From the time she was a child, Milissa Kaufman felt as if she had a gang of kids in her mind, each with their own thoughts and opinions. One was a girl who was curious and wanted to learn. Another was calm, wise and confident enough to speak in class. Though she was only a few years older than the rest, Kaufman thought of her as the nice lady. Then there was the angry boy who was tough and unafraid. And at the far back of her mind existed a very young girl. All alone behind a door and in a box, she cried and screamed. The curious girl, the nice lady and the angry boy avoided her, frightened by the pain and the secrets she held.
Until Kaufman was about 10 years old, these “inside people” seemed like her friends. But by middle school, the angry boy, who wanted to play, not study, argued with the others; he disliked them, declaring that some were dirty and weak. In Kaufman’s mind, she saw them as stick figures, but sometimes they felt more three-dimensional, which scared her. She also began to realize that none of her friends had people in their heads. During adolescence, the boy got angrier and louder and more powerful. She decided she would make the inside people go away by her 14th birthday. When they didn’t, she vowed it would happen by her 15th. Then by her 16th.
Kaufman hated looking in the mirror (she still avoids it). She felt something was unsafe about existing in a female body. When she tried on clothes in a store, it was as if a thick fog descended over her, and the boy surfaced to express revulsion at what she was wearing, at her body. Other times, he was furious at the crying girl in the box and wanted her to disappear. The nice lady and others tried to shush him. So many voices, so many opinions, all of which overwhelmed her.
The experiences also confounded Kaufman. She had been abused and neglected as a child, but she didn’t make a connection to what was happening inside her. And as distraught as she felt, no one else seemed to notice; she had plenty of friends and was smart. She could also tell that her voices existed only inside her mind (unlike people with schizophrenia, who hear voices that they perceive as external).
By college she repeatedly had flashbacks to the abuse and grew increasingly depressed. Occasionally when she was on a date with a guy at a party, she would leave him without saying goodbye. She couldn’t explain why she did it. Sometimes she didn’t remember getting home.
It would take decades for her to understand that the feeling of having multiple people inside herself and the amnesia she sometimes experienced were signs of an extreme type of dissociation known as dissociative identity disorder or D.I.D., a psychological defense mechanism that many experts believe develops in the wake of repeated childhood abuse or serious, ongoing neglect.
Since 1994 D.I.D. has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the most widely used guide on mental-health issues. Before then it was known as multiple personality disorder — a misnomer, because rather than having numerous personalities, people with the disorder have one personality with compartmentalized aspects of themselves, known as self-states, or what some people call parts or alters. About 1 percent of the U.S. population is thought to have the disorder, according to the D.S.M., making it about as common as schizophrenia. Researchers have documented it in the Netherlands, Turkey, China and other countries.
It is also one of the most controversial diagnoses in psychiatry. For decades, some critics have argued that it is extremely rare, or that it doesn’t exist at all. The public’s knowledge about the disorder tends to be informed by overdramatized and sometimes violent portrayals in movies like “Sybil” and “Split.” More recently, on TikTok — where one account focusing on D.I.D. has about a million followers — some people display the disorder floridly, as well as in other ways that don’t align with many experts’ clinical experiences.
Even as TikTok portrayals have renewed skepticism among critics, the field of psychiatry has never had more robust scientific and clinical data about the disorder — including the ways it defies decades-old stereotypes. There are now multiple validated assessment tools for dissociative disorders, including D.I.D., as well as neuroimaging studies that show how severe dissociation manifests in the brain.
Kaufman has played a role in this burgeoning understanding. Spurred by her own condition, she became a psychiatrist and has devoted her career to research and treatment for dissociation and trauma. For 16 years, she has been the medical director of several trauma programs at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and co-director of its dissociative disorders and trauma research program. She also helped found a McLean advisory committee through which people with D.I.D. educate medical students, residents and researchers about living with the disorder.
Still, it wasn’t until our third conversation that she told me that she herself had D.I.D. in the past and had fully recovered from it after years of treatment. At the time, only a few colleagues knew. “It took me a long time to even be able to say I had the disorder in therapy,” she told me one afternoon in a garden outside her office, referring to more than two decades ago when she sought help for her struggles. “I couldn’t say the words ‘I have D.I.D.’ until the end of my therapy.”
