Jack Surguy : I’ve witnessed this phenomenon only once

In the years I’ve practiced psychology and mental health, I’ve witnessed such a phenomenon on only one occasion. I was working with a woman who’d been forced to watch her boyfriend’s execution at the hands of her own family. This person was highly traumatized and was barely functioning. While in session, she experienced a flashback, which is an extremely vivid memory that makes a person feel as if the trauma is occurring all over again. She just slumped down in her chair, sobbing, with her head resting on the nearby table.

This woman was darker-skinned, with very dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. I sat quietly as her crying subsided. She remained sitting quietly with her head down on the table. In a whisper, she asked me if she’d ever be able to function again. When I stated that I was very confident that she would, she turned her head and looked at me.

I sat in disbelief as she looked at me with very bright blue eyes. She just looked at me for maybe 10 seconds and then calmly said that she did have hope. She laid her head back down on the table and her body then seemed to slightly convulse. She exploded back into sobs, crying for a couple of minutes, and when she finally looked at me again, her eyes had returned to being dark brown.

What these studies suggest is that a person’s biological and physiological components can, in fact, be altered depending on the person’s state of mind and perception. In other words, changes at the genetic level can actually occur in relation to a person’s state of mind.

Source: https://www.themindfulword.org/2017/psychological-spiritual-therapy-power-minds/

It had been more than a decade since “B.T.” had last seen anything.

After suffering a traumatic accident as a young woman, doctors diagnosed her with cortical blindness, caused by damage to the visual processing centers in her brain. So she got a seeing eye dog to guide her and grew accustomed to the darkness.

Besides, B.T. had other health problems to cope with — namely, more than 10 wildly different personalities that competed for control of her body. It was while seeking treatment for her dissociative identity disorder that the ability to see suddenly returned. Not to B.T., a 37-year-old German woman. But to a teenage boy she sometimes became.

With therapy, over the course of months, all but two of B.T.’s identities regained their sight. And as B.T. oscillated between identities, her vision flicked on and off like a light switch in her mind. The world would appear, then go dark.

Writing in PsyCh Journal, B.T.’s doctors say that her blindness wasn’t caused by brain damage, her original diagnosis. It was instead something more akin to a brain directive, a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.

B.T.’s strange case reveals a lot about the mind’s extraordinary power — how it can control what we see and who we are.

To understand what happened with B.T. (who is identified only by her initials in the journal article) her doctors, German psychologists Hans Strasburger and Bruno Waldvogel, went all the way back to her initial diagnosis of cortical blindness. Her health records from the time show that she was subjected to a series of vision tests — involving lasers, special glasses, lights shined across a room — all of which demonstrated her apparent blindness. Since there was no damage to her eyes themselves, it was assumed that B.T.’s vision problems must have come from brain damage caused by her accident (the report does not say what exactly happened in the accident).

Waldvogel had no reason to doubt that diagnosis when B.T. was referred to him 13 years later for treatment for dissociative identity disorder, once called multiple personality disorder. B.T. exhibited more than 10 personalities, each of them varying in age, gender, habits and temperament. They even spoke different languages: some communicated only in English, others only in German, some in both (B.T. had spent time in an English-speaking country as a child but lived in Germany).

Then, four years into psychotherapy, something strange happened: Just after ending a therapy session, while in one of her adolescent male states, B.T. saw a word on the cover of a magazine. It was the first word she had read visually in 17 years.

At first, B.T.’s renewed sight was restricted to recognizing whole words in that one identity. If asked, she couldn’t even see the individual letters that made up the words, just the words themselves. But it gradually expanded, first to higher-order visual processes (like reading), then to lower-level ones (like recognizing patterns) until most of her personalities were able to see most of the time. When B.T. alternated between sighted and sightless personalities, her vision switched as well.

That’s when Waldvogel began doubting the cause of B.T.’s vision loss. It’s unlikely that a brain injury of the kind that can cause cortical blindness would heal instantaneously after such a long time. And even if it did, that didn’t explain why B.T.’s vision continued to switch on and off. Clearly something else was going on.

One explanation, that B.T. was “malingering,” or lying about her disability, was disproved by an EEG test. When B.T. was in her two blind states, her brain showed none of the electrical responses to visual stimuli that sighted people would display — even though B.T.’s eyes were open and she was looking right at them.

Instead, Waldvogel and Strasburger believe that B.T.’s blindness is pyschogenic (psychologically caused, rather than physical). Something happened — perhaps related to her accident — that caused her body to react by cutting out her ability to see. Even now, two of her identities retain that coping mechanism.

“These presumably serve as a possibility for retreat,” Strasburger told the neuroscience site Brain Decoder. “In situations that are particularly emotionally intense, the patient occasionally feels the wish to become blind, and thus not ‘need to see.'”

It’s not actually all that uncommon for people’s brains to stop them from seeing, even when their eyes work fine, the researchers say. When your two eyes see slightly different images — when squinting, for example — the brain will cut out one image to keep you from getting confused by the contradiction. Your brain also intervenes in visual processing when you focus on particular objects in your field of vision.

