I wish I able to post an "About Me" in my profile. Perhaps more detail that you are looking for but here is the one I have on
bigender.net:
Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder (MPD/DID) is often described as "disorder of secrecy," masking itself as a plethora of other conditions because the victims' lives depended on it. I began counseling in Spring 2009 for sudden acute gender dysphoria. After running a gambit of diagnoses from transsexual to PTSD, the onset of flashbacks and time loss in January 2011 were the first clear indication to my doctors that I had multiple personalities.
It is common for people with MPD/DID to have opposite gender personalities in their systems. Male alters give female trauma victims the strength they do not believe themselves to possess as women. Female alters give men a way to justify in their minds the horror of having been molested and a way to resolve the resulting sexual confusion. I was no exception. My male and female alters have nothing to do with gender. They are what the Self needed to protect itself to survive trauma. That they are male and female is the result of me not being given a "consistent gender message" in early childhood because of:
-The extreme delineation of emotions/behavior as strictly male or female in my family's late 1800's Eastern European mores
-Identity confusion during critical stages of development around age 3 in having been given my female cousin's clothes to wear by my parents
-My only playmates though age 8 being girls
I was never given the chance to develop a "solitary gender identity." An innate ability to dissociate passed on to me by my Mother, my solution was to express myself as both a male and a female as I developed alters to cope with childhood trauma.
28% of MPD/DID patients are diagnosed in their 40's or later. Whether they are aware of their system or not, they established an inner homeostasis that allowed them to present the image of having a healthy life until an external life crisis triggered decomposition. I had a successful career and 20+ years of marriage before my System became unstable.
It is common for newly self-aware alters to battle for control or to attempt to kill other personalities. In my case that struggle between my male and female selfs (2 of 5 alters discovered so far in therapy) presented itself as "gender dysphoria." A transition level HRT regimen quelled the dysphoria but it was the calm before the storm until the nightmares, flashbacks and time loss characteristic of MPD/DID began.
My System is typical of others with MPD/DID who used dissociation as a coping mechanism to survive their childhood trauma. An Inner Self Helper (ISH) and two fragment personalities (Protector who contains rage and a 7 year old, the result of the trauma leading to the first personality split who contains fear) are genderless and have little narcissistic investment. The ISH comes to conscious as needed in its supervisory capacity in the system. The frags operate quietly in the background unless triggered. The two primary alters are male and female. As is often the case with alters, they are both extremely stereotypical to function in their required rolls in the System. The female alter (Virginia) is a strong alter, hosted the System throughout Junior High. She is a bulimic 13 year old who before 2009 had not been self-aware since 1975. The product of the trauma leading to the second personality split, she contains psychological pain. The host, the personality the system chose to represent itself to the external world for the majority of its life (VA), is male, a retired married technical professional, largely devoid of emotion and contains physical pain. Both are capable of fronting for extended periods, have grown quite coconscious over the course of therapy and pass well for each other when necessary.
It took a lot of give and take to settle on a grooming ritual that was acceptable to the primary alters. Fortunately the physical effects of HRT were minimal and the body they share has many intersexed characteristics, the likely result of prenatal DES exposure. Hair, what is removed and what remains, is extremely important. The hair on the head is worn in a shoulder length grunge. Laser/electrolysis treatment returned the eyebrows to their androgynous childhood shape and removed the beard excepting a Van Dyke. The body itself is not shaved. The light vellum hair that remains post HRT does not prevent the female alter from wearing dresses or going to the beach in a bikini and is extremely important to the male alter's sense of self. The small breasts pass for well-developed pecs allowing the male alter to go without a shirt in public and are extremely important to the female alter's sense of self. The fingernails are manicured and kept an active length and the toes have a French pedicure. It is about balance; the solitary Self does not win if one gains at another's expense.
Both alters are extremely confident of who they are and are rarely misgendered. Although they enjoy expressing their maleness/femaleness with clothing, this androgynous grooming enables each to receive societal acceptance of their gender by simply coming to the front. The male alter can literally walk into the mens room in his jeans and a tee shirt, comb his hair differently and let the female alter front, and people will see him as female when he walks out.
The alters live completely separate lives ala Victor/Victoria, Tootsie or Mrs Doubtfire, each having their own wardrobes, friends and interests. They do not identify as trangender and it is vital to each that they are perceived by the people in their respective worlds as the man/woman they are. Any crossover in their worlds would destroy the doublethink used to maintain the delusion of being separate people. It would be catastrophic to the Self for the boundaries that contain the feelings and memories held by each personality to break down. A handful of people in both of their worlds know I am DID, but they understand the personality they know (either male or female primary alter) to be the System host.
