yeah, so the thing here is that you're saying you weren’t traumatized by the abuse, but everything in your question points to the fact that you did internalize harmful ideas about what is and isn’t acceptable treatment of a child. that’s what makes it traumatic, not necessarily whether or not you personally feel traumatized by it in a way that you recognize.

like, the punishment for not doing chores should not be to hit a child. full stop. but because it was normalized in your environment, you don’t question it, and you even see it as something that could be justified. that's how trauma works—it gets into how you see yourself, the world, and what you think is just “the way things are.”

plus, your idea that abuse is only truly abusive if it’s random isn't actually accurate. abusers always have a reason—whether it’s control, punishment, or even just stress relief for them. but part of the trauma response is internalizing those reasons as if they make the abuse make sense or be somehow deserved. in reality, you were a kid, and kids mess up, and the appropriate response to that is teaching, not violence.

so, objectively, yeah, you might not label your experience as “traumatic” in the way that some people think of trauma (flashbacks, nightmares, etc.), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t shape you in a way that shows clear trauma patterns. the normalization of harm is trauma, even if you don’t immediately recognize it that way.

I want to start off by saying that switching in front of your therapist isn't a requirement to be diagnosed - literature on the subject says that relying on these 'overt window's for diagnosis usually misses other important signs because you're looking for something big, when really what therapists should be looking for are smaller things. the DSMV even changed the criteria and info about DID to say that self reported altered states is acceptable as well.

therapists who are well informed are not looking (or requiring at least) outright signs of switching or behavior, they're looking for changes in perspective and relation to the world.

that all being said, you could always explore the topic with your therapist and tell them that sometimes you feel like your perspective has changed (or outright say "I feel like I switch during therapy sometimes") and that you're struggling with a compulsion to keep 'acting' normal. they'll help you (or should at least) explore why this is and what you can do to help improve this or work towards something more functional for you

no one is ever like anything forever- there's not a single static person on this earth.

i think a lot of this is easier to grasp in hindsight obviously but I want to point out here that you don't know that you'll be fractured and dissociated for the rest of your life. you feel like it. and what you feel is important! it's important to acknowledge that. but you can't properly acknowledge it until you recognize that you can't know the future, and that "knowing" these things doesn't make room for you to be able to process.

trauma wires us to equate survival with permanence ("this pain will never end,") but life is motion. rivers change course. seasons turn. so do people.

when you say, "i’ll be fractured forever," you’re borrowing a script from pain, not truth. trauma loves to collapse time and say: "This is how it’s always been, so this is how it’ll always be," but that’s a survival reflex. not a crystal ball.

I think it might help to ask yourself the following questions:

• “what if ‘fractured’ isn’t the final word, but my starting point?”
• “what if my capacity to adapt surprises me?”
  
• *“what if healing looks nothing like I imagine?”

the mind you have today isn’t the mind you’ll have in 5 years. New tools, relationships, and insights can (and will! shift how OSDD impacts you over time

my immediate answer is "if you're asking this question you're probably not on the right track for actually understanding these concepts" but the more 'accurate' answer is that the DSMV does not decide who has OSDD vs DID based on these distinctions and afaik does not mention them at all. BPD is ctagrozied broadly as having secondary structual dissociation too and that's definitely not mentioned in the entry for that

I don't want to assume your intentions genuinely but I find a lot of the time focusing on these distinctions is not really helpful, having read The Haunted Self a few times. the entire book is very much full of "some people" and "typically" and "usually" that I think answering anything beyond "it's not exclusively secondary because barely anything in TSOD is exclusive" would not be accurate to the themes and premise of structural dissociation outlined in the book

for me what helps is acknowledging that like. you have it if you have it. it's already a part of your life and has been a part of your life basically your whole life.

the other thing is that fear and dread and amnesia come with it in the beginning and sometimes later on in recovery too but as you work on things (and honestly genuinely just getting older also helps with it a huge degree) it gets easier. you have a life that's in at least someways different than how you expected it to. and now that you know that, it's a lot easier to go "so I need to figure out what a good life looks like for me. what do I want? how do I achieve that? how do I work with myself to make that happen?"

once you stop trying make yourself live a life you don't have, you can start living in and working on the life you do. i think for me because I'm autistic it kind of is similar in that once I stopped trying to live an allistic life and acknowledged my struggles and acknowledged the things that I can't do very well, a lot of life opened up to me suddenly. it suddenly became not "why am I so bad at everything? why can't I do things like other people?" and instead was "what does a life that works for me look like? now that I have permission to exist how I do, how do I go about making it better? what does support look like for me?" and for me that was really, really freeing. this is from a family member perspective but I think this video might also be helpful when applying it to yourself in at least some ways.