Responsibility for the information “gatekeeping” that kept B.T. from seeing everything she looked at may lie with the lateral geniculate nucleus, a sort of neural relay center that sends visual information down synaptic pathways into the brain’s information processors.

Perhaps more interesting than what it says about sight, though, is what B.T.’s story tells us about dissociative identity disorder (DID), the condition apparently at the root of her vision loss.

Though DID has been listed in psychiatry’s “Bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, since 1994 (and was recognized as “multiple personality disorder” for a decade and a half before that), there is still a large amount of skepticism about the diagnosis among experts and patients alike. For years before it became a psychiatric diagnosis, DID was known along with a host of other psychiatric conditions as “hysteria,” a term that gives you a sense of how it and its sufferers were viewed.

Modern critics of the diagnosis point out the absence of consensus on diagnostic criteria and treatment and blame sensational stories of DID patients like the 1976 TV movie”Sybil” for creating an “epidemic” of MPD diagnoses. The 1990s saw a spate of lawsuits from patients subjected to dubious treatments for multiple personality disorder they said they didn’t have, and many began to believe that DID was not so much treated by psychiatrists but induced by them through the power of suggestion.

At the very least, it’s thought that DID may only be a product of fragmentation at high levels of thinking — a breakdown in a brain dealing with complex emotions.

But Strasburger and Waldvogel say their finding is evidence that DID can unfold at a very basic, biological level. After all, it was not just high-level cognitive functions, like reading, that were affected by B.T.’s condition — even basic things like depth perception were difficult for her. And B.T.’s doctors could see all that playing out in her brain right in front of them on the EEG.

The case study shows that DID “is a legitimate psycho-physiologically based syndrome of psychological distress,” Dr. Richard P. Kluft, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine not associated with the study, told Brain Decoder. The condition is not just a product of culture and psychiatrists’ suggestions, he said; as in B.T.’s case, it “represents the mind’s attempt to compartmentalize its pain.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/24/the-blind-woman-who-switched-personalities-and-could-suddenly-see/

Multiple personality disorders graphically illustrate how the mind can affect the body in extraordinary ways. Scientists have incorporated people with MPD to study many kinds of phenomenon. The personalities in a multiple have a strong psychological separation from one another. Each has his own name, age, abilities and memories. Many times each subpersonality has his/her own style of handwriting, cultural background, artistic talents, foreign language fluency, and IQ.

Even more astonishing are the biological changes that change with each personality. Often medical conditions possessed by one personality will disappear when another personality takes over. Dr. Bennett Braun of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality, in Chicago, has documented a case in which all of a patient's personalities were allergic to orange juice, except one. If the man drank orange juice when he was being one of the allergic personalities, he would break out in a terrible rash. But, if he switched to his non-allergic personality, the rash would instantly start to fade, and he could drink orange juice with no medical consequences.

Dr. Francine Howland, a Yale psychiatrist who speacializes in treating multiples, relates an even more striking incident involving a patient and a wasp sting. At one appointment, the man showed up with with his eye completely swollen and shut from a wasp sting. Howland called an ophthalmologist, wanting to get the patient treatment for the sting.

Unfortunately, the ophthalmologist could not see the man for an hour, and because the man was in severe pain, Howland decided to try an alternate personality. As it turned out, another personality was anesthetic, feeling absolutely no pain. The pain ended, but something else happened...by the time the man got to his eye appointment, the swelling was gone and his eye had returned to normal. Seeing no need to treat him, the ophthalmologist sent him home. After a while, however, the man's original personality took control back, and the pain and swelling returned with a vengence. The next day, he went back to the ophthalmologist and was treated. The eye doctor phoned Howland because "he thought time was playing tricks on him." He wanted to make sure that it was the day before when Dr. Howland had phoned him about treatment for the man. Howland laughed, told him that the man had multiple personality disorder and explained what had happened.

"Allergies are not the only things multiples can switch on and off. If there was any doubt as to the control the unconscious mind has over drug effects, it is banished by the pharmacological wizardry of the multiple." By changing personalities, a drunk person can instantly become sober, and different personalities within a multiple also respond differently to various drugs. Braun records a case in which 5 mg of Valium sedated one personality, while 100 mg had little or no effect on another. Often one or more personalities of a mutliple are children. While an adult personality is at the forefront and takes an adult dose of medicine he/she is fine, but, if one of the child personalities abruptly takes over, he/she may overdose.

With a change of personalities in multiples, scars appear and disappear, burn marks do the same, as well as cysts! The multiple can change from being right-handed to being left-handed with ease and agility. Visual accuity can differ, so that some multiples have to carry two or three different pairs of glasses. One personality can be color blind and the other not. Even EYE COLOR can change! Speech pathologist, "Christy Ludlow has found that the voice pattern for each of a multiple's personalities is different, a feat that required such a deep physiological change that even the most accomplished actor can not alter his voice enough to disguise his voice pattern."

