Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Hecock.

One of the best parts of making Back from the Abyss is that I get to continually learn and even challenge my assumptions and beliefs.

I get to choose the stories and topics that most call to me.

A few months ago, I got an email from a listener named Jade Miller, and she offered to share her story of DID or Dissociative Identity Disorder,

which used to be called multiple personality disorder.

Now I have to admit, one part of me, an unnamed part, not an altar, this part was

very fascinated and deeply curious about this, and another part of me, still Craig, was more than a little skeptical.

As the mental health professionals in the audience know, D.I.D. is a hot button and controversial

diagnosis. Now, I think basically everyone in psychiatry agrees that dissociation in a traumatic

context can lead to periods of profound

amnesia.

But the idea that these periods of dissociative amnesia can morph into discrete personalities

or alters, this is where the heat of the argument lies.

Prior to recording this, I had long believed that discrete alters or personalities were largely,

or perhaps entirely, an unconscious co-creation of well-meaning therapists, and they're

traumatized and easily dissociated trauma patients. In my large practice, with many patients with

complex PTSD, I'm not aware of a single patient with

alters, but after meeting Jade, I'm wondering how much I might be missing. Because after all,

can we actually see what we aren't looking for? Maybe the apparent lack of DID in my patients

is a co-creation fueled by an unspoken lack of

safety for these parts to emerge.

My patients can read me just as well as I read them on a deep energetic level.

...