Have you seen the show Moonnight on Disney plus?

The show does a good job about showing the features of someone who has dissociative identity disorder or DID. This is a real thing that has been studied for many years. How does something like this happen? When a person goes through trauma or scary situations our consciousness can check out. We go to a place in our minds so that we are not aware of what’s happening. Essentially, we go into auto pilot.

That is a helpful coping mechanism for that moment and in a way, it might prevent or make it difficult for healing from that trauma to take place. If someone keeps going into auto pilot, that auto pilot can develop into its own pilot or a separate consciousness. What was a subconscious emotion or part of us has now become more fully developed into a separate consciousness.

There can be extreme memory gaps associated with this disorder.

People who have this might find themselves suddenly in a room and they have no recollection of the last few hours, the last few days or even years. Some personalities may want to be present while others may not want to be present. A personality may wear glasses while others may not need them. Some may have allergies while others may not.

There are biologic things that happen that make it so much more than just a mood change. These are actual examples of what someone who has dissociative personality disorder. It is the goal of the therapists to either integrate these parts or get some sort of collaboration so that the client can have access to the memories they may have lost, or they are at least aware. This can help the client be more functional.

For us that do not have DID we have moods that we carry with us, and we can access all our memories. For example, if you argue with someone multiple times you can recall all the memories of all the times we got into that argument. However, people with DID have trouble doing this because they don’t know what has been happening while the other personality was forward.