Now 60, with two teenage sons, Kaufman is shy and warm and known among her graduate students and colleagues as incisive and generous. Yet, as eager as she was to educate the public about the disorder, she had avoided sharing her experiences, she said, “for layers and layers of reasons, including that I didn’t want to think about my diagnosis. I had a lot of shame around it.”
She also feared that disclosing it could hurt her lab’s funding, given the stigma around D.I.D. And because she regularly assesses patients for various dissociative disorders, she worried critics might accuse her of overdiagnosing D.I.D., even though, as she said: “I have an ethical obligation to practice medicine according to the standards of care. I have no skin in the game about someone having a certain diagnosis.”
For weeks after she first told me, she contemplated the consequences of acknowledging it publicly. She talked to friends and colleagues, in many cases divulging it for the first time. Ultimately, she decided the risks were worth it if her own story could elucidate the realities of the disorder. “My goal is to help people understand what it’s like as a kid who lives with these symptoms, what it’s like as an adult. It’s not what many people imagine.”
Experts in trauma have long argued that D.I.D. is an ingenious survival tool born in childhood. It typically begins by the time a child is 5 or 6 as a response to repeated abuse, often by a caregiver. Before about 6 years old, children generally have not yet formed a coherent sense of self. They may have imaginary friends or displace their own thoughts or feelings onto stuffed animals. (“My bunny is sad. He hates school.”) They may believe they will become a princess or Superman. It’s all psychologically typical, and over time, most children develop a unified self.
But for a small subset of abused children who have a capacity to dissociate — which experts theorize is in part genetic — developing a unified self becomes disrupted. To endure the physical and emotional pain, their mind makes it seem as if it is not happening to them but to someone else, someone inside them. “When it’s too overwhelming to feel such fear, too dangerous to feel what is happening to their body, they feel like that’s not me,” Kaufman says, noting that the phrase “me, not me” captures a core feeling for people living with D.I.D. And because children frequently don’t tell anyone about the abuse, the feeling of having inside people can be soothing.
Often people with D.I.D. unconsciously create an angry “part” as a protective mechanism, which tries to silence other parts that bring up traumatic memories. Many girls create boy parts, explains Richard Chefetz, a psychiatrist who treats people with complex post-trauma and dissociative disorder, because they believe if they were male, the abuse would not have happened. Other parts — like Kaufman’s nice lady who helped her speak in class — have certain skills that keep children engaged in school and in the larger world and help them experience humor, joy, hope.
That’s the adaptable aspect. But the flip side is that if a child has D.I.D. their mind doesn’t follow the usual developmental pathway to form a coherent self. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, where the pieces have never fully been put together,” explains Richard Loewenstein, a pioneer in dissociative research and treatment and the founder of the trauma program at Sheppard Pratt, a psychiatric medical center in Baltimore. While we all have self-states — a work state, a social state, a family state and so on — “most people who are well integrated can move among their different parts” without feeling unstable, says Frank Putnam, an expert on child abuse and dissociative disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Most people, too, experience some dissociation — when they drive from the grocery store to home with little memory of how they got there, or they lose track of time while immersed in a video game. But for those with dissociative disorders, the experiences are more pervasive, intense and disruptive. They may regularly feel disconnected from their thoughts, feelings or bodily sensations, a psychological phenomenon known as depersonalization. They may also experience derealization, in which the world seems blurry, dreamlike or unreal.
People with D.I.D. have both, along with fragmented self-states, which often cause them distress and can make daily functioning difficult: Among other things, one self-state can be unaware of actions taken by another state. One therapist, for instance, told me about a client who once spilled coffee on his suit and then found himself in a new suit and didn’t know how it happened. A woman told me she opened her car trunk one day to find three pairs of beautiful shoes in her size, with no memory of buying them.
Skepticism about D.I.D. stems in part from “Sybil,” published in 1973 and made into a TV movie three years later. Both were sensationalized versions of the story of Shirley Mason, a woman who her psychiatrist claimed had 16 personalities. Along with psychoanalysis, the therapist used hypnosis and injections of sodium pentothal, which may have created false memories of childhood abuse and personalities. An explosion of workshops followed to train therapists in multiple personality disorder, as it was then known. Some therapists asked clients leading questions and used hypnosis to uncover supposed sexual abuse and personalities, encouraging fabricated stories and memories. (When used correctly, hypnosis is highly effective in helping ground people and quell anxiety, including for people with dissociative disorders.) As cases of multiple personality disorder exploded, so did the criticism.
