Only a few people knew I was multiple: my spouse, my therapist, my oldest friend.
Words Count | Lilian Nattel on Writing with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Writing with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Do you value every aspect of yourself? Every inch of your body? It isn’t easy, is it?
When I told my first agent—and this is the reason she was my first and isn’t my current agent—that I’d been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personalities), she said, “You can’t write by committee.”
She had represented me on my historical fiction novels, but I was now working on my first contemporary fiction—about a mother with DID. Excited, I’d sent her a piece of the first draft.
She objected to the piece as unrealistic because the main character has three children. Anyone with DID, my agent said firmly, authoritatively, as if she was the expert on this, couldn’t possibly cope with more than one.
Only a few people knew I was multiple: my spouse, my therapist, my oldest friend. There were also a couple of new friends I’d first met in an anonymous, online support group who were multiple, too, and we’d progressed to talking on the phone, sharing the names under which we operated in the world, and eventually meeting in person.
The name on my birth certificate is not the name my parents called me. And I didn’t know how my birth name was spelled until I left home and got a copy of that birth certificate. This is the sort of small, weird thing that is reflective of much larger family dysfunction, the sort that causes PTSD. And if the trauma is severe and begins when a child is too young to escape in any other way, the child dissociates and compartmentalizes to cope. As the brain develops in the child, it contains not a single sense of self, but many, a difference that is visible in MRIs of adults with DID.
Besides the close friends from the support group, as a moderator, I was also interacting on a daily basis online with some twenty-five or so people who were multiple. Just like people who are singletons, they came in a range of childless and childed varieties. Some had no children. Some had four. I had two.
So, when my agent said that it was impossible for anyone with DID to have more than one child, it felt like an accusation—you can’t live a “normal” life; you are damaged goods. That pretty much sums up what my abusers said. It hit a nerve. A very raw one. PTSD had left me with a lot of those. I didn’t think and didn’t ask for permission from other folks inside when I impulsively—defensively—replied, “Well, I have DID and I have two kids.”
When I refer to other folks inside, I mean other parts of the system—other “personalities” as shrinks used to say—and when I say system, I mean the collectivity of consciousnesses that form the person in this body, this life that is shared. I am also a part, the part that is currently writing this essay. If you and I were meeting in person, I would probably say “we” when referencing the system and reserve “I” for the specific part that I am. But in the act of saying “we,” I would no longer be “me.”
There is another part, close to me in the system, who is the one to say “we.” In person, if talking about the system, there is an inevitable switch between us. I move back, the other moves forward, swiftly, unconsciously, noticeable to me not only in the change in pronouns, but in that I can simultaneously feel the ease the other has in saying “we” and its distinction from the discomfort that I feel with it.
My role is to simulate being a singleton. I feel like one, too, even though I know I’m not. You see that “I”? Writing here, not knowing who’s reading it, whether it is safe or unsafe, whether I will be judged or at the very least misunderstood, which is highly likely, given the still current inaccurate assumptions and prejudices about DID, makes for a high degree of guardedness. Yet, funny enough, even as I type these words, I feel the part that is very much like me, except for being freer to use the word “we,” and therefore acknowledge the system, coming very close.
When we say close or far, we mean where our folks are currently positioned relative to each other internally and to the outside. Our inner world extends from the front, just behind the eyes, where interaction with the world is conducted. The further from the front, the deeper inside, the more remote parts are from the outer world and the more involved in the inner landscape they are. We say “part” to acknowledge that there is a whole, the whole that we all are, not only because we share this body and this life. We also share a set of values, a home, a family. Being a collective makes it complicated to live this one life that is ours, making room for all and balancing the needs of the many.
Did you notice the switch from I to we? In person, it’s often subtle. Most people don’t notice, and we’re skilled at smoothing over differences. Switching takes energy, but less than it used to as we’ve become more fluid and conscious about it, rather than reactive, and more comfortable with each other.
Do you value every aspect of yourself? Every inch of your body? It isn’t easy, is it? Now imagine how hard that would be if parts of you contained memories of abuse, the pain and humiliation and dangerous rage, if some parts of you didn’t even know that time has moved on and you aren’t stuck in the horrible past. Other parts were taught that to break the abusers’ rules meant to be hurt even worse and their job was to keep the hurt parts shut up and deep within, as well as keeping outer parts ignorant of the pain at any cost so that life could go on and some level of functioning occur. Some, I want to emphasize.
I wrote my second novel mostly in bed. I had two small children, then, and was constantly anxious. The nightmares had mostly stopped when I married for the second time and married better. But the price of my being ignorant of the extent of the abuse and the injury it caused was a constant free-floating anxiety. This was maintained by parts who protected our life by constantly reminding me that I was a worthless piece of shit so that I wouldn’t feel anything inside other than the anxiety. This kept me from discovering the extent of my childhood abuse and being overwhelmed by it. Even if there was a price, I could muster the energy to read to my kids, feed them, take them to the park.
