Lore, the youtuber with seven identities inside: "It's like going to the front of a truck and alternating drivers"

These are the names of the seven personalities that live inside Lore, a 35-year-old Mexican girl diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and who through her channel, Long Soul System, in which she accumulates more than 300,000 subscribers on Youtube, tries to let the world know about his mental illness.

DID is an unknown disorder for the population, despite affecting 2% of its totality and having had a strong presence in fiction, being the basis of the plot of stories such as The strange case of Dr.. Jekyll y Mr. Hyde, Psychosis or Multiple.

The mental alteration that Lore suffers, as explained by the Mayo Clinic on its website, “represents a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, environments, actions and identity”. Those who suffer from it, usually as a result of a trauma experienced during childhood, “escape from reality in involuntary and unhealthy ways, going so far as to experience periods of amnesia or develop alternative identities.”

For example, in the movie 'Multiple', released in 2016, the character played by James McAvoy has 23 personalities and behaves in an aggressive way, completely controlled by the identities that reside within him.. A perspective of the disorder that caused great controversy due to its stigmatization of mental illness. Thus, the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation decided to release a statement discrediting the vision of this disorder as something dangerous that is shown in the film and criticizing that it was done “at the expense of a vulnerable population that struggles to be recognized and receive the effective treatment they deserve.

That is precisely the battle that Lore from 'Long Soul System' is waging, who, in addition to giving visibility to the disorder through social networks, tries to destigmatize the people who suffer from it and prevent them from living the ordeal that she went through until find out what was wrong with him. “With what I do, I hope that DID can be diagnosed much earlier than it is currently done, because in my case it took a long time. I started going to therapy at the age of 6 and I've been going to a psychiatrist since I was 11, but I wasn't diagnosed with the disorder until I was 28, it's too long. Many things could work if dissociation were detected much earlier,” he says.

Lore (she does not give her full name because, as she explains, “people are very intense”) explains that her DID arose from the violence she suffered as a child, “a fairly common thing that many Mexican families go through.”. Her brain, to try to take refuge from this violence, began to dissociate to try to understand the situation that surrounded her, an experience experienced by many children, who must assimilate “the idea that their mother gives them love, but also hits them.” .

This situation, which occurred when he was 15 years old, “led to conversations with other alternative personalities through a notebook”, which he tried to hide while the disorder developed without pause and without exact knowledge about him.

Years, even decades, in which Lore was wandering between psychologists hearing diagnoses of “depression, panic attacks, agoraphobia, bipolarism, borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive …”. Lore had a lot of misappraisals until she discovered the term dissociation herself and started researching it to not only find out her diagnosis, but also get a degree in psychology.

life with personalities

After this process, Lore is currently in the best moment of her life, “stable and lucid”. But he continues to live with seven identities within him, which fulfill a certain role within his total personality.

Among them, the four most characteristic are: Rayel who is 29 years old and is the hostess, the main character of the body; Antef, 32 years old, is the only man in the system and the main protector of the puzzle of personalities that make up Lore; Little Artist, who is a 3-year-old girl who, in addition to representing the most creative part of the system, has the ability to say what others are silent about, and finally, Alexxia, who, at 34, is the “persecutor” of the system, that is, that complicated identity, which the rest of the identities have already known how to control, but which has punished the rest for a long time, even causing self-harm to the body.

The personalities alternate with each other, through changes that can be born as a result of moments of stress and that Lore calls switches: “I really don't know very well how it works. It's like going to the front of a truck and switching drivers depending on what's going on around you.. When it does, it feels like passing out and can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours.”

They are alternations that arise at certain times, but the composition of the system is not similar to that of a queue in which the identities wait their turn to appear. If not, what Lore has inside is “a community” in which key decision-making, such as a move or the beginning of a relationship, is carried out through “a consensus among all”.

Lore, despite having managed to live with the disorder, continues to go to behavioral therapies, seeks professionals specialized in trauma, and has been taking antidepressants for years. Everything to achieve “a total fusion between the identities so that they remain in one and leave this disorder behind.”