A conversation with a 25-year-old with dissociative-identity disorder
Photo: LOUISE WILLIAMS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images Formerly called “multiple-personality disorder” and most often associated with murderous con artists on shows like Law & Order: SVU, dissociative-identity disorder is a widely misunderstood and controversial diagnosis.
I recently spoke to a 25-year-old with DID who goes by the name “Dia” and who prefers to use they/them pronouns to better incorporate their 21 personalities. We met because Dia is in a relationship with Rudy, a man diagnosed with narcissistic-personality disorder, whom I also interviewed. Dia was diagnosed with DID at 22, after many years of diagnoses they felt didn’t fit. Our discussion, edited for length and clarity, is below.
I was starting to become very unhinged. Am I awake right now? Is any of this real? Am I here? Is anyone here? At a certain point I felt like, Maybe I’m a god, or I’m some sort of deity, or I’m a ghost, because I felt so far removed from a sense of physicality because of dissociation.It’s like a numbing of the senses so you don’t have to feel the intensity of an experience. Everyone experiences dissociation to a degree.
I’m Bea. I am, I guess, the more responsible one. I’m the one who spoke to our therapists in the past and told them everything was going swimmingly, not knowing there were others in my head having a difficult time. You were just speaking to Michaela previously. I don’t know if Michaela mentioned this earlier, but DID varies greatly from person to person, because systems develop depending on what is needed. For us, the majority of the time, our switches are involuntary. We get triggered by something in the environment, or our brain controls it itself. It decides you don’t fit in that situation, so I’ll stick someone else in who fits better, like what happened a few seconds ago.
The official diagnosis I got was from a well-known psychiatrist who specializes in that field, Dr. John Chardavoyne. There is an organization called ISSTD, the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, which conducts research on trauma disorders and dissociative disorders, and on their website they had a list of therapists that specialize in DID. He was on a list for ones in my area.
To someone who doesn’t have DID, I wonder if what you’ve described sounds like having internal conflict, which we all do to some extent. How do you understand the difference between what you experience and another person’s competing impulse?
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