On Trauma Tuesday, I introduced the topic of dissociative disorders. Today, I would like to discuss the most extreme type of dissociative disorder, which is called dissociative identity disorder (DID). If you are unfamiliar with DID, you might recognize it by its former name – multiple personality disorder.

DID has gotten a bad rap in the media. When most people think about DID, they think about the movie Sybil. My biggest complaint about how DID is represented in the movies is its lack of subtlety. The whole point of DID is to be able to switch to different alter parts without anyone else knowing. The way that DID is portrayed in the movies is about as subtle as being hit by a truck.

DID is a brilliant way to survive extreme child abuse, and people with DID tend to be highly intelligent. A person can only develop DID if the severe abuse begins at a young age. My own informal polling of hundreds of child abuse survivors has shown that the magic age seems to be around six years old. Those who are older than six when they started experiencing extreme abuse do not seem to have the gift of fragmenting their consciousness into multiple parts.

You can read the DSM-IV guidelines for DID, which are outlined here, but they do not capture what it is like to have DID. DID is simply an extreme way of segmenting the way your brain functions. Instead of holding all memories in one place like most people do (in what I call the “core”), people with DID have the ability to hold different memories in different places so they can interact with the world as if the abuse was not taking place. This enables a child to be raped at 3:00 a.m. and then sit across the breakfast table with the rapist at 7:00 a.m. as if nothing happened. This is because the child has no conscious memory of the rape happening: That memory is safely tucked away in another part of her brain.

DID is a complex disorder, so I will spend the next couple of trauma blog entries explaining DID in more detail.

Related Topics:

• Understanding Integration
• Dissociative Identity Disorders topics on my personal blog
• Let's Talk Parts

Photo credit: JulieC