According to Legion Theory we are all multiple. The only difference is that most people have integration of their parts into the whole which presents as ‘one self’. To use some analogies, their ‘quilt’ is not a patchwork quilt. Their ‘vase’ is not glued together, it was and remains a little chipped, a little touched up, but it is whole. Dissociative disorders can effect any of us at any time given extreme enough circumstances and the right predispositions. Read the rest of this entry »

Usually life moves in small steps… sometimes life changes so completely, so suddenly, overnight, within a week, within a month… and who you were has no place in who you are now suddenly meant to be. But when you were does not die… it gets suppressed, left behind, shelved within your own world… still waiting for the continuity of its own life… as another you develops in accordance with the new situation, environment, expectations. Read the rest of this entry »

If you believe that Autism is NOT a ‘Fruit Salad’ of a range of other conditions presenting ‘as the autism’, then look through this list of ‘Autism Fruit Salad’ at all the things that can be taken as ‘just parts of The Autism’. Read the rest of this entry »

When people think of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) they commonly confuse it with the self injury or suicidal tendencies of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or with the voices of schizophrenics. Read the rest of this entry »

Dissociative Identity Disorder is on the same spectrum as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). They are both DISSOCIATIVE disorders. Those who develop DID have over developed abilities in dissociating, a skill very commonly overdeveloped in children with autism. Dissociation is a natural process in children under the age of 5 but most children grow out of it. Those with developmental disabilities may have stronger motivations to dissociate from what they find sensorily overwhelming or too hard to process and so those with autism may be predisposed to dissociation but also other dissociative processes, such as depersonalisation and derealisation. Some personality traits can also predispose some children to overdeveloping these dissociative processes. Read the rest of this entry »

Say Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and it may conjure up images of quackery, hysteria, Sybil, stories of satanic ritual abuse and controversies of false memory syndrome. There are those who are attracted to the circus of cancer and equally those who are excited by any new role or condition to the degree they are attracted to anything so intriguing as DID. But in fact, there is a spectrum of dissociative disorders which includes things quite common and mundane and with which most people have some familiarity. Read the rest of this entry »

I took my father to therapy last week. He’s been dead since 1995, around 16 years now, but I took him along anyway. I packed up his letters, objects from the different Jacks, and took them along. I laid them out on the floor and picked up each in turn, me and my alters addressing each father that shared that one body of his.
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Dissociation, alters, co-consciousness and PTSD nightmares can be extremely hard for children with DID to understand and those with awareness of any of their alters or experiencing co-consciousness or PTSD nightmares may easily conclude they are haunted or that their alters are ghosts or imaginary friends even if they had no conscious role in creating them and just ‘discovered’ they were already in existence Read the rest of this entry »

Dissociation is the ability to cut off from what is happening around you or to you. In its simplest form it is daydreaming. It is a skill all children have and which children with autism tend to overdevelop in managing a world they find overwhelming for a whole range of reasons. Dissociation, Derealisation (the feeling nothing is ‘real’ or that everything feels like a dream), and Depersonalisation (cutting off from emotions, detaching, inability to take experiences personally), are experiences most of us have had. Dissociative disorders are where these create problems with functioning and coping in every day life. Read the rest of this entry »

DID is Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is a DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER and part of a SPECTRUM of DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS… so is PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and all human beings dissociate, especially before age 5. Read the rest of this entry »