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...

The Kinsey staff asked questions of children, learning about sexuality in the family. And other psychologists, psychiatrists and paediatricians, including Benjamin Spock, explored this burgeoning field. As a result, it was known that children will...

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...

Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one’s own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding...

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...

You as a whole person are thus unable to reconcile conflicts about anger and learn to tolerate and express anger in healthy ways. Inner turmoil and dissociation are maintained.

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...

The programme into which Cheryl was inducted combined all the different ways the intelligence community had learned could cause intense psychological change in adults and children. It had been learned through the use of both...

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....

As Lynn began getting psychologically better, she took me to a variety of sites. She taught me how to read trail markers. In the end, Lynn’s stories could not be denied. She was not only...

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...

That is the problem with repressed memory and dissociative identity disorder. Your mind represses certain traumas for reasons of pure survival. And then you learn that to survive as an adult, you must uncover the...

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...

Cheryl’s growing awareness of her emotional difficulties was leading her to research multiple personality. As she had learned more about dissociation, she realised just how severe the abuse had been and how much she had...

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,...

Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind’s extreme...

Pathological dissociation is characterized by profound, functional amnesias and significant alterations in identity; normal dissociation is expressed primarily in the form of intense absorption with internal stimuli (e.g., daydreams) or external stimuli (e.g., a fascinating...

I honestly didn’t believe I could bear any more suffering. I was convinced that the child within me was just too young to endure all this, much less understand it. She just wanted to be...

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...

The primary treatment modality for DID is individual outpatient psychotherapy.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

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...

The men and women who continue to hold Lynn’s mind hostage against her will believe the future will be tilled with terrorism, death, destruction and a challenge to the survival of America. They believe Lynn...

I believe the perception of what people think about DID is I might be crazy, unstable, and low functioning. After my diagnosis, I took a risk by sharing my story with a few friends. It...

On its own, my internal dissociated part now came to the surface, and I found myself hiding from everyone. I still was not connecting it to the dream I’d had. At one time I had...

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...

Treatment for DID should adhere to the basic principles of psychotherapy and psychiatric medical management, and therapists should use specialized techniques only as needed to address specific dissociative symptomatology.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in...

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...

To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha’s life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He...

It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of...

This new co-consciousness brought me to a state of awareness in which my core personality was directly able to experience “her” personality. Being co-conscious with her, he explained, would stop me from experiencing the feeling...

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...

real” or more important than any other.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

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...

Changes in Relationship with others:It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be...

forget” the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital.

Denial returned, like a nagging cough you can never quite shake. Actually, it was always close at hand, and even though “satanic ritual abuse” did describe what had happened to me when I was a...

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...

Chronic trauma (according to the meaning I propose) that occurs early in life has profound effects on personality development and can lead to the development of dissociative identity disorder (DID), other dissociative disorders personality disorders,...

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...

Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and...

Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told — even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that — they were not...

I’m back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She’s lying on an alter, and they’re hurting her. The bastards. They’re hurting her. There is blood all over...

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...

Dissociation, in a general sense, refers to a rigid separation of parts of experiences, including somatic experiences, consciousness, affects, perception, identity, and memory. When there is a structural dissociation, each of the dissociated self-states has...

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...

Alterations in regulation of affect (emotion) and impulse:Almost all People who are seriously traumatized have problems in tolerating and regulating their emotions and surges or impulses. However, those with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders tend...

Cheryl was aided in her search by the Internet. Each time she remembered a name that seemed to be important in her life, she tried to look up that person on the World Wide Web....

I am truly crazy, I told myself. It’s over. I am not fixable. I cannot tell Tom. I cannot even tell Francisco. So I won’t tell anyone. My brain seemed out of control. Tom does...

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...

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.Atrocities, however, refuse to be...