I have pulled together pieces of various letters I wrote to friends in the fall of 1996, explaining what I meant when I said I have multiple personalities or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Since then, my insiders have become more independent, but I think that the ideas below are useful as a step along the way.

I don't claim any authority for this description. This is my way of looking at it from my experience. There certainly isn't a fixed dividing line--there is a spectrum of dissociation and different people and different therapists will draw the line defining Dissociative Identity Disorder in different places on that spectrum. Some people don't feel any need to figure out where they fit, but for awhile it seemed very important to me to define what I meant. Consider what I write an example of one point of view that takes the approach that multiple personalities is a useful concept for healing, even for people who aren't extreme cases. (I don't have clothing in my closet that I don't recognize, and I have never woken up in a strange bed and not known where I was or how I got there.)

Becoming Aware

Let me tell you the story of how I ended up thinking of myself in terms of multiple personalities. I have been aware for many years of inner child stuff, and sometimes even had experiences where an inner child spoke in therapy--mostly the three year old whose father just died. But I never thought that had anything to do with multiple personalities (and even in hindsight, I think that three year old child is on the inner child side of the dividing line, because even though she is very much stuck in past pain, I know her and she feels like a part of me).

Then I had an experience where a (5 year old) voice spoke in therapy. After the session was over, I discovered that I remembered my body language and what the therapist had said, but I didn't remember a word "I" had said during that part of the session (the therapist said that the words were just a generalized expression of pain, nothing dramatic or new, and the voice was not dramatically different or recognizably childlike).

I found my lack of memory very disturbing. When I talked about it at the next meeting, and was afraid to go back to that place inside myself, the therapist tried to reassure me that the voice wasn't something strange and different by getting me to talk about teenage memories. His strategy had the opposite effect; I realized that the teenage memories felt like a part of me, but that in a fundamental way the 5-year old, whose words I didn't remember, felt like not me.

I went in the next session with the goal of convincing the therapist that this was multiple personality stuff, not just inner child stuff. I convinced him, I guess, and he then decided that he didn't have the expertise to work with me and referred me to someone who specialized in that area. (The funny thing was that my conviction that this was really multiple personality stuff was very strong in the face of a therapist who didn't want to see it, but then when I got to a new therapist who saw it, I got scared and for a couple of months I wanted so badly to deny that I really had multiple personalities.)

Some of my parts were, from the beginning, full-fledged personalities--parts of myself that are so cut off that they feel like not me, that have their own memories, and that are, at least, somewhat well-rounded (have more than one feeling or role). In my first map of my system, I also had some parts that might better be called fragments or cut-off feelings--they weren't like people, but rather consist of one feeling (like grief), or one role (like the dark little girl who feels dirty and hopeless and worthless and unacceptable), that I tried to bury and deny. Then there are some parts that are what I would call inner children--they feel like part of me and their memories feel like my memories, but they have unresolved wounds. So sometimes, I fall into that inner child part and respond to something not like a 40 year old adult but like the three year old whose father just died.

Some therapists believe that it is better for someone like me to concentrate on functioning in the world, instead of deciding that I have multiple personalities (which I have successfully hidden from the rest of the world up to this point) and expressing childlike needs. I disagree--I believe that the way I have coped, up to this point, is based on hating and denying and shutting away some wounded parts of myself, and that the only way to heal the vague pain that I have always felt inside myself is to get to know and honor and validate those parts of myself that I previously cut off to such an extent that they don't feel like part of me, and to hear the memories they have and I don't. I don't have alters who take over and go off and do things I don't approve of or remember (at least I am pretty sure of that). What I do have is wounded parts inside me who I am trying to listen to instead of pretending they don't exist.

A Model

Perhaps a model of the process would help. The standard stages for therapy with dissociative disorders are first, getting into communication with the cut-off parts of oneself and building a strong working relationship (and overall ego-strength); second, recovering and reliving memories (trying to walk a line between feeling the feelings so that they can be grieved and let go and having it become so real that one is retraumatized); and third, integration, which doesn't necessarily mean that the cut-off parts no longer have separate identities, but at least that there is a free flow of information between all the parts. I'm not big on the idea of following standard stages, but I think that scheme might be helpful to some. It is obviously not a linear thing, but if it were, I would be on the border between the first and second stages.

When getting to know the cut-off parts, it is easiest to think of them as very separate. Neither I, nor my therapist, wants to make them more separate than they need to be, but it is a lot easier to talk about them as if they were separate. Occasionally, I do talk to myself in different voices (the only way to be guaranteed an intelligent conversation, someone was joking in my WWW group), more often I write conversations with different color pens.