Multiple Personalities

Geared to the needs of mental health practitioners unfamiliar with dissociative disorders, this volume presents a comprehensive and integrated approach to diagnosis and treatment. Each step--from first interview to final post-integrative treatment--is systematically reviewed, with detailed instructions on specific diagnostic and therapeutic techniques and examples of their clinical applications. Concise yet thorough, the volume offers expert advice on such topics as how to foster a strong therapeutic alliance, how to manage crises, and what basic errors to avoid.

Journalist Debbie Nathan reveals the true story behind the famous case of Sybil, the woman with sixteen different personalities.

A woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder reveals her harrowing journey from abuse to recovery in this #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography written by her own multiple personalities. Successful, happily married Truddi Chase began therapy hoping to find the reasons behind her extreme anxiety, mood swings, and periodic blackouts. What emerged from her sessions was terrifying: Truddi’s mind and body were inhabited by the Troops—ninety-two individual voices that emerged to shield her from her traumatizing childhood. For years the Troops created a world where she could hide from the pain of the ritualized sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her own stepfather—abuse that began when she was only two years old. It was a past that Truddi didn’t even know existed, until she and her therapist took a journey to where the nightmare began... Written by the Troops themselves, When Rabbit Howls is told by the very alter-egos who stayed with Truddi Chase, watched over her, and protected her. What they reveal is a spellbinding descent into a personal hell—and an ultimate, triumphant deliverance for the woman they became.

The general public is bewildered and fascinated by Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder. Through books, television and movies, a distorted view of DID is often presented. While it may make for good entertainment, it fails to truly present the depth and intensity of the inherent trauma. Outside the ordinary day-to-day life experience of most people, it is hard to understand. Ignoring past trauma simply will not help a patient. In his psychiatric practice, the author encountered a number of his patients' alters face-to-face. He found that the most effective course of therapy was to engage them directly. Talking to alters is a strange, serious and ultimately compelling experience. They are not real according to our customary definitions, but neither are they false or fake. They are survivors of childhood abuse, present in shared flesh and blood. The author discusses the phenomenon of DID through case histories, and how it manifests clinically. Most important, he elucidates techniques necessary to help these traumatized patients heal. DID patients can successfully engage in and profit from therapy. By processing the impact of their past traumatic memory, they may reclaim their present.

This is the true story of a woman with sixteen personalities - two of whom were men - and her struggle, against overwhelming odds, for health and happiness.

This account of multiple personality disorder (MPD) and related dissociative disorders presents the latest findings leading to a new model of MPD and a new therapeutic approach to its treatment. The book examines the large cluster of symptoms and dysfunctions associated with MPD, focusing on diagnosis, clinical features, and the relationship of MPD to other diagnoses. Data and clinical evidence are presented for a widely-accepted, but as yet unproven hypothesis that MPD arises as a dissociative strategy for coping with severe childhood trauma, usually involving physical or sexual abuse.

Books about Multiple Personality Disorder have usually been written by mental health professionals as texts or case studies. Now, in Becoming One, author Sarah Olson has allowed us the rare privilege of entering her internal world as she journeys from fragmentation to wholeness.Two little girls, the author and her sister, were routinely terrorized and assaulted over a period of years by a family friend. One grew up closed and withdrawn, the other angry and self-destructive. And, most painful of all, their common suffering resulted in estrangement from each other. Becoming One began as Olson's attempt to provide a written account of her memories for her sister as a possible means of reconciliation and family healing.Olson argues that Multiple Personality Disorder (recently re-christened Dissociative Identity Disorder), rather than being a form of insanity as is popularly believed, is actually a brilliant coping mechanism relied upon in the most desperate of circumstances. It is nearly universally associated with severe trauma suffered by very young children and reveals a highly creative, terrified young mind doing whatever needs to be done to survive in an untenable world. The author's courage and generosity in candidly sharing her remarkable experiences afford an invaluable understanding of the effects of severe childhood abuse, and provides important insights into the world of dissociation.Through selected journal writings, letters, and transcripts of recorded therapy sessions, she highlights the role psychotherapy played in her recovery. Here is at once a highly personal look into an individual life, the dynamics of a troubled family, and the healing power of the therapeuticprocess.