomach. Again, I narrated, feeling completely confused but also fully knowing what was going on. The swirling, dense sensation moved lower to the based of my spine before moving down my legs and feet, the sensation of flowing …something… coming out of the bottom - it felt like water flowing out of me, but from within. As I finished telling my husband what I was feeling, this lightness throughout my entirety, my feet began rotating in opposite directions (right foot clockwise, left foot counterclockwise). My hands were bracing me as I leaned back and almost felt attached to the floor. I watched in wonder at my feet, amused that it felt like a rebooting process. I was not consciously making any of these movements, as I’d made the choice to simply observe. The helpful part of having a brain like mine is I’m capable of switching into observer mode/passenger mode consciously - it’s being able to dissociate without an amnesic block occurring, and it seems to be the most helpful way of getting one’s mind out of the way of biological processes. Where’s an fMRI when you need one? I wanted so badly to see what neurons were firing and where.

My hands then began to shake and soon my entire body was convulsing, but I was able to watch and describe it while asking my husband if he’d seen that video of the Polar Bear stress response. I wasn’t feeling any sort of electrical activity in my brain, it was entirely body-based. I was experiencing that life threatening sensation fully (which was now so manageable I could observe it) and my body, my central nervous system, was purging it. And it was doing it the way mammals do it. My body was doing the survival protocol on an emotion, based on a lifetime of suicidal ideation, planning, and small attempts. And once it was over I just sat there, feeling the sensation of release. I told my husband how incredibly okay I felt but also that my body needed to just sit still for a moment. Everything felt heavy, and I just let it be. I felt like I’d just witnessed a legitimate miracle, because I have no way of proving it right now. Only time will tell if these feelings overwhelm me ever again, but I don’t think they will. As I felt the sensation, this deep knowingness washed over me as well. The thoughts that swirled were deep, and dark, and pained but also did nothing to my disposition. It felt like I was watching my own trauma create this electrical storm filled with debris finally discharge and dissipate.

This emotional pain was always so intense, and in a dissociated state was so powerful it actually created an independent identity inside of me. Gun was the manifestation of those feelings in it’s most intense form. And as I’ve gotten everything inside of me reconnected in this full mind-body way, I’ve been able to notice when these emotional electrical storms come around. They feel as natural a force as anything else in the universe, with this gravity that pulls similarly charged pains together. This ability to be in full communication with my body from a conscious place is beyond words, and I know I’m still at the early stages of it.

I had to write this experience down because once I’d felt everything balance inside of me, my immediate thought was “holy shit, that would have been amazing to record!” Because it was so weird and awesome to be able to narrate my way through a physical and mental sensation system. And yet, felt completely normal for me amidst my awe. My brain has been set up with the functionality for me to take a back seat. I know what it feels like to just be the observer. I was built for this. And I really wish everyone who studies psychology could know that this has a pretty quick pathway you can establish, and might be especially effective for DID treatment. Because when I was learning about my disorder, all I felt like I saw was misery. This message of “oh, well you experienced the worst kind of trauma. And you’re broken. And the only way you can be fixed is if you come to an internal agreement that you’ll all integrate” bullshit. It is a HARD disorder. I won’t argue that. But I was so disheartened by the argument that I was just too messed up. And thanks to Hollywood and social media, this disorder is so villainized and distorted that people seem to forget that it’s nature’s ultimate resilience protocol. An adaptation to a world filled with trauma, and one that so many more of us are experiencing than we realize.

And that’s part of why I’m sharing my journey right now. I don’t have the capacity for a more coherent platform, and I still have way too many constricting belief systems to put myself out there more than this. I guess I’m admitting this because I’d appreciate my substack being shared by anyone who reads it. Just to whoever comes to mind in this moment when I’m talking directly to you the reader. I would really love to help show what I went through, because what I experienced was not what I thought would happen when I got my DID diagnosis. I was told it was a permanent brain structure change. But not in a way that let me believe that structure could be utilized in a supercharged, quantum healing kind of way. And y’all? It can! It’s not a bug, it’s an evolutionary feature.

But it also means that what we think DID even is …well, it’s just not. It’s just the adaptivity-ended spectrum of dissociation, because of how much trauma I experienced at a really young age. Trauma that causes your body to freeze leads to a dissociated state, and we’re all being impacted by that. If you feel like the last 4 years have been harder on you than any collective time before, then I’m sorry to tell you that some of your wounds have gotten so big and so gravitationally heavy that they’re basically their own unique person. If you’re overwhelmed by your emotional wounds, you’ve got some of what I’ve lived through (because your brain has already adjusted to accommodate the freeze response). My brain just got a jumpstart on that particular neuroplasticity pathway because it was still so new. I’m on the other side of what everyone’s brain is doing right now. The release of emotional pain I experienced tonight started when I was 3. My body was holding that clenched pattern for decades, only finally releasing tonight because I have spent these last 4 years since my diagnosis learning everything I could about psychology, and about current modalities. I worked with one of the best DID therapists in Massachusetts, because she let me lead this investigative-researcher-mode journey to healing this. And I feel like it’s worth talking about, so that maybe the people who have the skillset and interest in studying this more will try to validate my own findings and help change the narrative around DID. Around any disorders, but the trauma-based ones are so incredibly misunderstood. Like I said, we’re at pre-germ-theory in what’s accepted in psychology. And the APA’s recent decision to remove body-based therapies (claiming there’s no evidence) feels like some weird, evil plot to kill off humanity rather than see it evolve. Not in a conspiracy theory way, but in the way we can all literally see now - just being greedy and refusing to acknowledge that what is currently “known” stops progress. If I’d believed everything I was hearing about what having DID means, I’d have given up. I’d have stopped trying to heal, stopped trying to know more about each of us inside, and probably wouldn’t be here to write this.

This substack is me telling my story, of the impact that undiagnosed DID (then diagnosed DID) had on our life. And also the journey I’m taking now, as a new me who is capable of transmuting pain into wisdom and love. It’s already been a wild ride, and I have no idea where it’s going, but I hope I get to be an embodiment of what’s possible. True cellular healing in a traumatic world. I hope you’ll join me.