This week, the readers here have posted a wide variety of reactions to the idea that being multiple could have benefits. If you haven’t yet read all the comments on that blog, please do so. They are very interesting.
When people have DID/MPD, they have experienced life as a multiple since their childhood. It is their norm – basically the only way of life they know. Multiples typically have not experienced life any other way other than being multiple, even if they didn’t realize they were as split as they are. Sure, one or two of the host personalities may not have a strong personal connection to what it’s like to be multiple, and many of them can deny the existence of the internal others to some degree, but the internal system as a whole would have been there for nearly your whole life.
And frankly, many DID’ers that are newly diagnosed just haven’t realized how much they have been switching their whole lives long. But just because they haven’t recognized their dissociative abilities doesn’t mean that they haven’t been living their life as a very active multiple, switching, possibly losing time, and putting amnesiac walls around anything that is too uncomfortable for them.
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So what if you are dissociative and you really really detest being a multiple personality? What if you can’t stand being DID/MPD, and you hate it, and you despise it, and you make sure that everyone in your system knows it, and that everyone in your treatment support team knows it too?
Then what?
- How does that affect how your internal system views you?
- Will they feel loved and accepted?
- Will you feel good about yourself?
For sake of argument here, let’s be sure to separate the fact of being dissociative as being very different from being traumatized and abused. I will clearly and adamantly acknowledge that no young child likes the trauma and abuse that happens as the first step in the process of creating various alter personalities. I am not proposing that the road to becoming DID is a pleasant one. It clearly is not. The very idea of being forced to become a multiple is horrifically tragic in itself. Any trauma, abuse, neglect, violence, horror, pain, that you’ve gone through is too high a price for anyone to pay.
Often the fact of being multiple becomes inextricably entangled with the fact of having been abused. The multiplicity comes to represent all the pain and fear and wrongness of the abuse, and rejection of the multiplicity is part and parcel of rejecting the reality of the painful past that caused it.
But how do those feelings of adamant rejection affect your healing?
One of the ways to treat and understand multiplicity is to join in, to some degree, with the idea that the alter personalities are their own individual people. Of course they are all connected to the same one person, but you can balance that out with also seeing each of the insiders as their own unique person. How would an outside person feel if they were treated the same way your insiders are being treated?
If your internal parts know that you hate the fact that you are multiple, might they begin to internalize that feeling as if you hate them? I would think so.
How would you feel if you were repeatedly told that you were disliked and unwanted and despised? Remember, your insiders don’t have to be told these things in actual words. They are connected to you, and they will know how you genuinely feel about them, whether or not you make a point of telling them. They will be able to feel how much you don’t like them. You will not be able to hide this fact from them.
How would you feel, if day after day after day, the people that you lived with refused to speak to you? Or to acknowledge you? Or to care about you? Would you feel cooperative? Would you want to be friendly and helpful? At what point would you lose your patience and tolerance? How might you act when that happened?
In this context, if you have Dissociative Identity Disorder, and you also firmly believe that multiplicity in itself is a horrible way of life, that strong pervasive belief will negatively affect your treatment progress and your healing. How could it not? Your insiders are aching for acceptance and kindness and comfort no less than you are – and constant rejection can and will make them continue to act out in resentment and anger and desperation. Nobody else’s acceptance will ever mean as much to them as the acceptance of their own group – their own self – and if that is perpetually withheld from them, then both they and you will be at a self-created stalemate in your healing.
Because the flip side of treating your insiders like individual people is remembering that they are the same person as you.
If you are repeatedly telling yourself that you hate the way you are, what does that do for your self-image and self worth?
If you believe that the way you are is not okay, not good enough, not right, not acceptable, not normal, then you are reinforcing a lot of negative beliefs of yourself – and it is a short road 
from having a low self-esteem to have a ton of self-hatred.
- What if hating your multiplicity is a version of hating yourself?
- What if accepting your multiplicity is a version of accepting yourself?
Multiplicity is simply what it is – the fact of having more than one personality / “person” in your head. In my opinion, it does not have to be a bad thing. The trauma and the abuse were devastatingly bad – absolutely. The dissociative walls can really cause problems in the current day, even if they were initially helpful. The PTSD, anxiety, depression, and other emotional fallout can be debilitating at times.
But the multiplicity – just the multiplicity… does it have to be bad to share your life with others?
Again I ask….
Is accepting your multiplicity a version of accepting yourself?
Warmly,
Kathy
Copyright © 2008-2017 Kathy Broady MSW and Discussing Dissociation
Hello to all,
I don’t know how long this article has been up, but it really touches a nerve with me. I am also one who did not like… being multiple. It is so frightening to me. I was in and out of denial for almost 30 years… although this dx was confirmed by quite a few therapists.
Over the years and with Kathy’s help and the help from the forums, (oh, and an excellent and very wise therapist)… I have finally come to peace with my diagnosis. I say that with some inside questioning the “truthfulness”of my statement. *sigh*
I’ve had times when my insiders have made it a serious point to TELL me that yes, they are really here and it’s time for me to listen and hear them.
The times now when I explain the answer to a simple questions they will ask right out of the blue… and I “feel” that one relax… that is such a rewarding feeling. I love to read some of the ways other people deal with their little ones.. how they comfort them. Because to me it has been very confusing. When I try to work on an internal landscape for example… it’s like I’m just using my imagination?? Is that they it’s supposed to feel?