“When I was seeing patients in the 1990s, it was so therapist driven,” says Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University. Frances led the task force overseeing the revision of the fourth edition of the D.S.M., in which multiple personality disorder was renamed dissociative identity disorder. He counts himself among the psychiatrists who remain wary of the diagnosis; most recently because social media has, he says, propelled a surge in questionable self-diagnosis. For some people, Frances notes, D.I.D. provides a label for explaining their distress. Others believe they have it, he adds, because they are fantasy-prone and struggle to differentiate reality from their imagination.
Steven Sharfstein, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, partly attributes ongoing skepticism about D.I.D. to the fact that while childhood abuse is widespread — at least one in four girls and one in 20 boys in the United States experience sexual abuse, mostly by people they know, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — psychiatrists disagree on the extent to which trauma is at the root of mental illnesses, including D.I.D. Also, Sharfstein notes, the disorder can simply seem unfathomable. “Fragmented states challenge our assumptions about a unified self. It seems incredible that someone could have radically different states of minds when it’s not a hallucination, not psychosis. And that’s scary, including to some therapists who don’t know how to treat it.”
But in contrast to the 1980s and 1990s, neuroscientists now have more clues about how severe dissociation appears in the brain. In the late 1990s, Ruth Lanius, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who is the director of the PTSD research unit at the University of Western Ontario, was running a PTSD study using a standard approach for measuring responses to trauma memories: A person narrates a memory, which is recorded and then played back during an fMRI scan. Typically, the subject’s heart rate, blood pressure and activity in their amygdala — which facilitates the fear response — increases.
One subject had been so horrifically abused as a child that Lanius expected the narrated memory would trigger a flashback and the woman would feel as if she were reliving her trauma, causing her heart rate to spike. Instead, to Lanius’s surprise, as the woman lay in the scanner, her heart rate dropped. Lanius had her listen to her trauma narrative two more times with the same result. When she interviewed the woman afterward, the subject said she felt numb and completely disconnected from her body. In further studies, Lanius was able to pinpoint areas of the brain that suggest subjects like her have a dissociative subtype of PTSD. In response to trauma, their brains — unlike classic PTSD patients’ — blunt arousal: Activity in their amygdala decreases, while processing in a part of the frontal lobe, where emotions are controlled, increases.
More recently, Simone Reinders, a neuroscientist at King’s College in London, has published multiple imagining studies about D.I.D., including those in which actors were told to mimic different dissociative states. The actors could not match the neural responses of those diagnosed with D.I.D. (Critics have noted that some imaging studies have small sample sizes and should include PTSD subjects as controls.) Newer studies, including by Kaufman and her colleague Lauren Lebois, show that patterns of brain-network communication change depending on the severity of the dissociation. “We don’t yet have a singular biomarker for D.I.D.,” Kaufman says, noting that schizophrenia and other disorders don’t either. “But we are seeing important patterns emerge.”
“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, where the pieces have never fully been put together.”
When she was 17 and in college, away from her friends and family, Kaufman felt unmoored. She started therapy but couldn’t talk about what was going on inside her. She had never told friends or family members about the neglect and abuse she experienced as a child. (She declined to discuss the specifics of her childhood trauma with me.) She couldn’t even fully acknowledge it to herself. For years, she’d been reading Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet and other psychologists who wrote about trauma and dissociation. Still, she could not make a conscious connection between what happened in childhood to her ongoing struggles, which were, mostly, easy to hide.
Despite a couple of bouts of serious depression and anxiety, she was extremely high functioning (working hard in school was one of her coping mechanisms). In contrast, many people with the disorder also suffer from other mental-health issues like substance abuse, eating disorders, debilitating anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation (over 70 percent of people with D.I.D. have attempted suicide), which sometimes are so severe they land patients in hospitals and make healing from the disorder harder.
