Multiple Personality Disorder

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

Revenant Threshold - WOW! You surprise me with your very intelligent question. Well that sounded insulting didn’t it? Sorry, it’s not meant to be. Yes, my alters are separate and unique. They have different names and appeared following different traumatic events. Because “we” like to retain “our” uniqueness we have each selected different names. All of us answer to Tina (the gatekeeper) because we must in order to function. Still, the sound of ones name validates their being, their existance. It makes one feel loved and cared for.

You are free to continue addressing me as Belle, because that is my name. Belle wasn’t available as a name, so I added one of the “alter’s” names (diamond) to it to form my “pen” name.

So yes, you’ve actually been speaking to an “alter.”

For those merely interested in learning more, and not about being critical or dismissive of the disorder, there are forum boards available where we talk with one another for support and encouragement. There are people from time to time who do research to learn more about the disorders (the site covers many different psychological disorders) and visit to ask questions.

Thanks for asking. It really warms my heart.

Belle

22

Dangerosa -

You’re right. You are absolutely right. Problem is, right now I don’t feel prepared to go to a counselor. We are on watch for when the time to deal with the PTSD comes about. My husband and I realize that we will need to have a counselor/psychiatrist to help us through that stage. Especially because the abuse stems back to when I was under the age of 4. That said, I want to be relatively certain of who the players are. Before I would willingly undergo hynotherapy I would have to be sure that I would not become a “subject” open to “suggestion” of parts of me that don’t exist. Until I can account for the smaller memories that hook my life together I won’t attempt to go after the bigger ones.

Thank you for your concern.

Belle

23

My best friend from high school is/was multiple.
The little girl, the cop, the horny teenager, the gang member, and a couple of other I don’t recall. Dating her was a bit like playing the lottery. You never quite knew just who you were going to wind up with. :wink: Made for some interesting dates, I can tell you that.
Anyway after many many years of therapy, she is pretty well integrated. It has been years since I have seen any of the others.

However on the recovered memory thing, I call bullshit. Look up the story of the McMartin pre-school.

24

I want to add something here. If all I ever have is the life I have today I am fine with that. I’m not seeking anything more than to enjoy my life. I’m not suffering, though there are some fears that go along with this. I am relatively well adjusted. More adjusted than many “singletons” that I know. I have a brother who is a crack head, who is currently in prison for theft. I have a sister who is a crack head prostitute. Neither of them graduated from high school. Neither of them have decent jobs. I own my own successful business. I’m the mother of 3 beautiful children. I own a home, have a 2 car garage and the cars to fill them (if it weren’t for all the junk in them). I have terrific friends, enjoy dinner out with them and going to the movies.

People with DID tend to be extremely high functioning, because we have an inherent ability to compartmentalize our lives.

So if I never reach the point of dealing with what has made me the way I am, I am fine with that. I just know enough to be prepared should that day ever come.

Belle

25

Rick -

You are talking about apples and oranges here. First of all you have pre-schoolers, who anyone can tell you, are easy to sway. “Did daddy hurt you?” “No, I fell down the stairs”… well the reality is that daddy pushed him down the steps, but daddy told him that he got hurt falling down the stairs. No where in this information does it mention that any of the children had DID. So you see, you are comparing suggested memories to recovered memories.

No one suggests the memories that I regain.

Belle

26

That doesn’t mean they’re all memories of things that actually happened.

27

Then explain, if you will, why when I recall a memory, such as the one listed above, the person that I was with at the time recalls it as well. Whether it’s a memory from my youth or a memory of my daughters childhoods, it’s recalled similar enough that the only differences would be expected ones of perception and not events.

Belle

28

Hi Belle,

Unfortunately, to provide that affirmation we’d have to get into more of a clinical interview than is appropriate for the net. Thanks for understanding. My suggestion is that if diagnostic confirmation (either exact or ballpark) and/or some ideas for intervention would be useful for you, get hooked up with a psychologist who can get into your history, symptoms, etc. There’s a pretty wide range of dissociative disorders and ways they are expressed in people’s lives.

You can see the DSM-IV-TR criteria for different dissociative disorders by going to APA Diagnostic Classification DSM-IV-TR | BehaveNet and following links from there.

29

Maybe this is really obvious…but…er…why were you wrestling with your husband? (I’m assuming that the eye gouging attempt happened after you were pinned as a reaction.)

30

Suggestion can work in both directions.

31

Miller - We were playing. He was tickling me. That was what was so strange. Nothing to fear there.

Belle

32

Some of you are really having problems with generalizing about memories. There are things that we can forget about for decades and then remember. Sometimes all it takes is a song or a scent, an old friend or a photo to bring it back. The notion that these are all bogus is silly.

