There was also a piece that wanted to sleep for eighteen hours a day and the piece that woke up shaking from yet another nightmare. And there was the piece that attended business functions and actually fooled people into thinking I might have something constructive to offer.
Over the course of seconds or minutes, their personalities may shift, making it difficult to establish a bond that feels real and tangible. The diagnosis of DID requires the presence of at least two distinct identities, each with its own psyche that perceives itself and its connections to the environment in unique ways. Symptoms that accompany this presence of multiple psyches include:.
People with DID also often experience other co-occurring mental health challenges , including depression, anxiety, sleep problems, mood swings, and suicidal tendencies. It can be stressful, even downright frightening to constantly be pulled back and forth between different realities, and when combined with other mental health issues, this struggle is amplified. A self-deprecating voice inside told me I had no chance of getting better.
I lived in an emotional black hole. However, in order to do so successfully, you must also understand the nature of their illness and how it is affecting the both of you. Being in a relationship with someone whose personality can change swiftly and without warning is a difficult experience, one that can easily cause friction and turmoil within the relationship. In order to deal with this trauma, people with this illness create alternate psyches as a coping mechanism to dissociate themselves from the pain of the trauma.
Understanding this can help you better empathize with why they are feeling the way they are, anticipate when symptoms of their illness are most likely to manifest , and provide them with the support that they need during the moments when they feel lost. He knows more about cars and stuff. What are some of your other personalities? How many do you have? A lot of our personalities only come out for a very, very specific reason.
We have one personality who comes out just to run away and hide: Anya. Two women, one man, one boy. Bea is very responsible. She sounds the most adult.
She sounds our age. She has a really high work ethic and good morals, and she always wants to do things the right way. Because of that, she gets really easily overwhelmed. Jason … we like to think of him as an anti-Bea, like her foil. For example, Bea is a people pleaser. He is gay. Physically he is stronger than the rest of our personalities.
Different personalities do have different physical characteristics as well. Some will be right-handed, some will be left-handed. Some will have better or worse vision or hearing. Jack is mentally 5 years old. He likes to make up songs and play with our puppy. Does he come out often? He seems to come out whenever the other three hosts are too overwhelmed.
He sees things differently. Rudy mentioned that one of your personalities is a rabbit. Oh boy, yeah. Rudy told me one time Rabbit was hungry and she was nibbling on his clothing and trying to eat his chest hair, so he gave her celery and then she was good.
Do you know the reason for DID, how it develops? Tell me. DID is a trauma-based disorder. Basically, if you experience recurring abuse or neglect in your early childhood, before you have a developed, unified sense of self, you are at the highest risk of developing DID — particularly before the age of 5, when your imagination is at its peak. The different personalities serve different purposes for survival. So, Rabbit developed because we were scared a lot as a kid.
There was a lot of fighting going on in our household between my mother and my sister — threats with knives, screaming, cussing. If alters are not discrete personalities, what are they? One hint: individuals who develop DID often meet the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder and other conditions marked by instability.
Indeed, a review in by one of us Lilienfeld and his colleagues found that between 35 and 71 percent of patients with DID also have borderline personality disorder. Understandably, then, many individuals prone to DID are bewildered by their unstable moods, self-destructive behavior, impulsivity and erratic relationships and are seeking an explanation for these disturbances.
Thus, DID may reflect an effort by individuals to make sense of extremely puzzling behaviors and feelings, a hypothesis proffered by the late psychologist Nicholas Spanos of Carleton University. If so, techniques for making alters talk to one another may backfire, encouraging patients to falsely believe that the varied thoughts and feelings reside separately in their minds, often rendering them more difficult to integrate. For example, a patient could become convinced that one of her alters is responsible for her intense anger toward her husband, causing her to disregard her true feelings.
A better approach would be to help patients understand that their painful psychological experiences are created not by different personalities but by different aspects of one troubled personality. That way those suffering could begin to come to grips with these experiences and recognize that their thoughts and feelings are genuinely their own. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Thanks for reading Scientific American. This trauma can stem from:. In some cases, a child may not experience a clear form of abuse, but may not grow up in a safe home environment. For example, they may live with highly unpredictable parents, and start to dissociate in response to the stress that comes with this.
Dissociative identity disorder may appear alongside other disorders. This means that several mental health disorders could arise from the same cause. It takes time to diagnose DID. To properly make a diagnosis, doctors need to see the different personalities and how they affect the person. Time is also an important factor in seeing the full scale of the symptoms.
This is because people who seek help for DID commonly present with symptoms linked to other mental health conditions. Additionally, as DID often occurs alongside other disorders, doctors need to rule out the symptoms of other conditions before they make a diagnosis. As such, they may prescribe therapies or medications to treat these conditions first.
There are no guidelines on how to treat DID. Doctors often prescribe treatments on a case-by-case basis. No specific medication exists for DID. Treatment plans manage any conditions that occur alongside DID, and they can combine psychotherapy, with any necessary drugs to help with symptoms.
Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, is the main treatment for people with DID. Techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy , may help a person work through and learn to accept the triggers that cause personality shifts. Art therapy, movement therapy, and relaxation techniques may all have a place in the treatment of DID. These methods may help people connect aspects of their mind in a low-stress environment.
A person will subconsciously create other personalities to handle certain aspects of themselves and their traumas, without which they cannot cope.
0コメント