Just curious.
Take care everyone…
Sincerely, My/selves+Me
7/21/22
Hi My/Selved+ME,
Great to see you.
Imagination is a wonderful and powerful tool. In my opinion, it is what saved us as children and allowed us to fragment in the first place. Our inside worlds are not constructed in the rational, outside thinking world. For me, my imagination is the portal to my inside world.
At first it felt awkward and I questioned what I was doing and what was real. I was caught up in the constraints I put on my mind by over thinking, analyzing and trying to find rational explanations for their (my insiders) world. Then I let go and used mediation to turn off my thinking mind and sink into the space of my insider’s world (to me that is my subconscious mind) and just let it speak to me. The more that I released and surrendered to its reality, the more I learned and interacted with my insiders.
It is not about “just using (your) imagination” it is about freeing your imagination to take you to the inside world to my way of thinking.
ME+WE
07/24/22
I experienced a period of hating my multiplicity and the inside folks who were popping into my life. In my mind, who the heck would want to be multiple. A big part of that is, who would want to have to learn about all of the trauma that created one’s multiplicity in the first place. Accepting my multiplicity meant that I had to hear and accept what my insiders were telling me about my life lost. Ya …. and I was not into embracing that reality without a healthy dose of denial first. Well, two years of denial actually.
I am not sure that hating my multiplicity was a version of hating myself (although there are certainly many elements of that in my world). Hating my multiplicity was about hating what happened that fractured me. I will always hate that. But I learned not to shoot the messenger.
My inside folks did not cause the trauma … they saved me from it. When I made that mental shift for myself. I could love my insiders because they all took on roles to protect me from the trauma … to ensure that lived. Yup, I learned to love even the difficult insiders because, in the end, they were trying to protect me. Maybe the ways that they were doing it were not healthy and helpful from my perspective but I could see how they thought so.
ME+WE
07/19/22
We usually dont mind it. Well lots of times we dont mind it. Becuase we always got lots of company in our head, we also got each other to cheer each other up and help in the middle of the night. And some times we dont like it. We dont like how people can trigger us. We let them i guess. We be visiting family and as soon as we got here we started switching. Hands on us a few times. Switch, switch, switch. Teeth sounds. Switch. Getting called a pig. Switch. Smelling something that triggers memories. Switch.seeing old pictures on the walls, switch. Listening to someone rant and rave. Switch switch. Theres too many of us. Its crowded in here tonight. Too many kids and too many voices and too many pictures. I wish them didnt call caroline names though. Cuz her not a pig. But it be our fault cuz we come here so we dont got no one to blame but us so we just disided to turn our feelings off, we trying to keep our heart off too.
I just came here to the blog to read tonight so i had something familiar and safe feeling
I was the part who hated being multiple, no one else really had any problems with it. To be more precise, I hated I couldn’t “fix” being multiple.
By the time I got diagnosed with DID, I had been already diagnosed with 5 different things. And I had already been open about them with people close to me. I didn’t have to hide or lie or come up with some weird explanation. So I thought they wouldn’t really be surprised if I told them about DID cause they had already known me, right? However, I mostly got a pretty weird reaction, got ashamed of myself and stopped talking about it because suddenly I became “too weird” even though literally nothing changed.
But I am a really task-oriented part. I can do everything quickly and I can manage many projects. So I saw integration as another project. It was a way out. “ok, I can’t change that we became multiple but I can make us one again”. Obviously my integration by means of saying “guys, focus on integrating” didn’t work. I “failed” again and again. I also tried to pretend I don’t have parts. I intentionally didn’t speak with them or pretended that this was how my own thoughts were like.
My insiders were pretty patient with me managing my denial/bargaining period. It lasted almost half a year. As for now, I admit that the way we are is not the problem. I myself have always been ok with it but some people around me weren’t. And I was ready to go to such lengths as literally changing my whole self from the core to be “more convenient” for them.
I have just realized that this is exactly what we had to do as children. Writing can be very insightful:). Then yeah, it makes even more sense since this is how the problem could be solved and attention or at least less negativity towards us could be earned.
I’m sorry I did this to my parts but I am very grateful they waited for me to sort my stuff out.
It’s scary to me. The most is when my T is teaching me now and what is coming to my consciousness is memories of when becoming Dissociative began. Like how my body will expand until it fills the entire room. Or how it feels like I’m going 100 mph down the freeway while I’m just laying in bed. These are I have had sunce ages maybe 1st or 2nd grade. It’s also scary to be having an emotional conversation with someone and suddenly they tell you that you were someone else. Or to live in a town and go around the corner and instantly be lost. Do something special with someone very important and not remember. Clean up the house terrifyed because someone destroyed it and you don’t want anyone to see. It’s scary to admit the people that I am aware of. Who I can hear when I’m not present. Or partially present. And yes, time. It has done this strange thing. I cant explain it, but it’s almost an illusion.
Parts stuck in trauma time have broken our internal clock. Today’s date means little. Time increments are relative based on which me’s are out front. And yet I’ve never missed a therapy appointment in 3 years, so someone inside can do it. Looking forward to having all parts oriented to present. Then they will know we are safe and we can have friends and job and leave the house more!