What we do have to be cautious of are memories recovered in therapy. A poorly trained therapist can plant all kinds of suggestions that we might embrace as our own memories. I doubt that it happens often, but when it does, it can be devastating to many people.

33

Regarding recovered memories, several years ago I began to experience severe anxiety which eventually culminated in flashbacks of abuse that had taken place 20 years before.

I spoke to family about it; their response was that they had noticed personality changes at that time, but attributed them to other causes. And then I heard from an extended family member, who confirmed what I had remembered, including details from the flashbacks that I hadn’t shared with anyone.

To any of you, I am just a person on the net. I have no way of proving to anyone that what I say is true. I agree that it is possible to lead someone in therapy, to plant ideas, etc. But when people state that there are no repressed memories, well, I for one know they are wrong.

34

Welcome to the forums.

Something I’m not clear on. How do you, Belle, know you were abused so badly as a kid? How did that information that you did not at one point remember, somehow transfer back to your host personality? You say it has something to do with integrating the personalities, but how is this done? How do they communicate with one another? If you could sort of construct a little narrative in this regard–like when you first felt something was going on and why, your first integral experience or whatever, I’d be interested in hearing you describe it.

Before you answer, I will be completely up front about my motivation for asking. I suffered various abuses throughout my childhood as well, but I have always remembered, in near perfect narrative form, what happened to me–with one exception. I’ve got a particular black hole of terror associated with one particular weekend of my life, and I remember all the parts before and all the parts after. I’ve got serious PTSD issues about this black hole. My husband describes my chronic PTSD as ‘‘static’’ but when that whole weird black hole memory thing gets triggered he says it’s like ‘‘a bomb exploding.’’ And it is. It’s horrible.

I spent a lot of time trying to fight my way through serious mental illness by clinging to just about every straw I could find. I tried to get that memory back, but focusing on it made me more and more irrational and prone to dissociative stuff. By dissociative I don’t mean DID, I mean numb, feeling nonexistent, like I was hiding in the empty space of my head. Really irrational out there stuff that just wasn’t letting me function in life.

So I let it go, I got into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and I stopped, generally, thinking about my past so damn much (I have my weak points, but we’re doing all right.) I have a whole life now, where I do lots of things that have nothing to do with the trauma of my childhood.

I’ve done my research too, and my husband is working on his Clinical Psych Ph.D. with a special interest in empirically based methodology, so I guess you could say we’re skeptics. I’m not telling you I don’t believe DID exists, I’m telling you I’m skeptical and rather unfamiliar with the evidential support surrounding this phenomenon. The scientist in me demands empirical support. The trauma survivor in me says, ‘‘Yeah, the brain can do some pretty freaky things’’ because I’ve lived there, and I have a million burning questions about my own memory hole, though a general scientific survey on this matter seems to indicate that my odds of actually remembering are practically nil, and that anything I did remember would be highly suspect.

So I hope you don’t take it as a disrespect. At one level I am genuinely curious, and on another level I am trying to find my own way back to sanity. Despite my misgivings about DID, I get the impression that you are an intelligent and reasonable person and will understand what I am trying to say.

If not, I’ll try again!

Thanks,
Christy

35

Please take the time to actually read what I said. I’ve bolded the relevant modifier for your convenience.

36

Okay Baldwin - point taken

37

Huh?

38

I have a question for Shoshana.

In your professional opinion, especially with the rise of “Munchausen’s by Internet”, as some of us call it, do you feel that DID is one of those disorders that is often “used” maliciously by those with factitious disorders? I know I’ve come across quite a few examples of it. There seems to be a romantic draw to the concept of alters that some people can’t resist, something about the helplessness of the younger alters and the protectiveness of the older ones, and something about the images they pull out in the talk of the “layout of the land” in their minds, if you will.

Along with the over-diagnosis of MPD/DID in the 80s and early 90s, I’m wondering if you’ve seen a similar tendency. It seems to be a really appealing disorder for the Munchausen’s crowd. I’ve done a lot of work in intervention (sexual assault/abuse survivors, crisis centers, children’s aid) and I’ve developed a rather well-tuned radar for factitious disorders . I’ve studied, in depth, the Munchausen’s Syndrome phenomenon, anthropologically/historically, both by proxy and not… and to me, there seems to be a clear rise in cases in the last 20 years…

39

Just because you respect people doesn’t mean that they aren’t fooling themselves. Lots of highly respected people in the past were diagnosing homosexuality as a mental illness and blaming madness on evil spirits. Progress moves on, even if certain individuals do not.

40

It happened left and right not even more than a decade or two back. And it’s not just therapists who do it, it’s anyone and everyone someone interacts with who asks about certain topics. That’s why these days police departments are trained to separate out witnesses as soon as possible and to not ask leading questions. Memory is extremely fluid.