nanowrimo madness

Normal people dissociate. It’s part of the human condition. It may even be a mammalian response to long stretches of time spent doing something like sitting in a tree waiting for a deer to walk by below. Or maybe it’s more to do with becoming prey. Once a rabbit is in a fox’s jaws it goes perfectly still.
Normal dissociation is daydreaming in a boring class or zoning out during commercials. Normal people often dissociate during things they do every day, like driving to work over the same route. I’ll bet if someone studied it they’d discover the number of accidents near people’s homes is disproportionately high compared to the amount of time they actually spend driving there. It’s because people veg when they’re covering overly familiar ground. Their brain actually fills in more of their visual field than usual.
Did you know what you see is actually determined more by your brain than your eyes? Your eyes provide raw data but your brain interprets it. If you’re looking at a housecat but your brain’s pattern recognition is skewed at that moment the interpretation might be ‘Cougar alert! Cougar alert!’
In much the same way your brain can interpret a clear road when in fact someone in a BMW is making a U turn right in front of you. After an accident when people say, “I didn’t see him officer” they aren’t lying.
It’s what makes people such lousy eyewitnesses. After a traumatic event five eyewitnesses will describe what they saw five different ways. Cops pick the ones that sound most alike to testify in court.
So, if daydreaming and zoning out are normal dissociative experiences when does the strategy become abnormal? An experience a bit higher on the dissociative scale is forgetting where you parked your car at the mall. The bell rings at the top when the reason you can’t find your car is because another person sharing your body drove it there and parked it.
In that case to find it you must: A. Connect with that person and elicit their help; B. Wander aimlessly until you spot your car; C. Call security and claim Alzheimer’s.
Choice A only works if you know you’re multiple and have established some sort of inner communication system. Choice B is a royal pain. Choice C is iffy unless you’re old enough to be plausible.
Those who are unaware that various personalities share their body and steal their consciousness may dismiss missing time and confusing circumstances as confusion spawned by hectic lives. Others live in constant chaos and fear. It really depends on how often it happens and how disinterested or outright sadistic the alters are. Some might enjoy planning little scenarios to play out later, when they can watch safely while lurking hidden inside. Like maybe messing up the house, or rearranging a closet, or spending the grocery money on a day out.
When lives spin out of control dissociation can reach epic proportions even for those who are not multiple. Victims of childhood abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, violent crimes and trauma nearly always exhibit higher than normal degrees of dissociation.
We’ve helped train people training working with victims in crisis. It is vitally important they understand the dissociative response. People in crisis are driven to normalize their lives. Remember those pictures of people sipping tea at a sidewalk café in New York with smoke from the towers billowing in the background?
The need to normalize life drives people to return again and again to abusive partners. Many survivors of childhood abuse and domestic violence believe they caused the problem. Because they blame themselves they believe they deserve abuse. It’s what they know, what they believe life is always like. It causes them to forget the bad stuff so they can go on with life. It’s a strong survival tool.
In the midst telling Victim Services staff she’d fled her home with her children while being threatened with a pellet gun, Lillie checked her watch and started to rise. “I should get home and start supper,” she said.
If you didn’t understand how dissociation works you might be tempted to assume she was either lying or in denial. Denial is just another word for dissociative.
It can be nearly as difficult listening to a survivor’s story as it is telling it. Dissociative responses can sidestep events or details and mask emotion. Listeners sometimes think if a victim’s story can be related with little emotion the victim must be lying, confused about what occurred, or mentally disturbed. Bingo.
Being the victim of a crime is so mentally disturbing dissociation can save your sanity. Just like zoning out during commercials, not remembering details of domestic violence, abuse, assault or other crime is a basic dissociative response; it’s just at a high level. At the highest end of the scale victims repress all memory of events, sometimes by dividing the personality into fragments who hold various experiences, memories or emotions. Becoming multiple is a survival strategy, a last-ditch effort to deal with a reality too awful to know. It can saves and disturb a victim’s sanity.
Untrained listeners tend to blame victims rather than perpetrators. Remember Lillie’s friends who asked her what she’d done to make her husband angry? Or the minister who said she needed to be more submissive? How about the doctor who intimated her defensive bruises weren’t ‘real’ injuries? These response and other like them are common in our society.
