Dissociative Identity Disorder

A year with Rose

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

On this day last year, my girlfriend Rose became part of my life. We first met online and started dating shortly after meeting in person. She’s a beautiful, generous, complex person I feel very privileged to know and love.

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Photo courtesy of Marja Flick-Buijs http://www.rgbstock.com/gallery/Zela

We’ve dealt with a lot over the year. We’ve both had health troubles. We’ve found ways to support and care for each other, to navigate the challenges of having two trauma histories and find joy in each other. I found myself reflecting upon a quote today:

Mama used to say, you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul.

Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days

365 days today. I’ve glimpsed a little and what I’ve seen moves me.

Dating as a multiple is… interesting. Different parts have different relationships with Rose. Some date, some are friends, some more like colleagues, or little sisters. Each takes time and effort to cultivate, each brings something different to the relationship. Where one is tender and nurturing, another is mischievous and energetic. There’s a lot of adapting, and a lot of talking things through. It takes an extra special effort to be honest and authentic. Friendship is the foundation.

We’ve been talking about moving in together for a while now. It’s exciting but also stressful. For both of us, we risk losing our secure housing in a gamble on our relationship lasting – or at least our friendship lasting. As we’ve both been homeless, it’s a very raw area. One thing adds a sense of urgency to our plans, which is that we both want children. Considering the challenges of conception in a woman/woman relationship, health concerns, and our desire to have settled into living together long before we start trying, there’s a certain keenness.

When I met Rose, she had been trying for a baby as a single woman. She’s been pregnant and suffered losses before, a grief that is still very fresh for her. I, on the hand, as a sick single woman approaching 30, had all but given up on my own dream of children. Last year I started reading books on grieving infertility. To my surprise, I was given a clean bill of fertility earlier this year. With Rose’s deep love for children, and my sister back in the country, my own health limitations no longer seem such an impediment. I visit my delightful goddaughter Sophie almost every week and fall more deeply in love with her. We’ll keep dreaming and talking, trying to find a balance between pragmatism and optimism.

Falling in love with Rose has been amazing, maddening, glorious, exhausting, healing, and deeply satisfying. She’s the first woman I’ve fallen in love with, and she’s been a gentle and caring partner, laying to rest my anxieties that perhaps I was mistaken in thinking I was attracted to women. I’m now very settled in my identity as bisexual, or queer. I’ve ended many years of choosing to be single, which was the right choice for me at the time. Being in this relationship has given me so many opportunities to grow and learn, and unlearn, to share and celebrate life. It’s been eye opening to realise how much difference it makes to have such support, little things like watering the garden when I’m ill, big things like supporting my efforts in business. We’ve made the most beautiful memories, that I’ll always treasure. I’m grateful and I feel blessed.

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Storms at Sea

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Last night was fantastic. It was rainy and stormy here, squalls of rain, then cold bursts of wind… so Rose, my sister, Zoe and I went down the beach. It was wonderful. I ran around whooping like a madman to encourage Zoe to run. The waves were high, the wind biting. We drank coco from a thermos, ate slightly sandy strawberries, and Zoe dug big holes to stuff her head into.

I felt free.

A part came out a few nights back who hasn’t been here in a long while. She bonded to Zoe, cleaned the house, and picked a fight with Rose. The fallout has been oddly settling. I feel attached to my dog for the first time in a long time. There’s affection when I look at her. Rose and I picked ourselves up and sorted things out. A cold wind blew through my heart. I love my house. There’s determination that, stay or go, I’m going to enjoy my time here, make the most of it. There’s good memories here, there’s scope for more.

Time off has been good. Less work, more rest, more chance to spend time connecting with friends – by which I mean more than just being in the room with them. Spring has walked through the windows and changed the colour of the light and the smell of the air. There’s a fierce joy in me suddenly, burning strong. The desire to devour life, drink deeply, inhale, crack the bones, run in the storms.

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Out of Despair 4 – The Railway Tracks

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Let me tell you about something I call the railway tracks. It is something I have struggled with for many, many years. I get stuck. I plan my life, and those plans are like tracks laid out before me. In good times, they are a guide. I stick to them, but I can also get off them, make detours, follow impulses, go where the moon calls me. In bad times, I am trapped by them, no deviation, no way out. Rewind 5 years. I’ve driven into the city to go to a church service that evening. I’m trying to make new friends. I know I’m multiple but I’ve told almost no one. I’m exploring an idea that if we don’t switch, if we take the same part to church each time, we might have a better chance at making friends. It’s sort of working but also not. Driving home late at night, there’s a sudden yearning inside to go home via the beach instead. The night is cold and clear and the moon is bright silver and I’m terribly lonely and lost. I want to do this so badly, but I can’t. The plan was to go to church and come home. The beach isn’t in the diary, isn’t on the schedule. I fight very hard but I cannot make myself drive there. I go home instead. This is the railway tracks.

