A 33-year-old woman was just a teenager when she realised that she may have a system of identities living inside of her.
Tarese Estelle realised there were messages in online chatrooms attributed to her username but she had no recollection of sending. She also had writing in her journal that didn’t look the same as her own.
The then teenager was reading online and discovered the condition now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID) – and thought that may apply to her.
DID, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, is when there are two or more distinct personality identities that may have their own names, history and characteristics in a single person. This is caused by the brain fragmenting into separate parts or alters with amnesia between them.
For someone who has DID, it can cause gaps in memory due to amnesia between parts.
Tarese, a couture fashion designer who runs The Hungry Australian, decided to go to her parents for help once she discovered the term.
“They were like, ‘No, it’s demon possession, you don’t have it’ and it sort of got shut down,” Tarese, who uses “we” to be inclusive of all alters/parts, and “I” refers to the alter/part who is talking, told news.com.au.
“So it wasn’t until we started therapy as adults that we actually started to come to terms with that a bit more.”
Due to the reaction that she received, Tarese then buried that part of herself until she was an adult.
DID can be caused by severe childhood trauma, with SANE Australia revealing this could include physical, verbal or sexual abuse.
Tarese grew up in a strict, traditionalist community that featured harsh rules and was quite isolated from mainstream society.
Growing up, Tarese thought the trauma she experienced as a child was normal as she had nothing else to compare to.
The trauma from her childhood bled into adulthood, particularly when it came to men, as she floated towards the familiar even though it wasn’t “safe”.
Other factors started to spiral out of control in the form of a complex post-traumatic stress disorder, extreme self harm that landed her in hospital and overdoses.
Tarese also experienced an eating disorder – but all of these were the experience of her alters and it had a flow on impact into her life.
“And for me, who doesn’t hold a lot of the trauma memories, it was really confusing as to why all these different things were happening,” Tarese said.
“Like why we ended up in situations where people do bad things to us or hurt us or why we ended up in hospital when all I was really trying to do was hold a job and live a normal life. .
“I was trying to keep our life together. It was confusing. All these conflicting things happening with no understanding why they were happening.”
The build up of everything led to Tarese going to a long term residential rehabilitation centre in 2009, and that began her journey to getting diagnosed.
In 2021, Tarese was officially told she had DID and she currently features a system of 25 known ‘alters’.
The ‘alters’ vary in age and personality traits – for instance one loves makeup and glitter, there are some more reserved and then there is Tarese who studied counselling and fashion, and takes care of the day-to-day things.
An underlying trait they all have is that there is a creative element to each of her ‘alters’.
She said that knowing about her ‘alters’ made a lot of her life make sense, and allowed her to heal in a way she once thought was impossible.
For a long time, Tarese didn’t talk about her childhood or diagnosis until one of her ‘alters’ came out during a live video on TikTok.
It revealed that they were part of a system and the courage of that particular alter allowed other alters to be more open on the platform.
“With some internal negotiations we started speaking out about it and discovered that there are people out there who are supportive,” Tarese said.
“We started to see just how it was helping people learn and just how many people out there don’t know what it is. I think the reason that we continue to talk about it is a to help people understand and learn about it.”
Tarese said films like Split are not a good representation of DID, and she wants more people to understand what it actually means.
Unlike other mental health conditions that are born out of things such as chemical imbalances, DID is created due to childhood trauma.
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When asked if she looks back and considers that life didn’t have to be that way, Tarese said there is a complicated response.
“It depends on what part you ask, but I don’t wish our experiences and what we’ve been through on anybody,” she said.
“But at the same time, I’m also super grateful that our brain fragmented the way that it did to help us survive. If that hadn’t have happened, we wouldn’t be here today.”
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