What On Earth Is Dissociative Identity Disorder, Formerly Multiple Personality Disorder?

A briefly detailed description

Greetings readers. There are many readers of my newsletter that are sufferers of trauma born disorders of every kind. I myself suffer from DID, CPTSD, Autism, and probably some BPD. There are also a great many supporters of sufferers of DID and PTSD spectrum disorders that are interested in reading Elephant In The Mirror, and there are a ton of people who just want to be informed about childhood trauma and its effects on their adult selves. Thank you all for your continued support and readership. I appreciate you.

I’ve put this article together to try and explain what DID is without glossing over the details but trying to keep it brief, as many people with DID know, we have to do a little PhD in the damn thing just to know what the heck is going on with us. I’m blessed that pinballing through my life like traumatized children do, encountering death, disease, and discord all our lives, I happened to wind up in medical school where I started to build a sense that something was deeply wrong with me. I wasn’t equally abled as the other students, and I got a close look at what people’s normal lives were like. I took a prolonged break from life itself to do some soul searching, healing mind, body, and spirit, and feverishly studying mental health. I’ve spent the last 8 years studying as constantly as my discontinuous consciousness would allow to set the foundations for a career in mental health, and trauma born illnesses.

Yes, it was personal. The kick I get out of this is knowing somewhere or the other, even if its just one person, I’ve helped someone avert the 10/10 psychological pain, and physical devastation that DID wreaks upon us.

First of all, we must educate ourselves about even being able to talk about DID, which many layfolks love to do to garner attention by exploiting the less informed sufferers of this 10/10 fucked up disease. All over podcasts and YouTube where they provide half assed information to more lay people who then treat us like garbage. You really need to stop telling people about DID if you don’t have it or aren’t a highly educated and EXPERIENCED mental health professional who sees people with DID with their own two eyes day in and day out like many doctors and therapists actually do. I hope we can both agree by the end of this article that one shouldn’t try to talk about what they don’t understand. It is certainly more special than ordinary day to day illness because for one it is rampant in even developed countries because no matter the color of our skins, child abuse has been endemic to every place on the planet since we were animals. If you stood in our shoes, you would be as, if not more, broken than we are. We’ve been marked and cursed since childhood to stand trials and tribulations that other people will hopefully never have to face. If you have DID, pat yourself on the back for surviving thus far. If the trauma didn’t kill you, or the perpetrators to cover it up, you yourself could have finished the job for them, but you were stronger than that. As a person with DID, one of the most painful things I had to do was actually learn that I had DID and then exposing myself to the horrifying information required to understand it fully.

When children are developing inside the womb, their hardware is being created, that is the nervous system is in a state of preparatory slumber and our personality or identity is at its most baseline going to be as it was according to its maternal and paternal genetic blueprint, and according to the conditions of the mother and her bodily environment during pregnancy. In essence, we are like a computer whose hardware is being constructed and put together. By the time we are born, we have developed the ability to start encoding software, and like an operating system like Linux or Ubuntu, the operating system its self is being constructed. This means that the various brain-body structures are beginning to give rise to a mind. The mind is an epiphenomena. It is created as a result of many other phenomena working together. I personally think of it as the arisen hologram from the integrated functioning of every cell in our body, not just the brain. Indeed a pin prick affects our mind. Even when a single hair is disturbed the mind may experience it.

First the typically right hemispheric structures and systems develop. What is being encoded is the environment and essentially all our experience into a narrative of the self. This information becomes attached or associated to other bits of information like it. For example, red, truck, and fire are associated words. So among the first things to be associated with “life” and “death” drives, which I will call, the symbols for safe and unsafe, are first humans, then parents. If a parent behaves in a manner the baby considers safe, it associates the parent with safety and if the parent behaves threateningly, the parent, or symbol for the parent or even human, becomes unsafe. Symbols for the self are generated alongside these early internal images in relation to them. As the person develops, these right brain divergent processes are tied together into an understanding of that information of the self by the left brain. The right brain holds information to reference about the environment and the past and people. The left brain ties it together and turns it into actionable data, working in tandem to produce the actions that arise out of our minds, including thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

Typically, DID and other PTSD spectrum “dis-association” arises from unstable caregiver and child dynamics characterized by a parent or parents that are caring and threatening at the same time. A symbol for dangerous parent, and a symbol for safe parent begin to form. These two symbols are not associated with each other, because one can not be both in a child’s mind. The “integration” of symbols doesn’t happen until 7-10 years old. They aren’t linking with each other because, think about it, if the child is perceiving a dangerous parent, he is bathed in cortisol and adrenaline, stress hormones. And if the parent is being perceived as safe, a completely different neurochemical environment is being perpetuated in the child’s whole body. Essentially, there are symbols for dangerous parents, safe parents, and good and bad self that are growing but not mixing into an integrated view of self and other. The good enough parent doesn’t form, or the good enough self. We can say that these parts are “disassociated” from each other. As time goes on, if trauma continues in the pre 7-10 years age period (another post on what counts as trauma coming soon), the symbols become more and more elaborate and become focuses of consciousness in and of themselves, as our conscious mind is essentially a symbol soup where like symbols clump together. This doesn’t mean multiple people are being created, but rather autonomous and elaborated “parts” of the self are forming, that don’t share awareness of each other as separate clumps. Again, think about it, if the memories aren’t associating with each other ie. the one self state remembers the safe periods of life, and the other remembers the unsafe periods but they aren’t simultaneously activated, then knowledge of what happened in each self state remains sequestered to various degrees of emancipation from each other. This is why people (the more normally developed parts) with DID have amnesia, but are able to recall some content of trauma with help from a therapist in accessing those compartments (parts still in the experience of trauma). This is a highly painful and destabilizing procedure involving trust in the treatment provider as you would a surgeon to operate on you.

