The word is dissociate. There is no ‘a’ before the invariably say dis-a-ssociate, which, if you’re suffering Disso-ciative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder, can be irritating. People then want to know how many personalities I have...

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am...

Why did I allow the abuse to continue? Even as a teenager?I didn’t. Something that had been plaguing me for years now made sense. It was like the answer to a terrible secret. The thing...

PART 2 I felt doomed to death,But in a flash, Before I could reduce my thoughts To an emotion, I felt a mass leave my body:Departing. Then my mind becomes anonymous As is each night....

My body was a Pandora’s box of aches and pains. When Grandpa died all the ailments came jumping out. I was forever twitching and shaking. I had a persistent sore throat and had difficulty swallowing...

It is hard to bring paedophile rings to justice. Thankfully it does happen. Perhaps the most horrific recent case came before the High Court in Edinburgh in June 2007. It involved a mother who stood...

Once I had found the courage to tell Rebecca about the children in my head, it wasn’t so hard in the coming months to tell Roberta. On the train from Huddersfield one day in May...

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as ‘fragments’. which are ‘relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory, or carry out a limited task in the...

I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley’s nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she...

There, there, best to bring it all up,’ she said. My memory was in shreds. Imagine a photograph cut into narrow strips then jumbled up. Everything is there, but you can’t see the whole picture...

It is necessary to make this point in answer to the `iatrogenic’ theory that the unveiling of repressed memories in MPD sufferers, paranoids and schizophrenics can be created in analysis; a fabrication of the doctor—patient...

Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle....

During this hour in the waking streets I felt at ease, at peace; my body, which I despised, operated like a machine. I was spaced out, the catchphrase my friends at school used to describe...

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta’s office. That’s what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and...

As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson,...

When I was cooking I enjoyed a sense of being ‘out’ of myself. The action of dicing vegetables and warming oil made my hands tingle and my thoughts switch to a different hemisphere, right brain...

It’s hard to feel supported when you can’t tell people everything. People haven’t really got a clue what it’s like. It’s hard to trust anyone. It’s hard to believe people won’t let you down. I’m...

When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like...

Just as sometimes I wondered if Grandpa had ever existed, sometimes I wondered if I truly existed myself. As I was running, I could see myself from outside myself: a skinny girl with the flapping...

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the...

Weird? Absurd? That’s how it seemed to me. I had these forces, these compunctions, these alternative personalities inside me, driving me. It was like being a jack-in-the-box and I was unsure which personality was going...

One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle...

The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the...

If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours on Saturday morning in the library. Was that normal? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I felt less prone to...

I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if...

I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimesit looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar...

When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream. A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but...