If you are a member of Medium, please support me by reading this article here.
A growing number of movies and novels love to portray Dissociative Identity Disorder.
This is a problem because many of them do it poorly.
Split, Shattered Window, Shutter Island, Fight Club, and even Sybil—these are all offensive portrayals of a sensitive psychological disorder that was once called Multiple Personality Disorder but has, for over thirty years now, been called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) instead.
Most of these movies, and similar novels, use the trope of the protagonist being a killer with DID. DID is portrayed as being the reason why the characters murder.
Let me underscore how offensive this really is by using analogous examples. What if people made movies and novels that implied the following:
All people with depression beat their children.
All people with anxiety sell drugs.
All people with OCD run puppy mills.
All people with social anxiety disorder drown kittens.
Would you really walk away saying, “Wow, what a great movie! That’s some awesome entertainment there”?
Let’s hope not.
So let me clear up some confusion about Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Full Disclosure
I have a B.A. in psychology, but this is no mere theory to me. My life partner, Keith, and I both have DID. We have both been officially diagnosed, and we are both in treatment. I will tackle the myths about DID using both clinical psychology and also Keith’s and my lived experiences.
What is DID for real?
Many people are confused about what Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is. So let’s begin by looking at the basic facts without the tough psychological jargon in the way.
Firstly, you need to understand that DID is an act of emotional self-defense in a child. Only children can develop DID; adults can’t. The child develops DID prior to the age of five- to nine-years-old, with psychologists not in complete agreement about what the cut-off age is. So all those movies and books that say an adult developed DID because of trauma are wrong. If you don’t have it by age nine, at the latest, then you just don’t get it. Your mind has to have a certain amount of flexibility that it will lose as you age.
Secondly, you need to know that it is the result of trauma. On this count, books and movies are usually correct. But keep in mind that the trauma is severe and repeated. This trauma is often years of child abuse, but it can be other things like living in a war zone. The trauma causes the toddler or young child to develop Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, known by most as Complex PTSD (C-PTSD).
Thirdly, you need to comprehend that DID is a coping mechanism to deal with the Complex PTSD and trauma. The word “dissociative” or “dissociation” now comes into play.
Dissociation is a reaction to trauma. I’ll explain more about it in future articles, but for now I’ll say this: You may have experienced one type of dissociation yourself if you’ve ever been in a car wreck, had a loved one die, or experienced some other similar trauma. You may have experienced feeling like you weren’t real, or the event itself felt unreal. Maybe you had trouble thinking clearly, too. This is one type of dissociation.
The toddler or young child who is being traumatized repeatedly, perhaps daily, is constantly dissociated. The dissociation provides a mental cushion that helps the child mentally and emotionally survive the traumas, often by feeling unreal or numb. This sense of unreality and numbness is half of the self-defense. I’ll explain the other half in future articles.
There is no killer or evil one.
Thanks to a landslide of offensive movies and novels, people with DID actually have the experience of having people—in real life—say to them, “Oh, so you have DID? Wow! So which one is the killer?”
I wish I were kidding.
I’m not.
Reality check: Hollywood is Hollywood. The real world is the real world.
There. Is. No. Killer.
People with DID are survivors of repeated, severe traumas. If there is any killing involved, then it would be that the person with DID is the survivor of an attempted murder. Put a less tasteful way, we’re the victim, not the killer. (I prefer the word “survivor.”) We’re not trying to kill anyone. No one inside of us is trying to kill anyone.
Instead, we have severe C-PTSD. Many of us are deeply depressed and/or highly anxious. We struggle with flashbacks of traumatic events, just like soldiers with PTSD who suffer flashbacks about war.
We’re not off sprouting a separate self who can murder our wife for us.
We’re in therapy trying to heal from years, often decades, of severe abuse and trauma.
There is no “real” one with a bunch of fakes or “alters.”
The idea that there is a single real “personality” inside a person with DID who is surrounded by a bunch of fake personalities or “alters” is at least thirty years outdated. That’s a long dead model of understanding DID that has been proven incorrect.
It’s also, frankly, offensive to people who have DID.
