Engaging Multiple Personalities - Living in Multiplicity: Engaging Multiple Personalities

By David Yeung

This volume is written specifically for individuals diagnosed with DID that have been unable to locate a therapist willing to and/or experienced enough to treat them. It is cast as a series of encounters at a coffee shop, dialogues about issues one might face with DID along with suggestions to work with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lyle Weinstein
• Release date: Jul 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781983581694

David Yeung

I received my medical degree and psychiatric training in Hong Kong. I continued my training in London, England and in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada where I became a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. After having practiced psychiatry on three continents and over four decades, I retired in 2006. Although my education was considered quite thorough, there was nothing taught about DID. Nevertheless, in my practice of over 40 years in a variety of settings, I encountered a number of individuals with Multiple Personality Disorder. They gave me a tremendous gift, windows into their worlds. I wrote this book to honor my DID patients, those I was able to help and those, unfortunately, who I was not. During my years of practice, most of my colleagues dismissed DID even as they referred their dissociative patients to me. It is my hope and aspiration that this book will enable therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists to build upon my experience so as to be able to correctly diagnose and treat DID. Even more important, I hope that the material in the book assists DID patients to see their own path to healing.

Book preview

Copyright © 2018

by David Yeung

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1983581694

BISAC: Psychology / Psychopathology / Dissociative Identity Disorder

No man should judge unless he asks himself in

absolute honesty whether in a similar situation

he might not have done the same.

Viktor Frankl

Dedication

This book is dedicated to

protecting the child.

Only by protecting that child will we have a

better future for ourselves and all

humankind.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

How to Use This Book

Section One:  What Is Happening?

Chapter 1   I Was Just Diagnosed with DID

Chapter 2   Is DID a Real Thing?

Chapter 3   I am Having Scary Thoughts

Chapter 4   How Do I Trust?

Chapter 5   What Is True

Chapter 6   Some of My Parts Are Mean

Chapter 7   How Can We Be Friends Inside?

Chapter 8   What Do I Really Deserve?

Chapter 9   I Worry All the Time

Chapter 10  Why Would You Believe Me?

Section Two:  Practical Suggestions for Self-Care

Chapter 11  Begin with Self-Soothing

Chapter 12  Panic and Refuge

Chapter 13  Staying Connected

Chapter 14  Empowering Positive Rituals

Chapter 15  Maintaining Safe Boundaries

Chapter 16  Meditation

Chapter 17  Physicality

Chapter 18  Connecting with People

Chapter 19  What About Intimacy?

Chapter 20  Where Did Those Parts Go?

Section Three:  Progressing on the Path

Chapter 21  Flashbacks and the 5% Rule

Chapter 22  I Don’t Want to Remember

Chapter 23  Can I Get Rid of Some of My Parts?

Chapter 24  Closure

Afterword

Notes

Preface

I was overwhelmed by the response from the DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) community to Volumes 1 and 2 of Engaging Multiple Personalities. Many of the kind responders included wishes that I could be their psychiatrist, although I am retired now for over ten years. I hope that they all find psychiatrists who can apply the insights I gained from my DID patients contained in those volumes. In that way, those ideas can be spread far wider than I ever could as an individual practitioner.

For someone with DID, the urgent question is what to do when you are unable to locate a therapist willing to work with you. While the search goes on, your inner turmoil may not leave you one moment of peace, as life continues in chaos.

This Volume 3 is written for you. I hope it will also be helpful to the Significant Others of DID individuals as well as supportive family members. Therapists should find some valuable guidance here as well.

If you have DID, I believe this book will ring true to you. The material will also apply to people without DID who have experienced early childhood or other trauma. Much of the grounding material has general applicability to anyone suffering with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

I have presented the material as if we were having an informal chat about living with DID. It is the closest I can come to communicating with you directly, not as therapist and patient, but as someone who has successfully worked with and supported people on the same journey of healing.

