Showing results for "Personality" in Women

As a young adult, years after her physical abuse has ended, Maggie Walters struggles with an unpredictable temper and socially difficult behaviour. After several false starts she finds a therapist who she trusts, just enough, to start talking about the childhood locked away behind the anger and isolation she has learnt to live with. Eventually she is diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, MPD (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID). Gradually, she understands.

An honest and compelling memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet is Merri Lisa Johnson’s account of her borderline personality disorder and how it has affected her life and relationships. Johnson describes the feeling of "bleeding out" unable to tell where she stopped and where her partner began. A self-confessed "psycho girlfriend," she was influenced by many emotional factors from her past. She recalls her path through a dysfunctional, destructive relationship, while recounting the experiences that brought her to her breaking point.

Emma Churchman's extraordinary memoir follows her search for identity as the eldest child of a woman with one of the most extreme cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder) diagnosed in the 1980s. Never knowing which of her mother's alters would emerge—the playful child, the raging demon, or the suicidal depressive—Emma became the family's anchor in an ocean of psychological chaos, raising her three younger brothers while navigating a mother who had no clear identity.

For most of us, the varied parts of our personalities are woven together and unified by our memories. But what happens when we have no memories? What happens when the components of memory (facts, feelings, and body states) are split apart and no longer relate to each other? When this story began more than 40 years ago, doctors and psychiatrists were mystified by patients with more than one personality. The diagnosis at the time was Multiple Personality Disorder.