I think Walky might be the FIRST horse, honestly. Still not sure if even Danny gets it. Dorothy probably doesn’t, same with Dina. Hunches, impressions, but nobody’s outright said it.
I, for one, did not realize the Amber/Amazi-Girl thing was a full-on split personality. Cases of that sort of behavior ‘Im familiar with, one personality is usually unaware of the other’s existence, or they “blackout” when the personalities swap, and Amber’s never done that as far as I recall.
Yep, that’s when the alarm set off for me. It seemed like Amber hadn’t lost time like that too many times before, and things were progressing in a direction she wasn’t anticipating.
That’s the earliest. There was some speculation before, but that’s pretty clearly it. There were a couple earlier bits where they talked to each other rather than just knowing what was up. There were definitely hints they were moving farther apart, but that was the first clear lost time.
And the obvious trigger for that final split was the Ryan stabbing.
Was it, though? I mean, maybe the first lost time we’ve explicitly seen, but I’m guessing there was a reason she set up social media alerts for mentions of her alter ego.
She could have been watching for reports that would get them in trouble. Police or otherwise.
It’s definitely the first we’ve seen and she seemed disturbed by it, so I think it was meant to be the first. Maybe she was worried about it?
I wonder where the last explicitly sharing memories scene was?
Even DID is a bit of a spectrum and not sharing memories to this degree is at the extreme end. It looked like she was dissociating but this is the first real confirmation of HOW MUCH (yikes)
In real world DID, There are a lot of things that are very different from traditional Fiction DID. For one, the average number of personalities is 8, and some personalities may be co-aware while others aren’t. In this case, Amber might actually be aware of what Amazi-girl does while Amazi-girl is not aware of what Amber does. Given impressions to the opposite, I’m not arguing that as the way it works here, simply using an example.
One of the most interesting cases I ever read was a painter whose different personalities all got into painting because of the “dominant personality”. The styles, themes, tones, and subject matter were incredibly different.
Like, I get the impression that a lot of people humor Amber when she says that she and AG are different people. I think Walky is the first to actually be like “okay, we have disassociation personality disorder going on here”
Assuming that I correctly translated his walkyspeak above.
I mean, Walky’s the only one who’s been given hard evidence. No one else has heard AG fail to remember something that was emotionally significant to Amber and also just happened.
…do you think it might be because Walky sees things on the face-value of it more than most people? That and how he sees things in the lens of fiction a lot, and the trope of split personalities being loosely used so often in media.. Just thinking, maybe his “everything is cartoons with you” thing might have actually given him some insight this time. Because of how the trope is used in fictional in a very unrealistic and fantastic settings and circumstances, lots of people would see it as fictional itself, like as for myself i knew nothing about DID in a real context before reading DoA and a lot of what Cerberus has written.. Lots of people would go “wait, come on. That’s not real, you must be confusing yourself” i imagine,, but Walky wouldn’t, even without any real life first, second, or third hand knowledge of DID. And.. yeah i guess it would make a lot of sense for Walky to notice that before most others.. Even if the same kind of mindset i think probably is what made him punch someone earlier today… Like, big thing he didn’t know was said. Sal barely reacted and basically understood and didn’t care much. Walky though may have thought that *something* needed to happen with him being a better brother and learning that, cuz is how fiction usually goes. Dramatic revelations need dramatic actions. Maybe he instinctively thought that then? Anyway
Nobody gets it so ar. Walky might be the first. A big part of what killed AG/Danny is that he didn’t get it so kept making mistakes. Amber talks about being different people but she never goes into it enough that others get she means literally and isn’t just being annoying by pretending her secret identity is a different person.
It’s also changed pretty rapidly, which likely threw Danny off. While they were together Amber and AG not only shared memory, but would switch personas pretty casually. He kind of was dating both of them, even if it was officially only AG.
But yes, Amber (and AG) often talk about them as separate people, as if whoever she’s talking to already understands the distinction, but without ever making it clear.
I think he’s the first horse too. Everyone else seems to think it’s just a bit of a quirk, not actually full on split personalities. I’m not even sure AMBER is willing to admit it yet. Not out loud.
Actually, she seems to be taking it as a ‘standard neurotypical thing, that Amber, unlike most people, has the decency to actively delineate so that I can follow it’.
It’s not super helpful to “getting it” that Amber and Amazing-Girl have, up until just nowish, always remembered basically everything that the other does.
Precisely this. There have even been several instances where Amazi-girl will forget she’s Amazi-girl and will suddenly remember and slip back into character. Does anyone know if that’s normal for DID? Or is Amazi-girl just a persona that helps Amber cope that Amber knowingly goes into? Remember when Amazigirl stoke Billie’s recorder to get details of Danny’s interview? Amazi-girl was pleased and smiled that Danny said he was interested in Amber. If it was DID, would she care? What about when Amber wanted to date Danny, but Danny was pulling away, saying he was interested in AG. Amber then revealed that she was AG and said it’s ok. Why would Amber be encouraging Danny to date someone else, if AG was indeed a separate entity? Basically, Amber claims AG is a seperate person when it’s convenient and claims otherwise when it’s convenient.
Amazi-Girl started as something that helped Amber cope but the divide grew larger and larger until they split. And then the split got worse as they started making their own decisions.
See that’s the frustrating thing, in real life DID develops in childhood, not in adulthood. So for AG to have started as an alter ego that Amber created on purpose is not consistent. The only way this would make sense is if Amber and AG split in childhood and Amber just thought she was making up AG, but generally people with DID don’t start out having full sharing of memory, it usually takes therapy to reach that stage. As a person with DID, I find all of it a bit backwards.
That’s kind of a fair assessment. Much more so than a lot of the criticism. I think it’s been mentioned somewhere that DID wasn’t the original intention, but people saw and commented on enough echoes of it in the early presentation that he took it more in that direction.
She does have the common childhood abuse background and it’s not at all clear when the split happened – though the trauma of the robbery would be a likely moment if we’re not assuming that’s too late.
I don’t think it’s necessarily that Amber created AG on purpose. Even in the beginning when the split wasn’t so clear and they swapped back and forth more easily there were moments when she switched in more traumatic fashion – mostly when confronted by Sal, but also the early incidents with Blaine.
Yeah, I think it was more of a later decision too. The robbery was definitely too late, according to all current findings the cut off point for developing DID is at maximum 9 years old. It’s just all a bit muddled tbh, even with the early instances it seemed like a deliberate compartmentalization than a dissociation or switch. Also, the starting with great communication thing bugs me because it’s not consistent with DID without therapy. Also, there’s the fact that the voice and hair change were things Amber did deliberately and are now supposed to be part of AG.
To be fair on that last point, we’ve seen the Amazi-Girl alter without either the voice change or the hairstyle change. Case in point: when she broke up with Danny.
And we’ve seen Amber do them deliberately without being Amazi-Girl. CASe in point: when she was posing as AG to discredit her and met up with Walky on the (not yet) Garbage Roof.
Maybe AG was willing to go with it because they were on mostly good terms with each other? Maybe she even liked having her own more unique look and sound?
It was AG as AG who first used then, not Amber pretending to be AG. At least the voice, we don’t see the first time she mussed up the hair to go out as AG.
While DID itself develops in childhood, new alters can develop after that time frame to my understanding. Especially in those who aren’t undergoing treatment this happens, again to my understanding, as a result to psychological trauma which no existing alter is able to cope with effectively. One could argue thereby that the beat down of Blaine incited the already in practice compartmentalization of the AG persona and activities to begin schisming into a new alter which fully split when “Ryan” met Amber over a knife.
I could easily see an equally valid argument for a series of psychotic or schizophrenic episodes interlaced with co-morbid PTSD, though the completely divided memory suggested here breaks that (if only Amber or only AG didn’t remember the actions of the other this would still work, but as we now have both confirmed to not remember the other’s actions that doesn’t fit the type of dissociation that would fit such a mix).
If you look into the “multiples” community out there, you’ll find a lot of people living with something-like-DID that claim they don’t have a disorder so much as a natural variation of human existence. These cases are definitely milder than what you might think of with DID. You’ll see headmates co-fronting (where both are active at once), sharing memories, caring about each other, dating each other, having different sexualities in the same body… it’s pretty cool.
There’s also people who have full DID but hide it well enough that nobody (especially themselves) catches on until well into adulthood. I’ve seen quite a few “I just got diagnosed, WTF” posts on r/did
…and it also seems fairly common for one of the alters to stubbornly refuse to believe in it, even with plenty of evidence.
If you look at those examples (and the separate ones) in sequence it’s clear that the divide has been getting worse. It’s not just random or when it’s convenient, but a clear progression.
At some point (after the break up with Danny?) we had scenes with Amber and Amazi-Girl talking to each other like different people. After Ryan’s stabbing, we know they stopped sharing memories – Amber’s been surprised by bruises and by reports of AG’s activities. And now of course, AG not knowing about Amber and Walky.
How do you explain today’s strip if AG’s only a separate person when convenient?
No-one else yet seems to have clued in to quite the mental implications of Amber/AG yet, even those that have mostly see it as a way for amber to deal with stress, not the full on case of DiD it’s becoming very apparent it is
walky may have gotten a bit of a headastart due to finding out about the memory gap, but he also figured it out within exchanging 5 sentences with amazigirl. dats still fast XD
yeah this strip is a very “Oh….Oh shit” moment, reading her line I almost want to read it as her forcefully implying to Walky to not call her Amber but the implication of a full blown split personality is there.
Tag at the bottom sort of sells it too now look at it.
He has a good read on Amber. I think it’s partially because he met Amber just as he was resolving to be better at considering other people’s problems and needs.
Things aren’t real until you have worded them, and Walky needs to make a flippant comment about everything. Amazigirl’s reaction will nail the realisation. Which is when the actual perception happens. Right now it’s not all that much more than something thrown out that others would have considered weird or impolite to voice, nothing of which would hold back Walky.
Remember when he figured out Ethan was secretly gay and fake dating Joyce through noticing his body language around her? He’s spent a lot of time around Amber lately and Amazi-Girl’s behaviour must be very different, like a whole different person’s.
I thought everyone who KNEW, knew about the “Jekyll & Hyde” syndrome.
Is Walky a bit slow on the uptake, or has he just not bee that close to the sitch until now?
Nope, only person who knows (or is closest to knowing, that we know of) about the DID is Danny. Other characters have gotten bits and pieces, but haven’t put it all together yet.
He’s gotten more clues than that – Amber mentioned during the Faz sequence that she thought she was out doing things at night. Danny’s surprise and confusion there showed that he still hadn’t gotten it then.
There was also a comment a little after the strip you linked about sharing a 5’2″ meat puppet.
Danny had the most pieces, but Danny also had the problem that while they were together, the alters were much closer together. The biggest clues he’s gotten conflict with what he knew while they were dating.
He’s never gotten anything as extreme as one not remembering what he’d done with the other. I don’t think he’s actually seen AG since they stopped sharing memories.
Even Ethan and Mike don’t know, or Dorothy, it’s just Danny and Walky right now, though it wasn’t always as severe a divide with Danny, whereas I think sometimes it seems to be more of a hard split.
If Danny understood what was going on it would worry him and we’d see him worry about if he should tell someone. As nothing like that has happened I don’t think he’s got any idea of what’s going on. He has a tendency to be completely oblivious and not connect clues that are right in front of him.
I say he’d worry about telling someone since they’re not exactly on the best terms right now but he’d want her to be safe and get help. But he doesn’t even bring it up to her best friend or roommate.
Compartmentalization isn’t the same as DID an its not uncommon for people to have different titles for different personas they have to play (ex. “Dr. Johnson” vs “Jennifer” vs “Jenny” vs “Mom” can all be different roles Jennifer Johnson plays)
I know a few businesswomen who use their maiden name professionally and will say “Some days I just need a break and to be Mrs Jane Smith instead of Jane Doe” to communicate they have days they need to step out of the corporate powerhouse role and just be a wife and mom. (This is their specific experience not all women) They dress differently and even act a bit different but they’re the same person.
So it really seemed for awhile like Amazigirl was just compartmentalizing and honestly I think for a long time that’s all it was because amazigirl and amber had the same knowledge and would make overlapping remarks. At first it was Amber playin a role that helped her process (so she thought)
As its gone on they’ve split off more and more.
Now this has gotten extreme and the two have split off to the point that amazigirl literally has none of amber’s memories for, I’d guess, at least a few weeks and its REALLY likely Amber will have no idea Amazigirl was out once this is over.
Not the first. We’ve known for awhile that Amber wasn’t sharing AG’s memories and it was at least strongly hinted that AG didn’t share Amber’s. As far as we can tell, that started after the Ryan stabbing incident. Amber started waking up with bruises and being surprised by news reports about AG. She even commented to Danny that she thought she’d been doing things at night.
Before that, but after the break up we saw scenes with the two of them directly talking to each other, which hadn’t happened before. Many read that as an indication that the split was progressing.
I definitely agree that it’s been more and more serious of a split as time went on, but I think even in the beginning it was more than just normal compartmentalization. Things like AG taking over when faced with a trigger like Sal are apparently a fairly common thing for a protective alter.
The strip where Amber reveals herself as Amazi-Girl to Walky on the roof does not have Amazi-Girl tagged. So they’re total strangers. Amber was only wearing AG’s outfit when having the initial Garbage Roof conversation. Explains why she’s so behind and barely recognizes him.
Yeah, the first time they met on Garbage Roof, she was Amazi-Girl. But the second time, she was Amber wearing the AG costume, looking for some kittens to kick (to smear AG’s reputation).
So Danny fell in love with AG and had to learn about Amber, while Walky fell in love with Amber is now going to have to learn about AG.
I knew there would be a gap but as far as AG knows, Walky’s still with Dorothy… Wow, that must be quite the shock, learning your other identity got it going with Walky…
Yeah, I doubt Walky picked up on that and I wouldn’t have thought of it, but it fits. That breakup was well after Amber and AG stopped talking and AG hasn’t been around to pick up any gossip from the floor.
I mean… how much further can one lean into it? We’ve leaned as far as completely independent and compartmentalized memories, and I’m not sure how much further one can lean.
I used to have a friend who had 6 people in his head, and could have internal conversations between them. If you really wanted to know how much further we could go.
Amber/Amazi-Girl’s DID is a core part of who she is and what she has to deal with. If a character is/has/deals with [x], and the comic is more or less realistic, at some point there’s going to be some content about [x].
