Understanding Dissociative Identity Disorder

What is Dissociative Identity Disorder?

Dissociative identity disorder is a new name for an old illness. The illness is what is commonly called "multiple personality disorder" (MPD). This is a psychological disorder characterized by having one or more alter personalities (alters). The alters are fragments of the person's inner-self or ego.

Do you know a person with this disorder? I do. A person with Dissociative identity disorder may admit to feeling he/she is sharing his/her body with other people who live inside.

I have a friend who suffers from Dissociative identity disorder. For this article, I am calling her "Mary". I asked her to explain to me what it is like when she dissociates. She said, "When I switch, I am aware that I am switching from myself to a 7 year old little girl".

What stands out to me about Mary is that she is very highly functioning. She has a business and takes care of it. She is a sole proprietor of a printing shop. She takes care of customers and no one knows she has a problem with her identity. I stayed around the shop as customers came and went, and when there was a lull in the flow of customers, she felt safe to let "Janie" come out to play.

Dissociation is a defense mechanism a person manifests to deal with trauma they are not ready to deal with. "Switching" or dissociation is not something that should be ignored. In time the "alter" can overtake the main personality.

Many years ago Mary went away with a man from the Internet. He wasn't who he portrayed himself to be. He was very abusive, and she shared to me that he used her up for all of her finances and threw her away. I don't know everything that happened to her, but I know some of the awful details. As a friend, I helped her get back on her feet, but something was very different about Mary. She was not the same person she was just a few months earlier.

"I feel like a broken mirror", she said to me one day. Dissociation is so complex that a person can totally function as fragments of the whole being. It is like the alter personalities share and cooperate within the one being.