What it's like Living with DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER with AnnaLynne McCord

so hi everyone i have a special guest with me today for this uh video we are going to be talking about what dissociative identity disorder is and the differences between that and schizophrenia and how they're often confused and so we're going to be shedding more light on what exactly dissociative identity disorder entails and so i have a very very special guest we have analyn mccord joining us today hi emilyn hi thank you so are you lauren i'm good thanks how are you i'm great thank you so so much for joining us and sharing your experiences with dissociative identity disorder um so i guess just just to start off can you give us a little bit of background information about who you are and when you were diagnosed and whatnot absolutely so i as people would identify me in the world i'm an actress that's the least identifying aspect of me now but that's what people know me as and i was living with d.i.d for a very long time with no awareness it was only three years ago that i was in treatment for childhood sexual abuse ptsd and i kept referring to parts of myself as she and her and they and when they do this she does this and she does that and and then i kept apologizing to my doctor and saying i'm sorry i know this is weird that i keep saying she is doing this and it's technically me but it's not really me i just i don't know how to be who she was i i don't feel like i'm her and my doctor just smiled at me with the sweetest misunderstanding smile and she was like she treats only women and always for domestic and sexual abuses and so she deals specifically with individuals like myself who have suffered severe ptsd and are trying to cope with that so in order to treat my post-traumatic stress disorder i was told by others who have suffered what i've gone through to check out emdr eye movement desensitization and reprocessing so she's an emdr specialist and a phd and all the things and so she's seen it all but she just smiled at me with this maternal knowing smile and she said yeah pretty much all of my patients you know have a have a version of this and are on the spectrum of it and at some point or other will refer to parts of themselves as other than the way they see themselves and i can't tell you the relief of like just feeling like okay this is not entirely weird but i i could it would be as crazy as me referring to i and speaking on behalf of you and things that you've done like that was how difficult it was for me to imagine referring to my alters as me even though in my mind they look just like me at different ages or different you know in different energies right so that was three years ago and that was the beginning of me realizing that i've actually lived with us for a very long time right okay wow so you kind of got into a little bit about what it feels like but can you give us a bit of a definition i guess about what exactly did is absolutely so disassociative identity disorder unfortunately was formerly known as multiple personality disorder which it no longer is referred to as that because that's a terrible way to depict it it is not what it is and the dsm has never appropriately apologized for what they did to sufferers by labeling a multiple personality disorder and my industry has never apologized for misrepresenting did in such an atrocious way on so many different films and projects hopefully we're moving into an era where there's less of that but for those of you who either have no idea what this is or have heard of its former reference multiple personality disorder and would like to know the truth disassociative identity disorder d.i.d is a fragmenting of identities of yourself so i describe it i have a set of mirror i have a perfect mirror behind me um it's a mirror with a lot of sections but if you look at yourself in a mirror you're just one person but if someone takes a hammer and smashes the center of the mirror suddenly there's a hundred images of you reflected back to you right because of the now separated little compartments that each shard is in that's what it's like to experience did did is a fragmenting of the identities it often most frequently starts and is a result of severe abuses or traumas early on in life the most intelligent brains my doctor said so you can feel good about yourself everybody out there suffering with the id the most intelligent of brains split the most and it is a protective mechanism that the brain automatically people don't choose this another myth automatically does to protect the individual to survive and survival is not about quality of life survival is about not dying so is it is a mechanism that is put into place for example because i was so young when i was experiencing these severe abuses and i was under the belief based on the adult who was abusing me that i would die that i would be killed or people that i cared about would be killed it was imperative that i could still be a child at times so parts of me broke off into the child part that played on playgrounds and the other part was the abused one who was terrified of her existence and it was a protective mechanism so that i could actually keep living so that is oh that is what did is in as as the most encompassing way that i can explain it to encompass and uh go over all the aspects of what it's like to experience it and to understand it no i think that was an amazing explanation and a really great distinction to clarify that like this is a protective mechanism that your brain is is doing which is amazing but you know i think a lot of people have this conception that you know multiple personality disorder dissociative identity disorder is um you know all these like wild different personalities that someone exhibits but really it's just parts of you along your life that are coming out in specific ways as a means of protecting yourself which is really kind of amazing actually absolutely yeah so what i guess i think what a lot of people