https://youtu.be/EdtK9hztd1M?feature=shared

the first time that you do something, you're probably not going to be very good at it, too. riding a bike, doing art, going to new places, all of those are little microcosms of a broader pattern of experiencing something, not being very good at it, and then getting better, finding easier ways, or learning more about how to do a thing. some things are hard at first. they're hard later. they'll in some ways always be hard. but for me, in my case, I think about how I've experienced a lot of really hard stress over the years, but as I've grown older and worked on myself more and developed more capacity to do things that are scary, or to handle difficult emotions, I notice that while they're still hard ... I get more confidence I'll be able to handle them. that's the big thing for me.

when I was younger, I felt like a lot of my problems and struggles were SO LARGE compared to me. they were overwhelming, and at times, I didn't know how I was going to survive them. but over time, I feel like I've gotten bigger. I still have many of the same problems but it feels like there's more "me" so to speak to contain it in a healthier way. I don't feel like I'm bursting at the seams anymore. I feel like I can hold a lot more than I used to and working towards and recognizing that within myself helped me find a lot of peace.

I hope some of this helps

my instinct is to say that I believe the answer is no, not by itself and that there most likely are other factors involved (like how if you're being mistreated to the extent it causes DID this would also strongly imply that your parental figure is not attuned to you emotional needs/emotionally absent), but my other instinct is to say that I am not the arbiter of how your trauma affected you.

I would not focus on how much trauma you've experienced to validate/invalidate the presence of a complex dissociative disorder. some people experience things worse than 99% of other people, and they don't develop complex dissociative disorders, so I can't really responsibly tell you what does or does not "qualify" for enough trauma. the DSMV does not care about what qualifies as enough trauma. it's not part of the criteria. trauma can cause OCD, but we don't culturally validate or normalize the idea that there's an "amount of trauma" that qualifies for someone to develop OCD, and I don't think that we should do the same for DID. I believe that DID develops as a result of trauma, but I do not believe that quantifying a qualifying amount is a helpful framework for exploring or determining what you have. you experience what you experience regardless of whether you're "allowed to" or not

then don't force yourself to write. or rather, just set a timer.

for a lot of parts, they're trapped in an unending torrent of being triggered. to them, there is no end in sight because they're not well connected to parts of you who are going on with daily life and well regulated.

what is recommend if you're experiencing this is to start with something simple to ground:

what day is it? where are you currently? where are you sitting?

and then, engage your senses. what do you see, smell, hear, and feel, around you?

start by writing that down before anything else.

then, start a five minute timer and tell yourself (as a whole) "hey, some bad feelings might come up. I set a time for five minutes. during that five minutes we can feel and express whatever we need to. when that five minutes is up, I'll ask again how you feel. then, whoever is with me is welcome to stay with me for some grounding exercises with me so we can regulate and feel better and then go about our day."

and then do some grounding exercises. I'll reply to this post with 101 of them.

you don't have to explore deeply, and you shouldn't. you're allowed to and encouraged to just do it a little at a time. this is called titration, and it's an important skill. some professionals recommend imagining a dial for your feelings, where you turn it down just a little bit. not all the way, but just enough so you can get a feel, and also still stay present.

Janina fisher has a really good part in her book (pinned in my bio) and about how you can unblend from parts and that might help as well.

this is not as nuanced as it should be but if the rest of the system truly are better at doing things than him then at least one of you should learn and recognize that it would really suck if you were stuck in a brain with others who saw your fears and worries not as things to explore, validate, or address but instead as learned helplessness and refusal to do things.

I do not mean that rudely so much as I mean it bluntly but truly if you want things to get better you have to learn how to handle behavioral health issue with curiousity.

ALL behavior is communication. all of it. what is he communicating? do you know? why does he not learn to cook? why does he not move out? do you care beyond just 'because he's the problem'? are you willing to help him if and when you do find out? can you do it in a way that demonstrates a genuine commitment to relearning the right way to interact with your own mind the way caregivers should have interacted with you as a child?

if I had multiple people in my life saying "im" the problem as an alter I would not be motivated to change. I also think that it's a shitty way to try and motivate people by saying that they're the problem.

again I am not trying to be blunt but I truly genuinely that that the rest of the system needs a wake up call. if you want better from another alter you have to do better. this is not a one sided dysfunctional intrasystem dynamic and if you want things to improve you will have to learn different ways to do things.

I do not think that they are implying that you are 'autismgenic' so much so as (poorly) implying/describing that autistic people exist within a world that is not built for us and our experiences are alienating, confusing, more stressful for us, and oftentimes inescapable. autism also means that you can have trouble regulating your emotions and processing feelings, much less know what you're feeling. you might learn to use dissociation to block out sensory information that is overwhelming or distressing to you as well.

or at least that's what I hope they mean. I am of the opinion that autism alone cannot cause DID, and I think that DID/OSDD are in large part at the VERY least require failures by caregivers to provide you with the care and protection that you need to develop normally as a child, and in the case of an autistic child it can be especially difficult to understand how to provide those things, and while not 'difficult' it is very likely that parents of autistic children will not be attuned to their child's needs and/or be outright abusive towards them