A Part Before the Reveal

Trigger Warning:  The following contains discussion of child abuse.  I have tried to be very vague in my discussion, but I need to use some description to convey what happens to a child to produce DID.

Let’s talk about how DID is experienced by one who has it and by a therapist who is treating the disorder.  I have drawn this information from many sources, including books by therapists, such as Alison Miller, Colin Ross, Ellen Lacter, and books and articles by individuals with DID, such as Svali Speaks, plus my own experience with clients with DID.  (Here is a partial book list if you are interested: https://endritualabuse.org/books/)

Someone who has DID, as described by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), has two or more distinct entities within the individual’s body.  These entities are typically referred to as “alters.”  Frequently, the individual will have many more than two alters.  For example, in Daisy’s case, once we had established that she had DID, she was sure that she had at least five or six alters, although she did not yet have access to their memories of their daily functioning or how they came to be.  In my other cases, clients had upwards of 200 alters, and I have read of cases in which the individual had 1000 or more alters.

Within an individual, alters exist as a system.  Each alter has a role within the system. There is usually one alter, sometimes a couple more, who function as the “face” of the system.  They are the ones that hold down jobs, take their kids to school, etc.  They are the ones who call a therapist to set up an appointment.

Then there are the other alters.   These alters are formed during various incidents of abuse; often they are very childlike, because they were formed while the person was a child.  These types of alters can arise spontaneously, but often they are purposely “made” by the perpetrator.  For example, there are often alters that align with the perpetrator and exist to keep the other alters from telling their stories.  These alters can be of various ages, but they tend to be formed while the person was still a child.  These perp-aligned alters have been assigned the job of threatening other alters if they talked had been made first.  A perp-aligned alter is made via by torturing the child and when the child dissociates, the perpetrator tells the alter what their job is, and the alter is told that if they do not do their job they will be killed.  This is the process used to make all of the alters with jobs.

How do the perpetrator-aligned alters keep the others in line?  There are many ways that they do so.  They may be the alter that comes out during therapy and refuses to speak.  Or, if another alter is out, the perp alter may instigate a headache or make the presenting alter forget what they were about to say, even shut down the whole system, resulting in total memory loss of personal details.  The perp alter may convince the other alters that the therapist is aligned with the perpetrator and therefore cannot be trusted.  Additionally, the perp alter might threaten the therapist or other people with physical harm, such as saying that they have planted a bomb in the therapist’s car or that they will be bringing a weapon to session.

There may be other alters, such as caregiver ones, who are modeled on people who were positive in the person’s life when they were a child.  These caregiver-alters act as soothers to the other alters.  They can also function as an intermediary between the therapist and the alters, helping to reassure the other alters.  They are generated by the system, not by the perpetrator.

Finally, many of the alters may be made by the perpetrator for specific roles, such as prostitutes, porn actors, breeders to produce more children, soldiers, or assassins (or some other designated role), or specific genders.  There are lists of such roles to be found in the reading material presented earlier.

How is an alter made to have a specific role?  They are made in ways very similar to how a perp-aligned alter is made.  Say that the perpetrator wishes to produce an alter who will be used as a child prostitute.  The child will be physically and sexually abused, and terrified to the point that the child dissociates.  Once the perpetrator knows that the dissociation, which is akin to a hypnotic state, has taken place, the perpetrator gives the alter a name and a role.  The perpetrator can make an alter into an animal by treating the child, once in the dissociative state, as the desired animal, potentially forcing the child to perform sex acts with the same type of animal.  To turn an alter of a young girl into a boy, the perpetrator will treat the girl, in a dissociative state, the way the perpetrator would sexually abuse a boy, and give the emerging alter a boy’s name.

So, the perpetrator creates alters.  How does that serve the perpetrator? If, for example, the perpetrator is involved in supplying children for prostitution, he/she can call out an alter that has been given that role.  The remaining alters can then be told not to remember what happens to the target alter.  The child now going by the name of the prostitute alter, is supplied to whomever has purchased services.

The child also creates alters, and sometimes, alters create their own alters, which are more like smaller vessels for parts, of the child’s experience, for example the worst two minutes of a 3 hour ordeal.  These extra alters can fill in blanks that the main alters don’t remember.

There are often alters that represent infants.  That is because for some, the abuse starts in infancy.  There are those who revel in hurting children under the age of six months.  During therapy, one of the older alters needs to share the information of the abuse for the infants.

The alters can help each other.  For example, an older alter will drive, but a child alter will be the one to talk to the therapist.  Some alters will be mute but will give permission to others to speak for him/her.  The alters may fight for attention from the therapist.  Prostitute alters may initially think that the therapist wants favors from them.

Often the client with DID is reluctant to work through the traumas because it can be very painful to relate to another person all of the events that have led up to their condition.  Sometimes the events can be difficult to access because the perpetrator has used hypnotic suggestions to place barriers to memory, in addition to the barriers that the client’s own mind places. 

So, how does the therapist break down the barriers?  First, the majority of the alters must trust the therapist.  If there is trust, then some of the alters may become confident enough to begin sharing what happened to them for them to be created.  If the therapist is accepting, then other alters may begin to reveal themselves, sometimes to the astonishment of the first set of identified alters who didn’t realize that there were others (it’s kind of like peeling an onion).

As alters begin to share, the perp-aligned alters spring into action to stop the healing.  I previously mentioned some of their tactics.  The way to thwart a perp-aligned alter is to gain its trust and have it speak about how it was made. 

A major technique to help some alters come forth is hypnosis.  If hypnosis got them to being alters, it can help get them to resolve issues.  Much of the time, I did not need to use hypnosis, but at times it was useful.

In an earlier article, I mentioned the issue of false memories.  Therapists have been accused of implanting memories into clients, and I will be addressing that more so in the next installment, but in my practice, I have always been mindful of my method of eliciting information.  I always ask open-ended questions, such as “what do you remember?  Was anyone there? Please describe what you remember,” etc.

What is the resolution for someone with DID?  Often the individual likes having a system, but once the healing starts, and each alter shares, the alters tend to fade away, leaving the memories to those that remain.  So, the system may shrink in size.  Eventually, there may be only a single mind left in the body, and it contains the memories of all the others.  This can be lonely for the one that remains, because the individual has lived a system since childhood.

Someone with DID needs supportive people around them, but, often, they may lack the support or their perpetrator may still be in their life.

In my opinion, DID is underdiagnosed.  The estimate is 1% of the population, but those are the people who have come in for some type of treatment, and the therapist may, like with Daisy, just, via observation, come to the diagnosis.  What about those individuals who have a face alter, but the other alters have just been silent throughout the years, or just come out in rare instances? 

The next article in the series may call into question much you believe about the world.

By the way, if you find my work interesting, please share it with others. I don’t have a paywall, because I want to share my knowledge with all who might find it useful to them. Thank you.