would wonder is how have you managed your did while being an actress or what has that you know been like playing characters and living with the id what has that been like well i think in a way you become the id to be an actress i guess yeah i've become a bunch of different people i become what you actually think the ideas um but no because i didn't know i had it and this is something that i think people really need to understand i thought i was in a different mood how i perceived myself versus how i was perceived by the outside world by individuals interacting with me by close loved ones and intimate partners was very different because they felt the energy shift and that shift is as profound as someone else walking in the room and that's where the confusion happens right that that it's you know a whole other personality and it's not because at any given moment i can throw you lauren into several different situations and you will speak in a different voice tone you will you will express in a different body language based on what you're subject to for example if i put you in a situation where there's a small child in front of you and a car is about to hit the child you might become super aggro you might not be aggro in real life but you might make an aggressive move to heroic moves to knock that kid out of the way and hey you know like to alert the driver and you can become really powerful and really intense and maybe that's not how you express in your daily life and so that's why it's easy as someone suffering with unawareness to think that you're in a different mood right this is why i again distinctly separate someone who has fluidity with their moods and someone who feels what they're feeling so strongly that they can't actually shift into anything else but that and that is that is what i was dealing with i didn't know it so when i was on set i just became someone else and then i was at a new set with new people and no one would ever know because that crew and that those cat the you know those cast members and those producers are all on a different project what was interesting and this is when i started to notice that there were two aspects so there was an independent film that i did called excision and i talked about this a little bit in regards to having an awareness that i was doing something a little bit more than acting when it came to my roles i wrapped this film where i played this disturbed delusional homicidal little teenager uh i wrapped that production at 2 a.m on a tuesday and wednesday on wednesday at noon i had to be on 90210 as this happy beach bomb blonde bombshell who's funny and comedic and i couldn't find her because i was dark and i didn't know how to get out of it and i went to my producing director after a few takes and i was like that was [ __ ] that was terrible don't don't use that don't use that and then finally i came i was like stuart i forgot how to act and he's like you didn't forget how to act you're fine i'm like no i've been playing this character this is season four of 90210 i've played this character for you know nearly a hundred episodes i know this character she was gone and i couldn't get her back and there that was that was a window into the fact that i was a little bit different i didn't know anything about what i was going to discover years later but that was the first kind of inclination that there was something that i didn't fully understand about even me my process or my way of acting right and the other thing i would say was that really stuck out and i noticed more specifically after i had my diagnosis was the director of that film i've gone on to do several films with him and we've become friends and whenever i'm around him i have a tendency to shift into the me i was when i was on that first movie with him it's almost that he activates my need to be pauline was the character's name and this is interesting because when i met him i was under threat so i wanted this role very badly and he made it very clear to my team that he did not want to meet me but he did not think i could do this role and he thought he was like i don't want to meet something i know to know you know blonde babe like this is a serious character that that i need the demographic to really feel that they're being represented correctly and i'm not doing i'm not just hiring this chick who wants to you know do an indie and be all like edgy so i showed up at our lunch because the little the little bugger he really wasn't going to meet me but his producer owed my agent a favor and he had to sit down with me so we went to lunch and he i mean i i could like as i'm walking up to the table he's just like i can just tell he's stewing he does not want to be there he's 26 years old this is his first movie ever he's as arrogant as the day is long and he's just like no she is not it i'm not hiring this idiot um so i sit down and i'm like i've had my makeup artist come and put these like weird bushy eyebrows on me i was like what's gonna alter my face and make me look a little you know strange or whatever just to try and he's just looking at me like you're just a pretty chick with eyebrows on like no way i brought pictures of you and i was like weirdo little kid with my mid-calf socks and my boys t-shirts i was like i'm gonna prove that i am a strange person and you're gonna freaking hire me man and then he tells me oh well pauline the character has to shave her head i was like i'll shave my head and he's like no you won't you're you're a 90210 little hollywood starlet you're not going to shave your head i was like i will shave my head and he's like no you won't you're on your show and it's like they can wig me i will shave my head for the movie and he would not believe me and i got pissed and protective protective mechanism popped up i grabbed my steak knife and started to saw off my hair at the table at houston steakhouse he goes whoa okay stop hold on you're crazy all right don't cut your hair off at the table and i had an offer once i had gotten in the