One multiple, admitted to the hospital for diabetes complications, baffled her doctors by showing no symptoms when, without warning, one of her nondiabetic personalities took control,. The patient instantly showed no signs of being diabetic. There are also accounts of epilepsy coming and going with personality changes. Robert A. Phillips, Jr., a psychologist, reports that he has even seen tumors appear and disappear, although he doesn't specify what type of tumors.

Multiples tend to heal faster. For example, there are several cases on record of third-degree burns healing with extraordinary rapidity. Most eerie of all, at least one researcher, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the therapist whose pioneering treatment of Sybil Dorsett (of the book and movie "Sybil") is convinced that multiples do not age as fast as other people.

How could such things be? We are deeply attached to the inevitability and "reality" of things. If we have bad vision, we have it for life; and, if we suffer from diabetes, we do not for a moment think our condition might vanish with a change in mood or thought. But the phenomenon of multiple personalities challenges this belief and offers further evidence of just how much our psychological states can affect the biology of the body. The systems of control that must be in place to account for such capacities is mind-boggling. An allergic reaction to a wasp sting is a complex process, involving organized activity of antibodies, the production of histamine, the dilation of blood vessels, etc.

Most amazing is the fact that after a multiple has undergone therapy and reconciled his/her personalities into a single personality, he or she can STILL make these changes at will. This suggests that somewhere in our psyches, we all have the ability to control these things. Some scientists believe that this is possible because our universe is holographic in nature.

A new paper reports the fascinating and perplexing case of a woman who reported that she was host to multiple personalities – some of whom were completely blind. The paper is called Sight and blindness in the same person: gating in the visual system, authored by German psychologists Hans Strasburger and Bruno Waldvogel.

The patient in this case, “B. T.”, aged 33, has a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID), a condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder (MPD). B. T. originally became blind (or seemingly so) following an accident at the age of 20. Her eyes were not damaged in the accident; instead, doctors attributed her loss of vision to brain damage: cortical blindness.

Years later, B. T. entered psychotherapy for her DID. In therapy, she manifested ten different identities or personalities, which differed in “name, reported age, gender, attitudes, voice, gesture, facial expressions” and other characteristics. Such a multiplicity of selves is not uncommon in DID patients.

But in B. T.’s fourth year in therapy, something unexpected happened: she regained her sight – but only some of the time. Some of B. T.’s personalities became able to see, while others remained blind. Strasburger and Waldvogel write that “Sighted and blind states could alternate within seconds.”

Now, by itself, this would be an odd psychological case study, but rather difficult to interpret, because the whole case would revolve around B. T.’s self-reports of her blindness. For instance, one interpretation would be that B. T. was malingering, for instance – that she had “made up” the blindness, and possibly also the extra personalities.

But Strasburger and Waldvogel present some remarkable evidence that seems to exclude malingering as a possibility: they show that when B. T. was “blind”, her brain actually didn’t respond to visual stimuli. To do this, they used EEG to measure visual evoked potentials (VEPs). A VEP is an electrical response generated in the visual cortex of the brain in response to stimulation. The absence of VEPs is suggestive of blindness.

Strasburger and Waldvogel show that B. T.’s brain generates normal VEPs when she’s in a “sighted” personality state, but that when she’s “blind”, there is a total absence of VEPs:

In the “sighted” condition, a sharp downwards peak is visible at approximately 100 milliseconds after the stimulus is presented. But the same stimulus evokes no detectable response in the “blind” condition.

This is really quite something.

The authors say that B. T.’s blindness must have a “psychogenic” origin, because of how quickly it comes and goes. No known biological process could cause such a rapid alternation between blindness and perfect vision (recall that B. T. can go from one state to another “within seconds.”)

So what could be going on? Strasburger and Waldvogel say that the answer may lie in processes that exist in the normal brain to temporarily “block out” visual input:

The phenomenon of a temporary suppression of the afferent neural signal in the healthy human that is reversible at any time is more common than it would first appear. Images of the two eyes that contradict each other temporarily, for example, when squinting or with dichoptic stimulation, lead to a transient, partial or full, suppression of one eye’s image…

So brain mechanisms are present that allow modulation of the incoming information, acting on either the entire visual field or some parts thereof.

On this view, B. T. not only genuinely believes she is blind – she really isblind (some of the time.) Some neural pathway is active which prevents visual information from reaching her brain. Her blindness is “psychogenic” but also very real.

Are there any more prosaic explanations? My first thought on reading this paper was ‘what if she’s just closing her eyes, or looking away?’, but Strasburger and Waldvogel say that an experienced VEP tester was observing her during the procedure to make sure she was looking at the stimuli. Furthermore, they note that B. T. got a VEP test when she first went blind, and that infrared eye-tracking was used to verify that she was looking at the stimuli. No VEPs were detected that time.