I am reminded of Jeph Jacques’s comments to the effect that every time someone complains about his comic having “too much gay stuff” in it, he makes it gayer.
Hey I know the science behind things like dissociative identity disorder is vague at best and its debated whether it exists at all, but does anyone know if there is any real life basis for something like this happening?
I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall Cerberus putting out more than a few comments back in the day describing her own experiences with alters and DID, oftentimes predicting how things would progress with Amber and Amazi-Girl’s storyline as a result.
Oh WOW, this is uncanny. I just opened up about my roommates being a multiple system in a different comment… and then I saw this. They actually sometimes go by the moniker Flowers online so they can be more anonymous and freely talk about their experiences.
Do you remember what was going on in the comic when this happened? I try to read all the discussions about DID here, but I must have missed this one. As far as I know my roommates haven’t ever read DOA, much less commented here. But at the same time… this coincidence is absolutely wild OMG.
(It’s okay if you don’t remember anything, I can ask them later when it’s not 5 am for us haha.)
Never mind, accidentally found it! That definitely isn’t any of my
roommates talking (the Flowers account here used ‘singleton’ and ‘collective’, while the lingo my roommates and I know are singlet and system).
Pretty fun coincidence either way, though I feel awful they felt like they had to leave/stop commenting after getting the whole ~DID isn’t real~ bullshit. I’m not at all surprised, but it’s still sad. ;~;
I had an ex-boyfriend who was supposedly DID. He did act like this, I definitely said/did things with one personality that the other would not remember at all, or even remember differently.
It was weird and awkward and extremely creepy and in retrospect, I’ve never been 100% positive it wasn’t all an incredibly convoluted lie by a psychopath…. But if it wasn’t a lie, then it worked like this.
At the time, I was in a psych class at university, and I couldn’t find any current articles that backed up that DID even exists and isn’t some weird induced delusions by desperate psychologists on impressionable patients. But well… He was my boyfriend. And there was some really, really weird shit that went on with him.
Keep in mind that sometimes, scientists are thorough to the point of being stupid, like the push for ages to write-off any demonstrable displays of emotion from animals as anthropomorphizing them. Some had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledging that animals feel things, despite it being ridiculously apparent.
There’s also a problem that a lot of this stuff is difficult to observe or get funding and researchers to properly study. It’s bad enough getting proper data about phenomena we can see and touch, sometimes, so it’s so much more difficult with mental illnesses/disorders and other such intangibles.
His personalities also did creepy things like modify the traits on other personalities so they’d be better lovers, or construct perfect memory palaces so that he had an eidetic memory… And apparently he was like, scoring 100% on his University courses, and had already gotten a Master’s degree by 18 and was working on his second (which he was then kicked out of for creating a virus that was too deadly, so he started a different one).
Once I got out of the destructive, toxic relationship we’d built, I realized that a lot of the things he’d said sounded a little too incredible. And one of the first things he’d told me was just how highly he scored in all the Cluster A personality disorders, some of which include chronic lying to always be the victim, and narcissism.
So in retrospect, there is a very real chance he was just lying based on how he thought DID should work. Or he was telling the truth and he was a huge grab bag of red flags anyways. I quite honestly don’t know.
But yeah, you are right, scientists can be idiots too. I try to keep an open mind on DID. What the research was saying (at the time) didn’t line up with what I was seeing at all. Either the research was wrong, or my ex was a lying scumbag. And I’m reasonably sure he was a scumbag, I’m just not sure if he was lying too.
So this is not directly related to your ex, but is related to the fact that intelligence (whatever that is) is not incompatible with serious mental health issues.
I once had an apartment-mate who was probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. As in, he understood nonlinear physics intuitively. He also believed that librarians were putting poison dust on the copy machines and Navy nurses were drawing blood samples from him at night. Years later I read the book “A Beautiful Mind” and I was like, I totally know this guy.
But he was so smart that when he was describing all the paranoid theories he had, it all meshed and ticked like a clock. Most of me would be thinking, “this is nuts,” but damn if some small part of me wasn’t thinking “Holy shit!”
Thanks! It was an unfortunately messy, toxic relationship that took me way too long to break out of, but it was also a long time ago, and I’m in a much better one now, so it’s all good. 🙂
If you had trouble finding information in psych class then, your texts weren’t covering DID well. Here’s a link to over1,000 articles on DID. Also, I knew I missed time, that people were constantly telling me “I” did things or said things I had no memory of, and heard internal voices, before I ever entered therapy. Also, I am an alter, so hope this answers your question. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/?term=Dissociative+Identity+disorder+
It was also around 15 years ago and Google was still only useful at searching a portion of the internet. Plus, most documents weren’t on the internet, or hidden behind paywalls that I was way too cheap to get behind as a first year student.
My ex was a huge grab bag of red flags, with or without the DID kicking around, which is a basis for a lot of the uncertainty I have. He could have been perfectly honest about all of the DID stuff. Or he could have been a chronic liar and everything still would have made sense. I know he didn’t tell his next girlfriend about the DID stuff. Or believe me about some of the stuff his personalities had done.
Neat that there’s better research on it now though! Thanks for the links, I might go through them if I feel like poking at an old scar.
Though the science is vague, my psychology professor said “It’s real for them, and treatment works best when you treat it not as if the patient is lying but with consideration of their experiences.”
I had a friend who was later diagnosed as bipolar schizo-affective, but she did have multiple personalities, and I even saw her “switch” between a few a few times. We talked about it, and both think that her brain kind of sectioned off “This is manic-you” and “this is depressed you” and “this is having a hallucination and paranoid you” (that was always the most scary, because she didn’t trust us to help her, and it broke my heart every time).
I’m really worried about Amber and kind of… concerned as to where this story line is going and how Willis handles it. Even teasing the DID thing kind of concerns me, as people take media to be the truth sometimes, and while everyone’s experiences will differ, people will walk away from this story seeing Amber’s story as THE story of DID. Which, so far I don’t think has been a problem – but it concerns me none the less.
Amber is *the* story of DID and there are no superheros in real life, so clearly there is no DID.
Seriously though, I’d be freaking out that I’d get this wrong if I were Willis.
It makes sense with what we know about how associative memory works. I think that it might be arguable that repressed memories could be considered to be small alters based on how the person was at that exact moment in time?
Some accounts I’ve heard of some types of depression also sound like the person is partially disassociating with themselves, forming their thoughts into two separate pathways where one side makes solid decisions but doesn’t pass on the motivation to carry them out, while the side that’s in control is unmotivated to act and has learned to expect and tolerate failure due to that lack of motivation.
DID is real. It is rare and the people who suffer from it have uniformly been subjected to horrific conditions, usually as a young child. It is no laughing matter and joking about it’s reality does no-one a service. The depiction of DID in the comic is not necessarily realistic, but that does not mean individuals with DID won’t see aspects that remind them of their own experiences. In my opinion, as a non-expert who does not suffer from dissociation, is that the sudden onset of the condition, in an adult, with no previous history or continuing severe trauma, is highly unlikely. I attribute this, in Amber, to Willis’s evolving concept of the relationship between Amazigirl and Amber. I am willing to accept far more egregious violations of reality as I understand it than this for the sake of a good story. And Willis writes a good story.
You seem to be under the impression that the Amazi-Girl/Amber split happened recently. It did not. Amber/Amazi-Girl have talked about the fact that Amazi-Girl was born from the night of the robbery. At the time of the robbery, she was not an adult, we don’t know if there was any less-obvious history before that, and she had both acute and chronic trauma (the robbery itself and an abusive father, respectively).
As of the start of the school year when we meet them, Amber and Amazi-Girl were largely cooperative, each with their assigned role, communicating and sharing memories. Over the course of the comic, particularly since re-meeting Sal and everything that went down with Danny, their relationship has become strained and even antagonistic. They have stopped communicating. This is a Bad Thing(tm). That is what is happening here: Amazi-Girl/Amber are not ‘suddenly’ DID, this is a progression of the failing relationship between the alters. We’d already seen Amazi-Girl failing to share memories with Amber, now here we see the reverse.
Amber was 13 during the robbery. Too old for the formation of DID. Currently the cutoff is agreed to be 9 years old at the maximum. Also, without therapy that level of communication we saw at first is pretty much unheard of.
Do you have any articles on that age limit? Personally I suspect they’re underestimating the sheer power of human self-destructivness, but I haven’t read any details on where that assertion came from.
It can be self-destructive and a necessary survival skill at the same time? But I guess I was thinking of the people who claim to have developed it intentionally without any trauma. Sorry I lumped those in with the necessary-but-late cases.
It’s not self destructive, it’s self defense to develop DID. It’s a way to survive. Also, my therapist who has worked with DID patients also says 9 is the cut off age.
“agreed to be” by whom? the number you cite does not match the experiences of real life people I have met, who’s first experiences with DID were in their adulthood.
Agreed to by professionals and researchers. Like my therapist who has worked with DID patients for decades. I have DID myself. It’s generally diagnosed in adulthood, but that doesn’t mean that that’s when it develops. I am an alter and I can distinctly recall having DID as a child.
Yay, a link!
Interesting that the quote says *usually* before the age of nine -so what if it just gets really unlikely after that, but not actually impossible? Unfortunately the link for the quote is a 404 now. Hrm.
Neat.
There’s still a lot of phrases like “some people argue” and “generally” and “likely”, though, so I’m not convinced it’s straight-up impossible.
Then again, last I heard pretty much every aspect of dissociative disorders needs more research, and who effing knows when we’ll actually get it :/ but in the meantime I prefer to err on the side of believing people are telling the truth about their experiences.
I would never disbelieve a person’s account of their experiences either, not without concrete proof anyway, but as this is fiction it becomes problematic because people often don’t differentiate between fiction and reality very well when it comes to things they don’t know much about. It’s why I often get asked by people if anyone in our system is a cannibal ever since Split came out.
Okay, but the claims you made above sounded to me like you didn’t believe anyone could ever have those experiences, and iirc there are comments elsewhere on the page about people’s experiences contradicting your claims.
Your point stands about the comic – the way Amber’s DID was retconned in does make for some awkwardness, and could give the impression that it’s common to develop that way.
Mostly I’ve been annoyed about people on Reddit being overzealous about this and was hoping for some convincing evidence one way or another. Thanks for the links though.
And note to self, never ever watch Split. 😛 I try to avoid Hollywood depictions of mental health stuff anyways.
If it came across that way, it wasn’t my intention. I was trying to say that it’s not the norm for DID specifically, but can be for another form of multiplicity like OSDD-1. Yeah, research is not concrete yet because it’s underfunded. Yeah, Hollywood is not great about mental illness in general.
Even assuming the current understanding leaves no room for error, the numbers are about the trauma that prevents a single solid identity from integrating in childhood and not about the actual experience of multiplicity. It’s actually pretty standard for someone with DID not to show symptoms until adulthood.
A very tsod compliant interpretation would be that the trauma of growing up in an abusive household prevented Amber from integrating a single coherent personality, Amazigirl was sectioned off as an EP at 13, and only in college did Amazigirl develop into an ANP in response to circumstance and stress. Neither party can deal with that situation and they cope by Dissociating Harder, and because their situation is what it is nobody — possibly including Amber — really notices the degree to which Something Is Up, until now. Ergo, DID “showed up” in adulthood in response to stress, with multiplish experiences that can maybe be tracked back a few months or years, but is in the long term technically a result of early childhood trauma.
DID is often very covert and since most people don’t know what to look for, they miss the signs until adulthood or adolescence. I’ve been part of a DID system since we were physically 3 years old.
The bit about internal communication being impossible without therapy is just wildly misinformed lmao, there’s a whole ass diagnosis for disordered multiplicity without amnesia (OSDD1-b) and it’s been suggested that the criteria for DID need a broader definition of amnesia specifically because too many people have that kind of internal communication.
I didn’t say impossible and OSDD is a separate Dissociative disorder for a reason. There are generally Dissociative barriers between alters. I’ve heard this from hundreds of people with DID in support groups. I’ve lived it myself as an alter. I’ve also heard the same from every professional I’ve ever met about every client they’ve worked with. It’s not everyone, but it is the majority. It’s called a disorder for a reason, because it negatively impacts functioning. Also, amnesia is a criteria for diagnosis.
Sorry, “unheard of.” Amnesia is a criterion for diagnosis! It’s currently under scrutiny because the strictness with which some professionals define it has caused a lot of people who would otherwise be diagnosed with DID to get shoveled into OSDD1. DID having a smaller population than “Like DID But Not” is a weird look.
The existence of two alters does necessitate a dissociative barrier between said alters by the definitions of the lit you are referring to — the existence of alters is itself considered dissociation. Internal communication does not imply the absence of dissociative barriers. Internal communication is in fact a symptom sometimes used to recognize undiagnosed DID. It’s nowhere near unheard of for alters to be able to communicate before therapy in DID, and especially not in OSDD1, which is the diagnosis that would have been applicable to Amber and Amazigirl before their amnesia developed to this point. Because while there is a reason OSDD1 is a separate diagnosis from DID, the two do interrelate very heavily.
Also i… didn’t say it wasn’t a disorder. I said it was a disorder. Because it negatively impacts functioning. I grouped it with OSDD1 specifically as a disorder. ???
I said almost unheard of and there is a large spectrum of multiplicity that isn’t covered by DID simply because it isn’t disordered at this point. If a person has great internal communication and a great relationship with their system mates and are able to be coconscious etc. Then while multiple, they aren’t disordered and thus, don’t meet the criteria for DID, even if they might have in the past. When talking DID specifically, as in those diagnosed, internal communication is often the most difficult thing to attain and is one of the most asked questions on any DID support site or forum.
Hit me tomorrow when I’m not on my phone getting in arguments about my disorders to avoid sleeping and I’ll send some links. I have DID and spent a goodly while denying it and avoiding treatment in large part because I was misinformed about how it works by people with a really rigid, poor understanding of psych they’d heard or read about in pieces. Thus the interest.
Not that being diagnosed with DID has much bearing on the current understanding of structural dissociation or the diagnostic criteria, or my understanding thereof. Rereading, not actually sure how that qualifies me to say anything I said or why you asked.
FWIW, in places I’ve hung out in it hasn’t been almost-unheard-of iirc, but that could be because they were all mixed DID/OSDD/etc groups 🙂
Now that i think about it, I tend to think in terms of the more general dissociative spectrum even when people are saying DID, because it’s hard to tell when they actually mean “DID and related disorders” vs actually specifically just DID. It’s such a convenient acronym even I tend to slip into using it instead of spelling out a more inclusive phrase. Doesn’t help that OSDD only recently got its own subreddit.