car and after he had he realized that this woman is crazy but there was a threat mechanism that had been activated at that table where i had to be this audacious like devil may care go [ __ ] yourself which was definitely and definitely has maintained itself for a long part of my life but that had to come out and couldn't be anything else i wasn't allowed to be anything else yeah and when i've been around him i've had to navigate that she wants to show up and suppress everything else and and i'm not just that anymore i'm compassion and love and and a lot of things now that i didn't feel at that time for myself and uh and it's interesting to dance with her right so i think that's probably something that a lot of people wonder is if you have the choice to kind of move between these alters or if it's more or just always triggered by some kind of stress stimulus or um yeah what is that like well it it differs as you evolve with the with the disorder um so in order for people to understand this and this is how my brain works by reverse engineering i i take the bed apart and get back to the very first screw and then i know how to put the bed together so that's what i did with my brain i didn't physically take my brain apart but i went in there and dug around for a long time until i could understand what was happening with me and even prior to my diagnosis i was doing this with all of my defense mechanisms and my aversion to love and my inability to have intimacy and a lot of things that i struggled with for a long time everything comes back down to two very simple things one is real one's an illusion love is real fear is an illusion this is what our world is made of and when you're talking about mental health concerns where there are more concerns there is more fear where there are less concerns there is more love i did not have the glue to put those fragmented mirror shards together to have a whole image of myself i have a wellspring of overflowing glue now i have so much love so i don't get stuck in a different identity i can fluidly move through them i can i can ask them to pop out one of them wanted to not integrate with me and she made it very clear that she wanted to this was in december of 2020. she wanted to go away and never come back and i was that that was hard because i had i didn't know i had this then i discovered that i had it three years ago then it was like i had a family and i was very ostracized at the time from my own uh family and no one really understood what i was going through and i i was like my doctor was so accepting of me saying well she and i are together and we are hanging out in my brain and my all my family's like you're in psychosis you're insane like not all of my family but certain people and i just felt very very seen for the first time by my amazing doctor and then i would go out in the world and i wasn't seen like that and and it was it was very difficult to to toe that line and so the the evolution of this is that now with more scaffolding on the inside of me more treatment more work hours and hours and hours days and weeks and weeks and months and months and months of this treatment that i've undergone coinciding with somatic experience to release trapped energy out of my cells out of my body that would initiate threats that weren't there the the perception of threat that wasn't there i now have the ability to manage what would be considered identities much more like moots the way people who are neurotypical do so for example i last week i had two people that i was speaking with who both have childhood sexual trauma they were one i was doing an inner child deep dive practice with and the other i've been working with for a while and she just called me and her face was little and you can tell i can tell anyway i can tell when someone is in a younger identity especially because it really presents on the face and i immediately said do you need little anna and i i said i can pop her out and i i was able to help this wonderful woman who's navigating this and raising a child and trying to figure out you know how to live life and convince herself that she's not crazy even though she feels she is and i i have no shame whatsoever i'm like okay little anna's here and little anna went to work and little anna started to talk to her and and immediately she just started crying and little anna told her how scary things had been and little anna told her that she had figured out how to not be scared of the monsters anymore and she has a lot of help from big aniline and she just went right into it and intuited what this lovely woman needed at the time and their little like the their littles were able to um able to i mean my little and her little were able to have a healing moment the same thing happened with the other young woman so yeah it's a very different experience now and i really want to express because there has been no material out there in the world that you can integrate fully and at some point be in a space where you don't feel that you lose control over your your alter switches uh and i in personal experience i can say that you can you absolutely can if i could do it it there's a possibility and it required a lot of love and that's the part that we're often missing i think that's a wonderful point to make in terms of really dealing with any mental illness in terms of how best to approach you know healing and whatnot so you call this integration that's that's not talked about very much in terms of dissociative identity disorder so it's so nice that you brought this up as a possibility for anyone out there living with dissociative identity disorder and maybe grappling with struggling with it absolutely i i mean i've never heard anyone speak about it and i saw it like my my experience was very visual with my alters i was in a moment i had a very like a blast of love that happened between me and a partner and he just doubled down on something that i just i was so nonchalant about it it was it was like i didn't i didn't even see