The foundation of the term “alter” either means to enter an “altered state of consciousness” or “alternate personality.” People with DID are not going into an alternate state of consciousness. This is our state of consciousness all the time. There is nothing else. And we definitely are not alternate, fake, or extra people. We all belong here, and all of us together comprise the overall person.
The current psychological language around people with DID calls the internal people (formerly known as personalities or alters) a System—as in, we are an internal family, an internal business partnership, or an internal system of people.
Likewise, the current Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM (the book used by psychologists to make a diagnosis) calls the people within the DID System “parts.” However, we are not actually “parts.” That implies that the DSM privileges an outdated mode of thinking that people within a DID System are not complete on their own but rather are limited and mechanical pieces. We are actually internal people. We have fully developed personalities of our own, with our own tastes in music, movies, and food. We also will score different results on personality tests like the Myer-Briggs. So the term “part” is misleading.
Let’s talk about two other terms: “self-state” and “subpersonality”. “Self-state” again hearkens back to the idea that there are different states of consciousness. I’m not a “self-state”. My state never changed. We are constant. Just because different people in the System take turns speaking does not mean we become each other. We are always ourselves. We don’t change. “Subpersonality” implies deductively that all the people in a System can be added together to form a composite, single personality. No, we can’t. If you do that, you would end up saying that we do and don’t like peanut butter, that we always sleep on our left side and always sleep on our back, that we hate and love rap music, and that we love to be outdoors and stay in bed all day. We would also simultaneously be INTJ, ENTP, ESFJ, and ISFP on a personality test. Putting everyone’s preferences and cognitive functions together mistakenly creates the same confusing impression people have of us when they don’t know we have DID.
We are a System of people with a lifetime’s worth of experiences divided up between us so that we have all had time to shine. That is why so many of us liken our Systems to families. Family Systems Theory can, in fact, generate a map of a DID system.
Think of us instead as a family inside of a single body and call each of us people.
(Note: I, Patrick, and my partner, Keith, have different opinions about the use of the term “self state.” I am okay with it and Keith is not. Neither Keith nor I like the term “part” and find the term “alter” deeply offensive. Always ask the person with DID what their personal preference is.)
Reality is still real.
Another misconception about people with DID is that they are delusional and live in an alternate reality separate from everyone else. People often think we hallucinate.
This is simply untrue.
DID is a defense mechanism, not a psychosis. We live in the real world with the rest of you. We work jobs, interact with other people normally, go to school or college, drive cars, ride subways, and watch sports. We go to concerts and ride bikes off-trail and go on vacations. We interact with this world.
Dissociation is not departing from reality. Dissociation is the haunting feeling that the reality that you are living is isn’t real. Reality feels muffled somehow, almost like listening to someone talk while wearing a noise cancelling headset. Yes, we understand that the doctor really did walk into the room and tell us that our grandmother has breast cancer. The doctor is real. Our grandmother is real. The breast cancer is real. But suddenly reality itself feels off.
People without dissociative disorders do sometimes experience dissociation. As I mentioned above, it’s common when someone dies or if you’re in a bad wreck. This sense of unreality is a coping mechanism; you go into psychological shock.
DID means that the dissociation happens more frequently. That’s all.
Keep in mind that the idea that people with DID have DID because they couldn’t cope, that they just couldn’t hack it without making up extra people to help them, is outdated and offensive. We aren’t born fantasizers who are so weak we had to retreat from reality. This misconception serves the purpose of exoticizing DID and making it seem whimsical, instead of the survival response to extreme trauma that it is. We’re not quirky. We’re survivors.
The Takeaway
People with DID are usually indistinguishable from neurotypical people. We have jobs, we get married, we have kids, and we have hobbies. We don’t murder people and stuff them in our basement. Our biggest problem in life isn’t even having DID, usually. It’s actually the Complex PSTD, with all the nightmares, flashbacks, and insomnia.
Stop making movies and writing novels about people with DID as killers or as the villain. We’re just like people who suffer from depression and anxiety: We’re under a lot of stress, we need love and therapy, and we’re just trying to live our life.
Commenti