I asked because I was curious what your experience was in regards to DID, basically I wanted to know where your view point comes from. I’m also diagnosed with DID and spend an inordinate amount of time reading about it because I advocate and provide education on DID and our experiences with DID for a living. I’m telling you this to explain my views.
Inahc, yeah that makes sense. Honestly, the people I’ve talked to with OSDD-1 have described living a different experience than people with DID and everyone I’ve talked to has also said that they like that the two are separate disorders because they generally need different things out of therapy than people with DID.
I don’t know what the hell I was on last night but here’s some links, without going down the rabbit hole that is trying to find Every Relevant Article Out There.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7247074_A_New_Model_of_Dissociative_Identity_Disorder : The majority of people with DID report hearing voices; some people hear voices but rationalize them as Normal Talking To Myself Experiences. Many people with DID are aware of other alters and what they do, and many professionals mistakenly use this to rule out a diagnosis of DID. Proposed diagnostic criteria include internal conversation and argument, cocon, and awareness of other alters’ actions. Current amnesia criterion criticized for being too vague to facilitate detection of all reported forms of amnesia.
Two alters being aware of one another’s actions, semi-cooperative, and intermittently coconscious is not a “pretty much unheard of” level of internal communication for an undiagnosed system, even if it’s pretty much unheard of in your support groups. Amnesia and lack of communication are not necessarily unchanging constants pre-diagnosis. Amber and Amazigirl are very weird and dramatic in the way they handle their multiplicity, but aren’t wildly unusual in the way they seem to experience it.
That said, I was unnecessarily bitter/aggressive last night and I have no idea why I latched onto a totally unquantifiable statement like “pretty much unheard of” when that’s…not even the part of your comment I took issue with. Sorry.
Egg,
Thank you for sharing these sources. I will certainly read over them. To be honest, I’ve never heard of a system with communication and cooperation before therapy that met the criteria for DID before, which is why I found it odd in this story. I’ve heard lots about hearing internal voices, and experienced it myself, but hearing them has not meant being able to talk to them in my experience or when talking to others. I’ve also never heard of someone with DID starting out functional and then degrading in to nonfunctional all while an adult. I’ve always heard of people staring out disordered and thus seeking help, starting out unable to communicate and needing to learn how. I am always happy to learn more. Thank you, I accept and appreciate your apology.
Egg,
I read through all of your links and while I saw plenty of discussion about being aware of alters and hearing them speak, I saw nothing about being able to actually converse with them. I do certainly agree that DID should be extended as a diagnosis, but OSDD also needs to still exist for those whose experiences are different and require different treatment. Overall, those articles were all from the early 2000’s except one and they didn’t acknowledge the most current addition of the DSM.
I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes here, so ignore me if you want haha. And if that’s how your system works I’m definitely not trying to say your experiences are wrong! But… that doesn’t match up with my roommates’ experiences with multiplicity either?
Maybe they’re just unusually healthy and functional, I dunno, but they didn’t need therapy to learn how to communicate. They needed therapy for other issues, but not their multiplicity inherently. And two of the headmates split from each other more around 11-12 (verified by outside accounts by people who knew them at the time, like their dad), so probably not as young as 9.
I don’t want to discredit your experience though, and I’m really happy if therapy helped you! (And I promise I really do mean that and don’t intend it to sound condescending. I’m a little out of practice with talking to people online, so I hope my intent is coming across right haha.)
…so I’ve never connected this to my main online identity out of fear of judgment, but I’m just an unknown lurker here so I don’t really have a reputation to ~ruin~ LOL. And… even if I did, this is important to talk about and relevant to the comic, so… here goes? (This’ll probably be long, so I completely understand if you don’t want to read it. No hard feelings LOL)
My ‘roommate’ is actually seven distinct people. They’re a multiple system[1].
Two of them are splits of each other/one ‘original’ person because of childhood trauma[2], much like the case here. The other five are not and only popped up in the last ten to fifteen years (the body is thirty). They all have different personalities, mannerisms, and preferences down to favorite foods and how often they want us to do chores. In every possible way aside from physically having separate bodies, they are different people. They share memory perfectly[3] so most of the day-to-day issues just boil down to who gets to choose the clothes for the day haha. If everyone in the system gets along, multiplicity can be surprisingly mundane once you get used to it[4].
So… yeah, I totally know of this happening IRL! I’ve been living with them in the past ten years as they worked this all out, so if you have any questions I don’t mind elaborating. (With some details omitted to preserve their privacy, of course! They don’t mind me sharing as long as they’re all anonymous, but… that has limits haha.) I definitely don’t want to make myself out to be a medical professional, I’m not… but I AM someone who’s lived with it and tried hard to learn the ins and outs for people I care about. And I understand how odd this all sounds from the outside, I really do. I was there a decade ago. But… to me, it’s definitely a real phenomenon.
– – –
Some footnotes!
1. I hesitate to use the term DID, because dissociative identity disorder isn’t a term my roommates are comfortable with. Some of them have dissociated due to other unrelated mental health issues, and it feels completely different from switching between each other, and some of the way psychologists have talked about the literature surrounded DID is… alienating to them, to say the least. Some systems are completely okay with calling it DID, though (or multiple personality disorder, which is what it was previously diagnosed as). My roommates just prefer the less pathologized terms ‘multiple system’ or ‘plural’.
2. Just to clarify, not every system conceptualizes it at working that way. I’ve seen more than one system reject the idea of there being an original singular identity. My roommates didn’t think any of them worked that way either until two of them did some digging and remembered the trauma that may have caused their differences to strengthen. The other five are very clearly unrelated, though. Every system is different!
3. Again, YMMV. Not every system has the stereotypical blackouts, but from what I know my roommates are fairly rare in the amount of memory they share. There’s actually a diagnostic in the DSM, DDNOS, that is intended to account for cases of DID that don’t fit all the supposedly standard symptoms, like memory loss.
4. Emphasis on ‘can’! I’m not trying to minimize the issues systems who don’t share memory have, I’ve heard a bit about how scary it can be from other systems so I definitely don’t want to make being diagnosed with plurality sound like it’s effortlessly easy for everyone. It’s not! Some systems legitimately struggle with making it work, and I believe that should be recognized in any discussion about multiplicity/DID. I won’t try to speak for them.
1. If the majority of memory is shared, how are different personalities identified? How is it different from a single individual that just has shifts in personality, rather than multiple distinct personalities?
1. This is a great question! I’m actually going to give it some thought and come back here later to answer it more thoroughly, hope that’s okay?
2. Oh haha, no, I’m a physically separate singlet (non-system)! I do have my own personal experiences with multiplicity but I am such a weird fringe case that I wasn’t going to bother discussing it here. My roommates’ system is much more typical of The Multiple Experience™️. (Though they don’t 100% fit the standard DID narrative either so please don’t think I’m trying to speak for every kind of system here! I think that, like with all mental health disorders/oddities, there’s a spectrum of experiences.)
Ah yeah, thank you for correcting it! I realized that some time after posting this but wasn’t sure if it was worth leaving another whole comment for it LOL
My roommates and I don’t keep up with DID-specific literature as much as some systems since they’re pretty healthy as a group and don’t need any multiplicity-related treatment as they are now, so I’d forgotten this change.
We wholeheartedly reject the idea of us being a broken Identity, we look at it as a case of several identities developing separate from each other due to dissociation.
I had this talk with Cerberus a few years ago. Here, in Eastern Europe, they still teach it as “well, it might exist, but the US has suspiciously high rates compared to Europe, so let’s take a careful look every time before diagnosis”.
Husband definitely has DID that has gotten more fractured with time. Unsure whether it predated his TBI or was caused by it, due to the fact the TBI was not initially apparent and he needed a light switch moment to trigger the worst of it. What doesn’t help? His memory past a decade is completely gone, so sorting out chicken and egg of personalities isn’t as much a priority as getting them to share at any given moment so he can have a cohesive life history.
Amber talking to Danny about her and Amazi-Girl “sharing a meat vehicle” despite being separate, and her not remembering Amazi-Girl’s nightly exploits (both linked below) were in real-time two years and four months, and one year and nine months ago, respectively.
To be honest, I don’t think Danny is clued in, nor do I think that’s a satisfactory way to say “Amber has told him”. It’s easy to interpret what she said as metaphor, and Amber is given to hyperbolic dramatization often enough that it’s reasonable for untrained people to completely whiff on the diagnosis.
Yeah but that could easily be read as just an internal conflict, like “oh man, drunk me sure does love fast food but normal me can’t stand it”, like a joke.
No, I mean I get it, I’m just saying that up until now, a lot of characters (and readers) have treated Amazi-Girl like it’s just an act Amber does, a persona that she treats like another person, the way Peter Parker changes his attitude when he goes out as Spider-Man (even Danny’s dialogue in that strip can be read as someone going “You’re not two people you’re just affecting a personality to pass your problems to”, even though that’s not the correct reading and he is someone who actually gets it). This is the first time it’s been made very explicit which is what has a lot of people in this comment thread surprised.
Well, Unnamed Protagonist actually interacted with Tyler, thought he was there in the room with him while a bunch of other people were present, and had fistfights with him that were actually just punching himself in the face (for certain values of “himself”). Amber/Amazi-girl aren’t like that.
It’s not a “full blown” Tyler Durden situation unless you blow up at least three tall buildings (which lots of financial companies in them) and mention “ground zero” in the prologue (of the movie).
Of course for a full blown Tyler Durden situation you need to release the movie at least one year before the actual event…
And now back to our regular realistic superhero-on-college setting!
Welp this is just as awkward as I expected it to be. I wonder how many weeks of events he’s going to haft to catch her up on- Wait does she even know about the Amber stabbing a rapist incident?
The person I know best with DID hates and despises Split with a furious passion. Don’t use “Split” (or, even moreso, “Psycho”) as your examples for psychological truth about anything.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single system approve of it. I usually don’t judge media too harshly before experiencing it myself, but I don’t ever intend to see it myself because its treatment of DID is just… oof.
This type of extreme misinformation pains me so much – this is a group of people with a brain oddity so rare, I’ve barely seen any activism, even among mental health advocates. But sensationalized fiction has the general public convinced they’re all murderers, and that’s not even an exaggeration. :C
Having not seen split, do you know what’s supposed to be so horrifically inaccurate and offensive about it? I was thinking of seeing it, because I loved Unbreakable back in the day, but maybe I wont after all.
As films that attempt to portray DID go it Could Be Worse, it honestly gets more right than I expect out of anything but unenjoyable psych drama. Although iirc 27 is referred to as an “unheard of” number of alters, which,, lol
But it’s another in a long line of films that portray multiple systems as dangerous, and specifically portray DID systems w/ blackout amnesia as dangerous, and use transfem alters as shorthand for “unhinged,” and anyone who’s opened up to someone about their experience, often implicitly if not explicitly telling them about early childhood trauma in the process, and got a response along the lines of “omg do you have a violent alter?? But how would you KNOW” is about ready to strangle every writer who contributes to our entire presence in mass media being “guy in horror movie does murders”
Well, it could be worse.
If Walky and Amber had started sleeping together, imagine AG waking up in bed with Walky? While still under the impression that he was dating Dorothy? AWKWARD.
That was something I’d been worried about when they were first getting together.
Led to a bunch of arguments about whether Amber had a responsibility to tell him what he was getting into.
Seems like it. AG also seems to genuinely like Dorothy. Probably why she seems so pissed off at Amber in panel 5–she doesn’t know if Amber made out with Dorothy’s still-boyfriend, if Amber even broke them up, or what.
Also in breaking news, Walky is an irresponsible man-child, Joyce has been indoctrinated in a bad type of Christianity, Billie has an alcohol problem, and I think Carla might be trans.
Ruth has problems with depression. Becky is gay, as is Marcie. Sarah swings a mean baseball bat and isn’t afraid to use it. Leslie has questionable tastes in women. Sal is cool, but she and her motorcycle are not as cute as Dina and her awesome dino-bed. Ethan likes transformers. Blaine and Toedad scrape the bottom of the parental barrel.Mike is an epic jerk and will be anything you don’t want him to be. With your mother. For a nickel.
Dorothy is way over-committed, timewise. Jason is probably in violation of his visa terms. Raidah is condescending to people who are, in her own words, “mentally-challenged,” and her friend Char uses the r-word.
I was going to point this out but then forgot, The other thing we all forgot is that Ethan is gay, gay, gay. And the other other thing we forgot is that Jocelyne is known to her family as Joshua.
I know. AG’s been gone from the comic for so long, I thought maybe Amber facing her fears responsibly might actually have caused some healing, and maybe the AG alter had gone away.
Didn’t Amber turn into Amazigirl right after finding out he and Sal are siblings? She was pushing the feelings down into amazigirl but like does Amazigirl not remember Walky and those details
“Okay. Which one of you shifty motherfuckers is going to be the first to try and deny her DID now? Like, the only way this could get more canon is if Amber/AG tattooed “I am a person with DID” on her forehead. C’mon, bring it.”
Seems at times like a few people still didn’t get the memo.
Oh, there’s a mental break between Amber and Amazi-Girl! Honestly, given how long this comic has been going on, I can’t exactly remember if that’s always been a thing or if that’s a new development.
It kinda became a hard split over Sal. AG had been all “we hates Baggansess forever”, but then she met her, and totally flipped, and was planning their super-hero wedding. Amber was all nope!, so they stopped talking. Then, to make it worse, Scarface made his move on Dorothy, and Amber cut a bongo. Well, someone did. We’re not sure. Their not sure.
Anyhoo, that’s when they stopped knowing what the other was doing.
Amber said “I am not Amazi-Girl” when she disarmed Ryan, and the tags for that encounter don’t list Amazi-Girl.
Honestly, the way I’ve read it, I think Amazi-Girl started off as a character Amber put on at will, but has since taken on a life of its own and broke out of voluntary control.
I didn’t say it was AG. My theory is there is a third personality involved. I call her the Red Rage. It’s the one that stabbed Sal, and beat Blane to a pulp.
It’s a possibility, but there’s no direct evidence for it. I’d disagree that they’re not sure. Amber has blamed herself for both rage incidents. I don’t think Amazi-Girl has commented on the Ryan stabbing.
It pretty clearly hasn’t been. It’s been a progression.