a problem my my image of myself had clearly been so low that i didn't see why someone would stay with someone if they were this this and this and i was saying that i was expressing that and he's just started he got in my face like he was emotional and intense and he was like i would never leave you like i would not leave you in that situation and i'm like no no you don't understand like this is a really extreme situation here are the factors and he's like i would not leave you and he got so it was like his emotion overtook me and i just like i went from just being very logical about no this is why you should definitely leave me if i was ever to be in the circumstance to which was my clearly one of my parts of myself that arose to protect me from the pain of being abandoned and he was like uh-uh and i went from this just clearly locked and loaded in my um that i call her analytical analytical she's she was a very analytical she couldn't she was just processing just not able to be in emotions and it wasn't safe and she does not leave like when she was there she had the reigns and it was like it could be weeks or months like she nobody gets her out of her role and he did and something broke something something that needed to break broke inside me and something healed in its place and i it knocked me out like i went into hysterics and then i passed out and had a nap which is also very common when you disassociate to to fall asleep or to feel the need to go to sleep when you're losing space and time as i was waking up i always check in with my alters i always check in with my alters to make sure that everyone's there you know like i started thinking of them as someone hanging out in my house it's just my mind house and i'm like you would ask them hey how'd you sleep how was your nap you know and i had woken up from the nap and i went to check in in the room in my mind where they always are and there they were and i told them i want to introduce you guys to somebody and in my mind i did something that my doctor and i do a lot which is resourcing so in memories when i was dealing with really difficult memories before we would go all the way into them to process with emdr we would go in and resource so i would go back to the place in time in my mind but i would bring like an army of aniline like we won't knock some people out you try to mess with little anna you know or or i would bring in you know my cat something that would make me feel you know happy or or someone who maybe feel feel protected some you know protection love safety happiness energy are all forms of anchoring and resourcing that my doctor would teach me to do and then we would go into the scary memories so i started to do that of my own volition in my meditation or in quiet time or now i could just do it with my eyes open i could like create this safety space by bringing in the image of someone but right after this happened i wanted to introduce this gentleman to my others in my mind and i went in the room with everybody and i it was the craziest thing because you know i had probably 75 splits that i could see i couldn't count all of them at six years old like they were all like it was like i had a definitive 13 year old self i had a definitive infant self i and then i had just like a sea of five and six year olds for as far as you could see in this room inside my mind and they were all just probably splitting constantly because i that was the period when i was really going through all the severe traumas so what was really interesting was he walked in the room in my mind and my mind i see him as myself i'm the pov the me that i feel is me and he never looked at anyone else but me and he like the other the little ones were all running and he was picking them up and and all these things were happening in my mind but he never stopped looking at me and all of a sudden i realized i didn't have to be a little girl and play baby i didn't have to my brain was making this realization that it didn't have to feel threat that if i wasn't cutesy and little and adorable i would lose the guy's attention or his adoration or whatever affection it was like my the energy of what i had just experienced was visually transmitting in my mind a message to me that i was enough and when that clicked in you can imagine the tears my heart is beating so hard right now 75 little me's just sucked up into me and the room was empty and i i looked around and i'm like wait what just happened like but i was just like fixed on him and me and then i fell asleep again because it might be a lot for your body to process when you're when you're processing an epiphany of love that you actually are lovable and that someone could actually care about you without you having to be a bunch of other things to keep them and when i woke up again i went to go to the room and now the room was gone like the room started to i couldn't create the room i couldn't get it back it was gone and it was disintegrating the it was just like just dust in my mind i mean this is so trippy that you're like this is your own mind i'm like i have an incredible imagination i'm an actress i'm a writer i can create worlds my mind does what i tell it to do when this is going on this is having this is a life of its own and this is something that's really you know everyone has a different experience you might have visual you might have impressions and senses or smells that that make you kind of notice your shift is occurring but for me it was very visual in my mind i called my doctor immediately and i was like the room is gone the little ones sucked up into me i don't know what's happening where are they they went all the way i need to find them they're missing like i need to put out a search award i use the search order for my little my littles and she's like wait tell me what happened and i told her about i just explained the same thing that i was just telling you and she said oh my goodness you integrated you integrated and and what i do want to share about that quickly