{"quotes":[{"text":"As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on ... It soon became apparent that what I had been taught was simply not true. Not only was I meeting people with multiplicity; these individuals entering my life were normal human beings with much to offer. They were simply people who had endured more than their share of pain in this life and were struggling to make sense of it.","author":"Deborah Bray Haddock","tags":["bizarre","dissociative-identity-disorder","mental","mental-health","mental-illness","mpd","multiple-personality-disorder","multiplicity","normal","pain","psychiatric","psychology","student","trauma","undergraduate"],"id":102464,"author_id":"Deborah+Bray+Haddock"},{"text":"At cocktail parties, I played the part of a successful businessman's wife to perfection. I smiled, I made polite chit-chat, and I dressed the part. Denial and rationalization were two of my most effective tools in working my way through our social obligations. I believed that playing the roles of wife and mother were the least I could do to help support Tom's career.During the day, I was a puzzle with innumerable pieces. One piece made my family a nourishing breakfast. Another piece ferried the kids to school and to soccer practice. A third piece managed to trip to the grocery store. There was also a piece that wanted to sleep for eighteen hours a day and the piece that woke up shaking from yet another nightmare. And there was the piece that attended business functions and actually fooled people into thinking I might have something constructive to offer.I was a circus performer traversing the tightwire, and I could fall off into a vortex devoid of reality at any moment. There was, and had been for a very long time, an intense sense of despair. A self-deprecating voice inside told me I had no chance of getting better. I lived in an emotional black hole.P20-21, talking about dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder).","author":"Suzie Burke","tags":["acting","black-hole","circus","denial","depression","despair","did","dissociative-identity-disorder","emotion","functioning","hopeless","hopelessness","mental-health","mental-illness","mpd","multiple-personality-disorder","parts","perfection","pieces","pretending","puzzle","rationalization","reality","social","social-anxiety"],"id":121678,"author_id":"Suzie+Burke"},{"text":"It was soon after that I, overwhelmed with the implications of that memory, overdosed - well, somebody did but as it was my mouth and my stomach that was involved I had to take the consequences. Somehow or other (did an alter ring him?) Bruce (from my support group) got to know, drove over and took us to the hospital.","author":"Carolyn Bramhall","tags":["dissociation","dissociative-identity-disorder","hospital","mental-health","mpd","multiple-personality-disorder","multiplicity","overdose","suicide","suicide-attempt"],"id":163656,"author_id":"Carolyn+Bramhall"},{"text":"The 'apparently normal personality' - the alter you view as 'the client'You should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the 'real' person, and the other personalities are less real. The client who comes to therapy is not 'the' person; there are other personalities to meet and work.","author":"Alison Miller","tags":["alter","alter-personality","apparently-normal-part","apparently-normal-personality","did","dissociation","dissociative-identity-disorder","mpd","multiple-personalities","multiple-personality-disorder","personality","psychology","psychotherapy","split-personality","structural-dissociation","therapy"],"id":203694,"author_id":"Alison+Miller"},{"text":"Dissociative Identity Disorder is borne out of trauma. Many individuals who survive severe trauma will later experience marked anxiety, which may or may not relate to triggers from the original trauma. Individuals with DID are highly likely to have a great deal of anxiety.","author":"Karen Marshall","tags":["anxiety","anxiousness","dissociative","dissociative-disorder","dissociative-identity-disorder","mpd","multiple-personality-disorder","trauma","triggers"],"id":243967,"author_id":"Karen+Marshall"},{"text":"After writing the letter Sybil lost almost two days. 'Coming to,' she stumbled across what she had written just before she had dissociated and wrote to Dr. Wilbur as follows: It's just so hard to have to feel, believe, and admit that I do not have conscious control over my selves. It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say 'This foolishness') any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would be easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.","author":"Flora Rheta Schreiber","tags":["amnesia","confession","controversy","denial","denial-of-reality","dissociative-amnesia","dissociative-identity-disorder","fake","faking","fraud","liar","lying","mpd","multiple-personalities","multiple-personality-disorder","pretending","recant","retraction","sybil","true-story","truth"],"id":272796,"author_id":"Flora+Rheta+Schreiber"},{"text":"...The vast majority of these [dissociative identity disorder] patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as posttraumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.2,10A history of multiple treatment providers, hospitalizations, and good medication trials, many of which result in only partial or no benefit, is often an indicator of dissociative identity disorder or another form of complex PTSD.","author":"Bethany L. Brand","tags":["complex-ptsd","dissociation","dissociative","dissociative-disorder","dissociative-identity-disorder","mental-illness","misdiagnosis","mpd","multiple-personality-disorder","posttraumatic","psychiatric-drugs","psychiatry"],"id":290203,"author_id":"Bethany+L.+Brand"},{"text":"It is now recognised that dissociation is a way of forgetting, for a time. The mind siphons off the bad memories into a separate part, and reclaiming those hidden-away memories us a complex process. So, when the memories resurface it does not feel as though they belong to you, it feels alien, more as if someone had told them to you, or you had seen the images in a film.","author":"Carolyn Bramhall","tags":["crime","derealisation","dissociation","dissociative-identity-disorder","memories","mpd","multiple-personality-disorder","multiplicity","satanic","trauma-experiences","trauma-therapy"],"id":318010,"author_id":"Carolyn+Bramhall"},{"text":"Another of the difficulties of having DID is the denial. DID is a disorder of denial. It has to be because if the original person knew about the alters and felt their pain, they would either go crazy and be hospitalized permanently, or would die.","author":"Eve N. Adams","tags":["alters","crazy","denial","did","dissociation","dissociative-identity-disorder","insane","mental-health","mental-illness","mpd","multiple-personality-disorder","split-personality"],"id":331505,"author_id":"Eve+N.+Adams"},{"text":"In this chapter I restrict myself to exploring the nature of the amnesia which is reported between personality states in most people who are diagnosed with DID. Note that this is not an explicit diagnostic criterion, although such amnesia features strongly in the public view of DID, particularly in the form of the fugue-like conditions depicted in films of the condition, such as The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Typically, when one personality state, or ‘alter’, takes over from another, they have no idea what happened just before. They report having lost time, and often will have no idea where they are or how they got there. However, this is not a universal feature of DID. It happens that with certain individuals with DID, one personality state can retrieve what happened when another was in control. In other cases we have what is described as ‘co-consciousness’ where one personality state can apparently monitor what is happening when another personality state is in control and, in certain circumstances, can take over the conversation.","author":"John Morton","tags":["alter-personalities","alters","amnesia","amnesiac","consciousness","diagnosing","diagnosis","diagnostic-criteria","did","dissociation","dissociative-amnesia","dissociative-disorder","dissociative-identity-disorder","dsm","dsm5","exception-to-the-rule","forgetfulness","fugue","fugue-state","memory","memory-loss","mental-illness","misdiagnosis","misunderstanding","mpd","multiple-personalities","multiple-personality-disorder","multiplicity","personality-switch","personality-system","prejudice","states-of-consciousness","stereotypes","stigma","switching"],"id":339393,"author_id":"John+Morton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}