In retrospect they’ve always been different since the beginning of the comic, probably dating to the robbery, but originally they were quite integrated – sharing memories, trading places as needed. Easy at that stage to read as just an affectation.
After her breakup with Danny things got more tense and while they still shared memories we also saw them explicitly talking and negotiating with each other.
It was the Ryan stabbing incident that seems to have severed the connection completely. Amber felt betrayed by AG not keeping her from turning into a rage monster and disemboweling Ryan and tried to keep her from coming back out. We’ve never seen AG’s reaction to that directly, but we know she was active at night without Amber remembering.
I’m sticking with my theory that Amber is the false personality while Amazi-Girl is the base. Amber was created to protect herself from Blane by forcing down all of her feelings and identity in order to smooth things around. The “real” Amber will recover when Amazi-Girl absorbs the false persona.
Your psych class was wrong. There’s some DID people I know who are more comfortable knowing what alter was there first, and plenty who don’t care or don’t think it’s relevant. Regardless, all of them are real.
From my understanding, unless it’s exclusively trauma based, DID is more the naturally present facets of an individual’s personality are more pronounced and separate than those found in normal populations making the separate personalities.
That model may work for some*, but for most of the plurals I know (as well as for myself), there’s no real neurotypical “end-point”. It’s more just a matter of getting all the alters to communicate and work on the same team.
*Though I’ve seen it do a lot more harm than good overall even while it may work and help for some.
I’d say Amber is the base just by raw percentage of time, and all the functions performed like eating, dressing, going to class, and everything. Amazi-Girl is the once-in-a-while pressure valve.
They were also much less “different-persons” when Danny was dating AG. Walky wouldn’t have picked up nearly so quickly if AG was able to remember what he and Amber had done.
Personally I’m not surprised at all that Walky is the first to really figure this out, and quick too. I mean as we learned at the start of that It’s Walky arc when Walky was made leader of the team, Walky is actually very intelligent. People just assume he’s dumb because of the way he behaves and he just rolls with it.
I’m impressed by how little this is freaking out Walky. Maybe he’ll react more strongly after he’s had time to process it? Something tells me that Amazi-Girl is thinking something along the lines of: “Great, someone else I’m now responsible for! Why couldn’t she have stuck with Danny? At least I could share bodyguard duties with Sal!”
I think he’s the first person to get up to speed on this – Danny seemed vaguely aware a while back, but I don’t think he’d outright understood that Amber/ Amazigirl have DID.
Especially when I think that Amazi-Girl is crushing on Sal. This could lead to some interesting triangular (or, strictly speaking quadrangular ) conversations about relationships at some point.
I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with this for a while and I’m just going to come out and say it: DID does not work this way and this is a pretty cheap dramatic device for a comic that usually treats subjects like this with more rigor. It’s like a plot arc from It’s Walky was teleported into the future.
Willis, it’s about time you sorted out the AG + Amber strips, put them into a singular collection and offered it up as a college textbook on Human Psychology. I’m learning more about DID just reading these strips over the past few years than in two semesters of semi-dedicater study.
Well if Moon Knight has taught me anything then its not actually DID but the Moon God has decided to inject other spirits into Amber to allow for a more complete annd efficient worshiper… or Amber has some other form of mental instability. Moon Knight writers go back and forth.
Has else anyone seen Red vs Blue, I’m asking because while I’m pretty sure Doc suffers from Hollywood DID, another “one” of the main characters seems to have something that seems like a slightly more accurate version of DID interacting with some scifi stuff and I’m wondering how realistic it is.
It presents as the pop culture idea of DID but turns out to be a weird kind of cyber-possession by a software entity that takes control of their electromechanically-articulated armours through a mind-machine interface. It’s… complicated. Please let me want to know more.
I think TemporaryObsessor was referring to a certain character whose various independent personality aspects received code-names after the fashion of the Greek alphabet.
(Trying to avoid spoilers here for anyone who hasn’t seen it.)
FWIW, I think it’s more of a Jungian presentation of a single psyche with each trait taking on an independent manifestation than real separate ‘selves’ but there is a lot of IMO in that.
To be honest, I’ve seen all of RvB and I’m still a little confused about who you’re trying to refer to because of the level of vagueness here. I know who King Daniel is talking about, if that’s the same one you’re referring to, but I wouldn’t call that DID, since they are all active at the same time and separated from each other and didn’t really show those symptoms when reunited.
Its good to know about them not acting right when reunited.
I knew about the first two but I don’t know if that’s a genuine sign its something else or just the side effect of giving them options which are impossible for us mere humans
Huh… so she really has done the full split personality thing. Before, it seemed like she just referred to the 2 different people so she could not feel guilty. But “each one” seemed to know what the other was doing.
This is the first time I can recall that it seems completely split personality types.
So, I predict at some point we’re going to have a Superman III-style junkyard fight between Amber and Amazi-Girl. (Probably in a dream… but still possibly in a junkyard)
They were aware for quite awhile, but they haven’t shared memory since the Ryan stabbing. Amber’s commented about “thinking she’s been doing stuff at night” and been shown reacting in surprise to social media about Amazi-Girl. As well as saying she and AG aren’t talking.
This is the clearest sign, but it’s definitely been out there for awhile.
This comic has SO MUCH in it, I notice more every time I read it.
The first time through, it’s just the shocking revelation that there are at least some memories that AG and Amber don’t share, that the dissociation is severe enough that Amber and AG are thinking of themselves as separate people.
The second time, you see AG wasn’t even sure of Walky’s name. She wasn’t doing her cryptic AG thing, speaking in weirdly formal phrases, she actually didn’t remember him. Then she tells him to go because Dorothy will be worried, which means AG didn’t know Walky and Dorothy broke up, thinks they are still together.
Here’s where it gets interesting. When she hears that Amber and Walky have been together, she thinks Amber has been letting Walky cheat on Dorothy. That’s gotta be incredibly counter to AG’s moral code, and I don’t know how AG is likely to take out her anger on Amber.
Also, I think AG *doesn’t* know that Walky is Sal’s twin. I think she would be having a very different reaction to him if she did and I’m concerned about her learning that.
At this point she is literally dissociating so hard she doesn’t even remember the things she’s doing while literally running around looking for people to hurt. There’s a line.
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Nightmasks don’t work that way
…
anyway THIS will be a fun convo later, no doubt
They do now!
cnet.com/news/cosplayer-makes-spider-man-mask-complete-with-movable-mechanical-eyes/
And I mean…we gotta keep up with the times. Dumbing of Age is always set in the “present”, after all.
Well, they still need work on the “makes someone unrecognizable” aspect
Walky’s doin that ‘sclera’ thing…
creepin’ me out
Maybe it’s not a mask, maybe it’s painted on his face.
[slow clap] And the last horse crosses the line
I think Walky might be the FIRST horse, honestly. Still not sure if even Danny gets it. Dorothy probably doesn’t, same with Dina. Hunches, impressions, but nobody’s outright said it.
Kinda seems like a lot of commenters haven’t gotten it, either. ;P
No joke, there are people down thread still unsure if DID even exists XD
I, for one, did not realize the Amber/Amazi-Girl thing was a full-on split personality. Cases of that sort of behavior ‘Im familiar with, one personality is usually unaware of the other’s existence, or they “blackout” when the personalities swap, and Amber’s never done that as far as I recall.
The blackouts started happening before her big fight with Sal. IIRC, that was “Into the Red Zone”.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/02-this-is-the-way-that-we-love/douche/ This is the first instance I remember for sure thinking “oh boy they aren’t sharing memories huh.” If anyone else finds a sooner instance feel free to say so!
Yep, that’s when the alarm set off for me. It seemed like Amber hadn’t lost time like that too many times before, and things were progressing in a direction she wasn’t anticipating.
That’s the earliest. There was some speculation before, but that’s pretty clearly it. There were a couple earlier bits where they talked to each other rather than just knowing what was up. There were definitely hints they were moving farther apart, but that was the first clear lost time.
And the obvious trigger for that final split was the Ryan stabbing.
Was it, though? I mean, maybe the first lost time we’ve explicitly seen, but I’m guessing there was a reason she set up social media alerts for mentions of her alter ego.
She could have been watching for reports that would get them in trouble. Police or otherwise.
It’s definitely the first we’ve seen and she seemed disturbed by it, so I think it was meant to be the first. Maybe she was worried about it?
I wonder where the last explicitly sharing memories scene was?
Even DID is a bit of a spectrum and not sharing memories to this degree is at the extreme end. It looked like she was dissociating but this is the first real confirmation of HOW MUCH (yikes)
Huh, yer like a different reader, ain’tcha?
In real world DID, There are a lot of things that are very different from traditional Fiction DID. For one, the average number of personalities is 8, and some personalities may be co-aware while others aren’t. In this case, Amber might actually be aware of what Amazi-girl does while Amazi-girl is not aware of what Amber does. Given impressions to the opposite, I’m not arguing that as the way it works here, simply using an example.
One of the most interesting cases I ever read was a painter whose different personalities all got into painting because of the “dominant personality”. The styles, themes, tones, and subject matter were incredibly different.
I’m not even sure Ethan gets it.
Like, I get the impression that a lot of people humor Amber when she says that she and AG are different people. I think Walky is the first to actually be like “okay, we have disassociation personality disorder going on here”
Assuming that I correctly translated his walkyspeak above.
I mean, Walky’s the only one who’s been given hard evidence. No one else has heard AG fail to remember something that was emotionally significant to Amber and also just happened.
Amber told Danny at one point that she thought Amazi-Girl had been going out at night. That’s the closest I think we’ve come before.
This is more blatant.
…do you think it might be because Walky sees things on the face-value of it more than most people? That and how he sees things in the lens of fiction a lot, and the trope of split personalities being loosely used so often in media.. Just thinking, maybe his “everything is cartoons with you” thing might have actually given him some insight this time. Because of how the trope is used in fictional in a very unrealistic and fantastic settings and circumstances, lots of people would see it as fictional itself, like as for myself i knew nothing about DID in a real context before reading DoA and a lot of what Cerberus has written.. Lots of people would go “wait, come on. That’s not real, you must be confusing yourself” i imagine,, but Walky wouldn’t, even without any real life first, second, or third hand knowledge of DID. And.. yeah i guess it would make a lot of sense for Walky to notice that before most others.. Even if the same kind of mindset i think probably is what made him punch someone earlier today… Like, big thing he didn’t know was said. Sal barely reacted and basically understood and didn’t care much. Walky though may have thought that *something* needed to happen with him being a better brother and learning that, cuz is how fiction usually goes. Dramatic revelations need dramatic actions. Maybe he instinctively thought that then? Anyway
Nobody gets it so ar. Walky might be the first. A big part of what killed AG/Danny is that he didn’t get it so kept making mistakes. Amber talks about being different people but she never goes into it enough that others get she means literally and isn’t just being annoying by pretending her secret identity is a different person.
It’s also changed pretty rapidly, which likely threw Danny off. While they were together Amber and AG not only shared memory, but would switch personas pretty casually. He kind of was dating both of them, even if it was officially only AG.
But yes, Amber (and AG) often talk about them as separate people, as if whoever she’s talking to already understands the distinction, but without ever making it clear.
I think he’s the first horse too. Everyone else seems to think it’s just a bit of a quirk, not actually full on split personalities. I’m not even sure AMBER is willing to admit it yet. Not out loud.
Yeah, everyone thought she was doing Batman, but she’s in fact doing Moon Knight.
I love you so hard for this reference.
Same.
I’m just glad someone got it!
More got that one than my Credit Card Soldiers reference a few pages back.
Gosh, that takes me back.
I have read zero moon knight comics (something that i desperately need to change), but I get it!
Dina has cottoned on.
Actually, no, I think that strip’s use of personas implies she considers the amber/ag thing an affectation?
Actually, she seems to be taking it as a ‘standard neurotypical thing, that Amber, unlike most people, has the decency to actively delineate so that I can follow it’.
Yeah, that was the vibe I got too.
If you are the only horse in the race, being first still makes you last.
It’s not super helpful to “getting it” that Amber and Amazing-Girl have, up until just nowish, always remembered basically everything that the other does.
True. I forgot that until just now.
Precisely this. There have even been several instances where Amazi-girl will forget she’s Amazi-girl and will suddenly remember and slip back into character. Does anyone know if that’s normal for DID? Or is Amazi-girl just a persona that helps Amber cope that Amber knowingly goes into? Remember when Amazigirl stoke Billie’s recorder to get details of Danny’s interview? Amazi-girl was pleased and smiled that Danny said he was interested in Amber. If it was DID, would she care? What about when Amber wanted to date Danny, but Danny was pulling away, saying he was interested in AG. Amber then revealed that she was AG and said it’s ok. Why would Amber be encouraging Danny to date someone else, if AG was indeed a separate entity? Basically, Amber claims AG is a seperate person when it’s convenient and claims otherwise when it’s convenient.
It’s obvious isn’t it? She hasn’t come to accept the truth or in the Danny case she hoped she could share him with Amazi-Girl.
Amazi-Girl started as something that helped Amber cope but the divide grew larger and larger until they split. And then the split got worse as they started making their own decisions.
See that’s the frustrating thing, in real life DID develops in childhood, not in adulthood. So for AG to have started as an alter ego that Amber created on purpose is not consistent. The only way this would make sense is if Amber and AG split in childhood and Amber just thought she was making up AG, but generally people with DID don’t start out having full sharing of memory, it usually takes therapy to reach that stage. As a person with DID, I find all of it a bit backwards.
That’s kind of a fair assessment. Much more so than a lot of the criticism. I think it’s been mentioned somewhere that DID wasn’t the original intention, but people saw and commented on enough echoes of it in the early presentation that he took it more in that direction.
She does have the common childhood abuse background and it’s not at all clear when the split happened – though the trauma of the robbery would be a likely moment if we’re not assuming that’s too late.
I don’t think it’s necessarily that Amber created AG on purpose. Even in the beginning when the split wasn’t so clear and they swapped back and forth more easily there were moments when she switched in more traumatic fashion – mostly when confronted by Sal, but also the early incidents with Blaine.
Yeah, I think it was more of a later decision too. The robbery was definitely too late, according to all current findings the cut off point for developing DID is at maximum 9 years old. It’s just all a bit muddled tbh, even with the early instances it seemed like a deliberate compartmentalization than a dissociation or switch. Also, the starting with great communication thing bugs me because it’s not consistent with DID without therapy. Also, there’s the fact that the voice and hair change were things Amber did deliberately and are now supposed to be part of AG.
