Split personalities
Illustrated by Kimi Moana Whiting (she/her)
We’ve all heard of DID, just maybe not directly. DID is ‘dissociative identity disorder’; but unfortunately, most people know of it through a warped lens under the name ‘split’ or ‘multiple’ personality disorder. Before ending up in a research rabbit-hole of ‘he-said’, ‘she-said’ type articles, I spoke with Shadow* who was diagnosed with DID early 2021 to help us better understand the realities of what living with DID is like.
“It’s basically an identity disorder where a person has experienced severe traumatic events in early childhood. It is a protective device as a result of repetitive childhood trauma,” explains Shadow. “The brain splits into different sections as a way to protect the individual, where you dissociate from yourself to cope with experiences.”
Affecting 1.5 per cent of the population, it’s more common than you’d think: around the same rates as autism, bipolar disorder and BPD (borderline personality disorder). While these disorders feel so much more common, we are just more aware of them. “So many people’s brains are separated, it's just this is more defined,” says Shadow.
“Incl[uding] myself, me as the host, there would be 11 at the moment. The host: the person who takes control of the body, is the one who is referred to as the name Jack, will respond to the name Jack the most.”
So, how does a DID brain think? Like with anything to do with a brain, everyone is different. Generally, people with DID have an ‘inner world’ they can see when they close their eyes, but it would be wrong to say this is how it is for everyone.
For Shadow, “They do have their own rooms. I don’t know if this is, like, known about DID. They look like something, I can see them, they're walking around. My head I guess is like a massive living room. There's a table, like an oval shape with a chair for everybody. The room is set out in specific places I guess, and I can feel where they are. There’s a screen behind my eyes where people can sit behind the table and watch what's happening, not everybody's always there.”
“I’ve heard some people describe it as a TV screen but, for me, it's more like a window screen (like a mosquito net) it’s not really a digital thing, it’s like a see-through curtain or something.”
“The rooms themselves, everybody has a door. If it’s open, I can hear what they’re thinking/talking about, see them, and be aware of what they’re up to. If their doors are closed, they’re blocked off to me.”
Everyone with DID refers to the people they share a body with differently, but we’ll go over some key words really quickly. A commonly used term for different people is ‘alter’, while the collection of identities can be referred to as the ‘system’. The ‘host’ is the main person in control of the body, usually the one whose name is used to refer to the body (in this case, Shadow is the host of their system). And, to ‘drive’ the body is to be the only one controlling it.
Let’s talk about some of Shadow’s alters.
“For starters, there’s Riot. He’s an anxiety holder. While Friday is a sexual protector, he’s an anxiety holder. He comes into a situation when nobody else can deal with how stressed out the situation might make us. The funny thing is he’s really anxious - he can just hold it better than the rest of us. He holds a lot of memories from when I was younger, because he used to host the body. There were several years in my life where I was identifying as a boy when Riot was taking control. I disappeared for several years after something traumatic happened. It wasn’t until I moved to Wellington and had another significant shift in life, when I ‘woke up again’ and Riot let go of control. He’s present a lot; the most annoying thing is I don’t know what I look like when he’s fronting, I’ve been told I man spread and have a man's voice.”
"Then there’s Friday, who is "like a bad bitch, she’s very much a party girl. Loves to drink, talk to people, has a terrible habit where she’ll tell everybody I [have] DID; which I really wish she would stop doing. She’s also the reason I talk kind of American.”
"Then after I went through another traumatic event in January, Friday basically was like; ‘Nah, fuck this I’ve had enough.’ When she did that my system was thrown into chaos a bit, I’ve split into a few alters this year, trying to deal with this new trauma that’s been added. Friday basically shut her door and was like ‘I’m not dealing with this anymore’. What she did in those situations, instead of getting out, she experienced the trauma for us. So, Jordan has become the primary protector, her whole thing is ‘fuck this, fuck everybody, I'm taking over’. She knows she won't sit there with it; she’ll say fuck you, fight you and bugger off. She sees life like a game, she plays my life like a video game, in my head watching everything. I swear to God sometimes she's in my head pushing buttons.”
A part of having DID is usually also having a child alter. For Shadow, this is Dot. “She’s been around for a very, very long time, definitely before I was diagnosed. She’s five and a half, I have to say the half or she gets upset. She was the first in my system to be named, my therapist said, ‘You should start listening to them.’ She was like ‘oh my God I can have a name’, and then said the name in my head for three days over and over and over. I finally told her and she finally shut up, I was like ‘oh my God it is real’. I would say it again and again and again but it’s a trigger, and she will come out. She’s a cutie. Another trigger for her, the crossing sound goes off and she comes out. It’s repetitive, one-syllable sounds.”
“I can’t go to the super[market] by myself, especially around Easter or Christmas. If I walk past a stuffed animal or reindeer, she will come out and I will get to the counter with arms full of chocolates and stuff[ed] animals, and I come back out because she doesn’t know where my card is. It's actually so difficult, but she doesn’t mean harm.”
“I have this game on my phone called Mobile Legends, and my card was attached, and she just bought a bunch of skins. Merge Dragons is another really dangerous game I’ve had to take off my phone because I think she probably spent about $200 on it. I am 22: she's not as simple as that.”
Shadow explains how tricky coming back after switching (when the alter driving the body changes) can be. “That’s probably one of the hardest things about having DID is coming back wearing different clothes, at different times, doing different things. The worst is when ... other people are around and you have to figure it out while acting like nothing happened. Sometimes I have to go searching for memories to figure out what has happened, but it’s a bit of a hunt sometimes to find things.”
Let’s talk stigma. When asked about some of the biggest misconceptions about DID, Shadow went straight to the film Split. “I’ve watched that movie maybe four times since getting diagnosed. What the fuck? Child alter walking on knees: no - Dot walks like a normal person. One of the main issues was the therapist, the perspective was that DID was like a ‘superpower’. While it’s a really sweet sentiment, the way that they made that happen was just a little bit disgusting.” Shadow laughed. "[It’s] just a little bit, gross. This alter with these negative traits was bad, I don’t have anyone in my head that wants to hurt anyone. Also, the fact that it says that you can grow in size and scale up walls like a tiger. No, I can't; and I did have somebody ask me that once.”
“Another main issue is what people see of it - superhero, fantasy, cult: especially in Split. In his system they call it the Horde, they all have this plan for the beast who has to eat all these human girls so he can be super strong which is like; huh? We’re not plotting to end the world; we’re trying to get through a fucking Wednesday.”
Unfortunately, DID isn’t something doctors really understand here in Aotearoa. Getting treatment is a struggle regardless of this disorder not being that uncommon, especially when going back to rates of DID compared to autism and bipolar which are at least known by doctors. “There’s not a lot of people in New Zealand who are equipped, there are a couple of people in Auckland but not practical, there's not enough done.”
Going outside professional treatment, and looking for information independently can still be tricky. “Most of the research done you can only find in court evidence. Almost everything in the psych library that’s accessible from uni was from court cases, and literally for the context of the ‘guilty to be passed as insane’ and that was the main thing, it was ridiculous. So, the only thing I could find was about murderers. [I]t’s just a trauma response before anything else, but it’s always made out as the villains, in movies, court and books. That makes it really dangerous for people like me, say, being involved in an investigation right now. It is not going to play in my favour having this illness, it doesn’t matter that at the end of the day everyone with DID is a victim of something. First and foremost, it’s a traumatized person.”