Once upon a time, I knew a person who had MPD back when it was called MPD. She was being studied as a case study by my University, and everything.
She wanted to “come out” to her group of trusted friends, to try and explain some of the weird stuff that had been going on with her as a result of the MPD. I was hanging out with them at the time, so I went along and mostly sat on my hands and watched.
They triggered the dominant alternate personality by talking about it, and she came front and forward to set us straight on a few things— how many personalities there were total, which personalities knew each other and which ones didn’t, the different traumas that each personality had been triggered by in the first place that created it, and so on.
I did have one question for the personality. “How long will you stay with her, before you go away?” I asked.
And the personality answered, “When she comes to grips with the traumas that we were created to protect her from— then we’ll disappear.”
A few years later, I was listening to a homily from an exorcist. He was talking about a particularly difficult case, where the person just wasn’t being cured. So they made the demon talk to them.
“What will make you go away?”
“When she forgives her father.” (He had sexually abused her as a child).
It struck me that these two similar-but-different situations both had the same cure: forgiving people who had caused them great suffering. That’s not to say they weren’t betrayed by people who were supposed to protect them, or that they weren’t wronged by people who should have only given them good— but their inability to let go of things was continuing to eat them up into adulthood in a very painful way.
Your trauma exists— what do you need to do to work your way through it and rise above it and get your closure?