To be fair on that last point, we’ve seen the Amazi-Girl alter without either the voice change or the hairstyle change. Case in point: when she broke up with Danny.
And we’ve seen Amber do them deliberately without being Amazi-Girl. CASe in point: when she was posing as AG to discredit her and met up with Walky on the (not yet) Garbage Roof.
It’s just weird, why would AG take on those attributes just because Amber used them?
Maybe AG was willing to go with it because they were on mostly good terms with each other? Maybe she even liked having her own more unique look and sound?
It was AG as AG who first used then, not Amber pretending to be AG. At least the voice, we don’t see the first time she mussed up the hair to go out as AG.
While DID itself develops in childhood, new alters can develop after that time frame to my understanding. Especially in those who aren’t undergoing treatment this happens, again to my understanding, as a result to psychological trauma which no existing alter is able to cope with effectively. One could argue thereby that the beat down of Blaine incited the already in practice compartmentalization of the AG persona and activities to begin schisming into a new alter which fully split when “Ryan” met Amber over a knife.
I could easily see an equally valid argument for a series of psychotic or schizophrenic episodes interlaced with co-morbid PTSD, though the completely divided memory suggested here breaks that (if only Amber or only AG didn’t remember the actions of the other this would still work, but as we now have both confirmed to not remember the other’s actions that doesn’t fit the type of dissociation that would fit such a mix).
Not sure where you’re getting schizophrenia here? Amber hasn’t been hallucinating or having delusions.
If you look into the “multiples” community out there, you’ll find a lot of people living with something-like-DID that claim they don’t have a disorder so much as a natural variation of human existence. These cases are definitely milder than what you might think of with DID. You’ll see headmates co-fronting (where both are active at once), sharing memories, caring about each other, dating each other, having different sexualities in the same body… it’s pretty cool.
There’s also people who have full DID but hide it well enough that nobody (especially themselves) catches on until well into adulthood. I’ve seen quite a few “I just got diagnosed, WTF” posts on r/did
…and it also seems fairly common for one of the alters to stubbornly refuse to believe in it, even with plenty of evidence.
If you look at those examples (and the separate ones) in sequence it’s clear that the divide has been getting worse. It’s not just random or when it’s convenient, but a clear progression.
At some point (after the break up with Danny?) we had scenes with Amber and Amazi-Girl talking to each other like different people. After Ryan’s stabbing, we know they stopped sharing memories – Amber’s been surprised by bruises and by reports of AG’s activities. And now of course, AG not knowing about Amber and Walky.
How do you explain today’s strip if AG’s only a separate person when convenient?
As people have stated, like any mental symptom, it happens on a spectrum. Take a look at this site, it might explain it a bit better for you: https://www.merckmanuals.com/home/mental-health-disorders/dissociative-disorders/dissociative-identity-disorder Amber appears to be moving from “nonpessession” toward “posession” and creating a more defined split.
literally the first horse
No-one else yet seems to have clued in to quite the mental implications of Amber/AG yet, even those that have mostly see it as a way for amber to deal with stress, not the full on case of DiD it’s becoming very apparent it is
walky may have gotten a bit of a headastart due to finding out about the memory gap, but he also figured it out within exchanging 5 sentences with amazigirl. dats still fast XD
yeah this strip is a very “Oh….Oh shit” moment, reading her line I almost want to read it as her forcefully implying to Walky to not call her Amber but the implication of a full blown split personality is there.
Tag at the bottom sort of sells it too now look at it.
I, too, think he’s the first person to actually understand what’s going on. Well, other than Amber/Amazigirl themselves, of course.
Walky’s cluing into this faster than I thought he would.
Yeah, this is very perceptive for our dear Mister Walkerton.
He has a good read on Amber. I think it’s partially because he met Amber just as he was resolving to be better at considering other people’s problems and needs.
Things aren’t real until you have worded them, and Walky needs to make a flippant comment about everything. Amazigirl’s reaction will nail the realisation. Which is when the actual perception happens. Right now it’s not all that much more than something thrown out that others would have considered weird or impolite to voice, nothing of which would hold back Walky.
I think Walky is pretty perceptive when he pays attention to people. Much more so than Danny.
My exact words reading this strip, and the last panel, were “… that was quick.”
Remember when he figured out Ethan was secretly gay and fake dating Joyce through noticing his body language around her? He’s spent a lot of time around Amber lately and Amazi-Girl’s behaviour must be very different, like a whole different person’s.
Dumbing of Age Book 9: It’s “Walky”
*slow clap
Wow. I didn’t even see that title drop until you pointed it out. Bravo.
NICE
*applause, whistling*
Woohoo, finally! Let’s see how this goes.
I thought everyone who KNEW, knew about the “Jekyll & Hyde” syndrome.
Is Walky a bit slow on the uptake, or has he just not bee that close to the sitch until now?
No, I think he’s actually ahead of the curve.
Nope, only person who knows (or is closest to knowing, that we know of) about the DID is Danny. Other characters have gotten bits and pieces, but haven’t put it all together yet.
I think Sal knows as well. Or at least knows Amber refers to herself and Amazi-Girl as different people.
Lots of people know that, but making the leap to completely different alters isn’t that simple.
I think Danny has gotten a couple of clues, but nothing explicit. And he’s both not bright enough and a bit too self-obsessed to put things together.
I don’t think Sal knows. And Amber’s activities as Amber have probably made it less likely for her to consider the possibility.
There’s also this sequence. With that and the immediately-following strip, Danny almost certainly knows.
He’s gotten more clues than that – Amber mentioned during the Faz sequence that she thought she was out doing things at night. Danny’s surprise and confusion there showed that he still hadn’t gotten it then.
There was also a comment a little after the strip you linked about sharing a 5’2″ meat puppet.
Danny had the most pieces, but Danny also had the problem that while they were together, the alters were much closer together. The biggest clues he’s gotten conflict with what he knew while they were dating.
He’s never gotten anything as extreme as one not remembering what he’d done with the other. I don’t think he’s actually seen AG since they stopped sharing memories.
Honestly I think he’s the first person to not just get it, but get it almost immediately after interacting with both of them.
Even Ethan and Mike don’t know, or Dorothy, it’s just Danny and Walky right now, though it wasn’t always as severe a divide with Danny, whereas I think sometimes it seems to be more of a hard split.
I don’t think Danny has any clue really. He just thought she was playing superhero. It’s a big part of what killed their relationship.
Danny’s seen more of it since breaking up. I think he gets on some level that they’re different people now – whatever that means to him.
And the divide is much stronger now than when he saw the most of them. It’s hard to keep up.
If Danny understood what was going on it would worry him and we’d see him worry about if he should tell someone. As nothing like that has happened I don’t think he’s got any idea of what’s going on. He has a tendency to be completely oblivious and not connect clues that are right in front of him.
He’s certainly worried and confused, but he’d put that effort into trying to get her to explain rather than thinking about telling someone.
I say he’d worry about telling someone since they’re not exactly on the best terms right now but he’d want her to be safe and get help. But he doesn’t even bring it up to her best friend or roommate.
Fly home, Buddy, I work alone.
NOPE. All of the NOOOOOOOPE.
This is the first genuine proof.
Compartmentalization isn’t the same as DID an its not uncommon for people to have different titles for different personas they have to play (ex. “Dr. Johnson” vs “Jennifer” vs “Jenny” vs “Mom” can all be different roles Jennifer Johnson plays)
I know a few businesswomen who use their maiden name professionally and will say “Some days I just need a break and to be Mrs Jane Smith instead of Jane Doe” to communicate they have days they need to step out of the corporate powerhouse role and just be a wife and mom. (This is their specific experience not all women) They dress differently and even act a bit different but they’re the same person.
So it really seemed for awhile like Amazigirl was just compartmentalizing and honestly I think for a long time that’s all it was because amazigirl and amber had the same knowledge and would make overlapping remarks. At first it was Amber playin a role that helped her process (so she thought)
As its gone on they’ve split off more and more.
Now this has gotten extreme and the two have split off to the point that amazigirl literally has none of amber’s memories for, I’d guess, at least a few weeks and its REALLY likely Amber will have no idea Amazigirl was out once this is over.
That is NOT remotely how things started out.
Well shit
Not the first. We’ve known for awhile that Amber wasn’t sharing AG’s memories and it was at least strongly hinted that AG didn’t share Amber’s. As far as we can tell, that started after the Ryan stabbing incident. Amber started waking up with bruises and being surprised by news reports about AG. She even commented to Danny that she thought she’d been doing things at night.
Before that, but after the break up we saw scenes with the two of them directly talking to each other, which hadn’t happened before. Many read that as an indication that the split was progressing.
I definitely agree that it’s been more and more serious of a split as time went on, but I think even in the beginning it was more than just normal compartmentalization. Things like AG taking over when faced with a trigger like Sal are apparently a fairly common thing for a protective alter.
I dunno, there have been signs for a while that Amber doesn’t fully share her memories.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/02-this-is-the-way-that-we-love/douche/
How did she know Walky didn’t make out with the guy he punched?
Asher offered him pizza and he couldn’t resist.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/04-walking-with-dina/jim/
The rest of his costume may be half-assed, but Walky has the patented superhero mask which perfectly conforms to his eyes, even when he closes them.
Gonna be hell peeling the superglue off his eyelids.
Doesn’t Amazi-Girl have a kind of scarf-like thing with eyeholes? It kind of looks drapey like a scarf when she takes it off.
Maybe he just does what they did in the Batman movies, and he’s wearing eye shadow.
Which magically disappears if you decide to take the mask off.
The strip where Amber reveals herself as Amazi-Girl to Walky on the roof does not have Amazi-Girl tagged. So they’re total strangers. Amber was only wearing AG’s outfit when having the initial Garbage Roof conversation. Explains why she’s so behind and barely recognizes him.
Yeah, the first time they met on Garbage Roof, she was Amazi-Girl. But the second time, she was Amber wearing the AG costume, looking for some kittens to kick (to smear AG’s reputation).
So Danny fell in love with AG and had to learn about Amber, while Walky fell in love with Amber is now going to have to learn about AG.
I knew there would be a gap but as far as AG knows, Walky’s still with Dorothy… Wow, that must be quite the shock, learning your other identity got it going with Walky…
Yeah, I doubt Walky picked up on that and I wouldn’t have thought of it, but it fits. That breakup was well after Amber and AG stopped talking and AG hasn’t been around to pick up any gossip from the floor.
Whoops, this is about to get awkward. At least she can finally START getting filled in?
“Walky. I need you to fill me in. Can you do that?”
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
I hope we don’t lean too hard into “split personality”.
To late, just be happy it’s not constantly apparent.
I mean… how much further can one lean into it? We’ve leaned as far as completely independent and compartmentalized memories, and I’m not sure how much further one can lean.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s another alter beside Amber and Amazi-girl.
I used to have a friend who had 6 people in his head, and could have internal conversations between them. If you really wanted to know how much further we could go.
Amber/Amazi-Girl’s DID is a core part of who she is and what she has to deal with. If a character is/has/deals with [x], and the comic is more or less realistic, at some point there’s going to be some content about [x].
I am reminded of Jeph Jacques’s comments to the effect that every time someone complains about his comic having “too much gay stuff” in it, he makes it gayer.
He’s not the only one.
Way more obvious when they are not sharing memories. Also glad Walky is not accusing her of lying.
An ad for infolinks is blocking half the page, and when I close it the comic doesn’t load in the space it was blocking.
Message hiveworks support about it. They’re pretty good about removing aggressive ads.
Hey I know the science behind things like dissociative identity disorder is vague at best and its debated whether it exists at all, but does anyone know if there is any real life basis for something like this happening?
We have had people in the comments section before describe their own personal experiences with DID. It certainly exists.
I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall Cerberus putting out more than a few comments back in the day describing her own experiences with alters and DID, oftentimes predicting how things would progress with Amber and Amazi-Girl’s storyline as a result.
You are not misremembering.
I also recall someone calling themselves Flowers who fled after getting a lot of “DID doesn’t exist” noise.
I know a couple of people with DID. Don’t do that.
^This. Thank you as someone with DID.
Oh WOW, this is uncanny. I just opened up about my roommates being a multiple system in a different comment… and then I saw this. They actually sometimes go by the moniker Flowers online so they can be more anonymous and freely talk about their experiences.
Do you remember what was going on in the comic when this happened? I try to read all the discussions about DID here, but I must have missed this one. As far as I know my roommates haven’t ever read DOA, much less commented here. But at the same time… this coincidence is absolutely wild OMG.
(It’s okay if you don’t remember anything, I can ask them later when it’s not 5 am for us haha.)
Never mind, accidentally found it! That definitely isn’t any of my
roommates talking (the Flowers account here used ‘singleton’ and ‘collective’, while the lingo my roommates and I know are singlet and system).
Pretty fun coincidence either way, though I feel awful they felt like they had to leave/stop commenting after getting the whole ~DID isn’t real~ bullshit. I’m not at all surprised, but it’s still sad. ;~;
I grew up with my mother occasionally waking me up in the morning thinking she was a guest at a hotel and needed to check out
I had an ex-boyfriend who was supposedly DID. He did act like this, I definitely said/did things with one personality that the other would not remember at all, or even remember differently.
It was weird and awkward and extremely creepy and in retrospect, I’ve never been 100% positive it wasn’t all an incredibly convoluted lie by a psychopath…. But if it wasn’t a lie, then it worked like this.
At the time, I was in a psych class at university, and I couldn’t find any current articles that backed up that DID even exists and isn’t some weird induced delusions by desperate psychologists on impressionable patients. But well… He was my boyfriend. And there was some really, really weird shit that went on with him.
Keep in mind that sometimes, scientists are thorough to the point of being stupid, like the push for ages to write-off any demonstrable displays of emotion from animals as anthropomorphizing them. Some had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledging that animals feel things, despite it being ridiculously apparent.
There’s also a problem that a lot of this stuff is difficult to observe or get funding and researchers to properly study. It’s bad enough getting proper data about phenomena we can see and touch, sometimes, so it’s so much more difficult with mental illnesses/disorders and other such intangibles.
Very true. Science isn’t perfect and sometimes in the search for definitive proof, researchers miss the obvious.
His personalities also did creepy things like modify the traits on other personalities so they’d be better lovers, or construct perfect memory palaces so that he had an eidetic memory… And apparently he was like, scoring 100% on his University courses, and had already gotten a Master’s degree by 18 and was working on his second (which he was then kicked out of for creating a virus that was too deadly, so he started a different one).