Several of the more than two dozen people I interviewed who have been diagnosed with D.I.D. had been in and out of hospitals or intensive outpatient programs, including a woman in her mid-30s who asked me to identify her by the first initial of her middle name, E., to protect her privacy. We met one summer afternoon not far from where she lives. Though initially cautious about talking to me, she was warm, funny and insightful. As far back as she could remember, she had different parts in her mind. One part helped her focus in school, where she was an A student. Another was more social; another extremely critical. Her favorite part was a teenager who took risks and pushed boundaries. In middle school, E. wore her hair in a mop of curls, dressed in muted tones, big baggy sweatpants. But every Friday, she straightened her hair, wore a T-shirt that clung to her ribs and lots of makeup. It wasn’t a decision; it just happened.
Though she struggled with dissociation and disturbing memories in adolescence, a breaking point came during her freshman year of college. She was giving a presentation on “the male gaze” in a women’s studies class, and as she spoke, she had a flashback to sexual abuse from her childhood. She felt outside her own body, as if watching herself from afar. She froze in front of the class.
That summer she had to interact with people who had abused her, and her anxiety, depression and O.C.D. spiraled. She avoided touching food and developed elaborate hand-washing rituals. She started exercising compulsively and restricted what she ate. Inside her head, negative parts made her feel worthless and encouraged her to hurt herself. She lost 40 pounds over three months without being fully conscious of it. She drank too much, took too many benzodiazepines and descended into a fog.
Over the next years, E. was hospitalized more than two dozen times by her count, mostly for anorexia and suicidal ideation. She went in and out of attending school and work. During her first hospitalization, an intake-staff member asked her if she had any history of trauma. E. hated thinking about her past, much less talking about it. She said no. Later, a psychiatrist placed her on a trauma unit, where she was diagnosed with PTSD with a dissociative disorder. During a subsequent hospitalization, she received a diagnosis of D.I.D.
Another woman I met, S. (the first letter of her middle name), told me that during her early stages of treatment, she struggled to navigate her job as a faculty member; her hospitalizations and different self-states interfered with work. Sometimes when she was grading students’ papers, she couldn’t make out the words, as if she were a child who couldn’t read.
Then one day she was in a departmental meeting, and a dean asked S. to explain something related to her work. In her mind, S. felt like a young girl — she suspects something triggered her, and she suddenly believed she wasn’t good enough or smart enough, a common experience when she was a child. But when she looked down at herself, her body didn’t match. She was an adult, wearing slacks and leather boots — the clothes of a professional. How, she thought, is it possible that anyone thinks I have something to say about this?
For S., like for many people with D.I.D., finding effective therapy took years. In one study, one-third of people with dissociative disorders reported struggling to find trained therapists. And people with D.I.D. often receive several misdiagnoses — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder — and are given medications that don’t treat the disorder and may cause harm. (There’s no medication that specifically addresses dissociative disorders.)
“I can’t count the number of cases when someone with D.I.D. is diagnosed with schizophrenia,” says Bethany Brand, professor emeritus of psychology at Towson University in Maryland, who is a clinician and the author of numerous studies on dissociative disorders. One of her patients, she says, was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was a teenager, and it took decades before a therapist finally pinpointed that she had D.I.D. instead. “Imagine if they had cancer but it was diagnosed as heart failure,” she says.
Part of the problem is that dissociation has long taken a back seat in psychology training. In a study of graduate psychopathology textbooks, Brand found that some of the books didn’t address D.I.D. and other dissociative disorders in depth. Chefetz told me that even if therapists recognize D.I.D., they don’t necessarily know how best to help the person, which starts with creating a “solid, safe-enough relationship,” he says. Instead, some push clients to dig up traumatic memories too soon. Or they become seduced by what they see as the dramatic elements of D.I.D. “How many personalities,” he says, “is exciting to some people.”
Among other things, one self-state can be unaware of actions taken by another state.
Starting in 2021, Kaufman and her colleagues around the country began hearing from an increasing number of families whose adolescents believed they had D.I.D. McLean and other treatment centers also got calls from pediatricians and therapists asking for advice on how to assess teenagers reporting D.I.D. It was during Covid; kids were stuck at home, and TikTok videos about D.I.D. were growing in popularity. By 2022, videos with the hashtag #DID had been viewed at least 2.7 billion times and those with #dissociativeidentitydisorder, 1.5 billion times. (TikTok no longer publishes information on views per hashtag.)
