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Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

Book by Sue Richardson · 15 quotes · Dissociative Identity Disorder, Therapy, Dissociation

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Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder Quotes

“The development of an incipient careseeking/caregiving system involves moving from avoidance to intra-subjectivity. This can be very anxiety-provoking. One person described it as a 'crisis of attachment '. Any past internal relating is likely to have been highly ambivalent at best. This is my face and which internal beliefs, such as being unworthy of care, which were formed in identification with the perpetrator, are challenged. The little creature [a hidden dissociated part of the self] may perceive both caregiving and careseeking as dangerous. He or she may fear being vulnerable to further abuse or exploitation and 'flinches, expecting pain again '.”

HealingAttachmentDissociative Identity DisorderTraumatizedAltersExpecting PainFear Of Attachment
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“The external therapeutic relationship remains a template for the kind of supportive companionable relating it needed internally. At the same time, this stage facilitates the role of the therapist as a consultant to the system [person with dissociative identity disorder].”

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“All parts need to be honoured for their role in survival and re-framed as helpful before new coping strategies can be developed. The ability to internalise the relationship with the therapist as a caregiver is key to the individuals ability to provide for self-care and management.”

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“Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia. This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.”

Mental HealthMental IllnessPsychiatryDissociationSchizophreniaSchizophrenicBorderline Personality DisorderTrauma SurvivorsDissociative DisordersChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorMisdiagnosisBpdDdnosMental Health ProfessionalsMental Health SystemDissociative SymptomsBorderline PersonalityMisdiagnosedMental Disordwr
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“Whatever the theory, it is important to note that clinicians such as Kluft draw attention to the clinical error of insisting that all alters talk as one or that only the alter with the legal name should be validated. 'Such stances are commonly associated with therapeutic failure'.”

TherapyMisunderstandingDissociative Identity DisorderPsychotherapyAlter PersonalitiesDissociative PartsAltersAlter Identities
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“While professionals and patients can be blamed for 'believing' in an illness or having one, patients also report problems when they are believed. Some professionals, they commented, have worryingly simplistic ideas of 'integration'. Ignoring the separately named alters in effect offers a psychic death sentence rather than aiding integration. If anything it can create a compliant false-self 'main person' who answers to [his or] her name and keeps all other 'states' in silent terror internally.”

TherapyIntegrationMisunderstandingDissociative Identity DisorderPsychotherapyAlter PersonalitiesAlter IdentitiesIatrogenic Harm
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“Working within the NHS, we are, as therapists, part of the system that has its own logic and values that can be experienced by the DID patient as not consistent with their own needs, and can be experienced as cold, detached and abusive.”

TherapyDissociative Identity DisorderPsychotherapyDissociative DisorderNhsTransferenceMental Health SystemCmht
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“I have stated elsewhere (Sinason 1994) that the number of children and adults tortured in the name of mainstream religious and racial orthodoxy outweighs any others. Wiccans, witches, warlocks, pagans and Satanists who are not abusive and practice a legally accepted belief system are increasingly concerned at the way criminal groups closely related to the drug and pornographic industries abuse their rituals.”

Ritual AbuseSatanic Ritual AbuseCultsOrganized AbuseOrganised AbuseSatanic PanicClergy AbusePedophile PriestsSatanic AbuseAbusive CultsRitual Child AbuseRitual Sexual Abuse
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“Because survival has been equated with internal separation, proximity can set off panic and fears of disintegration, i.e. 'fearing the trembling must turn to such severe shaking the vibration would dissolve her entirely, scattering her irrevocably wide'.”

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“Perhaps DID raises problematic philosophical and psychological concerns about the nature of the mind itself... Ideas of a unitary ego would incline professionals to see multiplicity as a behavioural disturbance. However, if the mind is seen as a seamless collaboration between multiple selves - a kind of trade union agreement for co-existence - it is less threatening to face this subject.”

SkepticismDissociative Identity DisorderMultiplicityMultiple Personality DisorderSplit PersonalityDissociative PartsMental Health ProfessionalsUnitary
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“However, it is important to remember that only 15 years ago most major training schools did not accept the existence of child abuse and condemned what they saw as the unhealthy excitement that was considered to emanate from the earliest exponents. The language of their criticism is very similar... to what greets the clinician of today who speaks of DID. It has been a later knowledge that understands the way the shame and trauma of abuse become projected into the professional network leading to splitting and blame.”

BeliefBlameChild AbuseSkepticismDissociative Identity DisorderDisbeliefMultiple Personality DisorderSplittingMental Health ProfessionalsSocial Denial
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“DID is often dragged into the debates about recovered and false memory. For example, it might be alleged that a person recovered memories from a state of dissociation. Such a claim reflects a misunderstanding of dissociation and a confusion with repression (Mollon 1998). If a piece of mental content (e.g. a feeling, a memory, a fantasy, a perception) is in a state of repression, it is not directly available to consciousness. Its existence may be inferred from its displaced and disguised expression. For example, a patient who is angry with the therapist may speak of anger with someone else - a kind of unconscious hinting. Gradually the patient may become more consciously aware of the previously repressed material. By contrast, the feelings, memories and other mental contents ofdissociated parts of the mind may be quite accessible to consciousness in that state of mind. Those contents may not be available, however, when the patient is in a different state of mind, or when another personality is in executive control. It is not that the objectionable mental content is kept in 'the unconscious (a horizontal splitting, implying a hierarchical gradation of consciousness), but rather that consciousness is distributed among the dissociated parts of the mind. Thus, in state of mind A, the patient may speak of a narrative of events of which he or she appears completely unaware when in state of mind B. When asked what she thought about the accounts of abuse that she had presented, in a childlike state of mind, during a previous session, a patient replied that she had no idea whether the memories were true or not because they were not her memories. In this way, what is claimed in one state of mind may be disowned in another stale of mind. There may be a repudiation not only of the content of what has been said, but also of the fact of ever having said it.”

PtsdRepressionDissociationRepressed MemoriesDissociative AmnesiaRecovered MemoriesTrauma Memory
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