Multiple Voices

Thoughts about DID, Diagnosis, and Parts

You might have noticed that I started telling the story of Anna, a person with multiple parts to her personality. If you want to know how Anna’s parts came to exist, and why, you will find many books, websites, and articles that talk about DID and alternate parts. I am getting a bit tired of all these clever explanations like the one in Wikipedia: “a single person displays multiple distinct identities or personalities (known as alter egos or alters), each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the environment. The diagnosis requires that at least two personalities routinely take control of the individual's behaviour with an associated memory loss that goes beyond normal forgetfulness”.

Connecting: The main focus in DID treatment and recovery

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but, if faced with courage, need not be lived again. (Quote by M. Angelou in Traumatic Stress, v.d.Kolk et. al, 1996).

Before I started my research project I had thought that a wider therapeutic approach that includes families and/or community would be an important treatment need for DID clients. Listening to the people that participated in my study I had to put a 'tick' behind that theory. People's main concern was CONNECTING. In hindsight that seemed to be pretty obvious. People who have been disconnected from themselves, from others, and from the wider world felt they needed to re-establish the ties that had been broken through childhood abuse and neglect.

The main focus of DID clients in their therapy was to stop reliving their painful histories and re-enacting painful childhood dynamics. They affirmed powerfully the importance of the human need for CONNECTING to one-self, to people close to them, and to the wider community. The basic human need for CONNECTING continuously fueled treatment and the processes of recovery! It cannot be understood as a by-product of therapy but has to be the most important goal of therapy - and maybe even one's life-journey itself.

Dissociative Identity Disorder

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) has captured the minds of many people, professionals, people diagnosed with that condition, and lay people. This blog presents my research about how DID clients handle therapy, gives voice to their experiences, and explores my experiences as psychotherapist who works with DID clients.

I cannot think of any other mental health condition that has caused such controversial discussions and heated arguments. Although I wondered for a long time whether I really do have to add to the large body of opinions, observing how people, who identify as having DID, suffer from discrimination and disbelief has motivated me to do so after all. So, to begin the begin in style, I like to share a comment of one of my research participants:

You are asking that someone suspends their knowledge of reality, suspends what they think of as real, and what they think are the normal boundaries that they experience every day. suspend all of that and go somewhere else...to be able to help the patient through you've got to be able to go to the place that that patient visits. And to not do that, I can't see how anyone could help. It's like a wall between you (Sharon, 1/17).