My T resisted diagnosis (well, I wasn't actively asking, but when we have discussed that word, he has emphasized me as an individual, rather than me as existing inside some rigid category) and we still don't actually talk about it directly almost at all. When I asked him questions about CPTSD vs BPD vs DID, he just mentioned that my dissociation is somewhere on a spectrum and regardless of label, we are working with my individual experience of myself and the approach is not dependent upon the label, but those experiences. No matter what the label, I have stuff that got put away somewhere that needs to come out "into the light" as he likes to phrase it, be experienced/integrated/whatever, grieved.

I did find it at least useful to be given an idea of what I'm dealing with, but only because I felt like it gave me "permission" to acknowledge my own reality and share in a way I had been resisting up to that point. Basically, if I don't have outside validation of my experiences, I struggle to trust myself and drive myself crazy constantly interrogating myself. Well, I still do that, but while we have barely discussed the actual diagnosis that we're using (which has become mostly for insurance purposes), we have begun discussing my experiences much more, rather than me discounting and hiding them. So, while I don't think the diagnosis itself is particularly useful, I think the process of discussing, "What the ---- is going on with me?" was very helpful. I don't think those discussions would have happened otherwise.