Hi everyone,
Here is a BBC article about a woman having multiple personalities that she manages individually.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170613-how-i-learned-to-live-with-multiple-personalities************
Until she was 40 years old, Melanie Goodwin had no memory of her life before the age of 16. Then, a family tragedy triggered a cataclysmic psychological change. Suddenly she was aware of other identities inside her, and the barriers between them were crumbling. The different identities belonged to her, Melanie felt, but ‘her’ at different ages, from three years’ old to 16 and on into adulthood.
“We” – she generally refers to herself as ‘we’ – “had lots of adult parts. Development should be seamless… But because we didn’t grow up naturally, we would update ourselves…
Melanie describes it this way: “If you’re in a totally impossible situation, you dissociate to stay alive. Trauma can freeze you in time. And because the trauma is ongoing over years, there are lots of little freezings happening all over the place.”
Not everyone who endures childhood abuse – or any other form of ongoing major trauma – develops a dissociative disorder. Based on his work, Aquarone says there’s another critical factor involved: the absence of a normal, healthy attachment to an adult.
This is not to say that our personalities are set for life in those early years. A relatively stable environment, in terms of relationships and work, helps to maintain a relatively stable personality. “I think the fact our environments tend to have a lot of stability to them contributes to the consistency that we tend to display,” says Johnson. But if these external influences change, we can change too.
It makes sense that Melanie will behave differently depending on ‘who’ is to the fore in her mind. She is not acting like her three-year-old self, or even remembering what it was like to be three. She is that three-year-old – until another identity comes to the fore.
One psychological benefit of religious belief may be that, in theory, a relationship with God, with all its associated memories, can extend from early childhood through to death, and no matter where you are on the planet, it is there. As Aquarone says, “You can’t take it away – and it transcends where you are.”
There are other ways to help connect your present ‘self’ with the past. Psychologists used to think that nostalgia – the use of memory to sentimentally hark back to good times in the past – was negative and harmful. But there is now work finding the opposite. In fact, nostalgia seems to foster a sense of the self-continuing, and enhances a sense of belonging in the world.
This sense of a single, consistent self through time helps people to navigate life, and the social world in particular.
“I’m a psychologist, not a metaphysician,” she adds, “but if you wanted to draw some metaphysical conclusions, you’d have to understand that when normal, everyday people are thinking about their own identity and the identity of other people, this is informed by their own values and circumstances.”
Strohminger has found that there is, however, one aspect of a person’s typical pattern of behaviour that, consistently, is rated as being most fundamental to who someone is – even more so than their memories, or whether they’re extrovert or introvert, placid or easily driven to excitement or anger.
The relatives reported that it wasn’t when their loved ones lost their memories that they became a ‘different person’, but rather when their moral sense altered.
“Traditionally, morality has not been given much attention in scholarly work about the nature of personal identity. Rather, it was thought that memory and distinctive characteristics, like your personality, is what made you,” Strohminger says. “Our results run counter to centuries of thought from philosophers and neuropsychologists.”
Now, the parts are all still there, but they coexist. “We are not one, but we all agree to live harmoniously together,” says Melanie.
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Some points....
1. A healthy and loving relationship with God (as a father, mother, child, friend, lover) can be very helpful in managing trauma and distress. A fear based relationship could however probably have the opposite effect.
2. We clearly have one Self that manages these various personalities. It is as though 'we' are looking through different mental frames (like colored glass) and seeing the world differently through each frame. In normal people these different frames are coordinated while in people with DID they are disjointed.
3. Our Self can be associated with our moral sense more than with anything else that we think of as ourselves, like memories for example. It is how we react to each of these mental frames that decides what 'we' are.
Just some thoughts.
Cheers.
Sriram