is that happened and then i wasn't i didn't feel fully solid in the integration and i also felt a little lonely all of a sudden it was just it happened so fast so i consciously popped back out my 13 year old self and my six-year-old cell like my most definitive six-year-old self so there was we were down to now three and in this space i felt safe to move forward because because this first integration is amazing but it's not like and they lived happily ever after the end you know like i still have i still have muscle memory i still have deeply dug grooves in my brain of neural associations and neural pathways that are associated with being altered and compartmentalized and fragmented and that burst of love which i felt was some glue and it allowed me to glue a lot of the knees back into me but there was still work to do and to make sure that those you know that glue was really firmly cemented and that it wasn't coming from an outside source right yeah that that was key so i was getting love from an outside source that and love heals no matter what but the love that keeps you healed is the love that comes from within so i wouldn't go on to find that level of integration until just in the last six months wow well thank you so much for sharing all that that was like a beautiful story oh absolutely yeah so you mentioned like you know finding that place of self-love within the last six months and i think that that's kind of when what i could find on the internet anyway but when you started to be open about your diagnosis is that kind of why you decided to be open or what was that process like to become more open about it you're the first one to put that together actually even beyond me i i didn't realize that but probably it was an organic because i was in an organic conversation with dr daniel amen at his office super comfy setting it was just me and him and he's like hey can we turn some cameras on i do a youtube show and i was like of course and i was just talking like i would talk to someone you know at the dinner table or anything like that so i clearly was at a comfort level to be able to share it it's just a normal conversation with someone that i didn't really know that well he was a doctor so it probably felt a little bit easier but when he said he wanted to share it there was no resistance i didn't feel any fear so maybe that is why so thank you for highlighting that yeah but so so you you talk about living with schizophrenia and and this kind of i would love to like cross-pollinate a little bit i mean obviously your listeners know your journey but i would how how is it how is it different or similar or whatever to what i'm explaining yeah so i didn't know a lot about dissociative identity disorder so i didn't know really the commonalities or differences that there are but um do people you know ever confuse dissociative identity disorder with schizophrenia for you when you have i've been called schizophrenic yeah yeah yeah okay so i thought it was just more of an [ __ ] thing but but it definitely is people's ignorance lack of knowledge and lack of information that's accessible so conversations like this really help yeah you mentioned that some of your family members thought that you were just in psychosis when you were experiencing the splits and whatnot and so perhaps that's kind of a similarity in terms of the presentation of it but i think the root of what is happening is very very different and so understanding that like you know psychosis is not necessarily like a dissociation and parts of you that are coming out i think it's really more just like you're losing touch with reality but it sounds like yes you know you are very much still grounded within reality just maybe triggered by different things and experiences oh oh absolutely my doctor was like how about how about they let me stick to the diagnosis of what you have since i'm the doctor here and i was like oh my god i love you she was very she was much nicer about it but she was she delicately reminded me um your family members you know i'm assuming don't have doctorates so where did they get the information to diagnose you with psychosis i do have one and i am not diagnosing you with psychosis and i see you three to four times a week so we're gonna go with that's a no so yes she she was very quick to correct that uh assessment of me but yes the assumption was that i was losing touch with reality because of my safety with within myself and with my doctor to to be able to refer to myself as me and my little selves as she and her and and feel very separate and okay in that and i think that it was so hard to hear for certain people that they just like you know you need help you need to be impatient like it was like they wanted to admit me and my doctor is like i speak to you every day like and i we do treatment for 90 minutes three times a week you're completely grounded in reality and you're more grounded than you have been in the last you know however many months of treatment so yes it was that was definitely uh you know you know people will be people yeah i thought it was also interesting that you mentioned kind of before you knew what you were experiencing that it felt like you were like fluctuating between moods which could probably be you know a similar experience although again very different what what is actually happening to you know like schizoaffective disorder which is a combination of bipolar or depression or whatnot so maybe that mood experience the way it presents to other people might be similar as well but again actually very different because you weren't fluctuating between moods you were fluctuating between different you know parts of you different parts of me initiated by protective mechanisms right yeah yeah so yeah i don't know i think that that's kind of the similarities that people think between did and schizophrenia really are actually nothing alike and so it's weird that you know people confuse these two so frequently because you know a lot of people a lot of people