The authors do note, however, that it’s theoretically possible that B. T. could have been (consciously or unconsciously) de-focussing her eyes in such a way that all visual input was blurry. They note that this would not be easy for an observer to spot, but they say that it would have to be an extreme level of de-focussing to blur out the stimuli used in a VEP test, which are large and very bright. Still, I would want some further testing to exclude this possibility before I was convinced by the “neural gating” hypothesis.

Source: Strasburger H, & Waldvogel B (2015). Sight and blindness in the same person: gating in the visual system. PsyCh Journal PMID: 26468893

When Timmy drinks orange juice he has no problem. But Timmy is just one of close to a dozen personalities who alternate control over a patient with multiple personality disorder. And if those other personalities drink orange juice, the result is a case of hives.

The hives will occur even if Timmy drinks orange juice and another personality appears while the juice is still being digested. What's more, if Timmy comes back while the allergic reaction is present, the itching of the hives will cease immediately, and the water-filled blisters will begin to subside.

Such remarkable differences in the same body are leading scientists to study the physiology of patients with multiple personalities to assess how much psychological states can affect the body's biology, for better or worse. The researchers are discovering that such patients offer a unique window on how the mind and body can interact.

Researchers feel that the study of these patients may also have significant implications for people with the medical disorders that are found to differ from one sub-personality to another. If the mechanisms through which these differences occur can be discovered, it may be possible to teach people some similar degree of control over these problems.

''We're finding the most graphic demonstrations to date of the power of the mind to affect the body,'' said Dr. Bennet Braun, a psychiatrist at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, and a leading pioneer in the research.

''If the mind can do this in tearing down body tissue, I think it suggests the same potential for healing,'' said Dr. Braun, who directs a 10-bed psychiatric unit that uses psychotherapy, hypnosis and drugs to treat people with multiple personalities. He said he believed that the drastic physical changes seen in patients going from personality to personality could be duplicated for emotionally normal people under hypnosis.

In people with multiple personalities, there is a strong psychological separation between each sub-personality; each will have his own name and age, and often some specific memories and abilities. Frequently, for example, personalities will differ in handwriting, artistic talent or even in knowledge of foreign languages.

Multiple personalities typically develop in people who were severely and repeatedly abused as children, apparently as a means to protect themselves against the pain of the abuse. Often only one or two of the sub-personalities will be conscious of the abuse, while others will have no memory or experience of the pain. It is unclear why some abused children develop the syndrome while others do not.

For more than a century clinicians have occasionally reported isolated cases of dramatic biological changes in people with multiple personalities as they switched from one to another. These include the abrupt appearance and disappearance of rashes, welts, scars and other tissue wounds; switches in handwriting and handedness; epilepsy, allergies and color blindness that strike only when a given personality is in control of the body.

Today, using refined research techniques, scientists are bringing greater rigor to the study of multiple personalities and focusing on a search for the mechanisms that produce the varying physiological differences in each personality.

Reaction to Medication

One of the problems for psychiatrists trying to treat patients with multiple personalties is that, depending which personality is in control, a patient can have drastically different reactions to a given psychiatric medication. For instance, it is almost always the case that one or several of the personalities of a given patient will be that of a child. And the differences in responses to drugs among the sub-personalities often parallel those ordinarily found when the same drug at the same dose is given to a child, rather than an adult.

In a recent book, ''The Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder,'' published by the American Psychiatric Press, Dr. Braun describes several instances in which different personalities in the same body responded differently to a given dose of the same medication. A tranquilizer, for instance, made a childish personality of one patient sleepy and relaxed, but gave adult personalities confusion and racing thoughts. An anti-convulsant prescribed for epilepsy that was given another patient had no effect on the personalities except those under the age of 12.

In another patient, 5 milligrams of diazepam, a tranquilizer, sedated one personality, while 100 milligrams had little effect on another personality.

Some of the recent findings on such changes will be reported at an international conference on multiple personalities that Dr. Braun will convene next October in Chicago. The reports will include other physical differences from personality to personality, such as seizures, eating disorders, and different neurological and sensory profiles.

Optical Differences

One of those reports will be on a study by Scott Miller, a psychologist at the University of Utah, of optical differences in people with multiple personality. Dr. Miller had an opthalmologist give a battery of standard optical tests to 10 patients and a control group of nonpatients. After each battery, the opthalmologist would leave the room while the patient switched personalties, sometimes at will and sometimes with prompting, then return and repeat the test.

The study included a control group of another 10 people who feigned switching personalties, unknown to the examiner, to remove a potential source of bias.

The study, which will be published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, found that there were significant changes in visual acuity, in the shape and curvature of the eye and in refraction from personality to personality in the real patients, but hardly any among the others tested.

The opthalmic exam also found some clinical differences apart from the standard tests. One woman had three personalities, aged 5, 17 and 35. When the five-year-old was examined, she had a condition, common in childhood, known as ''lazy eye,'' in which one eye turns in toward the nose. The condition was not present in the 17-year-old or the 35-year-old.