Once I got out of the destructive, toxic relationship we’d built, I realized that a lot of the things he’d said sounded a little too incredible. And one of the first things he’d told me was just how highly he scored in all the Cluster A personality disorders, some of which include chronic lying to always be the victim, and narcissism.
So in retrospect, there is a very real chance he was just lying based on how he thought DID should work. Or he was telling the truth and he was a huge grab bag of red flags anyways. I quite honestly don’t know.
But yeah, you are right, scientists can be idiots too. I try to keep an open mind on DID. What the research was saying (at the time) didn’t line up with what I was seeing at all. Either the research was wrong, or my ex was a lying scumbag. And I’m reasonably sure he was a scumbag, I’m just not sure if he was lying too.
Yeah, sounds like he had other issues going on and was very likely faking DID due to another mental illness like munchausens or factitious disorder.
So this is not directly related to your ex, but is related to the fact that intelligence (whatever that is) is not incompatible with serious mental health issues.
I once had an apartment-mate who was probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. As in, he understood nonlinear physics intuitively. He also believed that librarians were putting poison dust on the copy machines and Navy nurses were drawing blood samples from him at night. Years later I read the book “A Beautiful Mind” and I was like, I totally know this guy.
But he was so smart that when he was describing all the paranoid theories he had, it all meshed and ticked like a clock. Most of me would be thinking, “this is nuts,” but damn if some small part of me wasn’t thinking “Holy shit!”
Ugh, I’m so sorry that happened to you.
*appropriate gesture of support*
Thanks! It was an unfortunately messy, toxic relationship that took me way too long to break out of, but it was also a long time ago, and I’m in a much better one now, so it’s all good. 🙂
If you had trouble finding information in psych class then, your texts weren’t covering DID well. Here’s a link to over1,000 articles on DID. Also, I knew I missed time, that people were constantly telling me “I” did things or said things I had no memory of, and heard internal voices, before I ever entered therapy. Also, I am an alter, so hope this answers your question.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/?term=Dissociative+Identity+disorder+
It was also around 15 years ago and Google was still only useful at searching a portion of the internet. Plus, most documents weren’t on the internet, or hidden behind paywalls that I was way too cheap to get behind as a first year student.
My ex was a huge grab bag of red flags, with or without the DID kicking around, which is a basis for a lot of the uncertainty I have. He could have been perfectly honest about all of the DID stuff. Or he could have been a chronic liar and everything still would have made sense. I know he didn’t tell his next girlfriend about the DID stuff. Or believe me about some of the stuff his personalities had done.
Neat that there’s better research on it now though! Thanks for the links, I might go through them if I feel like poking at an old scar.
Makes sense. I hope it turns out well.
Though the science is vague, my psychology professor said “It’s real for them, and treatment works best when you treat it not as if the patient is lying but with consideration of their experiences.”
I had a friend who was later diagnosed as bipolar schizo-affective, but she did have multiple personalities, and I even saw her “switch” between a few a few times. We talked about it, and both think that her brain kind of sectioned off “This is manic-you” and “this is depressed you” and “this is having a hallucination and paranoid you” (that was always the most scary, because she didn’t trust us to help her, and it broke my heart every time).
I’m really worried about Amber and kind of… concerned as to where this story line is going and how Willis handles it. Even teasing the DID thing kind of concerns me, as people take media to be the truth sometimes, and while everyone’s experiences will differ, people will walk away from this story seeing Amber’s story as THE story of DID. Which, so far I don’t think has been a problem – but it concerns me none the less.
I highly doubt everyone with DID tries to become a superhero
Amber is *the* story of DID and there are no superheros in real life, so clearly there is no DID.
Seriously though, I’d be freaking out that I’d get this wrong if I were Willis.
But there are superheroes in real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-life_superhero#List_of_notable_real-life_superheroes
And also lots of cases of DID in real life.https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/mental-health/dissociative-identity-disorder/related/dissociative-identity-disorder-statistics/#gref
It makes sense with what we know about how associative memory works. I think that it might be arguable that repressed memories could be considered to be small alters based on how the person was at that exact moment in time?
Some accounts I’ve heard of some types of depression also sound like the person is partially disassociating with themselves, forming their thoughts into two separate pathways where one side makes solid decisions but doesn’t pass on the motivation to carry them out, while the side that’s in control is unmotivated to act and has learned to expect and tolerate failure due to that lack of motivation.
Possibly relevant: http://did-research.org/origin/structural_dissociation/anp_ep.html
DID is very real, in fact, we and many others make videos about our experiences on YouTube.
Also, here’s a link to some good articles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/?term=Dissociative+Identity+disorder+
DID is real. It is rare and the people who suffer from it have uniformly been subjected to horrific conditions, usually as a young child. It is no laughing matter and joking about it’s reality does no-one a service. The depiction of DID in the comic is not necessarily realistic, but that does not mean individuals with DID won’t see aspects that remind them of their own experiences. In my opinion, as a non-expert who does not suffer from dissociation, is that the sudden onset of the condition, in an adult, with no previous history or continuing severe trauma, is highly unlikely. I attribute this, in Amber, to Willis’s evolving concept of the relationship between Amazigirl and Amber. I am willing to accept far more egregious violations of reality as I understand it than this for the sake of a good story. And Willis writes a good story.
You seem to be under the impression that the Amazi-Girl/Amber split happened recently. It did not. Amber/Amazi-Girl have talked about the fact that Amazi-Girl was born from the night of the robbery. At the time of the robbery, she was not an adult, we don’t know if there was any less-obvious history before that, and she had both acute and chronic trauma (the robbery itself and an abusive father, respectively).
As of the start of the school year when we meet them, Amber and Amazi-Girl were largely cooperative, each with their assigned role, communicating and sharing memories. Over the course of the comic, particularly since re-meeting Sal and everything that went down with Danny, their relationship has become strained and even antagonistic. They have stopped communicating. This is a Bad Thing(tm). That is what is happening here: Amazi-Girl/Amber are not ‘suddenly’ DID, this is a progression of the failing relationship between the alters. We’d already seen Amazi-Girl failing to share memories with Amber, now here we see the reverse.
Amber was 13 during the robbery. Too old for the formation of DID. Currently the cutoff is agreed to be 9 years old at the maximum. Also, without therapy that level of communication we saw at first is pretty much unheard of.
Do you have any articles on that age limit? Personally I suspect they’re underestimating the sheer power of human self-destructivness, but I haven’t read any details on where that assertion came from.
“self-destructiveness”? an old friend of mine is still alive because a headmate stepped in and stopped her from suicide.
It can be self-destructive and a necessary survival skill at the same time? But I guess I was thinking of the people who claim to have developed it intentionally without any trauma. Sorry I lumped those in with the necessary-but-late cases.
It’s not self destructive, it’s self defense to develop DID. It’s a way to survive. Also, my therapist who has worked with DID patients also says 9 is the cut off age.
Sorry that’s supposed to say, worked with DID patients for decades.
Here’s an article. https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/dissociativeliving/2010/08/from-trauma-to-did-the-age-factor
“agreed to be” by whom? the number you cite does not match the experiences of real life people I have met, who’s first experiences with DID were in their adulthood.
Agreed to by professionals and researchers. Like my therapist who has worked with DID patients for decades. I have DID myself. It’s generally diagnosed in adulthood, but that doesn’t mean that that’s when it develops. I am an alter and I can distinctly recall having DID as a child.
https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/dissociativeliving/2010/08/from-trauma-to-did-the-age-factor
Yay, a link!
Interesting that the quote says *usually* before the age of nine -so what if it just gets really unlikely after that, but not actually impossible? Unfortunately the link for the quote is a 404 now. Hrm.
Here’s another link https://information.pods-online.org.uk/what-causes-dissociative-identity-disorder/
Here’s another link.
https://themighty.com/2017/03/misconceptions-dissociative-identity-disorder-did/
Neat.
There’s still a lot of phrases like “some people argue” and “generally” and “likely”, though, so I’m not convinced it’s straight-up impossible.
Then again, last I heard pretty much every aspect of dissociative disorders needs more research, and who effing knows when we’ll actually get it :/ but in the meantime I prefer to err on the side of believing people are telling the truth about their experiences.
I would never disbelieve a person’s account of their experiences either, not without concrete proof anyway, but as this is fiction it becomes problematic because people often don’t differentiate between fiction and reality very well when it comes to things they don’t know much about. It’s why I often get asked by people if anyone in our system is a cannibal ever since Split came out.
Okay, but the claims you made above sounded to me like you didn’t believe anyone could ever have those experiences, and iirc there are comments elsewhere on the page about people’s experiences contradicting your claims.
Your point stands about the comic – the way Amber’s DID was retconned in does make for some awkwardness, and could give the impression that it’s common to develop that way.
Mostly I’ve been annoyed about people on Reddit being overzealous about this and was hoping for some convincing evidence one way or another. Thanks for the links though.
And note to self, never ever watch Split. 😛 I try to avoid Hollywood depictions of mental health stuff anyways.
If it came across that way, it wasn’t my intention. I was trying to say that it’s not the norm for DID specifically, but can be for another form of multiplicity like OSDD-1. Yeah, research is not concrete yet because it’s underfunded. Yeah, Hollywood is not great about mental illness in general.
🙂
😊
Even assuming the current understanding leaves no room for error, the numbers are about the trauma that prevents a single solid identity from integrating in childhood and not about the actual experience of multiplicity. It’s actually pretty standard for someone with DID not to show symptoms until adulthood.
A very tsod compliant interpretation would be that the trauma of growing up in an abusive household prevented Amber from integrating a single coherent personality, Amazigirl was sectioned off as an EP at 13, and only in college did Amazigirl develop into an ANP in response to circumstance and stress. Neither party can deal with that situation and they cope by Dissociating Harder, and because their situation is what it is nobody — possibly including Amber — really notices the degree to which Something Is Up, until now. Ergo, DID “showed up” in adulthood in response to stress, with multiplish experiences that can maybe be tracked back a few months or years, but is in the long term technically a result of early childhood trauma.
DID is often very covert and since most people don’t know what to look for, they miss the signs until adulthood or adolescence. I’ve been part of a DID system since we were physically 3 years old.
The bit about internal communication being impossible without therapy is just wildly misinformed lmao, there’s a whole ass diagnosis for disordered multiplicity without amnesia (OSDD1-b) and it’s been suggested that the criteria for DID need a broader definition of amnesia specifically because too many people have that kind of internal communication.
I didn’t say impossible and OSDD is a separate Dissociative disorder for a reason. There are generally Dissociative barriers between alters. I’ve heard this from hundreds of people with DID in support groups. I’ve lived it myself as an alter. I’ve also heard the same from every professional I’ve ever met about every client they’ve worked with. It’s not everyone, but it is the majority. It’s called a disorder for a reason, because it negatively impacts functioning. Also, amnesia is a criteria for diagnosis.
Sorry, “unheard of.” Amnesia is a criterion for diagnosis! It’s currently under scrutiny because the strictness with which some professionals define it has caused a lot of people who would otherwise be diagnosed with DID to get shoveled into OSDD1. DID having a smaller population than “Like DID But Not” is a weird look.
The existence of two alters does necessitate a dissociative barrier between said alters by the definitions of the lit you are referring to — the existence of alters is itself considered dissociation. Internal communication does not imply the absence of dissociative barriers. Internal communication is in fact a symptom sometimes used to recognize undiagnosed DID. It’s nowhere near unheard of for alters to be able to communicate before therapy in DID, and especially not in OSDD1, which is the diagnosis that would have been applicable to Amber and Amazigirl before their amnesia developed to this point. Because while there is a reason OSDD1 is a separate diagnosis from DID, the two do interrelate very heavily.
Also i… didn’t say it wasn’t a disorder. I said it was a disorder. Because it negatively impacts functioning. I grouped it with OSDD1 specifically as a disorder. ???
Do you have DID egg, have you studied it, what exactly qualifies you to say how it does or doesn’t work?
Do you have any sources to back up your claims?
I said almost unheard of and there is a large spectrum of multiplicity that isn’t covered by DID simply because it isn’t disordered at this point. If a person has great internal communication and a great relationship with their system mates and are able to be coconscious etc. Then while multiple, they aren’t disordered and thus, don’t meet the criteria for DID, even if they might have in the past. When talking DID specifically, as in those diagnosed, internal communication is often the most difficult thing to attain and is one of the most asked questions on any DID support site or forum.
Christ I forgot my name on here is egg
Hit me tomorrow when I’m not on my phone getting in arguments about my disorders to avoid sleeping and I’ll send some links. I have DID and spent a goodly while denying it and avoiding treatment in large part because I was misinformed about how it works by people with a really rigid, poor understanding of psych they’d heard or read about in pieces. Thus the interest.
Not that being diagnosed with DID has much bearing on the current understanding of structural dissociation or the diagnostic criteria, or my understanding thereof. Rereading, not actually sure how that qualifies me to say anything I said or why you asked.
FWIW, in places I’ve hung out in it hasn’t been almost-unheard-of iirc, but that could be because they were all mixed DID/OSDD/etc groups 🙂
Now that i think about it, I tend to think in terms of the more general dissociative spectrum even when people are saying DID, because it’s hard to tell when they actually mean “DID and related disorders” vs actually specifically just DID. It’s such a convenient acronym even I tend to slip into using it instead of spelling out a more inclusive phrase. Doesn’t help that OSDD only recently got its own subreddit.
I asked because I was curious what your experience was in regards to DID, basically I wanted to know where your view point comes from. I’m also diagnosed with DID and spend an inordinate amount of time reading about it because I advocate and provide education on DID and our experiences with DID for a living. I’m telling you this to explain my views.
Inahc, yeah that makes sense. Honestly, the people I’ve talked to with OSDD-1 have described living a different experience than people with DID and everyone I’ve talked to has also said that they like that the two are separate disorders because they generally need different things out of therapy than people with DID.
I don’t know what the hell I was on last night but here’s some links, without going down the rabbit hole that is trying to find Every Relevant Article Out There.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7247074_A_New_Model_of_Dissociative_Identity_Disorder : The majority of people with DID report hearing voices; some people hear voices but rationalize them as Normal Talking To Myself Experiences. Many people with DID are aware of other alters and what they do, and many professionals mistakenly use this to rule out a diagnosis of DID. Proposed diagnostic criteria include internal conversation and argument, cocon, and awareness of other alters’ actions. Current amnesia criterion criticized for being too vague to facilitate detection of all reported forms of amnesia.
http://www.mid-assessment.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Interpretive-Manual-for-the-MID-2nd-Edition.pdf : Internal struggle of or with voices or “loud thoughts” is “one of the two most frequently elevated scales in clients with a complex dissociative disorder” in this assessment. Undiagnosed DID systems score lower than diagnosed systems on awareness of parts, but aren’t expected to lack awareness.