While some posts are educational, others show people abruptly switching self-states on camera, changing clothes, hair styles and voices, seemingly at will. As therapists and many people with D.I.D. explained to me, switching is typically involuntary, and is often so internal that it’s not obvious that someone is doing it. A person’s eyes, voice or posture may shift. On occasion it can be more intense — a person regresses to a childlike state or looks as if they are having a panic attack.
It’s impossible to know how many people on TikTok have D.I.D.; there is likely to be a mix of those who actually have the disorder, those who pretend to have it and those who believe they have it but don’t.
Several people diagnosed with D.I.D. told me they don’t recognize their experiences in the TikTok videos they’ve seen. After a lifetime of shame about their abuse (children often believe it’s their fault if an adult hurts them) and stigma surrounding the diagnosis, the idea of going public with their disorder feels incomprehensible. “I worry people think that’s what it really looks like,” E. told me. “As if I am 60 different individuals in a body rather than one person.”
Self-diagnosing mental-health issues via social media is hardly confined to D.I.D. But experts worry that if people falsely claim to have D.I.D. it will renew skepticism about the disorder. In addition, inexperienced therapists who rely on TikTok for their understanding of the disorder may miss real cases of D.I.D.
About a year ago, one teenager on TikTok disavowed his previous claim that he had D.I.D. During Covid, he explained, he felt lonely and suffered from anxiety and depression and was looking for community and attention, the very things teenagers so often long for. On Discord, he found a group of teens with dissociative disorders, and over time he came to believe he had D.I.D. — with hundreds of parts. In response to his confession, many people commented that they had a similar experience: They thought they had D.I.D., but it turned out they had autism, bipolar disorder, psychosis.
A few experts told me that some teenagers may be experiencing a kind of social contagion, which happened with Tourette’s syndrome during the early months of Covid, when TikTok videos about Tourette’s escalated. Typically, the syndrome affects young boys. But in 2021, adolescent girls who were often struggling with other mental-health issues, like self-harm, increasingly reported having Tourette’s. But their tics didn’t quite line up with typical Tourette’s tics and instead reflected those in TikTok videos.
The creator of what may be the largest D.I.D. TikTok account, The A System, with almost a million followers, told me that a therapist diagnosed them with the disorder several years ago. Posting on social media, they said, is an attempt to accept and embrace their disorder, and it’s also how they found an understanding and accepting community. When we talked, they asked me to refer to them as Asher, their self-state at the time (they also asked that I not use their last name; they receive regular hate messages — many accusing them of faking D.I.D.). Many of their videos, said Asher, who is in their 30s, do not reflect their life with D.I.D. Some, they said, are purposefully dramatized, with two identities talking in conversation — one denying they have D.I.D., the other not — often with different voice-overs and switching hats, outfits or wigs for different self-states. The idea, they said, is to show what it feels like to them to live with D.I.D. “I’m not an educator; I’m just trying to explain my own experience.”
Jaime Pollack, who was diagnosed with D.I.D. about 20 years ago and is the founder of An Infinite Mind, an education and advocacy group that hosts an annual conference for people with dissociative disorders, chalks up the posts to a generational shift in which mental-health problems are more accepted and being public about one’s personal life is common. “I’ve talked to some of them who said they make their parts more distinct, because it makes better content,” Pollack says. “People are trying to break the stigma. D.I.D. doesn’t look the same for everyone.”
After her diagnosis, Emma Sunshaw, a psychotherapist, an author and the host of the widely respected D.I.D. podcast “System Speak,” found social media useful — for a while. When Sunshaw was struggling to find a trained therapist, she discovered people on YouTube who talked about their experiences in a way that felt familiar and gave her a vocabulary to understand her own diagnosis. (One study found YouTube videos are more accurate depictions of D.I.D. than TikTok.) In other ways, though, she couldn’t relate to them. “The videos were mostly about how people presented their states to the world,” she told me. “People weren’t talking about getting better,” which Sunshaw desperately wanted to do.
After Kaufman decided in college that she wanted to become a psychiatrist, she went on to get a Ph.D. and an M.D. from Boston University. When she began her psychiatry residency, faculty encouraged the trainees to be in therapy to better understand their patients’ perspectives. Kaufman started seeing a psychiatrist with an expertise in trauma disorders.