The male alter is the more robust of the two. As agreed to by the System and the male alter's wife, he controls the body 5 days a week and the female the other 2. Triggered personality shifts remain beyond the system's control and the Self is generally unaware of which alter is fronting. The female alter does respect the male alter's wife's wishes that she not use her voice or wear her clothes in her presence and passes as the male alter when she needs his wife's companionship. This balance has been reasonably stable since 2010. It took 2 ½ years of cognitive therapy for the male and female alters to come to peace with each other before they were able to begin to explore the pain of my childhood. I have been in twice a week psychodynamic trauma therapy since June 2012.
My conscious mind has slowly begun to allow itself to experience the feelings the alters have held in silence for 45+ years. Yoga has become an instrumental part of the path to acceptance. Piecing together the events of my childhood with my adult mind I am beginning to understand my childhood for what it was, how my innocence, my freedom to think and feel and be were stolen from me, that I cannot be the person I am as an effeminate man, a crossdresser or any transgender expression of solitary self. And the role HRT has played in meeting my need not to propagate as a victim of childhood trauma and rape.
In God's infinite wisdom, the Self found a way to survive the childhood trauma that would have led to suicide. Given the time my System has existed, only continued therapy will show the extent to which personality fusion is possible. But after 54 years I am finally beginning to understand myself, why I relate to people the way I do and to see the benefits of an integrated existence. There is a different kind of pain in fitting the pieces together into a bigger and bigger picture but the consolation of truth is peace.
A few things I have learned about MPD/DID:
Time/memory loss is a primary characteristic of dissociation, and trauma based dissociative identities/personalities are a psychological disorder. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and MPD/DID have received a tremendous amount of attention because of the widespread problems experienced by veterans coming back from the Middle East and the horrible devastating effect these conditions have on a victim's life.
The relationship between trauma and MPD/DID is so well established, patients are assumed to have experienced childhood trauma unless the therapist determines otherwise. The narcissistic personalities the Self uses to express itself to the world do not have access to the memories of trauma held by the personalities that contain them. Patients with MPD/DID are in deep denial of their condition, often going to jail or turning to alcohol/drugs rather than facing the reality of their disorder or reliving the horror of the childhood trauma that caused it. I stonewalled my therapist's hints that that my childhood was less than perfect and that I had been molested for nearly two years with the self delusion that I was transgender.
Personalities often perceive themselves to have existed since birth because in a sense they have. In my case the original personality can be thought of as a chocolate bar with the alters being the individual pieces. Each piece will always have its memory of being part of the whole bar. But its coconsciousness of the whole ends when it was broken off. All five of the alters in my System perceived themselves to have existed since birth, each insisting they were the "original" personality. It took over a year of twice weekly psychodynamic therapy for me to begin to put together the memories each of them had so I could understand this was not the case.
It is common for an alter's psychological age to correspond to the host's age at the time of specific trauma events related to the dissociation that caused the split. Children are oblivious to my adult body and play with the 7 year old in my System like any other kid at the park. My 13 year old female alter is preoccupied with her looks and friends like any adolescent. She has the classic bulimia associated with young girls who were subjected to early childhood trauma. I am the host, what is left of the chocolate and the original personality.
Experiencing consciousness only as the Self calls on them to cope with trauma alters live a piecewise existence. It was a horrible shock and adjustment to the female alter when she became self aware in 2009. It wasn't 1975; the world she knew did not exist anymore. Originally diagnosed as gender dysphoria, my female alter was actually suffering extreme body dyphoria because of the disconnect between what she remembered my body as being when I was a preteen and what it had become as a 49 year old man.
People with MPD/DID must come to their own peace with the reality that their recovered memories are true and not false memories created in therapy. Our adult brains have a difficult time accepting/understanding the way our undeveloped child's brain remembered the knowledge of trauma. Unlike an adult mind's concrete images and facts, a child's mind stores information as feelings, sense/body memories, shadows and imagery.
The recovered memories that surfaced as emotional flashbacks, nightmares, snippets and feelings for me all pointed to what I knew without knowing and did not want to be true. Despite my therapist's objective perspectives, I persisted with the doublethink that had protected me for a lifetime. Despite the pictures in the family album, the consistency of the facts from my childhood my adult mind did remember with my recovered memories, I continued to delude myself that it was all just coincidence. The recovered memory became real when my Mother confirmed I had been raped.
A therapist's objective perspective is vital to the process of setting the historical record straight so the MPD/DID patient can begin to understand the things that happened to them as child with their adult mind. Accepting the thoughts and feelings they protected themself from with dissociation they can begin to rediscover the Self, and begin make their own choices for the first time in their life.
A common end result of therapy, the current methodology is not to merge personalities (fusion) but to help them work together so the patient can live a peaceful happy life. The degree to which personalities integrate the way they interact or fuse into fewer personalities is determined by what the System perceives to be in its own best interest with its new understanding of Self. It has always been and always will be that way for the dissociative person.
Excellent references:
Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality Disorders, Kluft et al
Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, Shengold
Breaking Free; My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder, Herschel Walker