are from there if i share that i have schizophrenia they're like oh so how many personalities do you have and it's like that's not even a good question for anyone first of all but well i would love to be more educated on how to answer that question you know when because people assume that if you have a severe mental health concern that you know everything about all severe mental health concerns it's like well no i'm not i just know what i live with but how how does it differentiate for you if if i'm if i'm faced with that in the future that i like a question about if you have or what schizophrenia entails or or just like a day in the life of like a moment i i'm kind of explaining obviously moments where my did has presented what does your schizophrenic tendencies present as yeah so typically do you have it is it thoughts or feelings impressions or it's typically like um so there's like the positive symptoms so like hallucinations and delusions that you experience and i experience those while on medication too i get breakthrough symptoms like that but i think probably the harder symptoms that i experience on a daily basis are the like delusional thoughts or the paranoia and so it's kind of where you follow this narrative within your mind that isn't necessarily grounded in reality and you kind of you know float between reality and you know delusional thought or paranoia about things that maybe shouldn't necessarily be bringing that up but you know i thought it was so lovely what you were saying about you know love and self-acceptance being a huge component of your recovery and i think that that is very applicable for schizophrenia as well in terms of you know obviously i'm not saying that you can heal yourself by with love and whatnot like that's not what i'm saying and i don't think that's what you were saying either but it's a huge huge step forward in terms of learning how to manage your illness and how to you know operate from a place of self-love and self-acceptance which is just huge so i love that you shared that yeah absolutely i mean i think i think about the fact that i was diagnosed as bipolar i later was told by dr eamon who scanned my brains and who had this initial conversation that became the public conversation that i would go on to further about me having d.i.d he said i've scanned thousands and thousands like 50 000 bipolar brains you don't have a bipolar brain but i was diagnosed with it because i had the symptoms and i have family history and what's interesting about that to me is that bipolar is realized in teenage years typically it remains dormant until teenage years and it often is activated by some form of trauma so the question then lies in if you are bipolar and that is activated would it have been avoided if you grew up with love that to me is a curious thing to discover because if what activates it is probably what is the opposite of love trauma like you know like i think that not a lot of love is centering around those abuses and stuff you know so it's interesting to me to think about it so again in reverse engineering my own experience and my own feelings going through piece by piece memory by memory me becoming the woman that i needed where i show up in my own mind with an army of me and i rescue little me out of every single bad memory that i have and i went i did i mean i went through every single one and it was a long log and i rescued me out of every single one of them yeah and something happened in those moments something happened in reality in an intangible experience that an abstract mind-based moment had tangible effects in reality because of what i did i changed in real life because of visiting myself in my mind in different moments of my journey and i don't think that this is something that doctors can speak to i don't think it's something that you can collect data on and and prove that this is something that is an effective tool or not i can only go on personal experience and i can only go on the experience of the individuals who have gone on to work with doing inner child practices and working leading inner child workshops and the tools that i use i very clearly describe them i articulate how to go in what you have to do the steps and there is healing healing that comes as a result of these practices in all of the people 100 track record of healing moments in real life in tangible life because of something that that was resolved in the mind which is beautiful and i think for me the biggest testament to that is my symptoms of bipolar whether i have a brain for it on the scan or not i did have the symptoms the symptoms are gone and that looks like i have no more hypersexuality i've had sex between you and me and everyone listening i've had sex one time in a year over a year i used to have to have it four times a day or i was losing my mind um i have no more hypersexuality i do not have the i think there's like seven sentence hyper spending hyper frugality is the thing that's impulsivity extreme irritability agitation i have an interesting sleep situation still insomnia is one of the things which it also goes along with a lot of things insomnia is also a result of wiring in the child's brain when they grew up with trauma because nighttime is very scary but i have much better restful sleep i used to have you know wake up every 45 seconds and like ah like am i gonna die and i have restful periods of sleep and then i have like a window in the middle like the witching hour where i wake up and i'm like it's 3am again everybody um but all of those things started to drop away when i went back to the root cause which was this very traumatic early life these memories that were in a bubble for 31 years that bubble got popped and then they started to flood and i started to flood my system with love over the last three years and so there's definitely something there that we don't fully understand yet i think that's not necessarily measurable with the data that we or the the way we measure data but uh i would love to see more