Identity: At War With Yourself by Jeanette Alvarez

                                                                     At War With Yourself

                Keeping a balance on a day-to-day basis is a constant battle we face everyday. Has it ever crossed your mind that you can be at war with yourself? Most of us have experienced mild dissociation, which is like daydreaming or getting lost in the moment while working on a project. Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a severe form of dissociation, a mental process, which produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (previously known as multiple personality disorder) is a fairly common effect of sever trauma during early childhood, usually extreme, repetitive physical, sexual, and/ or emotional abuse. The latest research indicates that dissociative disorder is primarily among woman and less frequently diagnosed among men. Statistic show the rate of dissociative identity disorder is .01% to 1% of the general population. Still, more than 1/3 of people say they feel as if they’re watching themselves in a movie at times, and 7% of the population may have undiagnosed dissociative disorder. People with dissociative identity disorder may experience any of the following symptoms; depression, mood swings, and suicidal tendencies, sleep disorder (insomnia, night terrors, and sleep walking), anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias (flash backs, reactions to stimuli or “triggers”), alcohol and drug abuse, psychotic-like symptoms (including auditory and visual hallucinations), eating disorder, compulsions and rituals. Someone with this disorder may find themselves doing things they wouldn’t normally do such as speeding, reckless driving or stealing money, yet they feel compelled to do it. People with this disorder feel compelled to do these things because they have no control over themselves.

The theme of the article really caught my attention “multiple personality”. How many times haven’t you question yourself about your own personalities and of others at least I have? I always wonder about people’s personalities and the wide range of them. Can it be possible that one person can carry various personalities? After reading this interesting article, my curiosity was answered and the answer is yes! There are people who have multiple personalities. But what they have is a disorder? 

This article has very interesting facts and has a lot of information about dissociative identity disorder. One very interesting fact that I found in this article was that there’s an average of two to four personalities present when a patient is initially diagnosed but, there’s an average of thirteen to fifteen personalities that can become known over the course of the treatment. While unusual, there have been instances of more than one hundred personalities. While reading I thought I fit in with the characteristics of multiple personality disorder and as I continued reading, I realized that we all have different personalities but not necessarily a disorder. This article has great specific examples and details such as the percentage of people who have this disorder, what are the characteristics of someone with this disorder and the symptoms of this disorder.

We are in a constant battle to keep balanced on a day-to-day basis with ourselves while dealing with everyday circumstances of life. Identity is something very delicate and interesting matter to search.  Who would have known that dissociative identity disorder was something that people face?