Imagine an important project that you were working on suddenly develops significant challenges. You know you cannot handle the load all by yourself, so you bring in people with distinct skills to undertake specific roles. These people commit to staying by your side, compartmentalizing the project into manageable fragments, and providing the support, guidance, and stability you need to see the project to fruition. They grow alongside you like your family, work as gatekeepers to hold the stressors at bay, and manage your overall emotional wellbeing.
Now imagine the project is your life, the challenges are extreme traumatic events haunting you from childhood, and the people are the alternative personalities you created who share your headspace.
My first introduction to the intriguing concept called Multiple Personality Disorder came through Sidney Sheldon’s Tell Me Your Dreams. Since then, the enduring appeal of this psychological condition has made it the ideal sub-genre for my occasional thriller highs, with Disney’s Moon Knight being the latest addition to my long list of favorite alters-driven storylines. But the more I read about MPD, or Dissociative Identity Disorder as it is known now, I realize that it is far from what the movies and books have led me to believe.
Fiction’s hyperbolic take on DID shows characters in a sterotypical light as those who have blackouts and experience a loss of time during which a violent, more colorful entity appears to avenge the wrongdoers; in some renditions, the alters would have chaotic personalities on the extreme ends of the spectrum for entertainment purposes. In rare instances like Aaron Stampler in William Diehl’s Primal Fear, the alter of interest is simply a brilliant criminal faking the switch to manipulate the judicial system.
But in reality, most DID individuals are fully aware of the other identities within their brain/body. The alters were created by the brain as its coping mechanism to separate the individual from a traumatic reality/memory in order to preserve the psyche and not settle scores with the individual’s abusers. If anything, these people have a higher chance of harming themselves than others.
And more importantly, DID cannot be faked. It is ludicrous to suggest that a person can get away with maneuvering multiple identities, each with specific behavior, emotions, and quirks all while keeping their stories straight because,
A. It will be exhausting to keep up with the act and,
B. Modern neuroimaging techniques can pinpoint distinct brain functions and structural changes when a patient with DID switches alters.
When doctors linked an EEG device to a woman in Germany who had multiple personalities in her, a few of whom were blind, they observed that the electrical activities related to sight were absent when the blind alter was in control of the woman’s body and the brain activity returned when a sighted alter took over. The blindness that the woman was living with for over a decade was not due to any damage to her eyes or the visual processing centers in her brain, but because her brain chose to “not see things” during an emotionally-intense experience, self-installing an on/off button on her visual functions depending on which alter was in control.
Dissociation Identity Disorder is no fad or plot point, but a very real psychological mishap. When a young child is exposed to conflicting behaviors from its abusive caregiver where the source of care also happens to be the cause of pain something terrible begins to take effect within the child’s mind. When home becomes a place of both safety and danger, the child’s frightened, malleable psyche gets torn between its defense system and attachment system. It develops an internal struggle where the child’s mind just wants to leave the situation, but cannot as it is trapped in the body. No child deserves to go through this kind of an emotional chaos, but when the miscarriage of trust inevitably happens, it becomes the responsibility of the brain to scramble for a quick fix through whatever means it could. So it dissociates the self from the inescapable trauma by splitting up the self, thus creating alters.
“Everyone has their own way of being brave.”
Anna Quinn, The Night Child
DID is quite real. The brain’s unfathomable capabilities to preserve one’s psyche for survival are very real. So what does this reiteration of the phenomenal power of the brain reveal to me about consciousness? How does this information about the myriad facets of the mind relate to my personal search for clarity in the spiritual realm?
I had been of the impression that on one side, there are awakened people with silence as the bedrock of their existence who have internal speech only when necessary; and then on the other side, there are those like me, who only have to flip the switch and “see” the seer of all things to quiet the mind and become awakened. But now I realize that there is a third tangent, a subsect of voice-hearers and mind jugglers, who have to contend with not one mind voice but multiple voices of co-existing head-mates. So in terms of getting closer to liberation, does it mean that those who have more than one entity in their minds have a longer, winding road to enlightenment than I do? Are they farther from being able to silence the mind and “see the seer” when there are multiple minds within a single body instead of one?
Research psychologist, Eleanor Longden, was only a college student when she first started hearing the voice in her head. She had her history of repressed emotions from a traumatic past, but she had put on a compelling pretense, even to herself, as a happy and secure person until a voice started narrating everything Longden did in a neutral, third-person tone. She was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic, at which point the impassive, reassuring voice started to multiply and become aggressive, i.e., when she was given a label and primed to see the voices as a concern, the voices became a concern. After a long, traditional medical route that involved being drugged and stigmatized by society while persecuted by her own hostile voices, she came to realize, through her support system, something pivotal about the voices that changed her entire outlook.
“For the first time, I had an opportunity to try and see my voices as a meaningful response to traumatic life events, particularly childhood events, and as such were not my enemies but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems. The voices took the place of overwhelming pain and gave words to it. The most menacing, aggressive voices actually represented the parts of me that had been hurt the most.”
Eleanor Longden
Sure, enlightenment is all about boundless joy and living in grace. It may be our natural state and all we need to do in order to return home is drop our illusions and “see we are already that”. But in that journey back home, what happens to all the baggage that we had accumulated from our egoic existence, all the painful memories and conditioned attachments that we had amassed when we drew the veil on enlightenment?
We all carry varying degrees of trauma within us, though not all of us are aware of them. Everyone’s brain pulls the same trick of hiding bad memories and stashing away trauma in one form or the other. But to move toward liberation, this subconscious baggage that has barnacled our souls needs to be consciously leveled with. Enlightenment is not about eternal bliss and everlasting peace. It is about healing the fragmented parts, those unfelt, unseen fault lines that lie beneath the surface.
I may have only one mind to work with and less baggage as led to believe by my brain than those who share their headspace with multiple alters. But at least, they have a support system within to point the spotlight on broken parts that need fixing. In that sense, they are certainly one step closer to liberation than I could ever be.
“The idea that enlightenment means sitting around with a beatific smile on our faces is just an illusion.”
Adyashanti