on on that it's just a you know it's a hard sell to walk into a science doctor community hey so you want to measure love and see how well that works as a medicine but i think that's such a valid point in terms of you know it's a very huge component and you know it doesn't matter if you have a diagnosis or not i think that healing process is an important journey for everyone to go on but it's very hard to measure as you said and so there's not a lot of you know scientific research being done in terms of that as a treatment method but i think it is very important so yeah thank you for touching on that absolutely i guess kind of wrapping up um is there anything that you would like people to know about did that you haven't mentioned or what it means to live with or do you have any tips or whatnot for other people in terms of managing did yes absolutely and i appreciate the question if you are dealing with did first and foremost i see you i see you i see that struggle i see that uncertainty i see that fear i know it i know it in such an intrinsic way and i am sending all of the love in my heart to you as you either embark on your journey as you discover more about what you're dealing with and and how to cope with it ways that i really really really found healing first somatic experience must be a part of your self-treatment it just must be a part of your self-care routine and this goes for anyone really but especially if you are dealing with did if you are able to learn more about holotropic breath work it's spelled h-o-l-o-t-r-o-p-i-c holotropic breathwork pranayama and sound baths which is literally bathing your body mind soul in sound that has healing frequencies you will release energy that has been stored in your body that's holding you back from being able to fully access parts of your healing on your journey i can promise you if you do this this is this will have a profound effect on your life if you stick with it so that is something you can do in the comfort of your own home a lot of meditation companies facilities who have gone virtual one of which is called unplug that i that i go to all of their events online they offer sound therapy they offer breath work practices coinciding that with whatever your doctor prescribes or whatever your doctor you know whatever treatment you are doing with your doctor and also asking yourself why is this here what is this protective mechanism about hello little hello little mechanism thank you for trying to protect me why are you here where from where did you originate where was the beginning of your need to really strongly fiercely protect me and thank you for that but but when did that start and building a relationship with ourselves however many selves we feel we have is the most essential key and no one teaches us this no one teaches us that we have to have a relationship with ourselves and this goes for every single person on the planet we build a relationship with people that we work with people that we interact with online like people that we see at the starbucks but we wake up every morning with ourselves and we never check in and say hey how are you doing how are you feeling what's this about so i asked myself why is this here what is this moment about not a why me don't go victimy on me i with kindness and graciousness like a mom would ask like what is that buddy why are you feeling that way why you know what what's where's your boo boo why did why did that happen can i kiss it with that that nurturing soothing energy that most of us are not taught at least i wasn't um and asking why why why why is this here where did it originate where did it originate from and what is this moment about what is this protective identity about what is she he they what are they here to show us you do that in any situation in your life and i promise you you're going to have a lot more of an understanding about yourself and how to navigate the world i do it all the time i do it mostly now when i'm frustrated or something when i when i'm not vibing with somebody else i'm like what is it what's going on inside of me that i'm getting this frustrated by you yeah that's a great exercise for anyone to do in terms of getting to the root of feelings that are coming up and whatnot but great advice in terms of dealing with gid as well so thank you so much analyn for being with us today and for sharing so openly about your experiences with did i learned a ton and i think that our audience is going to find this very valuable too so thank you absolutely well thank you for asking me to come on and i hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and happy holidays thank you you too so also just a quick do you have any ways for people to follow more along with you or to hear more about your journey or whatnot absolutely so i am actually early days of a potential project centering around things like this but i will be keeping everyone abreast of that on my social media platform i'm a i'm on instagram it's at the anna mccord and anything that i'm doing especially in regards to mental health you can find on there also if you check on my instagram tv like igtv you can see a lot of meditations that i've led i've led some inner child practices that are really helpful for this work so feel free to deep dive and stalk me on instagram if you feel like awesome there's a lot of love there for you oh we'll link to your instagram in the description of this video so thank you again so so much analyn it was wonderful speaking with you and take care thanks laura it was wonderful speaking with you too bye

Channel: Living Well with Schizophrenia

Views: 75,964

Keywords: schizophrenia, schizoaffective, schizoaffective disorder, dissociative identity disorder, DID, multiple personalities, living with DID, living with dissociative identity disorder, symptoms, symptoms of DID, DID symptoms, AnnaLynne McCord, AnnaLynne McCord dissociative identity disorder

Id: 9NDnr3tMyB4

Length: 49min 13sec (2953 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021