Therapy with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“I call them the persons of my mind, my pers,” Robin said, in reference to the split personalities she experiences due to trauma. “I talk out loud to them and I find it therapeutic, but I try to be careful because I know it can bother my roommate, and other people,” she said. 

Robin suffered severe and serial traumas, and was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and associated psychotic symptoms (voice-hearing and delusions).

She currently resides in a nursing home, where she receives care and treatment for a painful chronic medical condition that she keenly understands may be a terminal condition. She also receives psychiatric medications, and she meets with me for psychotherapy.

Robin is intelligent and fluent, and able to think in rational and logical ways. The psychotic and dissociative features have a common origin in her traumatic experiences. Addressing split personality issues is only a part of the scope of our therapy conversations, yet will be the focus of this brief essay.

Robin had psychiatric care over the years, and was fluent with professional terminology. I did not begin to directly address the split personalities until a trusting therapeutic rapport had been well established, and until she had initiated comments that directly included the pers in our conversation We then began to discuss the therapeutic goal of reintegration of the personality fragments into the self, and to include the “pers” in conversations. 

Robin would tell me how the pers were listening to and reacting to comments I was making, and she would convey questions asked by the pers. “They like the way you talk to me, and to them,” Robin said. 

Robin would sometimes mentally gather the pers so they might participate in our sessions. I would speak in a teaching way about the trauma previously experienced by Robin, and about the fragmenting impacts of trauma, and about ways that dissociative features could have a protective effect – at least at the time of the trauma. I would explain that the so-called split personalities were actually all parts of Robin, and that one purpose of therapy was to help them all come together again as one person.

I said there is only one Robin. There are no other persons or personalities inside of you that are not Robin. Parts of you, Robin, might be experienced as-if being separate – but only because of the psychologically explosive impact of trauma. The task of healing is a gathering up of the parts into the whole – of learning to recognize and identify with those thoughts and feelings and memories that have seemed peculiarly different, due to shattering troubles.

Some pers would argue or complain to or about Robin because, “they feel frustrated being stuck in this nursing home, and they want to be out in the world doing things.”

“They get mad at me because I can’t easily move or walk,” she said. “I can feel the pers moving in my body, and sometimes others come in and enter the pers, and I can feel them in my body, and I don’t really know who they are or what they want,” Robin remarked.

We would talk about the pers as aspects of Robin’s own feelings – that she feels frustrated being ill, and restricted to the nursing home, for example. We spoke of how the ‘others’ were Robin’s as-yet unfamiliar, or unconscious, thoughts and feelings, and that her bodily sensations were ordinary visceral elements of emotions (but feelings numbed by suffering for Robin, or pushed away from awareness to the point of seeming to be other than self).

When her subjective experiences were considered as unfamiliar elements of her own thoughts and feelings, Robin could glean new understandings about the complexity of her reactions.

Robin suffered horrible and criminal mistreatments, yet she has been quite resourceful and remarkable in her coping and her capacity for growth. Her well-being has been served by our careful, gentle, and sustained reconsideration of her internal experiences, with the aim of bringing it all back home, as Bob Dylan said, or returning the many parts into the one whole.