In the dissociative identity disorder world, all people are divided into 2 categories: singletons and multiples. A singleton is said to be anyone who doesn’t have d.i.d. The thought is that person has a single, monolithic-acting personality. Of course, a ‘multiple’ is a person who is thought to have incongruous, and disparate-acting personalities typically called alters. But as I walked with my wife these last 11 years, I learned a lot from her, and one thing was that I function best when I recognize that I have various, non-homogenous ‘parts’ to my personality. In fact, on my other blog, I began to refer to myself as a ‘non-dissociated multiple.

 

As I lived and walked with the 8, somewhat-separate, girls who comprise my wife, I began to realize there were many aspects of my personality that mirrored the ‘personality territory’ that each girl controlled within my wife. Moreover, I began to watch myself do ‘soft personality switches’ that looked very similar to the harder switches between ‘alters’ that d.i.d. is known for. And I began to wonder if what we call mental compartmentalization is just a milder form of dissociation.

 

And so I began to live on the premise that I had multiple parts to myself that simply weren’t fully dissociated like the girls in my wife. If that was true, then in the same way that I was teaching the 8 girls in my wife’s system to respect each other and get along with each other, I had to learn to do the same with my various parts. See, I was raised an evangelical Christian, and if one tries to live a ‘holy life’ there’s a minefield of terrible things in the world. There are all kinds of temptations to sin and do wrong. After 40+ years of trying to be a good Christian and trying to suppress so many parts of myself that didn’t want to ‘be holy’, I changed my approach to mimic what I’d been teaching the girls in my wife’s system.

 

I began to embrace my warring and ‘bad’ parts. Now that doesn’t mean I let them do anything that popped into my head, but it meant that I began to recognize I was a conglomeration of disparate feelings and motivations and needs. Furthermore, I embraced the idea, because of my Christian upbringing, that all of me was made by our Creator. If that was true, then none of them were necessarily ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ but they might be misdirected or wanting things that overall were out of line with my long-term goals. And sometimes parts of me wanted things that weren’t healthy for me or were downright destructive because I had ignored their legitimate needs for so long.

 

Once I took this approach to life, embracing all the various parts of myself, the warring stopped, and I tried to find ways to meet the various needs without doing something harmful to others or to any of my long-term goals. It also meant I had to develop long-term goals that embraced all of me, and not just the ‘good’ parts of me. It meant I had to teach certain parts of myself about ‘delayed gratification’. And it meant I had to help my angry part accept the fact that we were choosing to live in a relationship that was very stressful and painful because we wanted a ‘win/win’ solution for the girls we still love. I loved the perspective that Tom Cruise’s Mummy and King Kong: Skull Island revealed in the ‘good monster’, and I realized there was a place for that same kind of part within me.

 

And so little by little I began to approach life as a ‘non-dissociated multiple.’ It didn’t happen overnight as it was a huge adjustment. But as I made the changes, I began to realize how much our language accepts the multiplicity of our personalities when we talk about ‘a part of me’ wanting this or that. The concept of going on ‘autopilot’ understands we aren’t ‘fully engaged’ by an activity that much of our personality finds boring. If you accept the multiplicity of your personality, you will find the examples infinite throughout literature and current media of this reality that, for some reason, we assign to only ‘crazy people’ and in doing so, we add so much stress and disharmony to our own lives.

 

In fact, as I began to implement this change of perspective in my life, I realized that the d.i.d. world has it exactly backward. In reality most people, including those with d.i.d., live as if they are a ‘singleton.’ I have observed most people only be able to accept one position on any given issue at a time. We default to black and white thinking because it’s easy and because it gains us entrance into whatever tribe appeals to us most.

 

But I believe, healthy, mature adults should strive to become ‘multiples’, people who are able to grasp the complexity of life and who can become comfortable holding views that seem to conflict and pull in different directions. That is what I’ve been teaching the 8 girls in my wife’s group, and that’s what I’ve been trying to learn for myself. I’ve come to embrace perspectives from both the Right and the Left politically, socially and religiously. I’ve come to realize that often good and honest people can have completely different perspectives and these complement and enhance our understanding of things. And yet, I refuse to embrace the anything-goes mentality on the Left nor the narrow-mindedness of tradition-only on the Right: I try to test things to see what works better, what is helpful, what is harmful, etc.

 

Now, the reason I wanted this topic to be my very first post is because understanding this concept is fundamental to so many things I hope to share. And I think the lack of understanding this concept is what has brought our culture and country to the brink of cultural civil war as neither side can see any other perspective than the narrow one it has adopted. When we embrace all the disparate parts of our personality, it allows us to embrace the true diversity of life, not the stridently narrow diversity of the Left, nor the straight jacket of conformity on the Right. Life is not in black or white as the 2 sides would have us believe. It is a huge array of diverse colors, and yet it’s still follows basic guidelines. It’s not an anything-goes situation that many would have us believe.

 

Wishing you well,

Sam

 

(Note: sorry for the confusion of mixing single and plural references to myself, but I hope you were able to follow. It’s a little messy, but I’m ok with that. It’s better, imo, than the simplistic idea that we are a monolithic, personality ‘singleton’.)