Multiple Personalities

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.

Cammie is a healthy little girl who lives with her mother, father, little sister Prissy, and her grandmother. Cammie thinks there is something wrong with her because she hates her mother and yet loves her too. She feels lonely and scared many times. Her daddy works nights and she doesn’t feel safe with her mother. When Daddy has an accident and has to stay home to recuperate, things take an unusual turn. He becomes involved in his little girls’ lives and realizes that his wife isn’t the person he thought she was.

Cammie and her husband Dan start to deal with recovery, if for no other reason than to be functional parents to their precious baby girl, Angel. Recovery only seems to make things worse for the young couple when Cammie starts having blackouts. Dan and Cammie’s father and stepmother are terrified to leave her alone with the baby. Michelle is doing her best to suck Cammie back into the dark world of drugs and Satanism. How will Cammie deal with her mother, who is involved in the dark world of Satanism? Will she be lured back into the horrors of addiction and evil?

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.

Christine Ducommun was a happily married wife and mother of two when, after returning to live in the house of her childhood, she began to experience panic attacks and night terrors. Says the author, "I sought therapy, and there I discovered, to my shock and horror, that I had been sexually abused at the hands of my father at a very early age. I surely didn't want to believe it. But as my mind began to release bizarre flashbacks, my alters began to show themselves.

For 18 years of my life, I dealt with harm daily. I suffered over 40 years with a substantial assortment of trauma-related manifestations. The devastation of the problems began when I was a child and lasted until I was in my mid-40s. I know my story sounds bleak but don’t be discouraged. Peace, laughter, joy, and happiness eventually came my way.