Practicing Self-Care While Living with DID

How does dissociative identity disorder (DID) affect self-care? When you hear self-care, you might think of a person practicing yoga, meditating or taking a bubble bath to relax and unwind. While it’s true that all of these activities can fall under the umbrella of self-care, it’s also worth going beyond the run-of-the-mill bubble bath once in a while to make sure everything is in check.

Living with DID requires individuals to ensure that their personalities are cared for around the clock, and I can vouch for this, especially while living in an environment full of triggers.

Tips for Good Self-Care with DID

Understanding Wants vs. Needs with DID

The personalities that I live with on a regular basis vary in age, and this is not uncommon in individuals with DID. While I have several “littles,” or personalities who would qualify as children, I also have some older “protective” parts who need tender love and care as well. The key to self-care for a diverse crowd, such as my own, is listening to their needs.

Of course, this means siphoning out their desires as well. While a bubble bath might sound fun to my “littles,” it might not necessarily be what they need to feel cared for in the long run. On the flip side, a bubble bath might be in the cards for “protective” parts that need that adult-type of relaxation. Knowing the difference is critical to making sure that each personality feels fulfilled.

Find What You Need for Your DID Symptoms

One simple way I like to find out what my individual parts need on a rolling basis is to take notes. It isn’t uncommon for my internal dialogue to run rampant, so it is almost second-nature for me to jot down my thoughts to keep track of it all.

By writing down everything you hear, you get a grand scope of all of your personalities’ wants and needs. From here, it’s easy to run a process of elimination to determine what different parts may need more urgently than others.

A quicker way to determine how to soothe your personalities is to simply get grounded and ask them what they need. This is where meditating or practicing yoga can come in handy. Not only can it potentially serve as self-care, but it can help you get grounded enough to have a more structured internal dialogue with your parts to ask what they need.

At the end of the day, you may find that some of your personalities want to take a nap, while others want to dive into a crossword puzzle. Maybe one part desperately wants to watch a movie, and another wants to take that long-overdue bubble bath. Whatever the case may be, providing the self-care that your personalities need can help you ease the burden of living with DID.