In my journal, I questioned why my parts weren’t like other people’s—mine seemed so much more real, more distinct. The answer came when I was diagnosed with DID. The first time a therapist addressed folks inside, acknowledging them, my anxiety largely disappeared. Instead, I touched their pain, anger, terror. This is not fun, either.
It was the start of a two-year period that she called riding the tail of the dragon. The cooperation that we have come to, the internal appreciation of all parts, was hard won. The culmination of it was writing a novel about a woman with DID. When that novel was published, my kids were ten and thirteen. I didn’t acknowledge my own multiplicity publicly, not even to my new agent or editor—though I recently found out they suspected it.
Did you notice that I’ve switched back to I? My editor, my agent, my kids. If someone else was forward, they would say “we.” But I don’t know you, and so I don’t know if it’s safe.
Back when the book was published, over ten years ago, now, I was terrified that people would come to book festivals and harass me. I’d been primed by abusers to expect harassment and worse if I ever told: that I’d be called crazy, locked up, that no one would ever want me, that everything I loved would be taken from me.
And yet here I am talking to you.
We have parts of all ages, all genders. Some are soft, others tough. Some are practical, techy. Others are dreamy, love beauty and art. Several of us feel most alive skating or holding a tool. My husband once commented when another part was helping install an air conditioner—“You’re handy all of a sudden.”
When my first agent said, “You can’t write by committee,” we were so hurt by her insistence that one part must write the book, as if the others were superfluous, or the worst thing you can say to someone with DID—not real. We were taking in a message, intended or not: that the rest of us but that “one” didn’t have a place in the world, that all of us but the part chosen to face the outside world must recede deep inside and never be seen.
I remember this feeling well. I was in the bathtub, one foot on the hot water tap, my eyes on the grey tiles above it, reheating the water because I’d been sitting there so long and crying, and then I—or someone—I don’t remember which of us it was—said, No. Not doing that.
We’d worked too hard to bring the energy of each part into the life, to value all, to understand and listen to each other inside. To stuff all of that into the far back and leave just a shred of the person that we are all by themself out there in the front.? Alone again as we were when abused?
No. Not happening.
DID is a survival mechanism. It isn’t meant to be obvious, but to allow a person to function without notice despite the harm done and being done by intimate and powerful predators.
I didn’t like The United States of Tara, where every part (and there were only a handful, unlike ours or the multiple people I knew) has its own wardrobe. (Not to mention that each of them had a much better wardrobe than we’ve ever had in total!) Even the marvel fantasy Moon Knight—which is more accurate than any ostensibly “realistic” portrayal—is still flamboyant, exaggerated. These portrayals make being multiple too hard to confess to. People have such strange ideas about it.
And yet, in some ways it is strange. Maybe writers can understand that strangeness because the act of creation is often strange itself, how it occurs, what makes it possible and what stops it.
My first drafts are sometimes wooden because they’re written, as far as I can tell, by parts that are more often forward, the same ones who chat with neighbours or pay bills. Those aren’t really the creative parts—sorry, if I am offending any folks inside us. “No,” I’m hearing from within. And there is also some internal laughter about that.
But in the act of writing that first draft, however flawed, the creative parts, and I’m not sure, really, how it happens, are drawn close enough to the front to make it possible for real writing to start happening, to direct the fingers, to make it seem to me like the words are flowing from somewhere deep, connected to something larger than I am or even the sum of our parts.
Besides the mundanity of putting in time, producing words, many wrong-headed words, which are replaced by others that feel like they’re coming closer to truth, the process of writing is also a spiritual experience for me. It brings with it a sense of the unity of life, a sense that, through the ambiguities, complexities, cruelties and painfulness of existence, there is a thread of beauty that animates joy and hope, and that this thread is what carries the story to its conclusion.
Our conclusion.
Lilian Nattel is the neurospicy author of five novels in three genres. The middle one—Web of Angels—is about a mom with dissociative identity disorder. She's working on a new novel in a fourth genre and embarking on a project to read books by women authors from every country in the world. She posts about this and more at liliannattel.ca and creates content on TikTok as @bookcrone.
Web of Angels by Lilian Nattel Penguin Random House, 2012
On the surface of things, Sharon Lewis is a lot like any other happily married mother of three: she is the beating heart of a house full of kids, cooking and chaos, the one who always knows the after-school practice schedule, where her husband put the car keys and who needs a little extra TLC. Her kids and husband think she's a little spooky, actually, the way she can anticipate the tensions of any situation—and maybe they love her all the more for the extra care she gives them.
Life is definitely good until the morning Heather Edwards, a pregnant teenaged friend of the family, kills herself. The reverberations of that act, and the ugly secrets that sparked it, prove deeply unsettling to the whole family, and stir up Sharon's own troubling secret: she has DID, or dissociative identity disorder. And the multiples inside the woman the world knows as Sharon seem to know what happened to Heather, and what may be happening to Heather's surviving sister.
Will Sharon's need to protect the innocent cause her to finally come clean about her true nature with her family and friends, and not just in the anonymous chat rooms on the web where she's connected to others like herself? Will a woman with DID be able to persuade her quiet and respectable community that evil things can happen even in the nicest homes?
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