(cw description of abuse) https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1552/Diss_7_2_7_OCR_rev.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y : SCID-D diagnostic assessment addresses internal dialogues and awareness of multiplicity. Both previously undiagnosed case studies reported internal struggles and/or dialogue with ambiguously separate parts.
https://information.pods-online.org.uk/did-or-ddnos-does-it-matter/ : Predates OSDD but addresses the overlap and diagnosis of DID and DDNOS in ways that are still relevant. Experiences with dissociative amnesia do not fall cleanly into two categories.
Two alters being aware of one another’s actions, semi-cooperative, and intermittently coconscious is not a “pretty much unheard of” level of internal communication for an undiagnosed system, even if it’s pretty much unheard of in your support groups. Amnesia and lack of communication are not necessarily unchanging constants pre-diagnosis. Amber and Amazigirl are very weird and dramatic in the way they handle their multiplicity, but aren’t wildly unusual in the way they seem to experience it.
That said, I was unnecessarily bitter/aggressive last night and I have no idea why I latched onto a totally unquantifiable statement like “pretty much unheard of” when that’s…not even the part of your comment I took issue with. Sorry.
Egg,
Thank you for sharing these sources. I will certainly read over them. To be honest, I’ve never heard of a system with communication and cooperation before therapy that met the criteria for DID before, which is why I found it odd in this story. I’ve heard lots about hearing internal voices, and experienced it myself, but hearing them has not meant being able to talk to them in my experience or when talking to others. I’ve also never heard of someone with DID starting out functional and then degrading in to nonfunctional all while an adult. I’ve always heard of people staring out disordered and thus seeking help, starting out unable to communicate and needing to learn how. I am always happy to learn more. Thank you, I accept and appreciate your apology.
Egg,
I read through all of your links and while I saw plenty of discussion about being aware of alters and hearing them speak, I saw nothing about being able to actually converse with them. I do certainly agree that DID should be extended as a diagnosis, but OSDD also needs to still exist for those whose experiences are different and require different treatment. Overall, those articles were all from the early 2000’s except one and they didn’t acknowledge the most current addition of the DSM.
I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes here, so ignore me if you want haha. And if that’s how your system works I’m definitely not trying to say your experiences are wrong! But… that doesn’t match up with my roommates’ experiences with multiplicity either?
Maybe they’re just unusually healthy and functional, I dunno, but they didn’t need therapy to learn how to communicate. They needed therapy for other issues, but not their multiplicity inherently. And two of the headmates split from each other more around 11-12 (verified by outside accounts by people who knew them at the time, like their dad), so probably not as young as 9.
I don’t want to discredit your experience though, and I’m really happy if therapy helped you! (And I promise I really do mean that and don’t intend it to sound condescending. I’m a little out of practice with talking to people online, so I hope my intent is coming across right haha.)
You’re fine. Splitting can continue to happen throughout a person’s life, but it starts in young childhood.
https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/dissociativeliving/2010/08/from-trauma-to-did-the-age-factor
DID is often covert in general, but especially in the early stages and is often missed until signs start piling up in adolescence or adulthood.
Yup, it happens.
This is the shitty end of the spectrum where the alters ain’t talking to each other.
…so I’ve never connected this to my main online identity out of fear of judgment, but I’m just an unknown lurker here so I don’t really have a reputation to ~ruin~ LOL. And… even if I did, this is important to talk about and relevant to the comic, so… here goes? (This’ll probably be long, so I completely understand if you don’t want to read it. No hard feelings LOL)
My ‘roommate’ is actually seven distinct people. They’re a multiple system[1].
Two of them are splits of each other/one ‘original’ person because of childhood trauma[2], much like the case here. The other five are not and only popped up in the last ten to fifteen years (the body is thirty). They all have different personalities, mannerisms, and preferences down to favorite foods and how often they want us to do chores. In every possible way aside from physically having separate bodies, they are different people. They share memory perfectly[3] so most of the day-to-day issues just boil down to who gets to choose the clothes for the day haha. If everyone in the system gets along, multiplicity can be surprisingly mundane once you get used to it[4].
So… yeah, I totally know of this happening IRL! I’ve been living with them in the past ten years as they worked this all out, so if you have any questions I don’t mind elaborating. (With some details omitted to preserve their privacy, of course! They don’t mind me sharing as long as they’re all anonymous, but… that has limits haha.) I definitely don’t want to make myself out to be a medical professional, I’m not… but I AM someone who’s lived with it and tried hard to learn the ins and outs for people I care about. And I understand how odd this all sounds from the outside, I really do. I was there a decade ago. But… to me, it’s definitely a real phenomenon.
– – –
Some footnotes!
1. I hesitate to use the term DID, because dissociative identity disorder isn’t a term my roommates are comfortable with. Some of them have dissociated due to other unrelated mental health issues, and it feels completely different from switching between each other, and some of the way psychologists have talked about the literature surrounded DID is… alienating to them, to say the least. Some systems are completely okay with calling it DID, though (or multiple personality disorder, which is what it was previously diagnosed as). My roommates just prefer the less pathologized terms ‘multiple system’ or ‘plural’.
2. Just to clarify, not every system conceptualizes it at working that way. I’ve seen more than one system reject the idea of there being an original singular identity. My roommates didn’t think any of them worked that way either until two of them did some digging and remembered the trauma that may have caused their differences to strengthen. The other five are very clearly unrelated, though. Every system is different!
3. Again, YMMV. Not every system has the stereotypical blackouts, but from what I know my roommates are fairly rare in the amount of memory they share. There’s actually a diagnostic in the DSM, DDNOS, that is intended to account for cases of DID that don’t fit all the supposedly standard symptoms, like memory loss.
4. Emphasis on ‘can’! I’m not trying to minimize the issues systems who don’t share memory have, I’ve heard a bit about how scary it can be from other systems so I definitely don’t want to make being diagnosed with plurality sound like it’s effortlessly easy for everyone. It’s not! Some systems legitimately struggle with making it work, and I believe that should be recognized in any discussion about multiplicity/DID. I won’t try to speak for them.
two questions:
1. If the majority of memory is shared, how are different personalities identified? How is it different from a single individual that just has shifts in personality, rather than multiple distinct personalities?
2. Are you one of the alters in the system?
1. This is a great question! I’m actually going to give it some thought and come back here later to answer it more thoroughly, hope that’s okay?
2. Oh haha, no, I’m a physically separate singlet (non-system)! I do have my own personal experiences with multiplicity but I am such a weird fringe case that I wasn’t going to bother discussing it here. My roommates’ system is much more typical of The Multiple Experience™️. (Though they don’t 100% fit the standard DID narrative either so please don’t think I’m trying to speak for every kind of system here! I think that, like with all mental health disorders/oddities, there’s a spectrum of experiences.)
Of course! Take your time to respond, no pressure. And thanks for indulging me. 🙂
FWIW, ddnos is deprecated, it’s called osdd now. (With some subtypes I usually can’t remember the details of)
Yes, OSDD type 1 is the closest to DID. With two subtypes of a and b.
Ah yeah, thank you for correcting it! I realized that some time after posting this but wasn’t sure if it was worth leaving another whole comment for it LOL
My roommates and I don’t keep up with DID-specific literature as much as some systems since they’re pretty healthy as a group and don’t need any multiplicity-related treatment as they are now, so I’d forgotten this change.
We wholeheartedly reject the idea of us being a broken Identity, we look at it as a case of several identities developing separate from each other due to dissociation.
I had this talk with Cerberus a few years ago. Here, in Eastern Europe, they still teach it as “well, it might exist, but the US has suspiciously high rates compared to Europe, so let’s take a careful look every time before diagnosis”.
Husband definitely has DID that has gotten more fractured with time. Unsure whether it predated his TBI or was caused by it, due to the fact the TBI was not initially apparent and he needed a light switch moment to trigger the worst of it. What doesn’t help? His memory past a decade is completely gone, so sorting out chicken and egg of personalities isn’t as much a priority as getting them to share at any given moment so he can have a cohesive life history.
. . . . .Ohhhhhhhh deeeeeaaaaaar. Is. . . Is Amber really this dissociative? Does she actually have a split personality?
Looks like. Amber actually said she did. This is the first time we’ve had confirmation though.
No, the confirmation was when Amber woke up not remembering going out as Amazigirl, and with Sal. It’s been years.
Amber talking to Danny about her and Amazi-Girl “sharing a meat vehicle” despite being separate, and her not remembering Amazi-Girl’s nightly exploits (both linked below) were in real-time two years and four months, and one year and nine months ago, respectively.
DOA time is really slow. this whole comic has been less than a year, is it even the second semester yet?
It’s not even Halloween yet. Mid-terms are coming up.
I assume Adam meant years of real time, not in-comic time.
I mean, Amber’s straight-up talked to Danny before about how she finds herself and Amazi-Girl getting along.
To be honest, I don’t think Danny is clued in, nor do I think that’s a satisfactory way to say “Amber has told him”. It’s easy to interpret what she said as metaphor, and Amber is given to hyperbolic dramatization often enough that it’s reasonable for untrained people to completely whiff on the diagnosis.
Huh, I had read that as an internal struggle, rather than two distinct identities in conflict
Started as such, but she kept feeding the disassociation and kept solidly compartmentalizing until….
well.
She started to have memory blocks.
Yeah but that could easily be read as just an internal conflict, like “oh man, drunk me sure does love fast food but normal me can’t stand it”, like a joke.
Not literally two personalities.
It’s not the only time Danny and Amber have talked about her differing personas.
No, I mean I get it, I’m just saying that up until now, a lot of characters (and readers) have treated Amazi-Girl like it’s just an act Amber does, a persona that she treats like another person, the way Peter Parker changes his attitude when he goes out as Spider-Man (even Danny’s dialogue in that strip can be read as someone going “You’re not two people you’re just affecting a personality to pass your problems to”, even though that’s not the correct reading and he is someone who actually gets it). This is the first time it’s been made very explicit which is what has a lot of people in this comment thread surprised.
The dissociation got to the point of not sharing memories (at least not flowing from AG to Amber) more than a year ago, real time.
And now it seems the reverse is true as well.
When you see photos of yourself going around doing things that you don’t remember doing than yeah your. It’s a full blown Tyler Durdan situation.
Well, Unnamed Protagonist actually interacted with Tyler, thought he was there in the room with him while a bunch of other people were present, and had fistfights with him that were actually just punching himself in the face (for certain values of “himself”). Amber/Amazi-girl aren’t like that.
It’s not a “full blown” Tyler Durden situation unless you blow up at least three tall buildings (which lots of financial companies in them) and mention “ground zero” in the prologue (of the movie).
Of course for a full blown Tyler Durden situation you need to release the movie at least one year before the actual event…
And now back to our regular realistic superhero-on-college setting!
Y’all need to invest in post-it notes so you can communicate with your alternate personalities.
… I read “invest” as “invent” for a moment there. Did a little double take.
I didn’t realize I’d done the same misreading until I read your comment.
Everyone knows that Post-it notes were invented by Romy White.
You say Post-Toasties were invented by a gypsy white guy? I had no idea.
please keep racial slurs out of the comment section, holy shit
Wow this personality split has gotten pretty bad when Amazi-Girl barely even knows who Walky is after all the time he’s been around Amber.
Welp this is just as awkward as I expected it to be. I wonder how many weeks of events he’s going to haft to catch her up on- Wait does she even know about the Amber stabbing a rapist incident?
Oh my god, does Amazi-Girl know that?!
And if not, how is she going to respond?
Walky probably knows, everybody does, but amazi-girl doesn’t. That’s gonna be some Yugi and Yami dialogue that’s gonna be AKWARD
I wouldn’t be surprised if AG does know about that. It might be the last thing she remembers.
Walky: “So this is like Split?”
Amazi-Girl: “What?”
Walky: “Oh right, I only watched the movie with Amber.”
Amber needs help.
DID is nothing like Split, that had bits of truth buried under a mountain of lies.
The person I know best with DID hates and despises Split with a furious passion. Don’t use “Split” (or, even moreso, “Psycho”) as your examples for psychological truth about anything.
^ THIS
I don’t think I’ve seen a single system approve of it. I usually don’t judge media too harshly before experiencing it myself, but I don’t ever intend to see it myself because its treatment of DID is just… oof.
This type of extreme misinformation pains me so much – this is a group of people with a brain oddity so rare, I’ve barely seen any activism, even among mental health advocates. But sensationalized fiction has the general public convinced they’re all murderers, and that’s not even an exaggeration. :C
Having not seen split, do you know what’s supposed to be so horrifically inaccurate and offensive about it? I was thinking of seeing it, because I loved Unbreakable back in the day, but maybe I wont after all.
As films that attempt to portray DID go it Could Be Worse, it honestly gets more right than I expect out of anything but unenjoyable psych drama. Although iirc 27 is referred to as an “unheard of” number of alters, which,, lol
But it’s another in a long line of films that portray multiple systems as dangerous, and specifically portray DID systems w/ blackout amnesia as dangerous, and use transfem alters as shorthand for “unhinged,” and anyone who’s opened up to someone about their experience, often implicitly if not explicitly telling them about early childhood trauma in the process, and got a response along the lines of “omg do you have a violent alter?? But how would you KNOW” is about ready to strangle every writer who contributes to our entire presence in mass media being “guy in horror movie does murders”
That makes sense. So it’s not THAT bad, but problematic in the same way that many minority representations in media tend to be problematic.
I’ll probably just not bother with it then.
It’s best not to believe anything you see on tv or in a movie, those exist to entertain not to be accurate.
The same is usually true of webcomics.
Everyone in yesterday’s comments saw this one coming.
Oh…. shit. Does Amazi-Girl still think walky is dating dorothy? Is that why that was her first thought? Just how bad is this split?
Well, it could be worse.
If Walky and Amber had started sleeping together, imagine AG waking up in bed with Walky? While still under the impression that he was dating Dorothy? AWKWARD.
Holy shit
You can’t stop the fanfic train
Or headcannon train
Whichever you prefer
That was something I’d been worried about when they were first getting together.