The thing being operated on however is a psyche, a mind, a soul, that is invisible but extremely real, and to do this effectively we need to look inside at it. This means the person with DID must learn to perceive their inner environment, and then be able to translate it to the treatment provider and they work as a team to slowly associate and integrate this information that was incompatible with comfortable consciousness as a child, into awareness and acceptance as an adult. The adult however goes through hell for this and slowly adjusts to the burn of his own existence over a long period of time. There are people in treatment for DID that have been at it for decades. Everyone responds differently and takes their own time to get better, and during this period may be severely incapacitated by the procedure. Suicide and attempts are common in this population as structural dissociation related disorders can produce torture level experiences for the sufferers. Essentially, if you condition a child into being multiple parts by means of alternating safe and terrifying experiences over a long period of time, you inculcate in them a system whereby their brains are torturing themselves. This is also why DID is usually caused by repeated and consistent traumatization over a period of time that can cause conditioning. The various developmental levels of a DID systems parts are much like all the muscles of the body. Where if you were to exercise some far more than the other, you would get a misshapen appearance, with some parts being atrophied while others remain stunted. It is also that if you were to expose a person to repeated poking in the ribs over a long time, the person may slowly become conditioned to be guarded on one side and start to stoop and tighten their abdomen in one area causing a posture change. If you do this to a growing child, you risk giving them lasting damage from conditioning. That’s what DID is. A deformity of personality structure and mind, that must be corrected as though by braces, slowly tightened and corrected over a long period of time.

Because of this mental division and dissociation, many normal mental functions become affected and a person may get structural damage to parts of their brains. Imaging studies prove that people who have DID have significant and measurable changes in various brain areas, causing devastating mood changes, amnesia, attention and executive dysfunction, positive and negative hallucinations, all the symptoms of PTSD and some more. Prior to being diagnosed with DID I was diagnosed with Schizoaffective disorder because I have all the symptoms of that disorder on top of all the shit I’ve got from DID. It is literal hell and it’s all the fault of other people. That’s right. The individual with DID is the child abuse victim whom everyone has to accept they couldn’t protect. It is societies responsibility to help them or they should no longer call themselves civilized in my personal opinion. Y’all fucked up as a society. You let the baby get harmed. You lose. And the only way to right this wrong is by providing support and acceptance. We can start from informing ourselves. And PLEASE let the professionals dictate treatment and don’t try to be confrontational with these people. They are mentally ill and any bad outcomes are your own fault. The DID person is the way they are because the body and brain are meant to bend in this fashion by design. They are behaving as humans under undue developmental stress are INTENDED to.

The divisions do not dictate “good” and “bad” parts. A person can have all good or all bad parts. There is every possible combination. Indeed in a normal person in whom the parts are well integrated, it is possible to have all shitty parts, like abusive assholes. They don’t have a disorder. They are orderly and evil. This is why the TV trope of the DID psychopath is bullshit and harmful not just to people with DID but everyone who has been a victim of any crime, because DID is just one of the presentations of abuse related disorder. Each and every instance of DID individuals where they are shown in a negative light makes me think the creator is a pedophile inside that wants to undermine the healing of child abuse victims. It takes special shitty personalities to blame victims of these heinous crimes. This atrocious behavior is intended to undermine victims of child abuse. They are just like a mugging victim, a victim of terrorism, a victim of bad governance etc. Just victims of evil people. In attacking individuals with DID you might as well label yourself a shit person. They are all victims of child abuse. It says more for you than us. I know adults who have become shit people from minor adult traumas that have changed who they are. These are individuals who have suffered and if you speak to them, they are often the ones people label as “young at heart” and “wise beyond their years” or “highly creative” all at the same time.

People often stress about what kind of parts they have, what the genders of the parts are, whether they are based on real or imaginary things. Fuck that. In sufficiently stressful circumstances, the child can internalize anything. These are ways to view the self from the outside by the tortured kid. You let them be. You let a skilled and experienced mental health professional deal with that. There are no excuses. There is massive scientific evidence present online and in paper form for everyone to read if they so wish to validating all of this information, much of it is available in the stickied post called Resources.

Resources

Inform yourself about DID and the effects of trauma so that you don’t accidentally become a cunt and throw shade at someone whom you may not know has something going for them that your privileged snowflake ass can’t even fathom. It’s present in up to 15% of the population. You may inadvertently be saying things that will lead you to wonder why your loved one killed themselves because of shit you said. And remember, the only people throwing shade at people with DID are the ones that are cool with child abuse.