Still, she couldn’t talk about abuse in her childhood. She barely talked about her past at all and repeatedly told her therapist that she never felt angry. But over time, as she began to feel safer, Kaufman mentioned that she had different voices in her head and described some of the amnesia she experienced. Slowly, her therapist helped Kaufman understand that those voices represented difficult emotions that were too scary to process as a child. She explained that despite Kaufman’s disavowing feeling angry and vulnerable, the angry boy was Kaufman’s own expression of anger and important to her survival; he served as a form of self-protection, in part by trying to push away self-states that held on to experiences of the past.
And though her therapist acknowledged Kaufman’s different self-states, she didn’t reify them by writing down their names or speaking to a young state as if Kaufman herself were a child. “The parts were not the point, really,” as Kaufman explained. “It was about the conflict represented by my self-states.”
During treatment, she read and reread the memoir “A Fractured Mind: My Life With Multiple Personality Disorder,” by Robert Oxnam, a China scholar who was the president of the Asia Society in New York City for years and died in 2024. Kaufman was reassured by the fact that he was professionally successful and had a family. Knowing there were people with similar struggles, Kaufman says, came at “an important time in my own treatment.”
Still, when her psychiatrist diagnosed Kaufman with D.I.D., she felt ashamed and panicked. “It’s sort of akin to people who are so closeted,” Kaufman, who is gay, told me, “that they don’t even know they are gay.”
Therapy was slow and could be rocky. While driving to a session one morning, a couple of Kaufman’s scared young states wanted to talk to her therapist about the past. But her angry self-state, which helped keep her from thinking about the abuse, was furious, unwilling to do it. It felt like a war inside of her. She parked her car and in her angry state, slammed the door, signed a check for the session, added a note that said she couldn’t meet that day and dropped it at the office. By the time Kaufman arrived at work she was calm and professional and proceeded through her day as if nothing had happened.
Not long after, when Kaufman cried during a session, she told her therapist it felt as if it was the young, neglected parts of herself that were crying. And as she started to acknowledge her traumatic experiences and dissociate less, she understood she was no longer at risk of abuse, as she was as a child. She began to see too that her self-states were not separate: They were all aspects of herself. Then one day, after years of treatment, Kaufman noticed that the nice lady had disappeared. And next, the angry boy. “He just lost steam,” she told me. None of it was dramatic. One woman told me that when her parts quieted and finally became silent, it was like watching large inflatable yard decorations deflate. “They had nothing to do anymore,” she said, referring to the roles they had protecting her and hiding secrets.
On occasion, Kaufman misses some of her parts. She hates public speaking, and the first time she had to address an audience after the self-states disappeared, she wished she had the nice lady to do it. And she’s still uncomfortable expressing anger in a way the angry part was not.
Kaufman’s own experience is what’s known as integration. Many people won’t get to that point, and it’s often not a goal for them and their therapists. Instead, researchers are focused on other treatment outcomes for people with D.I.D. or other trauma-related dissociative disorders, to create a standard of care for practitioners. In a recent study by Bethany Brand, therapists helped stabilize patients, among other interventions, and taught them to use strategies instead of dissociation to manage memories of trauma. The study found that subjects receiving the treatment hurt themselves less and experienced greater emotional regulation, self-compassion and better relationships. Researchers in Britain, Denmark, Chile and other countries are now developing studies using the same program.
Even as they heal from D.I.D. some people don’t want to lose their parts. One evening at E.’s apartment, she told me that she was crying and distraught in therapy that day, recalling an old memory. Then, a part took over. She didn’t summon it, but it washed over her, and she stopped crying immediately. “It’s as if I took a Xanax.” If she integrated, she wondered if the part would recede or disappear altogether. Would she no longer be able to get into a trance state that blocks out all distractions and had helped her be a focused student? Her ability to move into severe dissociation, she said, allows her to experience no pain during certain situations, like getting a Brazilian wax. Often people with D.I.D. have such intense depersonalization — feeling disconnected from their body — that they are unaware of their pain, even when they harm or cut themselves deeply.
