Page 10 - PIECES OF THE PUZZLE Eline Vissia

CHAPTER 1
Having multiple personality states: a participant’s story1
“As a DID patient, I participated in the study investigating dissociative identity disorder (DID) using neuroimaging. It was exciting to get involved, because it is far from easy to “just” bring another personality part of myself to the surface. No one with DID does so easily, unless under a state of threat. I believe there is much misunderstanding about a condition as DID anyway and therefore I am very grateful that with this thesis an attempt to give clarity and insight into the brain of DID patients is made and I’m thankful that I got the opportunity to be a small link in this. On the cover you see “Puzzle”, a painting I made before I was diagnosed with DID and before I knew that I consisted of multiple parts. At the time I painted this, I was hospitalized to cope with internal crisis and felt suicidal. Painting was a way to somehow stay ahead of the overwhelming emotions and in advance I did not know what I was going to make; often I was not even aware of who or what was painting. By painting, the parts in my head, which have their own life and age, communicated with the world and with the present time. When the painting was finished, and the emotion was translated to the canvas, generally it became clear what the story was about. However, sometimes it could take years for myself to understand what a painting depicted, I was not always ready to realize what an inner child wanted to make clear. Through painting, inner parts were communicating from the inside to the outside world. Sometimes it were the younger parts, inner children that tried to communicate, and sometimes other parts of the personality, such as defensive parts, or even parts that imitated perpetrators. My world inside was dark and cold, as if it were dark caves where the children were isolated, alone and withdrawn. All parts of our inner worlds were totally isolated and not in contact with each other until we began trauma therapy. We were on record as untreatable, constantly suicidal because of our defense system and we were terribly afraid to trust others.
After years of misdiagnoses and more than twenty hospitalizations, I started DID focused therapy and my fear and resistance were enormous. In the beginning I saw only an authoritarian perpetrator in my therapist. What contributed to overcome my resistance and fear was the psycho-education that helped me understand what was going on inside my head. I was so grateful that finally someone could explain my madness. It appeared that I was not crazy and
1 Translated from Dutch by the thesis’ author. The original statement can be found in Dutch on page 295 in appendix A of this thesis
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