Similar differences were found in other patients. ''One patient had had his left eye injured in a fight, so that it turned out,'' said Dr. Miller. ''But the condition only appeared in one of his personalities. It disappeared in the others, nor was there any evidence of muscle imbalance.''

The study corroborates an observation of vision differences that had often been made by those treating multiple-personality cases. ''Many patients have told me they have a drawer full of eyeglasses at home, and they never are quite sure which to bring when they go out,'' Dr. Braun said.

How Mind Regulates Biology

The medical phenomena being discovered in multiple personalities stretch the imagination, but researchers believe that they represent only the extreme end of a normal continuum. The effects found in these patients, they say, are graphic examples of the power of states of mind to regulate the body's biology. By studying them, researchers hope to find clues to links between mind and body that can help people with other psychiatric problems, as well as point the way to powers of healing that may one day be of use in treating normal medical patients.

The lesson for psychophysiology from multiple personalities is that a given personality has as its biological underpinning a specific pattern of mental and biological states, according to Dr. Frank Putnam, a psychiatrist at the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology at the National Institute of Health. In a sense, Dr. Putnam said, there is a ''biological self'' that corresponds to the psychological self; as the psychological one shifts, so does the biological.

''We have a work self and a play self, for instance, but we are the same person,'' said Dr. Putnam. ''But each of those selves has its own repertoire of emotional states, memories and, to some extent, an underlying biological pattern. Those minor differences are seen in their extremes in the patients with multiple personality.''

The biological differences found in the patients, Dr. Putnam believes, reflect the range of states of mind that each sub-personality typically manifests. Many of them are extreme: the terrror of a frightened child, the hatred of an avenger.

''A given state of consciousness has its biological reality,'' said Dr. Putnam. ''By keeping these states separate and distinct, the patients create biologically separate selves.''

Mechanism of Change

Dr. Putnam, who has done extensive research on patients with multiple personalities, is now focusing his interest on how they switch from one personality to another. During the switch, there is typically a period of seconds or even minutes when heart rate, breath rate and other physiological markers show a disorganization, which is followed by a new pattern typical of the personality that is emerging.

Some of the most striking changes occur in the tension levels of the person's facial muscles. It is almost as though the person were donning a new face, according to Dr. Putnam.

The changes also include blood flow patterns in the brain, according to findings by Dr. Putnam and other researchers. The blood flow changes were observed while different personalities performed the same mental tasks.

''The transitions in children from one extreme state to another is every bit as abrupt as in the patients,'' said Dr. Putnam. ''You see it in the child who switches from crying to laughing, or who cries himself to sleep. Normally, adults don't switch that abruptly; one of the tasks of growing is learning to keep the switching under control. Children have to make an effort so that their school self doesn't behave like their home self, for instance.''

In the children who respond to severe abuse by developing multiple personalities, Dr. Putnam believes, the usual integration of various ''selves'' did not occur. Such children seem to make use of two psychological capacities to protect themselves against the pain of abuse. One is the ability to enter an altered state of consciousnsess, such as a hypnotic trance, an ability that peaks at around the age of nine. Another is the capacity to dissociate, to separate one aspect of experience from another.

''It's adaptive for the children to keep the states separate, so that they can keep the awareness of the abuse from their other selves,'' said Dr. Putnam. ''That way the feelings and memories don't flood them while they are at school, for instance.''

Universal Phenomenon

The switches that patients with multiple personality go through are a special case of a universal phenomenon, according to an article by Dr. Putnam in the current issue of Dissociation, a journal devoted to multiple personality and related disorders. Anyone who goes from one extreme emotional state to another undergoes major biological shifts akin to those observed in those with multiple personality, according to Dr. Putnam. They are no different from the plunges into extreme emotion seen, for instance, in patients who go from depression to a manic state, or in someone having a panic attack, he said.

''But the switches are harder to catch in other disorders; they're more random,'' said Dr. Putnam. ''But some multiples can switch six times in an hour. They're a better laboratory for study.''

Through studying such patients, Dr. Braun believes, wider medical applications may be discovered. He points, for instance, to one patient who had a blood pressure of 150/110 when one personality was in control, and a pressure of only 90/60 when another personality took over.

''They can teach us much about the mechanisms by which we shift from one state of consciousness to another,'' Dr. Putnam said. ''Most of psychiatry deals with helping people shift from one unpleasant state to another, more pleasant one.''

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/28/science/probing-the-enigma-of-multiple-personality.html

In our weekly Psychological & Spiritual Therapy column, therapist Jack Surguy is offering professional advice to The Mindful Word readers for all those questions and problems you have wanted to discuss with someone qualified and caring.

If you would like Jack to assist you in any areas of your life and relationships, fill out this form. He will respond to your questions through this column, normally published every Tuesday.

Based on a question raised by a reader about her ability to disappear into a different headspace when situations became “out of kilter,” as she put it—her ability to completely (mentally) remove herself from her physical situation, often making it necessary for her to jerk herself back into her immediate “now”—we’re going to go in a bit of a different direction this week.

In discussing a specific disorder, we’ll look at what possibilities this disorder may suggest when it comes to how we relate to our own physical bodies.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association released the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). It was within the DSM-III that the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) made its first appearance. In 1994, the DSM-IV renamed MPD as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and a publication entitled “Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults” was released by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.

The diagnosis of DID is extremely rare. Reports indicate that around 0.4 to 1 percent of people in community samples meet the criteria for this disorder.

Though there remains considerable debate regarding the validity of this disorder, researchers and clinicians do agree that the central issue in DID pertains to dissociation, which has been defined as “a disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control and behaviour.”

We’ve all experienced dissociation to some degree

Many of us have experienced a time when we were driving and then suddenly realized we either didn’t know where we were or had missed our exit miles ago. This is a form of dissociation. Our bodies seem to go into an auto-pilot mode in which we’re still responding to environmental cues (like keeping the car on the road), but are doing so in a way that lacks a full conscious awareness of exactly what we’re doing or where we’re going. Dissociation is highly correlated with trauma.

In her 2013 book, Restoring the Shattered Self: A Christian Counselor’s Guide to Complex Trauma, author Heather Davediuk Gingrich titled a section “Dissociation: God’s Gift to the Traumatized Child.”

When people are forced to endure extremely stressful situations, such as child abuse, the human mind has a way of protecting itself from those experiences. In ways not fully understood, the mind is capable of fully blocking out, from conscious memory, experiences that may be too emotionally charged for a person to acknowledge and process in a safe manner.

While a person is enduring a traumatic event, some people just “go away” in their mind to such a degree that the experience isn’t fully integrated into conscious biographical memory. Amazingly enough, however, a person may still respond to “triggers” or reminders of the traumatic event without knowing why. What’s even more amazing is that these people may also experience what’s referred to as “spontaneous” recovery of a traumatic memory, through which they’re able to remember the event in intense, vivid detail.

Taking on a life of its own

According to many theories, when a person (especially a child) is forced to endure particularly intense, repeated traumas, the dissociative experience accompanying the traumatic events may be powerful enough that a kind of “split” takes place in the person’s personality. The split-off or dissociated personality, typically the part that experienced the trauma, can then take on a life of its own—as astonishing as that sounds. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) lists the following as criteria for the disorder:

Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession. The disruption of marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual.

Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.

The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

The disturbance is not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice. Note: In children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.

The symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g. blackouts or chaotic behavior during alcohol intoxication) or another medical condition (e.g. complex partial seizures).

There’s some research that does appear to support the existence of DID, which can be read in more detail below in the “Research and Addendum Notes.”

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon only once

In the years I’ve practiced psychology and mental health, I’ve witnessed such a phenomenon on only one occasion.

I was working with a woman who’d been forced to watch her boyfriend’s execution at the hands of her own family. This person was highly traumatized and was barely functioning. While in session, she experienced a flashback, which is an extremely vivid memory that makes a person feel as if the trauma is occurring all over again. She just slumped down in her chair, sobbing, with her head resting on the nearby table.

This woman was darker-skinned, with very dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. I sat quietly as her crying subsided. She remained sitting quietly with her head down on the table. In a whisper, she asked me if she’d ever be able to function again. When I stated that I was very confident that she would, she turned her head and looked at me.

I sat in disbelief as she looked at me with very bright blue eyes. She just looked at me for maybe 10 seconds and then calmly said that she did have hope. She laid her head back down on the table and her body then seemed to slightly convulse. She exploded back into sobs, crying for a couple of minutes, and when she finally looked at me again, her eyes had returned to being dark brown.

What these studies suggest is that a person’s biological and physiological components can, in fact, be altered depending on the person’s state of mind and perception. In other words, changes at the genetic level can actually occur in relation to a person’s state of mind.

How does this apply to readers of The Mindful Word?

Mindfulness meditation is a practice in which our state of mind and perceptions are altered during practice. Research is now providing evidence supporting the belief that mindfulness meditation can literally change your body at a genetic level.

In a study by Rosenkranz et al. (2016)8 the researchers investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice. Results from a group of experienced meditators were compared to those from a group of untrained control participants who engaged in quiet, non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating processes and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.

In another study, Carlson et al. (2014)9 found that mindfulness meditation altered the genetic processing of cancer patients in a manner that made the patients’ bodies more conducive to health and recovery.

The power of our minds

In writing about these exciting findings, I decided to first discuss the profound biological, neurological and psychological changes that can ensue when severe trauma occurs. I did this to help the reader understand that our minds are extremely powerful and can alter our biology in profound ways we previously thought impossible.

SEE ALSO: MENTAL FENG SHUI: Operating from a renovated belief system

SEPTEMBER 2, 2021

Current research is now demonstrating that mindfulness practice can also alter our biology, even if this happens in less dramatic ways when compared to the effects of trauma. However, you must consider the fact that trauma is often a life-changing event. The person prior to the traumatic event is different from the person after the event. Life has been radically changed.

But what if we approached our mindfulness practice in a radical manner? What if we allowed the insights we often gain in meditation to truly transform the way we perceive the world and act within it? According to research, if we did just that, we could literally change our biological and neurological processing in such a way that our genetics would be altered. In other words, in a very real sense, we could truly become new people who’d be able to view the world differently.

RESEARCH AND ADDENDUM NOTES

Research by Shepard and Braun monitored refraction, visual acuity, ocular tension, keratometry, colour vision, and visual fields in DID patients and found changes in these measures among each patient’s varying identities or personalities1.

In another study by Ludwig et al2, the visual evoked potentials (VERs) were studied with a patient diagnosed with DID. The visual evoked potential (VEP), or visual evoked response (VER) is a measurement of the electrical signal recorded at the scalp over the occipital cortex, in response to light stimulus. The light-evoked signal, small in amplitude and hidden within the normal electroencephalographic (EEG) signal, is amplified by repetitive stimulation and time-locked, signal-averaging techniques, separating it from the background EEG readings. The results indicated that two dissociated personalities had prominent and similar VERs, a third personality had none and a fourth personality had only a small potential2. In similar studies, Larmore3 and Pitblado and Densen-Gerber4 reported differences in VERs in their DID patients.

In a very interesting study, Braun (1983a)5 found differences in VERs in the personalities of two DID patients. However, after successful treatment, the patients’ post-integration VERs were different from any of their pre-integration VERs.

Densen-Gerber (1986)6 reported on two patients who exhibited unusual dermatological variations. The first patient would develop symbolic needle track marks when she’d switch to a drug-addicted personality. The second would develop welts and marks on his back and legs when undergoing flashbacks of physical beatings.

Clinicians have also described anecdotal evidence in which DID patients had variations in allergic reactions and differential responses to medications across dissociated identities, as well as reports indicating that eye colour even changes across varying dissociated personalities. In a more recent study, Reinders et al. (2006)7 found that patients with DID neurologically processed information in different ways. In other words, a person’s brain reacted differently to stimuli across different dissociated identities.

FOOTNOTES

1 Shepard, K.R & Braun, B.G. (1985). Visual changes in multiple personality. In B.G. Braun (Ed), PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIPLE PERSONALITY/DISSOCIATIVE STATES, (p. 85). Chicago: Rush-Presbyterian-St Luke’s Medical Center.

2 Ludwig, AM., Brandsma, J.M., Wilbur, C.B., Benfeldt, F., & Jameson, D.H. (1972). The objective study of a multiple personality, or, are four heads better than one? ARCHIVES OF GENERAL PSYCHIATRY. 26, 298-310

3 Larmore,K,Ludwig, A.M., & Cain, RL. (1977).Multiple personality: an objective case study. BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY, 131,35-40.

4 Pitblado, D., & Densen-Gerber, J. (1986). Pattern-evoked potential differences among the personalities of a multiple: some new phenomena. PROCEEDINGS OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIPLE PERSONALITY/DISSOCIATIVE STATES,In B.G. Braun (ed.), (p. 123). Chicago: Rush-Presbyterian-St. Lukes Medical Center.

5 Braun, B.G. (1983a). Neurophysiologic changes in multiple personality. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CLINICAL HYPNOSIS, 26,84-92.

6 Densen-Gerber, J. (1986). The occurrence of stigmata in multiple personality/dissociative states. In B. G. Braun (Ed), PROCEEDINGS OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIPLE PERSONALITY/DISSOCIATIVE STATES. (p. 74). Chicago: Rush-Presbyterian-St Luke’s Medical Center.

7 Psychobiological Characteristics of Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Symptom Provocation Study Reinders, A.A.T. Simone et al. Biological Psychiatry , Volume 60 , Issue 7 , 730 – 740

8 Rosenkranz, M. A., Lutz, A., Perlman, D. M., Bachhuber, D. R. W., Schuyler, B. S., MacCoon, D. G., & Davidson, R. J. (2016). Reduced stress and inflammatory responsiveness in experienced meditators compared to a matched healthy control group. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 68, 117-25. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2016.02.013. PMCID: PMC4851883

9 Carlson, L. E., Beattie, T. L., Giese-Davis, J., Faris, P., Tamagawa, R., Fick, L. J., Degelman, E. S. and Speca, M. (2015), Mindfulness-based cancer recovery and supportive-expressive therapy maintain telomere length relative to controls in distressed breast cancer survivors. Cancer, 121: 476–484. doi:10.1002/cncr.29063

Source: https://www.themindfulword.org/2017/psychological-spiritual-therapy-power-minds/

5 Shocking Dissociative Identity Disorder Cases That Will Make You Think

For decades, researchers have focused on the psychological difficulties that present in dissociative identity disorder cases. But now they are realising there is another issue.

Typically we associate dissociative identity disorder cases with multiple personalities or split personalities. So from the very start, we are exploring what’s happening with the identity or personality. As a result, previous studies have tended to look at the changing character traits of the person.