Please take the time to rest at the end of each chapter, just as I set out at the close of each chapter’s conversation. Allow yourself to process whatever arises for you. Breathe slowly, remain connected to the present experience, and let things settle before moving on to the next task in your day.

I have tried to put this volume together as if we were truly speaking together as friends meeting for coffee. It is my heartfelt wish, as a friend, that you will find benefit in these pages.

Warning

This Volume 3 of Engaging Multiple Personalities uses an imaginary acquaintance at a coffee shop to allow me to pass on practical suggestions for life with DID in as personal a way as possible. Although not meant to be therapeutic advice, it is what I would say if we were to meet in a coffee shop and chat about life with DID.

I want to be clear that I never made all these suggestions to any one patient, nor did any one patient ask all of these questions. Please use the material here as it is intended—to give some support on your healing journey until you can find a therapist to work with.

Please always keep in mind that this book is not therapy. If you know or suspect that you have experienced childhood abuse, please make sure you have a good network of support to turn to when exploring such a past.

Please stop reading and ask your support network for help if you feel any emotional turmoil arising when reading this book. While every effort has been made to limit materials that might trigger traumatic memories, any thorough exploration of the concerns DID individuals have, and the challenges they face, will make for difficult reading. The best protection, always, is to have the support of a competent therapist to help process any such turmoil.

Acknowledgments

Ken Smith has provided various aspects of technical assistance, for which I am most grateful. He has also contributed insights gained from seeing another side of the DID patient; the spousal point of view. His perspective deeply informed and supported the organization of this work. He is effectively my co-author of this and the other volumes of Engaging Multiple Personalities.

Being with a DID individual 24/7 gives additional information and insights, different from those of a therapist who only meets with a patient once a week or so. Much of the material related to intimacy is the result of our dialogues.

The chapter on Meditation is a result of other dialogues with a collaborator whose decades of experience as a meditation instructor included working, on occasion, with individuals diagnosed as having DID.

Introduction

I had no intention of writing any books on DID when I retired as a psychiatrist. I began reviewing my old files as part of closing up my practice. While my practice was not primarily focused on DID, I found a surprising number of patient files whose referral letters to me included comments about dissociation but lacked any dissociation-related diagnoses.

Over time, I had received more and more referrals of dissociative patients from colleagues, including patients with DID. These had often been misdiagnosed as borderline or bipolar, and were perceived as being difficult individuals. The prognoses for most of these patients were that they would likely require multi-year treatment commitments without high probabilities of success. It turned out that these colleagues simply did not want to deal with dissociative patients.

I felt that the intensity of the efforts my DID patients engaged in to heal was extraordinary. It was clear that they needed to help me understand the nature of dissociation further, especially in the beginning, so that I could help them.

Without their efforts, and on occasion the efforts of their spouses, I would have remained unable to fully encourage, support and help them process their traumatic memories. I felt it was necessary to honor their work and to ensure that their insights would not be lost.

The result was Engaging Multiple Personalities: Volume 1 – Contextual Case Histories. It was intended to be an introduction to DID through the experiences of some of my patients in therapy. It contained information that I believed would be helpful to both therapists and DID individuals, but it was not specifically focused on day-to-day guidance for them.

Before Volume 1 was published, it became clear that the next task was to help therapists caring for DID patients who had little or no experience in treating DID. The result was Volume 2 – Therapeutic Guidelines. It was intended as a somewhat informal training manual.

At that point, I felt that I had said all that I could say about DID and that my life as an author about DID was complete. I had recently begun following, and occasionally participating in, some of the DID support groups that had started on Facebook, contributing what I hoped were helpful comments. I began to post more thoughts on my blog that seemed relevant to DID issues.

In general, my posts were in response to questions that were posed in these online groups. Meanwhile, there continued to be media exposure of the ongoing tidal wave of early childhood abuse—a key part of DID etiology.

According to comments I received from readers, more and more DID individuals began bringing one or both volumes to their therapists—particularly to those who lacked experience treating DID. They asked their therapists to read those volumes and to explore my blog posts at www.engagingmultiples.com/blog in order to understand and treat them more effectively.

