When most people think of multiple personalities, they get a pretty sensationalistic picture in their heads. If you give it a thought, you will probably think of some talk show special or daytime movie you've seen on disassociative identity disorder. Although these shows can be pretty entertaining, they do present a pretty skewed view of multiple personalities. Although this condition exists and has been well documented, it is also pretty rare. Even among psychotic conditions, multiple personality disorder is extremely uncommon. Nevertheless, it does exist. Hundreds or thousands of people have been affected by this strange and crippling phenomenon.
Multiple personalities " like most psychiatric conditions " are a way of coping with internal stress that the sufferer has no other way of dealing with. People with multiple identities usually have been subject to childhood abuse. Often, they have been moved around from family to family and have had no stable adults in their lives. Because of this, they suffer from acute anxiety and disassociation. They feel unable to deal With their lives, so they invent other selves to deal with them. They may have one who handles anger issues, another which is happy and unaware of what is going on, a third which has given up hope entirely, etc. They fragment themselves As a way of coping with problems which they find impossible to cope with on their own.
One of the interesting misconceptions about multiple personalities is that people with the disorder always have dozens of different discrete personalities. In fact, this is not the case. Multiple personalities are usually pretty flowing. Different aspects of different personalities will often change places at different times based on the needs of the patient.
Sometimes the patient himself is convinced that multiple personas exist. Anyone else looking at him will simply see someone talking to himself. The personality aspects between the different personas will not be significant enough to be noticeable.
Of course, sometimes the very sensational cases do happen. There have been people on record with more than a dozen different personalities, and sometimes they can actually take on different roles. I have even heard stories about people with multiple personalities who live several different lives at the same time, having no knowledge of the other things going on in their life from one personality to the next. It is as if the left hand literally doesn't know what the right hand is doing. These are some of the most interesting cases out there, but they certainly aren't the most common. In general with psychiatric illnesses, the stranger it is the rarer it is.
Multiple personalities " like most psychiatric conditions " are a way of coping with internal stress that the sufferer has no other way of dealing with. People with multiple identities usually have been subject to childhood abuse. Often, they have been moved around from family to family and have had no stable adults in their lives. Because of this, they suffer from acute anxiety and disassociation. They feel unable to deal With their lives, so they invent other selves to deal with them. They may have one who handles anger issues, another which is happy and unaware of what is going on, a third which has given up hope entirely, etc. They fragment themselves As a way of coping with problems which they find impossible to cope with on their own.
One of the interesting misconceptions about multiple personalities is that people with the disorder always have dozens of different discrete personalities. In fact, this is not the case. Multiple personalities are usually pretty flowing. Different aspects of different personalities will often change places at different times based on the needs of the patient.
Sometimes the patient himself is convinced that multiple personas exist. Anyone else looking at him will simply see someone talking to himself. The personality aspects between the different personas will not be significant enough to be noticeable.
Of course, sometimes the very sensational cases do happen. There have been people on record with more than a dozen different personalities, and sometimes they can actually take on different roles. I have even heard stories about people with multiple personalities who live several different lives at the same time, having no knowledge of the other things going on in their life from one personality to the next. It is as if the left hand literally doesn't know what the right hand is doing. These are some of the most interesting cases out there, but they certainly aren't the most common. In general with psychiatric illnesses, the stranger it is the rarer it is.
About the Author:
Charlie Reese enjoys giving health and free psychic readings by phone advice on his free online psychic website weekly.
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