We’re taught to mind our own business from an early age. Neighbors, ministers, storekeepers, teachers fail to see patterns screaming of victimization. Doctors dismiss bruises on a toddler’s head as age appropriate; toddlers fall down a lot don’t they?
And women all across the country walk into a lot of doors on a regular basis. I’ve actually seen Eyvonne walk into a door, her arms full, looking back over her shoulder talking to one of the kids or yelling at the dog. She didn’t end up with a black eye and bruising on half her face, but I suppose it’s possible.
Untrained listeners blame victims because of their own need to normalize situations. It’s more comfortable for them to believe a child falls down a lot than his dad hits him frequently with malice.
There is an almost natural response to the sexual or physical assault of a child that something so heinous can’t possibly be true. Start reading the newspaper. Keep track of each article about such crimes. You won’t want to believe the numbers after a week or two. Not wanting to believe it can happen is the first step toward our society’s collective dissociation from the ugly truth.
Remember, the first rule of multiplicity is: Don’t talk about multiplicity.
Current research indicates MPD, now referred to in the medical community as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), is not as rare as once believed. Remember some doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists don’t believe it exists. In their opinion people who claim to be multiples are fakers.
They want to ignore the body of information documenting some commonalities. Most multiples have histories of repetitive, overwhelming early childhood abuse or trauma. Research indicates people with MPD/DID constitute about one percent of the general population. Some researchers put the number higher, between three and ten percent depending on where a person falls on the dissociative scale.
One of the commonalities about multiples is they often hold highly responsible jobs in public service, as professionals or in the arts. Outwardly they appear no different than anyone else. Most live inner lives undetected even by those closest to them, spouses, children, co-workers.
Among medical professionals who believe in it MPD rates as one of the top four major mental health problems in our society along with schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. MPD is traditionally recognized among females but new research indicates it may be equally as prevalent among men. Anyone with a history of early, repeated childhood abuse could be multiple: your neighbor, boss, co-worker, spouse, or parent.
There are some documented cases of multiples formed in response to the trauma of war or medical procedures. But by far the most common recipe to make a multiple is frequent profound abuse in early childhood. It helps if the child has a natural talent for dissociating.
I suspect most multiples are of above average intelligence. Most of those I’ve met, either in person or over the Internet are extremely talented writers, actors, visual artists or musicians. Some, like us, have alters proficient in many fields or professions.
I’ve never met a multiple with an alter who was a serial killer. I met a cop who said he’s never met a real multiple but knows plenty of people who claim the honor after they lawyer up. It’s viewed as one way to get slammed into a mental institution rather than prison.
A decade ago multiplicity was popular with the media. There was at least one article published about a multiple who had a ferret alter. That was one of my personal favorites. I just hope to hell there isn’t a ferret hiding outside the Q system waiting to come in. Considering my current anxiety about someone grabbing a whole day from us maybe I should have a bit more reverence. I can’t help it ferrets make me laugh.
Other multiples were on TV demonstrating for the camera how drastically different they were when they switched ops. This boggled my mind. We spent most of our lifetime keeping a low profile. So low in fact it’s still difficult sometimes for Eyvonne to peg who’s up. There were multiples on talk shows with their kids and spouses. It was apparently a national craze. We missed the whole thing because we didn’t have TV. We still don’t. Don’t tell Oprah OK?
We were interviewed a few years ago by a filmmaker from Japan making a TV documentary about the brain. He wanted to include a portion on how the chemistry of the brain stores memories, and how people can dissociate from events in a way that hides memories from their conscious mind. We spent an afternoon together, talking mostly through an interpreter. He met several of us, including some of our young alters. He filmed us as we talked. He was surprised to learn when we switched it was barely noticeable. We missed our day of fame because his company dropped the project. At least it wasn’t a talk show. But overall it wasn’t a fun experience. We have a deep-seated dislike of being ‘tested’ or proving we’re multiple. You can either take us at face value or forget it.
The only thing we hate more than proving our existence is movies and TV shows with multiples are cast as villains. It’s bad PR and not very factual. I’m sure there are some multiples with dangerous or criminal alters. Maybe it’s just fate that we’re not among them. Or maybe it’s that we have the steadfast love of Eyvonne. Without her love ‘rion might have turned his rage on the world instead of learning to understand why he was so angry. Understanding is the key. It’s not about keeping things locked away; it’s about learning how to live even when you know the truth.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot