Behavioral Navelgazing

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

This article for the psychiatric times degenerates into almost new age psychobabble discredit multiplicity from a behavioral stance.

It's okay, I'm about degenerate into my own personal psychobabble:

Reading the article, I realise I've got a complicated stance. There is a significant amount of enablement in both the survivor and psychiatric community towards victims, to a level where it damages their ability to function in the outside world. Boundaries need to be drawn, and often aren't, on account of not wanting to hurt or offend the "innocent victim", who has "already gone through so much pain". This behavior helps noone. When faced with a world that is significantly less sympathetic outside of that social context, many people multiple or no, will try to find a way to retreat back to the safe haven of the wounded. I've met people who will invent situations in which they are being attacked or harmed in some manner, or go so far as to actually harm themselves, blaming some new and invisible assailant, ranging from an angry alter or self-destructive thought pattern, to a physical perpetrator. This is differentiated from instances of the above, which can be legitimate occurances. However, some self-examination might be in order for some people, as to what is going on.

It can be debated until the cows come home whether or not the behavior was pre-existing. Perhaps they were histrionic before they were abused, or were already inclined to develop munchausens. After a point it doesn't matter. Like them, I do beleive that it's important to target this behavior, and help them get past it in such a way that allows them to function in the outside world without needing to constantly push themselves down so others can lift them up. I don't agree that targeting this behavior immediately requires disacknowledging the existance of multiple systems wholesale, or other issues.

Simply because someone can replicate something, however crudely, doesn't mean it's not legitimately the case in others. Are we to infer that because of high profile instances of Munchausen's by Proxy, that all mothers who lose their children are doing it for the attention?

--Me

Comments

[ex-yohjidera753.livejournal.com]

Are we to infer that because of high profile instances of Munchausen's by Proxy, that all mothers who lose their children are doing it for the attention?

We are lurkers in this community for the most part. But this time we just feel the need to say "Thank you" and "halle-frickin'-lujiah!"

You hit it right on the head there...with everything you said!

Thanks!

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Just mouthing off, as per usual. ;)_

--Me

[shandra.livejournal.com]

... or faked pregnancies mean no one's ever *actually* born. Or fake tumours. Or, or...

I think the question of why multiplicity -or- MPD/DID have produced such skepticism is a really interesting one. I personally think it has to do with two things.

One is that so much of it is perceptual - no one can really measure what I remember/think/feel very easily and compare that to what Lynn remembers/thinks/feels. In that sense it's sort of like fibromyalgia - how do you measure someone else's tiredness or pain? It's hard.

But I think the big thing is that it really comes up against the question of what it is to be human or what is reality, and medicine is not good at dealing with those questions. They are more philosophical or spiritual questions, and medicine (psychiatry) and psychology have pretty much (as M. Scott Peck says) become sciences by distancing themselves from those questions. They can't really address the question of how many souls can exist to a body.

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Identity in current society is very based on the physical form. Our society's structure is based on the incorrect notion that what you see is what you get. In a way, it's hard not to be counter culture when your being goes against this system. Assuming that we're just making it up keeps people from having to ask the hard questions, like just what is a person anyway?

We wouldn't want to question that, now would we? It's far easier to presume that someone's SSID # is a truly unique identifier for each US citizen, and that when you are dealing with one physical body, you only need to take into account the feelings, thoughts, views, and prejudices of one person.

This line of thought has been it's own rant bubbling in the back of my mind, but it's late, and I lack the ability to properly get it down onto any medium, digital, or otherwise.

--Me

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Points well taken, we saw many such people on usenet in the 90s. Therapists not only permitted but encouraged it. The book Little Girl Flyaway is about such a woman, apparently a completely rational telephone company worker, who began receiving threatening messages and was several times attacked in her home or in parking lots, only to have doctors discover that she had been doing it to herself the entire time. Some attempt was made to tout her as a multiple or as dissociative on national television, and the execrable film Never Talk To Strangers was based partly on her story.

Naturally they don't mention the possibility that the medication cocktail she's on might be responsible for some of her bizarre behaviours (particularly her speech pattern) described so lavishly in the article. But I digress.

Psychological reports can be and are written in such a way that the examiner's biases and prejudices are evident; word choice sends a message telling readers to sympathise with or scorn a client. The words "holding court", and the inclusion of the phrase "royal-blue" in describing the cushion she sits on, are clearly indicative of the examiner's dislike of Natalie; he is telling you that she believes herself superior to others. The offhand (unofficial) diagnosis of "borderline" and the inclusion of the concept that all so-called "main personalities" have borderline personality disorder is another cue to readers to regard Natalie as a mere attention-seeking brat.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

The book Little Girl Flyaway is about such a woman, apparently a completely rational telephone company worker, who began receiving threatening messages and was several times attacked in her home or in parking lots, only to have doctors discover that she had been doing it to herself the entire time.

o.o What was she doing, beating herself up until she got bruises and then calling the police and telling them she'd been attacked? You'd think that in so open a place as a parking lot, it'd look a little odd to go around whacking yourself and yelling for help.

[squnq.livejournal.com]

Citing a commonly frowned-upon mainstream depiction of multiplicity - It strikes me as rather Fight Club-esque.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

She stabbed herself in the back with a kitchen knife. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671780859/qid=1123295669/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_1/103-9348129-4651055?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) You will see some of the same controversies in the reader reviews as in the case spookshow_girl cites.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

*reading the review at the top...* @_@

It really sounds like everyone around this woman was so eager to believe that she was multiple that they wouldn't buy it when she admitted to having staged the incidents herself. I'm almost inclined to say that she had to go ahead and tell them it was 'someone else' because that was what her doctor, husband, and everyone else wanted to believe.

(And, uh... logistics of how to stab yourself in the back are... confusing me. I can't imagine it would be a very deep wound. Not that I'm about to try it or anything.)

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

For five years, Ruth was treated by a psychiatrist named Andrew Pickens, gradually revealing that she had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse and that, while not suffering from multiple personality disorder, she still had the abused little girl in her psyche and that girl, resentful that no one had come to the adult Ruth's aid when her husband was stricken ill, became the Poet.

WTF? Okay, given that we're operating in the psychiatry framework here, huh?

--Me

[pthalo]

I think in every circle of life you will encounter those people starved for attention (or whatever) who must make their drama the concerns of everyone else. Among cutters, back when we were in high school, there were the few who would show me what looked like the result of scratching ones wrist with a paper clip and say "I tried to kill myself last night." In the ED chatroom, there was the girl who faked her death. On LJ you'll see "my boyfriend isn't paying attention to me and he hates me because he doesn't read my mind and anyone who says otherwise is siding with HIM" type hissy fits.

It's all the same. There are always going to be some people who seem to draw some kind of energy or validation or self worth or whatever through being high drama and being the center of attention at whatever cost. It's certainly not unique to the multiples.

Personally, I get more out of trying to function and keep up with normal society. I like getting good grades and hanging out with friends and talking about things other than "we were abused, poor us." Sure we're not all perfect and stuff and things are kind of rough right now but we'll get back to a better place. I like attention as much as the next average person, but I like the attention I get for being a nice person or a good listener a hell of a lot more than any freak show attention I could garner if I wanted.

Pthalo

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Personally, I get more out of trying to function and keep up with normal society. I like getting good grades and hanging out with friends and talking about things other than "we were abused, poor us."

Our experience has always been that being able to do 'regular everyday things' is more emotionally rewarding than any pity or fawning we might get from others for any kind of unpleasant things we went through. Yes, validation is useful-- to a point. There's always a stage where you want and need to be told "yes, it was wrong, it shouldn't have happened to you." There's a point where being patted on the back and told that you're great for having come through with your sanity left really does give an emotional boost. But that only goes so far-- you can't feed forever off of that, and if you don't want to make victimhood your entire identity, you reach a point where you want to move on to life outside the 'survivor bubble.' You want to actually live rather than look backwards, as much as you can.

[pthalo]

I agree totally. I think I am still at a stage where I need to look backwards a bit and make sense of it, and I also do need to just get stuff out of my head things, but that's what I have a journal for. I don't cut anymore, though every now and then I want to. I used to just wallow in self pity, but it just made me worse. I'd get caught up in this circle of hatred and self pity and destruction and it wasn't worth it. So when I start getting feedback from other people that seems like pity or amazement or whatever, I try to nip that in the bud. It's the kind of feedback that will keep me sick.

A good friend taught me that there's a big difference between letting yourself feel things, being sad or upset or whatever and pitying yourself and sabotaging yourself and she explained to me how emotionally draining I was at the time. And so I stopped. I don't indulge in it anymore. It took a while for me to get it but I think I've learned the difference between going to someone for comfort and getting them to feed the victim mentality. And I've learned how to be the kind of person who can offer that in return. Love, support, acceptance, without enabling the person. I try anyway. My best friends are the ones who love me, but will tell me to "cut that shit out right now" if I start getting too emo about stuff.

I think we're all in different places with it. For some reason, Little One and me are the ones who spend most of the time in the body. The others seem content to ignore this world right now unless there's some pressing need for them to be in it. (Or for both Little One and me not to be in it: we like to spend time inside too and since I'm her mommy I like to spend some of my inside time with her.) So we're the ones with the most contact with the outside world. I'd rather things be more shared like they used to be but I don't suppose that's something that can be forced if I'm the only one unhappy with the arrangement.

Little One needs time to play with her bears and blowing bubbles and coloring, which she does when we're home alone. And she's also just starting to trust a few people (me, her godmother, and in her journal somewhat) and talk about abuse stuff which she never talked about before. I believe that if a kid is getting enough attention, the kid won't do obnoxious things to get attention, because they'll know they can get it in constructive ways. So I'm working on fostering that in her and giving her good kinds of attention. She's very well behaved, but does get a little clingy or overly scared that I'm not coming back if I disappear for a little while. We're working on that too.

Pthalo.

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

It's all the same. There are always going to be some people who seem to draw some kind of energy or validation or self worth or whatever through being high drama and being the center of attention at whatever cost. It's certainly not unique to the multiples.

It's not about whether or not multiples are more attention-grabbing, it's about the fact that when dealing with victims of abuse, multiple or not, there is tacit and overt approval and encouragement of the behavior, which has, in certain communities and contexts, made this behavior more prevalent. This isn't the case because they are multiple, but because the behavior was rewarded. Multiplicity is, in these contexts treated as the ultimate badge of victimhood. The fact that the system was in some cases victimising others doesn't become an issue, because they've been through so much. How could soomeone tell an abused person to stop behaving in a manner that hurts others around them? Pretty simple: Stop, you're hurting others, and yourself.

Now, the mental health community is going in the other direction. In theory, they don't want to foster that sort of behavior anymore. That's reasonable enough, when it's applied sensibly. It's not sensible to discount multiplicity when they were significantly responsible for that particular side effect. Instead of teaching the single or multi how to make it on their own, these groups teach them to depend on others to raise themselves. They degrade them, and now they want to deny their existance. In those social contexts, there is no middle ground.

Still, the survivor community does continue this practice, and shades of it can be seen in some attitudes present on forums where abuse survivors are public and open. In a tertiary fashion, it becomes present in the general multiplicity communities because people come with those attitudes, and occasionally get a rude awakening when they discover that people like them, may not accept that behavior that they have been taught to take for granted.

Unfortunately, in large portions of both the survivor and mental health communities, the idea of irresponsible, manipulative, and unhealthy or unethical attention-seeking behaviors, and multiplicity itself, is so linked, that promoting responsible behavior is too often equated with the disacknowledgement of multiple systems.

--Me

[silence1986.livejournal.com]

Before I comment on the article, let me give you soem background info that is relevant to my opinion. I am 19 and have had people in my mind for about 7 or 8 years. The people in my mind are pieces of myself, or "split off" insiders, but I am not DID for several reasons: 1. it is believed that DID can only come about in yung children and I was 11 when I started this, 2. I was not severely abused as a child, and 3. I don't lose time. The main reason whey I created my insiders was to cope with contradictory wualities/opinions that are all mine (I sometimes say it's just an outcome of adolescent identity development, although that's very simplistically stated). I also have a history of getting obsessed with psychiatric disorders if I recognize some featutres. This is not truly hypochondria, let alone malingering, but more cause my symptoms, that are very real, have no explanation and I then seek one.

Now as for this article, it points out many issues. Firstly, it's about whether DID is real or induced by therapists. I strongly believe that splitting can and does occur and a person may have insiders, and even know about them, long before they first saw a therapist or the like or had ever heard of DID. I had never heard of DID when I became first aware of my insiders and when I did hear of DID, I knew I didn't have it (even thought hat was in the summer of 2003, which was when I was most obsessed with psych disorders). Later, people have labelled me DID, starting from March 2004 on (when I was first opena bout my insiders), and I have consistently made clear that I don't have it.

Then, there is the stuff of whether DIDers are truly multiple or only act this way to get attention. I think there should be something in between, which is what the DID diagnosis says, as opposed to the MPD one: it's an identity disorder, and that means that it's a disorder of the concept a person has of him/herself, not a disorder of who the person is. People who split apart as a rsult of trauma pretend that their traumas are occurring to someone else and as a result of this dissociation, they develop their alters.

Now there is something about my own situation with regard to this: I am the first to acknowledge that my insiders are an identity issue, not a personality one. Yet I don't believe that this is the same as saying that I created my insiders to get attention. I'd been having them for over six years before I even told anyone I did! I just so hate it when folks can't think of a reason to do any undesirable behaviour but for "attention-seeking". Even for me any explanation would be more appropriate than this, while I'm a very questionnable case, so don't get so stupid as to blame all multiple sof malingering!

Then, of course, there's the issue of how to treat someone claiming to be multiple. As the writer of "creating hysteria" (don't remember who it was) says, it's more important to focus on what caused the multiplicity rather than just keep focusing on the alters, but just telling someone that they're not multiple or that they are malingering won't get them rid of the system. Sure I believe there are some people who fake multiplicity, as with any illness, but this is not a reason to believe that all multiplicity is attention-seeking.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

The people in my mind are pieces of myself, or "split off" insiders, but I am not DID for several reasons: 1. it is believed that DID can only come about in yung children and I was 11 when I started this, 2. I was not severely abused as a child, and 3. I don't lose time.

Many people on this group weren't severely abused as children and don't lose time either. Of course, many people on this group think of themselves as being multiple rather than MPD or DID, whether or not they split from trauma. Origins aren't ultimately as important as how a system conducts itself in day-to-day living-- whether someone split, due to abuse or other reasons, or was born multiple, or whatever, whether they're good at communicating with each other or not, it's possible to live functionally and happily as a system, without necessarily having to integrate or see a therapist.

Some people find that they actually do better as multiple, that it isn't a problem, and that they work better and are happier than they are trying to integrate-- some systems can't integrate. (A nurse who worked with multiples in a psychiatric institution reported that it wasn't unknown for systems to fake integration in order to get out of the hospital.)

There are several pages on the Internet by multiples who choose not to integrate, or feel it would be unnatural for them to do so. The userinfo for the community has links to a few of them.

[silence1986.livejournal.com]

Amorpha~Shiu:
I know that multiplicity is not the same as DID, that not all folks become multiple as a result of trauma (I know quite afew natural multiples) and that integration is not the best option for every system, but what I was reacting to was the article of this psych who encountered a woman diagnosed with DID (ie. the pathologicla model of multiplicity) who appeared to be just attention-seeking. As a person who is about as non-empowered as can be and yet who doesn't fit the pathological model of multiplicity at all (simply cause I don't meet hte criteria for DID), I however do have to point out what I just pointed aobut about it not always being just malingering. I agree that this may be true on several different grounds, ie. 1. Natural multiples who usually don't need treatment for their multiplicity at all, 2. The standard model survivor with DID, who usually truly do have a problem because of their trauma (I agree that empowerment and survivorship are not mutually exclusive, but that's something different entirely), and I would add 3. Those cases like me who don't have DID and/or are not survivors yet who are still troubled cause of multiplicity, ie. those that would be eager to consider themselves DID/survivors if they met the criteria/standards (and I even know some who do consider themselves DID despite clearly not meeting the criteria). I would be not at all surprised if people considered folks like me attention-seekers, even though I'm not making up my system to get attention, and I was explaining that to point out tha DIDers/multipels are not just attention-seekers.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

It's certainly possible to have operating system problems without fitting the diagnostic criteria for DID. I definitely take you seriously about that, and I don't think you're an attention-seeker. I've known several natural, non-abused systems who had problems with things like communication, mutual responsibility, etc, and many of them had problems that were made worse by people not taking them seriously-- accusing them of malingering, or being in denial of their abuse, or something.

[silence1986.livejournal.com]

Thanks Amorpha for your comment. I'm always kind of reluctant to post in multiples communities cause in the survivor/DID/psychological community I always have to explain how my multiplicity came about etc. (not a natural multiple but kind of hard to explain) yet in the empowered multiple communities I feel I ought to pretend that my system is working perfectly healthy. I by the way have no experience of being accused of attention-seeking, at least, no-one has told me openly (maybe cause I will readily tell everyone that I´m not DID--so they don't have to think I'm obsessed with yet another disorder), but it's indeed frustrating when folks false assume you have DID--for me not even so much cause I don't meet the criteria (I simply don't) but more cause folks are so paradigmiatic of how folks become multiple, ie. severe abuse before the age of whatever, which is simply not my situation.

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Being flawed isn't a problem, IMO. I imagine any system has it's moments. I do get bothered by how in some areas there is a lack of desire to learn from one's mistakes.

If you want, I'm happy to hear your explanation.

--Me