Does multiple personality disorder even exist?

Because of books like Sybil the myth is, that this disorder is multiple personalities inhabiting the same person. That it’s formed by some effort on our part, to remove ourselves from things that we have a problem dealing with. That we choose somehow to “dissociate” to protect ourselves from our reality, and that is what causes other parts to take over for us when we are too weak to handle life. In the last 15 years I have seen little change in that THIS is what is being printed as fact.

There are so many facets that are interwoven to create the experience of DID, but that myth does nothing to explain the actual reality of it nor help you heal from the disorder. There are truths that can do both. This site is great for letting me publish them in small pieces that are easy to understand and digest so that it’s possible to get a better understanding of the experience without needing a college education to get it.

This ‘personality disorder’ is a brain injury. Everyone is effected by these same types of injuries but only a small percentage to the extent that it causes the personality disorders that people expect to see in someone with DID. This is a trauma disorder and the myths of this disorder are not helping people deal with its effects or heal from it so grab some info and get educated, the brain you save could be your own.

Dissociative Identity Disorder has replaced “Multiple Personality Disorder” for the brain dysfunction that results from early childhood trauma but it is no less controversial or confusing to both therapists and the people who experience it then it was when they called it MPD.

It is fascinating to me that a “the world is flat”, phenomenon developed in the Psychiatric community regarding this disorder. Anyone openly admitting to believing it existed was criticized, ostracized and considered a fool. It has taken a phenomenal amount of research to refute the previous claims made about this disorder, including that the therapists themselves have hysterically created it in their patients.

If you’re the person experiencing it you have no doubts but speaking about it to anyone who could help was almost as traumatizing as experiencing it. They doubted the truth and sincerity in all you said or at least felt that you were hopelessly confused because they couldn’t argue it out of existence.

In order to function in my own life I have spent years studying this one thing. I believe that what feels like a “Multiple Personality Disorder” to the person experiencing it, is essentially a filing disorder with the functioning of the disorder and even the formation of it based totally on “normal” brain development.

Memory is basically a filing system. It is essential. To function you need that filing system to process information. If the filing system you have is damaged, your brain may start a new filing system in another part of the brain where the brain is not damaged. This filing system will not have any of the original files in it. It will only contain information processed after the trauma occurred.

Normally your brain stores information in order. What happened when you were 6 then what happened when you were 7 and so on, so that things that are current are easier to access than earlier files and yet everything is orderly and easy to find.

If you have M.P.D. that way of storing information was temporarily impossible because you have more than one place that stores parts of this info. At first the damaged parts are inaccessible but as your brain heals pathways to them can be built, and yet early on those areas are not connected to each other so that when you’re in one area you have no access to information stored in another.

As you get older the fact that you need to access information about the past makes you create neural pathways to more filing areas. The processing parts of your brain are continually trying to make those connections more efficient and useful.

If your brain has several areas of filing this type of information available to it, it may get more creative in the way it files future information. If you had an abusive step father that constantly told you you were stupid when you were 6, everything that supports that belief in the future will be put in that file. In fact any thing that you experience in your life that reminds you of that abuse may also go in there.

The neighbor you babysat for when you were 14, always said what a wonderful parent you would be, so all the supportive details for what a good parent looks like would be added to that file. In this way year by year, you added details to each file that seem to fit what was already beginning to be a basis for your personality.

Now we have formed the basis for forming a set of unhealthy heavily weighted personalities. Until your brain is mostly formed there is no real way for you to experience the wholeness of who you really are, because when your in one file you don’t have access to the information in any of the others.

The qualities that formed the basis for who you perceive yourself to be are unevenly weighted by the fact that any information that doesn’t seem to fit in that file will be efficiently pruned and added to a file that seems a better fit. When the information needs to be accessed, every supporting detail is easily found.

Normal Brain development will make more and more connections to the parts of the brain that you use most. In that way a lot of the healing that people describe that have this brain dysfunction will naturally occur as your brain develops. If it hasn’t reached a certain level of development then no amount of traditional therapy will fix it.

The aging brain develops outer connections that give access to all the parts of the brain. Like highways connecting one city to the next it allows for the sharing of information across all the structures of the brain. Like highways, you will develop connections to memory areas deemed most important first.

Normal brain development will open up that access and without any outside intervention this “healing ” will occur and eventually all the areas that file personality may be able to share information. May, and not will, because unless there is the need to access an area of the brain, no connections are made.

It doesn’t take decades or more of “therapy” to get over the pain that caused the original brain dysfunction. The brain just needs time to recover and mature. If stress and trauma have been prolonged or repetitive it will take longer for the brain to do that.

Even a lack of understanding for what is happening can re-traumatize someone so that the progress they make is stunted. It feels “crazy” to know internally that there is more than one area of the brain processing your own thoughts. Since that experience is rarely verified and explained to the person experiencing it, it isn’t just placed into perspective and processed as it should be.

This is an area where therapists could be most helpful. Unfortunately they are failing miserably at it. More often then not medication is offered instead of information, and empathy. Ignorance of this brain disorder has made therapists one more challenge in the lives of people facing the disorder, instead of the source of help that they were seeking.