MPD - Who and Why?

When a child is abused or neglected, they often fear that they will die. And even though they may feel totally overwhelmed and helpless in their situation, they usually must find a way to deal with the abuse alone. As the abusive situation continues and the pain does not stop, a child may stop being afraid of dying and actually wish that he could die. He or she has come to believe that death is the only way out of the intolerable situation.
     When there is no one to comfort or protect the child, she feels completely abandoned. She concludes that bad things are happening to her because she is a bad person. Now, not only does she wish to die, but because she is so bad she believes that she deserves to die.
     In this way she blames herself for the abuse taking place; it is much too threatening to blame the abuser who is really responsible for what is happening. The abuser is quick to confirm the child's thinking with comments like: "If it weren't for you, I'd be happy" or "Now see what you've made me to? It's your own fault."
     As the abuse continues, the child feels that she has only two choices: to literally die physically, or to shut down emotionally and spiritually. Unfortunately, we hear too often of children who attempt or succeed at committing suicide. The more common choice that children make is the second one - to kill off and bury deep in their unconscious vital aspects of themselves. At this point the decision made is one of survival and may have to be made many times during the course of childhood. Each time the child chooses to stay alive, she must repress the feelings associated with the abuse.
     In the book Adult Children of Abusive Parents, Steven Farmer describes this process:

"Partial or complete repression is a mechanism that nature has provided for us to use to deal with painful experiences. It is what happens when an experience is so traumatic and so painful that we partially or completely push the memory and the feelings surrounding it out of our consciousness. The memory and feelings are still embedded deep within us and we continue to experience the symptoms of trauma, yet we are partially or completely blocked from consciously remembering the actual trauma.
"All abused children will experience this type of repression to some degree. However, in the case of multiple personalities, the repression and dissociation have been so massive that most of the different parts of the person that are split off remain largely unknown to each other."

Most true Multiples were abused severely as children and represent extreme, dramatic instances of the processes of denial, repression, and dissociation. However, in some cases, the child does not have to suffer a trauma, but merely witness it. An important factor in the development of mulitiple personality disorder is the absence of a sympathetic adult to help a young victim make sense of a disturbing experience. This is why, for example, during the Holocaust the probability of children becoming multiples would have been unlikely. Even though their experiences were far beyond the realm of ordinary, they weren't going through it alone. There were caring adults around to offer some kind of comfort and support.

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One theory about the development of MPD includes the following factors:

biological - about 25% of all children are born with the ability to dissociate to this extreme if they need to
early childhood abuse
continuing abuse and lack of nurture throughout childhood
psychological structure - a high ability to fantasize, a high level of creativity, and an above average intelligence

Traditionally MPD has been considered most common in women because of the nature of the abuse. However, workers in the field suspect that men are under-represented in clinical populations because they are moste likely to get into trouble with the law, and enter the criminal justice system.

Multiple Personality Disorder

Who? and Why?