“In some ways being totally integrated sounds super lonely at this point,” S. told me. “If you were to ask me what my real goal is, it wouldn’t be to be integrated.” Instead, for S. who is far more aware of her self-states than in the past, healing means improved self-regulation, including among her parts. “Right now, it’s still as if there are lots of doors opening and closing in my mind with parts waking up at different times and creating chaos.”
At a DoubleTree hotel in Orlando on the edge of SeaWorld, among multiple pools and waterfalls and all-you-can-eat breakfasts, about 350 people gathered at a conference center tucked away in the back of the hotel grounds. They were there for Healing Together, the annual event Jaime Pollack created more than 15 years ago for people living with D.I.D. and other dissociative disorders, as well as their loved ones and clinicians in the field.
Kaufman had told me about the conference and encouraged me to attend, calling it “revolutionary” for bringing together people with D.I.D. — who often feel there is no one else like them — and for focusing on education and support.
In the main hallway, which was lined with tables, a therapist named Jamie Marich promoted her book, “Dissociation Made Simple,” and included bookmarks that proclaimed “Dissociation Is Not a Dirty Word.” Another tabletop was filled with ribbons to attach to name tags, with playful messages of pride: “#plurals,” “Hot Mess Express,” “Allow Me to Introduce Myselves.”
People had come from all over the United States and other countries to attend, some scraping together money to do so. (Another 300 people attended online.) One woman told me she was diagnosed more than a decade ago but was too scared to come to the conference before now. She brought her husband for moral support — the only other person aside from her therapist who knew she had D.I.D. The conference was comforting and validating, she said. “You come here, and you can’t deny your diagnosis anymore. I’m overwhelmed with feeling like I belong.”
A woman named Jennifer, who is a lawyer at a major international bank, attended her first conference more than a decade ago, when she’d never met a person with D.I.D. Robert Oxnam was among the speakers, and when Jennifer confided some of her struggles to him, he reassured her it would get better. And slowly it did. After years of therapy, she no longer has distinct self-states. She returned to the conference, she told me, hoping she could help others, just as Oxnam helped her.
Every year, Pollack closes the conference by appearing onstage, wearing a bee costume: a yellow tutu, a black-and-yellow striped jacket and antennas. As a kid, she tells the audience, she didn’t know anyone who had a mind like hers, who felt the way she did. Later in her life, Pollack attended groups for sex-abuse survivors. They were useful, but she still felt like an outsider with a secret she couldn’t share. “I could never find my people,” she says, until she created Healing Together.
She then plays a video of Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” which made her feel less alone in high school. In the video, an elementary-school-age girl, chubby and wearing glasses, is dressed in a yellow-and-black bee costume with a beanie on her head. Onlookers laugh at her or view her with puzzlement or indifference, until she finds a field with dozens of people dancing and cartwheeling, twirling, jumping. All of them are dressed in yellow-and-black tutus, leotards and beanies — just like her.
The year I was there, Kaufman was ill and could not attend. She told me that when she first came to Healing Together more than a decade ago as a clinician and researcher, people kept approaching her. They were desperate for therapy referrals. They needed help with insurance problems. A woman asked if Kaufman could put her in an fMRI machine to prove to insurers that she had D.I.D. (No imaging scan can do that.) Kaufman suggested clinicians and helped where she could.
At the end of that weekend years ago, Kaufman went to the final event. As Pollack stood onstage and the video played, she invited her “bees” to stand up. “I consider all of you part of my beehive,” she said. Kaufman watched as dozens of people crowded into the aisles and along the sides and back walls, some holding hands, others putting their arms around each other, all counting themselves among a community of people with the disorder.
Kaufman couldn’t bring herself to join them. She worried about her job and what her colleagues would think. She felt like a hypocrite, hiding behind the title of researcher, never divulging that she had lived with the disorder. She stayed in her seat, tears streaming down her face, both moved by the courage of others and ashamed of herself.
She continued to return to the conference each year with her research team, who still didn’t know that she once had D.I.D. Then, about eight years ago, something shifted in her. Kaufman was sitting by herself during the closing ceremony when Pollack invited her bees to join her. This time, as people around her got up, some swaying together, Kaufman slowly rose from her seat. Her body felt heavy. Her heart raced. Part of her longed to sit back down. But as “No Rain” played, she remained standing.
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