How do I Help You Understand What I Cannot Myself

Do you know how it feels to always have a companion in your head? An alter ego that can deal with whatever you cannot. You know him; you can see him, talk to him, in your mind of course. You can let him take your body when things threaten you, and you feel safer because he is there. Do you know how that feels; I do.
I have always, as long as I can recall, had Mikey with me. He is 8, but he has always been with me, seen what I have seen read what I have read, and he is smart. The degree on my wall should have his name on it too. He read the books and wrote the papers with me. He did all of the playful theatre stuff. He’s 8 and he is 48, if that makes any sense.
Now I am finding out there are others, not always present, who don’t know everything I know. They do know every moment of pain, abuse, humiliation. Some of them know things I am missing, well they all do. Each holds some memory or memories of events I could not handle. Indeed this is why they came into being. These alters have taken my place during some of the worst, or that’s what I am told.
One alter, named Patty, took all of third and fourth grade math, but just the math. And here’s the kicker, she won’t tell me what she knows. I don’t know how to do word problems because she holds the keys to how they work. She knows and I don’t and it sucks.
So many pieces of my life are missing, and now that I have acknowledged that they are there, and have met a few of them, the rest want to come forward. They want to tell me everything about who they are and what they know. Some of them feel like I do, others feel differently. Some of them like the brother. Many of them have conflicting feelings. And what is so rough on me, causing me major headaches, is the talking all at once, the trying to force me to see them, acknowledge them right this second. I am not ready to meet all of them.
I am fearful that if I start to get to know them, they will start to pour out the memories of the events I wasn’t able to handle before and I still won’t be able to handle them.
I have lost little bits of time here and there all of my life. I cover well, something I had to learn to do because my family already called me stupid, I certainly didn’t want to give them more ammunition. Losing time is only one thing. Another is that I have had conversations in my head with people I seem to know well. I often find myself speaking with a Southern dialect I can’t shake. I see these people in my head, I know what they look like, sound like, but I never knew they were “real” in any sense of that word. I stutter sometimes. I do a lot of things that are out of character for me. I feel compelled to do certain things, go places, act in certain ways, and people think all of these behaviors are mine. For me it is like watching a movie, seeing it on a screen; I have no more control over what happens than I do over a movie. And there are the voices, not like schizophrenic voices, telling me to do things, they are just talking. They talk to each other, sometimes to me.
Since I was 28 three of my therapists suggested DID and I rejected it, but when this therapist, the fourth to say it showed me I had to give in and say yes, I have those feelings, those symptoms. The therapist that first suggested it got a Kleenex box thrown at her head and I got “fired” from therapy. The next therapist suggested the same thing. It seems that I actually dissociate during sessions.
So honestly, all of this craziness, this DID thing is completely new to me. I don’t know how it works, or why it happened to me and when. I don’t know a lot of things about it. I know that for me it explains a lot of mood swings and crazy behavior. It explains the voices I hear in my head, the time I lose, and other things. So what I do know is they are all supposed to be pieces of me that broke apart at times of stress and or trauma in my life. But I don’t understand the different genders, or ages. Some are older than I am now; others are young and never get any older. Mikey, the one that I have been coconscious with as long as I can remember, is always 8 years old. I don’t understand, so how do I begin to let others know how to understand? I thought he was just an imaginary playmate that I kept with me all these years.