But things have changed. Now researchers know that people who suffer from this disorder can also undergo remarkable physical changes. And this is where it gets interesting. Because understanding how our minds can change our body could help in other medical areas.

Early Scientific Dissociative Identity Disorder Cases

Early scientific studies on dissociative identity disorder cases were pretty rudimentary. Dr. Morton Prince, a neurologist in the early 20th century, studied the galvanic skin’s response during multiple personality episodes. But later research showed that there were other, more advanced physical symptoms.

Patients reported a range of different symptoms, including:

• headaches

• heart palpitations

• pain

• gastrointestinal problems

• changes in menstruation

• sexual dysfunction

• vision

• handwriting

Researchers were able to record variations in brain wave activity, respiratory and cardiac activity, blood flow to the brain and more. It seemed incredible. In the past, the general consensus was that people with dissociative identity disorders were somehow malingering or fabricating their symptoms. Now there was real proof of a serious medical condition. So how is this even possible?

Dr. Frank Putnam is a psychiatrist and works at the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology at the National Institute of Health. He thinks it is easier to understand how the mind can influence the body if we look at ourselves in two parts. We have a ‘biological self’ and a ‘psychological self’. So when one switches, so does the other.

“We have a work self and a play self, for instance, but we are the same person. But each of those selves has its own repertoire of emotional states, memories and, to some extent, an underlying biological pattern. Those minor differences are seen in their extremes in the patients with multiple personalities.”

So when a person with dissociative identity disorder switches personality, they will also change biologically. Furthermore, these changes can be enormous.

“A given state of consciousness has its biological reality. Keeping these states separate and distinct, the patients create biologically separate selves.” Dr. Putnam

5 Examples of Dissociative Identity Disorder Cases

Allergies

In one interesting case, a young man with dissociative identity disorder has no allergic symptoms drinking orange juice when he is his true self. But it appears that his other personalities are allergic. As such, when they take over, he experiences hives.

Stranger still is that if he drinks the juice as himself but a personality appears whilst it is being digested, the hives will still appear. Even more strange is that if he drinks the juice as another personality and has an allergic reaction, but then comes back as himself, the hives disappear.

Skin

One study examined a woman with an undiagnosed rash on her skin. This woman was admitted to hospital with an inexplicable rash on her left arm and was found to suffer from multiple personalities. Medical staff discovered that during the night, one of these personalities had been placing poison ivy on her left arm with her gloved right hand.  This caused the rash.

She had no knowledge of these nightly excursions. However, when access was restricted to the plant, lesions appeared on the left arm as usual. Dissociative identity disorder cases like these are helpful. This is because they diagnose patients with this disorder in the first instance when they might present with another condition.

Vision

This study examined the extraordinary ability of a blind woman who regained her sight. A 37-year-old blind German woman was able to see, but only when her personality switched to a teenage boy.

‘B.T’ suffered an accident at a young age which left her with damage to the visual processing area of the brain. This means her eyes function normally, but her brain cannot process the information it receives.

However, during a therapy session to help her cope with her dissociative identity disorder, BT suddenly regained her sight. As she switched between personalities, her vision also switched on and off like a light. BT managed to regain her sight in all of two of her personalities after months of therapy.

Eye Colour

A family had forced a woman to be present as they executed her boyfriend. As a result of this terrible trauma, she developed a dissociative identity disorder. The woman was dark-skinned with brown hair and brown eyes.

During a therapy session, she experienced a particularly disturbing flashback of the event. She questioned whether she could ever live a normal life again and turned to the therapist. Her eyes had changed from deep brown to a bright blue. They remained that colour for about 10 seconds before changing back to brown.

Handwriting

Changes in handwriting are amongst one of the most common symptoms of physical changes in dissociative identity disorder cases. In fact, studies show that 37% of patients with the disorder report changes to their handwriting style.

Not only that but when examined by forensic handwriting experts, analysis revealing striking differences between samples provided when switching between personalities. In fact, changes in handwriting are now such an indicator of dissociative identity disorder cases that experts are using it to diagnose patients.

This is because handwriting samples from the broader general public tend to convey a wider range of emotions and experiences. By contrast, samples from those with multiple personalities often reveal specific memories and emotions. And this can be helpful, not only in the diagnosis but in the treatment as well.

“They can teach us much about the mechanisms by which we shift from one state of consciousness to another,” Dr. Putnam said. ”Most of psychiatry deals with helping people shift from one unpleasant state to another, more pleasant one.”

What Research into Dissociative Identity Disorder Cases Can Show Us

These dissociative identity disorder cases show us the incredible power our minds have over our bodies. This demonstrates just how dramatic the changes can be if we can harness this extraordinary power in the right way.

Researchers believe that the key to better health is a move away from pharmaceuticals and using the power of our own bodies to heal. If we look at dissociative identity disorder cases, we can not only help those who suffer from multiple personalities but a wider population as well.

Source: https://www.learning-mind.com/dissociative-identity-disorder-cases/

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