Led to a bunch of arguments about whether Amber had a responsibility to tell him what he was getting into.
Seems like it. AG also seems to genuinely like Dorothy. Probably why she seems so pissed off at Amber in panel 5–she doesn’t know if Amber made out with Dorothy’s still-boyfriend, if Amber even broke them up, or what.
Whelp, she needs serious psychiatric help
Also in breaking news, Walky is an irresponsible man-child, Joyce has been indoctrinated in a bad type of Christianity, Billie has an alcohol problem, and I think Carla might be trans.
Ruth has problems with depression. Becky is gay, as is Marcie. Sarah swings a mean baseball bat and isn’t afraid to use it. Leslie has questionable tastes in women. Sal is cool, but she and her motorcycle are not as cute as Dina and her awesome dino-bed. Ethan likes transformers. Blaine and Toedad scrape the bottom of the parental barrel.Mike is an epic jerk and will be anything you don’t want him to be. With your mother. For a nickel.
ANIMAL DANCE
Dorothy is way over-committed, timewise. Jason is probably in violation of his visa terms. Raidah is condescending to people who are, in her own words, “mentally-challenged,” and her friend Char uses the r-word.
Marcie is bi, not gay, but everything else is accurate.
I was going to point this out but then forgot, The other thing we all forgot is that Ethan is gay, gay, gay. And the other other thing we forgot is that Jocelyne is known to her family as Joshua.
Robin might be a tad irresponsible and Roz might be a little TOO passionate sometimes, while we’re at it.
Also, Lucy is very friendly.
Re Marcie. You’re correct of course. I had forgotten. Thanks.
No problem. I just get nitpick sometimes.
Sierra’s not much for shoes.
Jacob is tall and buff. Joe is a misogynist. Nash has boundary issues.
Galasso intends to achieve world domination via pizza (and subs). Danny has a hat and ukulele now. Bloodrose is never tagged.
lmao what do you mean “might be trans”??? she’s explicitly canonically trans. interesting choice to list that as a problem though
You missed the incredible sarcasm of the “yeah, we already knew that for ages” variety.
Walky kinda looks like Deku from My Hero Academia with that mask
And Walky suddenly realizes what he thought was a can of works was actually a barrel of graboids.
“worms”. Can of worms. #CurseYourLackOfEditiing
You can always add “can of works” to urban dictionary.
Be the funky lingo trendsetter.
…. Joyce is doing a very convincing job of pretending to be Walky.
Hoo boy, I forgot about Amber’s dissociative identities.
And Walky looks good with sclerae.
I know. AG’s been gone from the comic for so long, I thought maybe Amber facing her fears responsibly might actually have caused some healing, and maybe the AG alter had gone away.
Walky: What gives you the right? What’s the difference between you and me?
Amazi-Girl: I’m not wearing pajama pants.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/amazi-girl+walky/page/3/
Here is the history of AG and Walky interacting, helpfully from the beginning.
So not only does Amber not know what AG is up to, AG doesn’t know what’s going on in Amber’s life.
AG still thinks Walky is with Dorothy. In fact, she barely remembers his name.
She doesn’t know they’ve made out. Had sex. None of it.
And Amber has no clue that AG is even still active. She thinks she’s abandoned that part of herself.
I know this wasn’t the point of your comment but…when did Walky and Amber have sex?
As far as we know, they haven’t.
Didn’t Amber turn into Amazigirl right after finding out he and Sal are siblings? She was pushing the feelings down into amazigirl but like does Amazigirl not remember Walky and those details
It’s likely that she didn’t surface far enough to find out what was going on. Maybe to be aware of the panic attack, but not the details.
Holy crap the mask gives his eyes the white part
To quote a comment of Cerberus’s in a very relevant comic strip from over two years ago,
“Okay. Which one of you shifty motherfuckers is going to be the first to try and deny her DID now? Like, the only way this could get more canon is if Amber/AG tattooed “I am a person with DID” on her forehead. C’mon, bring it.”
Seems at times like a few people still didn’t get the memo.
🙂
I dunno, the way the mask gives him eye whites is sort of working on me.
Oh, there’s a mental break between Amber and Amazi-Girl! Honestly, given how long this comic has been going on, I can’t exactly remember if that’s always been a thing or if that’s a new development.
It kinda became a hard split over Sal. AG had been all “we hates Baggansess forever”, but then she met her, and totally flipped, and was planning their super-hero wedding. Amber was all nope!, so they stopped talking. Then, to make it worse, Scarface made his move on Dorothy, and Amber cut a bongo. Well, someone did. We’re not sure. Their not sure.
Anyhoo, that’s when they stopped knowing what the other was doing.
Amber said “I am not Amazi-Girl” when she disarmed Ryan, and the tags for that encounter don’t list Amazi-Girl.
Honestly, the way I’ve read it, I think Amazi-Girl started off as a character Amber put on at will, but has since taken on a life of its own and broke out of voluntary control.
Disarmed Ryan is one way to put it.
Disarmed, disemboweled… In this case it all means the same, any way you slice it.
I didn’t say it was AG. My theory is there is a third personality involved. I call her the Red Rage. It’s the one that stabbed Sal, and beat Blane to a pulp.
It’s a possibility, but there’s no direct evidence for it. I’d disagree that they’re not sure. Amber has blamed herself for both rage incidents. I don’t think Amazi-Girl has commented on the Ryan stabbing.
It’s been a thing for a long time, but it’s unclear if it’s always been this cut and dry.
It pretty clearly hasn’t been. It’s been a progression.
In retrospect they’ve always been different since the beginning of the comic, probably dating to the robbery, but originally they were quite integrated – sharing memories, trading places as needed. Easy at that stage to read as just an affectation.
After her breakup with Danny things got more tense and while they still shared memories we also saw them explicitly talking and negotiating with each other.
It was the Ryan stabbing incident that seems to have severed the connection completely. Amber felt betrayed by AG not keeping her from turning into a rage monster and disemboweling Ryan and tried to keep her from coming back out. We’ve never seen AG’s reaction to that directly, but we know she was active at night without Amber remembering.
I’m sticking with my theory that Amber is the false personality while Amazi-Girl is the base. Amber was created to protect herself from Blane by forcing down all of her feelings and identity in order to smooth things around. The “real” Amber will recover when Amazi-Girl absorbs the false persona.
Neither alter is any more “false” than the other.
I’m mostly going from what I learned in psychology class that there’s a core and protective splits.
Your psych class was wrong. There’s some DID people I know who are more comfortable knowing what alter was there first, and plenty who don’t care or don’t think it’s relevant. Regardless, all of them are real.
Also, that’s not how integration works.
From my understanding, unless it’s exclusively trauma based, DID is more the naturally present facets of an individual’s personality are more pronounced and separate than those found in normal populations making the separate personalities.
That model may work for some*, but for most of the plurals I know (as well as for myself), there’s no real neurotypical “end-point”. It’s more just a matter of getting all the alters to communicate and work on the same team.
*Though I’ve seen it do a lot more harm than good overall even while it may work and help for some.
I stand corrected and revise my opinion. I apologize also for my ignorance of DID.
Aw, it’s okay. It’s not an easy condition to know much about if you haven’t lived through it.
Which is not at all helped by horror movies using it as the go-to condition for an easy twist ending.
Damn the media’s portrayal of mental illness. -_-
But if you’re interested, Fox posted a link to a whole bunch of articles above!
I’d say Amber is the base just by raw percentage of time, and all the functions performed like eating, dressing, going to class, and everything. Amazi-Girl is the once-in-a-while pressure valve.
Well he figured that out quick.
Let’s see how fast he freaks out.
…if at all.
Hey, hey, Amazi-girl. Don’t diss Amber’s choice in boyfriends.
Walky may have been behind the curve, but he twigged to the whole “different-persons”-thing faster than Danny.
Has Danny actually fully twigged yet? He seemed vaguely aware, but not like he completely understood last I remember.
Danny has no clue, nobody really does.
Danny got told by her to stop poking into her business and he respected that. Walky has managed to dive right past the social polite defences.
They were also much less “different-persons” when Danny was dating AG. Walky wouldn’t have picked up nearly so quickly if AG was able to remember what he and Amber had done.
Personally I’m not surprised at all that Walky is the first to really figure this out, and quick too. I mean as we learned at the start of that It’s Walky arc when Walky was made leader of the team, Walky is actually very intelligent. People just assume he’s dumb because of the way he behaves and he just rolls with it.
I’m impressed by how little this is freaking out Walky. Maybe he’ll react more strongly after he’s had time to process it? Something tells me that Amazi-Girl is thinking something along the lines of: “Great, someone else I’m now responsible for! Why couldn’t she have stuck with Danny? At least I could share bodyguard duties with Sal!”
Walky’s having a `Soooo, less like Batman more like Moon Knight’ moment
Rrrrrright, Walky’s not completely up to speed. I forgot.
WELP.
I think he’s the first person to get up to speed on this – Danny seemed vaguely aware a while back, but I don’t think he’d outright understood that Amber/ Amazigirl have DID.
Ohhhh. The learning curve is steep with this one.
Walky is so much more emotive with his eyes fully outlined.
It’s creeping me out.
Even Punch/Counter-Punch is looking at this situation and going ‘Damm…..’
Fun with non-communicative alters.
Especially when I think that Amazi-Girl is crushing on Sal. This could lead to some interesting triangular (or, strictly speaking quadrangular ) conversations about relationships at some point.
And finally, someone clearly knows Amber and Amazi-girl are, for the last weeks, different people.
The water got into the river… time to see where it goes know.
Also: It is Walky; possibly the character least likely to be able to deal with a situation like this.
Interesting to see a full confirmation that Amber has a full-blown DID with separate alters…
Oh, crap, the dissociation has reached critical levels.
I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with this for a while and I’m just going to come out and say it: DID does not work this way and this is a pretty cheap dramatic device for a comic that usually treats subjects like this with more rigor. It’s like a plot arc from It’s Walky was teleported into the future.
Hi! id like to open a dialogue about this. can i start by asking what experience youre basing this opinion on?
Especially given that there are several others in the comments with DID (or experience with it) who seem to differ on that opinion.
Buzz off, Donatello
Well, that concern came around much faster than expected! This oughta be interesting, given how far behind Amazi seems to be…
Willis, it’s about time you sorted out the AG + Amber strips, put them into a singular collection and offered it up as a college textbook on Human Psychology. I’m learning more about DID just reading these strips over the past few years than in two semesters of semi-dedicater study.
Can we get it annotated with the Cerberus commentaries? 🙂
Well if Moon Knight has taught me anything then its not actually DID but the Moon God has decided to inject other spirits into Amber to allow for a more complete annd efficient worshiper… or Amber has some other form of mental instability. Moon Knight writers go back and forth.
Has else anyone seen Red vs Blue, I’m asking because while I’m pretty sure Doc suffers from Hollywood DID, another “one” of the main characters seems to have something that seems like a slightly more accurate version of DID interacting with some scifi stuff and I’m wondering how realistic it is.
It presents as the pop culture idea of DID but turns out to be a weird kind of cyber-possession by a software entity that takes control of their electromechanically-articulated armours through a mind-machine interface. It’s… complicated. Please let me want to know more.
I think TemporaryObsessor was referring to a certain character whose various independent personality aspects received code-names after the fashion of the Greek alphabet.
(Trying to avoid spoilers here for anyone who hasn’t seen it.)
FWIW, I think it’s more of a Jungian presentation of a single psyche with each trait taking on an independent manifestation than real separate ‘selves’ but there is a lot of IMO in that.
Yea I’m reffering to the Greek alphabet gang.
The person in charge of them intentionally makes the DID like properties worse and one thing I noticed is they were not allowed to talk to each other.
To be honest, I’ve seen all of RvB and I’m still a little confused about who you’re trying to refer to because of the level of vagueness here. I know who King Daniel is talking about, if that’s the same one you’re referring to, but I wouldn’t call that DID, since they are all active at the same time and separated from each other and didn’t really show those symptoms when reunited.
Its good to know about them not acting right when reunited.
I knew about the first two but I don’t know if that’s a genuine sign its something else or just the side effect of giving them options which are impossible for us mere humans
I hope this will be’ the start of a good, and really weird, relationship.
Oooooooh. Damn I feel so dumb now.
She said it! She said “It’s Walky”! Did you see? She said the thing!
I clapped! I clapped when I heard!
Going on the record now: If Amazi-Girl tries to function when not in costume, I want her to use the alias ‘Maisie’.
We’ve already seen Amazi-Girl without the costume – check the tags in the linked strip.
You would think that Amazi-Girl would be able to keep up with Amber’s social life.
Huh… so she really has done the full split personality thing. Before, it seemed like she just referred to the 2 different people so she could not feel guilty. But “each one” seemed to know what the other was doing.
This is the first time I can recall that it seems completely split personality types.
So, I predict at some point we’re going to have a Superman III-style junkyard fight between Amber and Amazi-Girl. (Probably in a dream… but still possibly in a junkyard)
They were aware for quite awhile, but they haven’t shared memory since the Ryan stabbing. Amber’s commented about “thinking she’s been doing stuff at night” and been shown reacting in surprise to social media about Amazi-Girl. As well as saying she and AG aren’t talking.
This is the clearest sign, but it’s definitely been out there for awhile.
This comic has SO MUCH in it, I notice more every time I read it.
The first time through, it’s just the shocking revelation that there are at least some memories that AG and Amber don’t share, that the dissociation is severe enough that Amber and AG are thinking of themselves as separate people.
The second time, you see AG wasn’t even sure of Walky’s name. She wasn’t doing her cryptic AG thing, speaking in weirdly formal phrases, she actually didn’t remember him. Then she tells him to go because Dorothy will be worried, which means AG didn’t know Walky and Dorothy broke up, thinks they are still together.
Here’s where it gets interesting. When she hears that Amber and Walky have been together, she thinks Amber has been letting Walky cheat on Dorothy. That’s gotta be incredibly counter to AG’s moral code, and I don’t know how AG is likely to take out her anger on Amber.
Also, I think AG *doesn’t* know that Walky is Sal’s twin. I think she would be having a very different reaction to him if she did and I’m concerned about her learning that.
OKAY we went from batman to like idk two-face? killerfrost in the CW show? Something more than i thought
Wow, she needs to be forcefully hospitalized.
Um, no, fuck no.
She needs a good therapist.
At this point she is literally dissociating so hard she doesn’t even remember the things she’s doing while literally running around looking for people to hurt. There’s a line.