Awareness Raising: Dissociative Identity Disorder

Real-life D.I.D. is usually much subtler than media portrayals

embracing the split: a ten-year-old photo of me in a split tree

I want people to know that D.I.D. does not usually look like the dramatic film and TV portrayals of split personalities. It’s much subtler, quieter, and lonelier. I have two close loved ones who suffer from D.I.D., and no one outside their closest circles even knows.

This condition still gets a lot of stigma and misunderstanding, so I thought I’d take a moment to write about it, in my own words, from my own experience and research.

Intro to D.I.D.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.), formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder, is a developmental condition of fractured awareness and identity. It develops when children have to recurringly split, or dissociate, their awareness in order to cope with ongoing trauma and emotional neglect.

When traumatic things happen to children and there aren’t any emotionally safe and attentive grownups to help them process the experiences, but only adults who pose further threats and demands, children may shut off awareness of their terrible feelings and experiences in order to be able to function in ways that keep them safe, such as compliance with the threatening adults. This is how D.I.D. begins.

Then, as time goes on and the unsafe conditions persist, those fractured sections of their awareness remain separated and develop into segregated personalities / “alters” / ego states / selves.

(My D.I.D. loved ones and I like the term “self” best, so I’ll use that one going forward.)

Degrees of Separation

The exact nature of the separation between those split portions of awareness—selves—varies widely among sufferers of D.I.D.

One person with D.I.D. (or “system,” the widely used term for the collected set of internal selves) may have selves that are extremely segregated to the point of using different names and having full “amnesia” (the term for not remembering what happens while in different selves), as depicted in various media portrayals. Meanwhile, others instead experience a much subtler degree of separation.

(My own guess is that the nature and degree of a system’s segregation depend on the particular conditions that caused the splitting in the first place: whatever splitting would have best conduced to survival is the kind of splitting that happened.)

Despite dramatic media portrayals, the subtler forms of splitting are actually far more common:

“Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is often covert and difficult to notice, with only 5-6% of individuals with DID having a more florid presentation.”

— from DID-research.org

Subtle Splits and Shifts

In the subtler forms of D.I.D., rather than having different names and storylines, the separate selves may manifest more like this:

• there will be one set of memories, feelings, viewpoints, and personality traits—one “self”—that is active when the person is doing ordinary daily activities or holding things together at school or work;

• but then later, when something happens to trigger strong feelings, a whole new set of memories, feelings, viewpoints, and personality traits—a different “self”—becomes active, with little to no sense of continuity with the earlier self.

And it may seem like this second self is a whole different person from the earlier one, even without amnesia or change of names. There’s just a significant internal shift in mood, outlook, and core beliefs, accompanied by a sort of forgetting of the earlier mood, outlook, and core beliefs.

It may sound like this: “I don’t know how it was that I was feeling that way earlier, but now I feel like this, and I’m pretty sure this is how I usually/always really feel; this is my true state”—but that same sense happens every time there’s a switch to a markedly different set of feelings, viewpoints, beliefs, etc.

This is what D.I.D. looks and sounds like to me, at least, as manifested in my two close loved ones who suffer from it. They don’t go around introducing themselves with different names, radically changing their appearances, or lacking all memory of our previous interactions. No, they just suffer quietly inside their minds with chronic confusion, lack of consistent sense of self, and struggles to satisfactorily organize their lives (plus depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and “comorbid” diagnoses).

They don’t need to be feared; they need to be loved and helped.

Again, dramatic film portrayals of D.I.D. give a wrong impression. While there may be some D.I.D. trauma survivors who exhibit violence or disruptive behavior when they’re in certain trauma-reflecting selves, the majority of D.I.D. sufferers bear this confusing condition alone inside their minds—unless and until they find someone/s who can patiently, loyally listen and be there for them (as I am trying to do for my loved ones).

And in fact, far from being violent towards others, it turns out that people with D.I.D. are more likely to be 1) violent only towards themselves and 2) victims of violence from others:

“A handful of older studies specifically on individuals with DID found that the majority are not violent and do not have violent alters. … In contrast, high rates of internally directed violence (ie, suicidal alters) have been found, and a study found that 26.1% of individuals with DID are at risk of being assaulted.”

— from DID-research.org

Further D.I.D. Facts and Resources

Current statistics show D.I.D. as affecting 1% to 5% of the global population. (This is from the National Library of Medicine’s article on D.I.D., which also has a lot of other useful information about D.I.D.) My guess is that it’s more common even than that, but it’s just been slow to be recognized and understood—as with autism and ADHD, which are currently being diagnosed much more than they were a few decades ago because of the much greater understanding there is now.

My favorite D.I.D. resource as of now is a website called DID-research.org, which was created and written by a doctoral student and seems to me very well done. It’s organized, thoughtful, respectful, and thorough, with a lot of helpful information, such as common types of “alters,” for example. (I do wish the font was larger, but I can zoom in my screen.)

Thank you for reading!

And please let me know if you would be interested in hearing more from me about D.I.D.

I hope that my thoughts here will help ready more hands to be offered in compassion to those suffering from D.I.D. 🌺

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