Suspecting dissociative disorder; how do I cope with it?

Hello!

My name is Mark, and I'm a host of an undiagnosed polyfragmented fictive-heavy system.

We've been trying to find proper therapy for a good long while, but it's hard to do so when you're freshly unemployed with no way of being able to afford any type of help. So, I'm posting here.

If you're triggered by trauma discussion, specifically topics of abuse, I'm gonna try to hide it under a read more but it doesn't seem to have that option so I'll just add a horizontal break line.

We struggle to remember large chunks of our life, but from what we've been told it started as early as 6. Our father was chronically abusive, both physically and mentally, and never provided the comfort and stable connection often needed for kids that age, and we had to move away from my childhood home shortly after. Every 2-3 years we'd end up needing to move again as we were surrounded by narcissistic and abusive family members, and as a result of trauma our own mother was no help half the time as she was very emotionally volatile and occasionally took her anger out on us. Usually in the form of emotional manipulation and abuse, but we very vividly remember to this day moments where she would physically hurt us in drunken rages. She was an alcoholic almost our whole life, only recently stopping within the past 4 years.

The first thing we remember as far as symptoms go, was the presence of uncontrollable "thought" voices in our head. We assumed it was imaginary friends, but we also had pretty bad maladaptive daydreaming and would often imagine ourselves as fictional characters, despite them acting almost exactly like the host. Then came the memory issues, concentration issues, executive dysfunction... Eventually the symptoms regarding the voices and "pretending to look like/be fictional characters" became not as noticeable, despite persisting, and a few times we ran into discussions of DID and its symptoms and we related, but shoved it aside and refused to address it. We instead thought our concentration and memory issues were merely ADHD as our mother was diagnosed with that very problem.

April of this year, however, we got back into watching a Youtuber named Soren, whose channel is named DissociaDID. And we got into watching The Entropy System, and The Ring System. I noticed the symptoms were very much like mine, and began to question whether or not I was a part of a system. As a result, all the symptoms came flooding back in, alters seeming to appear left and right as though they were waiting for me to discover them again. Primarily fictives and other introjects, but there were plenty of "brain made" alters as well. Now we're struggling to figure out how to cope as the dissociation has gotten worse, and the other trauma symptoms have worsened as well, especially since I seemed to have fused with a former host that had my deadname. She was the "first", so to speak.

Basically, what I'm trying to convey, is that I'm wanting to ask how other systems have coped? How did you manage to get through it, and is EMDR worth a try? Should we try and dig deeper into our past and work through the trauma ourselves, or is it not worth it and should we just wait for therapy? And how do we let others know of the whole "system" thing without being accused of faking or being judged? How do we deal with our own feelings of denial and feeling like we're just roleplaying the whole thing? It's embarrassing, but we cannot for the life of us explain why. It just is.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thank you for any responses you may decide to send to me. We appreciate every single bit of it.