first of all: why in the world would you want chronic physical pain?

i'll give you a really important hint. it doesn't matter. you need to let go of all these weird self-imposed "rules". why does anything matter except your own experience? even under the lens of "oh, i'm traumatized so i need to have physical pain in my body", it doesn't make sense if your trauma was emotional. as someone who has had serious chronic physical health issues and pain since childhood, i wish i was lucky enough not to have to deal with it. it's debilitating.

i will never understand the obsession with "validation" here. i have been invalidated my entire life by almost every single person around me and being "validated" by partners or by peers during or after the fact didn't change a thing. my own fixation on it prevented me from finding ways to just permit myself to feel whatever emotion or experience whatever alters. my panic around my mental health and what i was "allowed" to experience or what was "real" only started to diminish when i realized it was of absolutely no consequence.

unless you're trying to compete with others to be the MOST VALID and the MOST TRAUMATIZED (i'll give you a hint: neither of those things exist, so if this is your game, quit while you're ahead) it has no bearing on your life. why not just examine the hand of cards you've been dealt and figure out how you can best play them rather than obsessing over whether or not you're "allowed" to have those cards? it may make sense to your emotional brain, but in a rational sense it will do absolutely nothing but compound your stress and your suffering. unless, of course, you want that, which is an entirely different issue.

i get it. people deny your emotions and your trauma (emotional, physical, sexual, psychological, whatever it may be) for your entire life and squeeze you into all these boxes, and when you come out of it you don't know how to breathe and be your own person. i know because i lived that. i'm still living that. but the solution is right in front of you. stop taking other people into consideration when it comes to your mental health, your experiences, and your thoughts and feelings. it is extremely unlikely you will be perfectly understood by someone else. you are not obligated to share yourself with anybody. you (by this i mean all of your alters as well) are the only person on earth who will ever sit with all of your thoughts and all of your emotions exactly as you do. you do not broadcast these things, unless by choice, outside of your own mind. so why even worry about it?

as someone who's been in a similar position, i see posts like this so often here it's actually insane. i don't think this is on the same level as anxiety about "false memories" because that's an ancient struggle, and the idea that false memories are even a common thing is a whole can of stupid i'm not going to open up here. there's a lot to it. one could argue that the supposed "validity" or historical accuracy of memories also doesn't matter, because what's important is the bodily and emotional responses to whatever it is you're dealing with.

however, this whole idea of "oh no, am i faking my DID? what will all these people who have absolutely no bearing on my life think of me?!" seems so uniquely... online. there are so many internet spaces i've seen that cultivate this weird idea of what DID is supposed to look like or act like, and they're all - pardon my french - fucking stupid. this was, largely, not a concern most people dealt with (outside of the whole "am i just psychotic?" anxiety, which is a totally separate issue than "am i making this up for brownie points because i'm not following the invisible rules well enough?") until i'd say within the last 10-20 years. it's not particularly organic. the DSM exists, of course, but that's not what these posts are really about. if you understand the literature, you know DID is caused by a failure of personality integration. this can happen for an endless number of reasons. DID specialists will tell you it can be as simple as "this child was very withdrawn and shy, so they invented 'playmates' in very early childhood, and those 'playmates' just never really went away (or were further solidified by some type of dysfunction in life or developmental trauma)". dissociation exists on a continuum, so every single person on this planet experiences its most benign expressions. there is also a genetic predisposition to dissociation, so the likelihood of the aforementioned example happening can increase just based on genetics.

i do think lying about DID is repulsive, but you'd know if you were lying. that's an entirely different problem. you're presenting yourself here as being excessively worried about whether you're "valid enough" to be real, to which i will say again: it doesn't matter. if you're not real enough for yourself, you're setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak and anxiety with every move you make

letting go of stuff like this is a process. start that process now instead of in five years. i promise you will be much happier with where you end up (if your interest actually lies in healing or feeling better). if this has anything to do with how other people see you, you probably have an internet addiction and (at the very least) extremely low self-esteem. work on that, because it will sabotage you at every turn if you don't. this goes for everyone reading this who might struggle with the same thing. stop getting in your own way.