Personality and Personal Growth: Dissociative Identity Disorder

Looking into personality types means paying attention to the cases that sit outside the usual range. If you are putting together a personal development plan, this matters a great deal, because a personality disorder changes what that plan has to account for. Dissociative identity disorder, once called multiple personality disorder, belongs to the broader group of dissociative disorders. At its core is a breakdown in how a person holds together awareness, memory, and their sense of who they are. The dissociation in the name is exactly what defines it. Often it functions as a coping mechanism, a way to pull away from an event or situation that is causing real psychological pain. In the more severe presentations, a person carries at least two distinct personality states, sometimes more, and that is where the older label came from. Each state tends to handle a different set of circumstances, and the states can run entirely separate from one another. If you live with this, your mental health provider needs to know about it before any development plan gets built around your personality type.

The symptoms show up in combinations rather than one at a time. Someone might notice shifts in how well they function day to day, shifts that can be disabling when they are at their worst. Nervousness, anxiety, and panic attacks are common. So are self-injury and suicide attempts. Amnesia and a lost sense of time happen. Sleeping and eating patterns can change for no reason the person can point to.

No single cause has been pinned down, which is true of other personality disorders as well. Researchers lean toward the idea that several factors work together. One of the stronger ideas is that repeated, extreme trauma sets the stage, particularly when it happens in childhood. That abuse might be physical, sexual, emotional, or some mix of all three. Other kinds of trauma can feed into it too.

Getting a diagnosis usually starts by ruling out a physical explanation. Your primary doctor runs a full physical exam, orders bloodwork and X-rays, and checks your general health. Part of that step is confirming your medications are not behind the symptoms. From there you are referred to a mental health provider, who conducts a psychological evaluation: your symptoms, your childhood, how you live, and the ways the symptoms are reshaping your daily life. The DSM-5 criteria guide the diagnosis so you can trust its accuracy. With the diagnosis in hand, treatment can begin.

Treatment tends to come as a combination rather than a single approach, and what you receive may shift as time goes on. Creative therapies are part of it, music therapy and art therapy among them. Medications such as anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants also play a role. Most people respond well, but finding the right blend of treatments can take a while, so patience and sticking with the plan your doctor builds both count for a lot. A personal development plan works alongside the treatment, both as a way to gauge whether things are helping and as a way to repair the other parts of life the disorder has touched.

So you have a working picture now of dissociative identity disorder and the weight it can put on someone's life, including how it reaches into their personality type. A development plan that ignores the disorder will not hold up. You have to weigh your symptoms and the way they bend your overall personality, and plan around those realities so the plan can actually work despite them.

References: Cleveland Clinic, Center for Behavioral Health, dissociative identity disorder; josephkaminski.net, March 25, 2015.