At the time I dig into it enough to realise that I suffered from it because it supported my functioning in another way. I didn’t exemplify the chaos that is common in someone who has parts, because we all stuck to an agreed schedule. The downside was this lack of freedom to be spontaneous. That was upsetting but an acceptable trade off. Over time, the schedule – and this whole approach, the group being bound to decisions made previously, a rigid adherence to agreements, inflexibility, feeling trapped and locked in, has degenerated into severe depression. Hence, the letting go of it all, the following of small voices, listening to immediate needs and wants. The tracks are suddenly gone. The sense of living my life by constantly bullying myself into doing things I desperately did not want to do, being so far outside of my comfort zone I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen it, of holding myself down, holding my hand in the fire, holding the feelings at bay, that has gone. The boulders on my heart have lifted. The despair is still there, the screaming pain, the loneliness, the scars, the terror, the years of torment and loss. But the crushing destruction of motivation, initiative, emotion, that has gone, for now at least. The tracks are gone. I can do what I wish, make impulse decisions. Turn right instead of left. Stand at the edge of the world and watch the ships.

Suddenly I’m walking Zoe because I want to, because I love her, because I love going out in the night and the cold where I have the world to myself, not because I have to, not out of guilt or obligation.

Suddenly I’m realising that this freedom is the key to attachment, to connection, to love. That this isn’t just how I want to look after my dog, it’s the kind of parent I want to be. Connected. Let off the hook for not being perfect. Working with what I have. It’s the kind of partner, friend, person, I want to be.

Stronger members of my system have allowed themselves to be bound by the needs and fears of more vulnerable members. It’s been critical for cohesion. We’ve been very good at presenting only one face to the world. We’re united by a set of values, and the primary need to survive. This leashing also strips us of much of our strength, passion, fire, and zest for life. You cannot dream when your dreamers are locked in stone. There’s a cold war between those who hope and those who despair. We are changing this. We are loosening leashes. I don’t know what will happen. That’s precisely the frightening and wonderful thing. I don’t know what my future holds.

Out of Despair Part 1 – Language is Powerful

Part 2 – Frameworks Free and Bind

Part 3 – The Tribe

Part 5 – The Cave Dwellers and the Golden Light

Is Schizophrenia having ‘Multiple Personalities’?

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The short answer here is no. Multiple personalities (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID in the DSM) is classified as a type of dissociative disorder, while schizophrenia is a type of psychotic disorder. Very shorthand descriptions of these types of conditions are:

  • dissociation involves a disconnection of some kind, in this case between parts of identity
  • psychosis involves an addition of some kind – hallucinations, delusions etc.

From the perspective of the DSM they are entirely separate and distinct, with fundamentally different processes involved and treatments. There are certainly huge differences between many of the experiences.

Popular culture often mixes them up, which tends to enormously irritate people with either diagnosis. I have some degree of sympathy for the confusion however, because even the concept of what schizophrenia, or for that matter, multiple personalities, actually is changes quite regularly and I get that folks outside of psychiatry aren’t getting the memo and keeping up.

The longer answer is still no, with some qualifiers.

Schizophrenia roughly translates to split mind. This does not traditionally refer to the idea of split personalities, but instead to divided mental process or a split from reality. Schizophrenia is a fairly poorly defined cluster of symptoms that has changed significantly over the years and since the previous term ‘dementia praecox’. ‘Multiple personalities’ has also been understood in various different ways over the years – as an experience of spiritual possession, a subtype of schizophrenia where the person is in fact suffering from the delusion that they have other personalities, and so on.

Where things get really tricky, even with the current rigidly defined separation between these two conditions, is in the overlap of presentation or experience. And there are a lot of them. Firstly, Schneiderian First-Rank Symptoms, which were once thought to be extremely diagnostic of schizophrenia (and involve experiences such as thought insertion, thought withdrawal, and voices heard arguing) have been shown in some studies to be far more indicative of DID. What this means is that telling the two conditions apart on the basis of observing a person, or even learning what kinds of experiences they are having can be very difficult.

 

Secondly, psychosis and dissociation often seem to co-occur in my personal experience. Many people with a psychotic condition find that massive dissociation is part of the prodromal (or onset) phase, just prior to a major break. Some people with a dissociative condition, like myself, experience psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations. PTSD is an excellent example of this. Technically classified as an anxiety disorder, people diagnosed with it commonly experience both significant dissociative and psychotic symptoms.

Thirdly the whole area of voices, which I think is what really confuses things in popular culture. The DSM perspective is that voices are hallucinations, while alters are split off parts of personality. The fact that some people who have DID can hear their alters as voices blurs the two categories. Having some people experience their voices as stable personalities who perceive themselves as separate but alive, likewise. There is a considerable space here where people from both diagnostic categories meet. For more on this overlap, see Parts vs Voices. For a lovely description of working with voices as parts, see Creating a New Voice by Indigo Daya.

For some people, the diagnostic labels are very useful and important. It can be a great relief to have a name for distressing or confusing experiences, and I’m not in any way trying to take that away. These frameworks have their uses. But they also have limitations, and when you move beyond the boiled down Psych 101 spin, life is more complex than these discrete packages of symptoms can really capture.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.