Dissociative Disorders

To dissociate means to detach, separate, disconnect. A person with a dissociative disorder experiences a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions, and identity. Symptoms range from amnesia to alternate identities, or alters.

Dissociative disorder used to be known as Multiple Personality and that’s how many people still think of it. When I thought about it at all, it frightened me, it seemed very foreign, this happens to others, not to me, and I was phobic of my own alternate identities.

Fully one percent[i] of the general population has dissociative identity disorder, or DID. In cities the size of Portland, Oregon or Louisville, Kentucky, with populations over 600,000, that means that 6,000 people have DID, but many, if not most, are misdiagnosed or untreated. Dissociative conditions are frequently complicated by two or more concurrent diagnoses, such as anxiety disorder, panic disorder, depression, eating disorder, PTSD, and others, and diagnosis is often difficult. While all trauma does not cause dissociation, all dissociative identity disorders have trauma[ii] in their early histories. Disorganized early caregiver attachment style is an even better predictor of DID than trauma[iii]. And DID is treatable.

When I dissociated I sometimes just “went away” or spaced out unpredictably, and sometimes alternate identities took over for me, which I tried to overlook. I didn’t think of my alters as dissociated identities because I dissociated that thought as well. Essentially, I dissociated from my dissociation.

I had five primary alternate identities that I’d created to protect me when I was a very young child, and I did not accept their existence until I was an adult and they burst into my life. They “burst into my life” because I lacked the body-regulation skills controlled by the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex and insula that are customarily learned in secure attachment[iv] with a mother or other caregiver. I experienced what is meant by “the back-brain hijacking the front-brain.” Trauma is a back-brain process.

The experiential realization that “I am not who I thought I was” is one that most of us have acknowledged to a lesser or greater degree sometime in our lives. When I was faced with the probability and then the certainty of my dissociative disorder, I was alarmed at what I understood was a major psychiatric disorder, a craziness I hadn’t suspected in myself, who is this? and I predictably fled inside myself—I dissociated.

I have been gratified in my reading to learn that other patients also met their lived-in diagnoses with skepticism and disbelief. As my own alternate identities spoke up and relived memories in my body that were unknown to me, I protested that I must be making it all up somehow, that they could not be real; I must be wrong. That is a common response to finding alters in one’s life. My protest was typical and so was my effort to hide my internal voices and my “Parts,” as I called my alters.

There are ongoing studies that have established the validity and reliability of DID;[v] that dissociation can always be traced to early trauma; and that the only thing we know that truly works therapeutically is the relationship between the client and the therapist.

Early maternal attachment and the practice of mindfulness are both controlled from the same place in the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex[vi], to regulate our bodies, attune our communication, our response flexibility, internal and external awareness, empathy, insight and fear modulation.

Extreme emotional pain and inner conflicts are frequently triggered in traumatized, insecurely attached individuals when they meditate[vii], until they develop the emotional tolerance to handle complex feelings and emotional fear and terror. In therapy, I had to build up my medial prefrontal cortex, my “meditation muscles.” I had to find my way into all the encoded implicit memory laid down in high adrenalin states, safely, with an engaged therapist who tracked my small, small steps, who understood that exquisite pacing, that slower was faster. The same skills that would allow me to find a stable mindfulness practice would allow me to resolve old trauma and eventually, to integrate my split-off Parts. Christine Forner’s recent book, Dissociation, Mindfulness, and Creative Meditations: Trauma-Informed Practices to Facilitate Growth, explores this work. (Routledge, 2017). 

David A. Treleaven’s, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing is also highly recommended. (WW Norton & Company, 2018).

Most of the stigma of disclosing DID is related to mental illness. Some of the stigma is related to speaking openly of the early childhood neglect, abuse and incest that is often associated with developmental trauma. Most abused and neglected children never come to the attention of government or social service authorities.

I have been warned, and I’ve seen first-hand how some people expect a Jekyll and Hyde spectacle when they learn of my dissociative disorder, as if I weren’t any longer the very compartmentalized person they’ve always known. But of course, we need to bring DID out in the open, we need to address the national conversation about sexual abuse survivors and traumatic memory, and we need to demonstrate the reality of healing and integration.

[i] Martin J. Dorahy, et al. “Dissociative identity disorder: An empirical overview.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 48(5) (2014): 402-417.

[ii] Constance J. Dalenburg, et al. “Evaluation of the Evidence for the Trauma and Fantasy Models of Dissociation.” Psych. Bulletin. 138, no. 3 (May, 2012): 550-588.

[iii] Karlen Lyons-Ruth, “Dissociation and the Parent-Infant Dialogue: a Longitudinal Perspective From Attachment Research,” J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 51, no. 3 (Sept. 2003): 883-911.

[iv] Bessel van der Kolk, “Developmental Trauma Disorder,” (2005) Psychiatric Annals; Psychology Module 35 no. 5 (2005): 401.

[v] Dorahy, et al., “Dissociative identity disorder,” 402-417.

[vi] Marion F. Solomon and Daniel J. Siegel, Eds., Healing Trauma: attachment, mind, body, and brain. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2003.

[vii] John Briere, “Mindfulness, Insight, and Trauma Therapy,” in Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, ed. Christopher K. Germer et al. (New York: Guilford, 2013), 208-24.

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• Jekyll on trial: Multiple Personality Disorder & Criminal Law. New York: New York University Press, 1997.