- How do you know
if you have dissociative identity disorder,
formerly known as multiple personality disorder?
I'm Jonathan Decker with Mended Light.
Let's do this.
(bright music)
So first of all,
this is called dissociative identity disorder
instead of multiple personality disorder
because multiple personality disorder spoke only
to having split personalities,
but there's so much more going on here than that.
The term dissociative identity disorder
speaks to dissociation.
Dissociation speaks to a disconnect in your thinking
or in your behavior or in your relationships
or in your feelings
or in your experience with the world around you.
It speaks to a number of things,
which does include split personalities,
but it's not just limited to that.
So let's talk about if this is what's going on with you
or someone you know.
First of all, someone suffering
with dissociative identity disorder may struggle
with depersonalization,
which is feeling detached from your body.
It's an out-of-body experience.
It's being detached from your thoughts and feelings
and kind of just like witnessing
from afar what you're doing.
And what you're thinking kind of feels
- Derealization is when the world feels murky,
when you feel detached from the world,
when it feels like you're just kind of watching a movie
and none of it is really real.
It's feeling of the world is murky, foggy, or far away.
There may also be a struggle with amnesia,
which is more than your average memory loss,
or just moments of lack of clarity,
where you're actually losing chunks of time of your life
or experiences that other people in your life can refer to
and look back on
and you're not sure what they're talking about.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa.
What's the fuss?
Tell me what's happening.
- And then finally,
we come to identity confusion or identity alteration,
where there is some confusion about who you are,
what gender you are, what age you are,
what your religious beliefs are,
what your sexual orientation is,
what your profession is, basically, who am I?
And you don't necessarily know the answer.
And the reason for that
is with dissociative identity disorder,
in addition to these other depersonalization,
derealization, amnesia,
which can play in other diagnoses that aren't DID,
with DID you have at least two personalities
that take over your psyche, your psychology, your thinking,
your feeling, your behavior.
And with each one may come wild fluctuations
They're different versions of you
and they remember things differently.
And so there's some kind of overlap and confusion about,
well, did dad say this, or did dad say that?
And what year did mom die?
Or how did she die, right?
These sorts of things happen.
Other times, they are completely different
from one another, these personalities.
These different personalities are known as alters,
as in alternates or alternatives.
And they may have different races, different genders,
different personalities, different beliefs,
different ages, come from different parts of the world.
- They may be completely made up people.
They may be based on someone that you know
or something that you observed.
And sometimes, in rare cases, they're even animals.
I'm not talking about furries.
I'm talking about people actually thinking
that they are a duck or a dog.
And what you see with these different personalities
is they have different ways of talking, different voices,
different postures, different mannerisms,
different personal histories.
And it's not a joke.
In the moment, you actually believe that you are this person
or that person.
Now, going from one to the other is called switching.
And that may take seconds, minutes, hours,
even days to go from one to the other.
In fact, that's one reason why it's so hard to diagnose.
The title of this video is, How Do You Know
If You Have Dissociative Identity Disorder?
And the fact is, this can help you to confirm some things,
but to get a formal diagnosis,
you need to spend quite a bit of time in treatment.
The reason for that is, if switching occurs gradually,
your therapist may not even notice that it's happening
or it may happen not in the presence of someone
who can diagnose you.
- I think I'm talking to Dennis.
- And so oftentimes it takes a long time
for this diagnosis to formally be made.
But if I'm telling you these things
and you're going check, check, check, check, check,
then this more than likely describes
what you're going through.
Now, speaking of shifting,
triggers may cause that to happen more rapidly.
I was talking in a previous video about someone that I knew,
someone that I worked with,
a woman who was sexually abused as a child,
and she could shift very rapidly if she was triggered.
Part of the program that we were doing,
we were watching a movie that we didn't anticipate
to be especially triggering.
But something that happened in the movie reminded her
of her abuse.
And she went from the host personality,
her original personality,
to a little girl who's crying and rocking
and needing comfort because she didn't feel safe.
Because something in the movie reminded her
of someone who hurt her and she didn't feel safe.
And this personality, who had a different name,
who thought like a six-year-old,
who spoke like a six-year-old,
who loved to hold the blanket and the Teddy bear,
and hold people's hands and walk around,
came out because she didn't feel safe.
That personality served that purpose.
Now, it's important to recognize
that if these experiences are caused by substances,
then they're caused by substances, not by a DID.
But once again, it's not just the split personalities.
Headaches, amnesia, out of body experiences,
feeling like a passenger in your own life,
like someone else is driving the car
and you're just witnessing it,
these are all the types of dissociation
that play into this disorder.
on what are the most effective treatments
for dissociative identity disorder.
You don't want to miss that video.
So go ahead and like, subscribe, click the bell.
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that says, "Hey, this is live now and you can watch it."
Now, to give you a little taste of DID,
I'm gonna switch here to something completely unrelated,
just like I'm switching to a different personality.
I've got a video for you.
It's How Long Should You Date Before You Get Married?
That happened fast, right?
How long should you date before you get married?
A lot of people don't know what's the timeline.
How long does it take to actually know somebody?
So check that video out right here.
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Spread us around.
Let people see what we're doing here.
Because we are aiming to lift
as many people as we can out of trauma and out of heartache.
If you have an experience
with dissociative identity disorder
and you can share without betraying your confidence,
please do so on the link below.
If you have a question you'd like for me to answer
in one of these segments,
one of these Ask A Therapist segments,
please let me know in the comments below.
And as always, let your light shine before the world, folks,
because the world needs it and so do we.
I'm Jonathan Decker with Mended Light, licensed therapist.
This has been Ask A Therapist.
I'll see you next time.
(bright music)
And here comes the video.
Clicky, clicky, clicky, clicky, click.