While both volumes of Engaging Multiple Personalities seem to have proven helpful, there was nothing specifically written for those living with DID every day. Volume 3 of Engaging Multiple Personalities – Living in Multiplicity begins to address that shortfall.

In retirement, it is gratifying to have connected through these books and postings with far more people in the DID community than during my years of practice. In some ways, these books are more important, going forward, than my psychiatric practice. However, without my practice of 40 years, any thoughts I might have had about DID would be based on speculation rather than experience. Without being grounded in the day-to-day experience of helping DID individuals heal from their trauma, any recommendations I could make would have been mere guesswork.

A friend asked me whether the different parts inside would follow along with whichever alter was reading this book. While I cannot guarantee anything, I always thanked all parts of my DID patients’ systems at the end of each therapy session. It was my belief, supported by subsequent communications with alters of different patients, that even though they were not verbally participating in a therapy session, they all heard it.

They listened—sometimes agreeing and sometimes not. That was important because so long as they were listening, the memory barriers (the holding of memories by one alter that are not shared with others in the system) between them were gradually, and safely, being weakened. I believe the same thing will happen when reading this volume.

Neither this nor any of the other volumes is a substitute for a competent therapist. I have focused this Volume 3 on the issues encountered by individuals with DID who are living in multiplicity—whether it is before, during or after therapy. It is for all of the parts, all of the alters, of DID systems.

This volume helps set the ground for making friends with your own mind, for instilling some level of confidence that there is a path of healing, and for encouraging the beginning steps toward that goal.

The path of healing does exist. My deepest wish is for you to embark on that path and follow it to completion.

With my best wishes always for success on your journey,

David

How to Use This Book

Whether you have DID or are close to someone with DID through family, marriage or any other committed relationship, please read this material slowly.

It is not psychiatric advice. It is what we might chat about if we were to meet at some point, and you knew my background as a retired psychiatrist with some experience treating individuals with DID. It should be taken as a conversation between friends.

I use the format of speaking with an unidentified individual without specifying their age or gender—imagining someone just diagnosed with DID who has yet to find a psychiatrist or therapist to treat them.

The vignettes are a somewhat step-by-step progression of topics, presented in the form of questions. These are all questions I was asked during my practice, in addition to some from individuals with DID who have contacted me over the internet, and through some of the many Facebook groups dedicated to supporting the DID community. I was never asked all of these questions from one single patient, nor did I ever give all of this advice to one single patient.

The material might be helpful while you are seeking a therapist, and maybe also as you work with one. So, if something is helpful to you, that is wonderful. If it is not, that is okay too. Perhaps it will be helpful at some point in the future and perhaps not. Again, that is okay.

Having one’s own therapist is best, but sometimes it is simply not possible. In any event, the journey of healing starts before and continues during, after, and in between sessions with your therapist(s). Healing is possible, and I am confident that there is indeed a path for you to heal. Have confidence in your capacity to heal—even when parts of you might have doubts.

There are a few grounding exercises presented here that you can do to start generating that confidence. Try them and see which ones you connect with most easily. Focus on those as a regular exercise program. Perhaps when you first wake up in the morning, and then again for a few minutes in the late afternoon before dinner, or before you prepare for sleep.

I do think that this is not a book to be read quickly or even just once. Go slowly, re-reading sections that are relevant. Over time it will be helpful as a reminder of the various tools you can develop for healing. Gently invite all the parts of the system to follow along, at least to help you decide what might be relevant to them.

The most important suggestion I have is that you follow the structure of the conversations. At the end of each chapter, take the time to process the material for a few minutes before transitioning into the next part of your day—just as I suggest to my coffee companion.

All healing is closely associated with self-empowerment. So, let this be part of your personal positive self-empowerment of staying in the moment.

Section One: What Is Happening?

In the Coffee Shop

Chapter 1

I Was Just