It turns out that "classic DID" is made up of a mixture of degrees of co-consciousness, rather than being textbook all or nothing, in terms of amnesia. I suppose it depends on so many different factors, including how many reminders of abuse there are/were in day to day life. Like if your abuse was not committed by immediate family members and only happened for a discrete period of time it would make perfect sense for alters to be more discrete and separate, and to have all aspects of abuse and associated alters completely separated from day to day life (ie full amnesia for all dissociated alters). That would have enabled the primary self state to develop and grow without the apparent effects of the trauma.

But if your abuse was a part of your every day life day after day for years on end and was perpetrated by the people you depend upon for survival, its a different thing all together. It would be impossible for some alters to be completely separate from conscious awareness all of the time. I live with this kind of DID, where there has always been degrees of alters who deal with aspects of abuse and/or daily life, and with whom overlap between dealing with life and dealing with abuse was a necessity of survival. There was never any one single self-state that had enough experience to be called "the self". Why? Because the threat of abuse was constantly present. We had to be constantly on guard to protect ourselves as much as we possibly could, while also trying to just be normal and live. There's a lot of overlap there. Our daily life parts and certainly all attachment parts were always primed to defend against abuse. It is not "less" DID. It is DID with the varying degrees of coconsciousness that were needed to be to get through.

I'm reading a few books about healing from DID at the moment and pretty much all of them say that the classic presentation of DID (with full overt switching and amnesia) throws many therapists off the scent... that the most common presentation of DID is with very subtle switching and the blending of parts instead.