Multiple personalities : Characteristics of People with Multiple Personalities

Multiple personality or in psychological terms with Dissosiative Identity Disorder or abbreviated DID, is a disorder in which a person has several personalities in him, has several other selves in his body.

Some of the characteristics that appear in people with DID are the appearance of several alters (as previously mentioned, an alter is another personality in a person) that has characteristics that are very different from the main personality or what is called the identity of the host. Changes in people with DID can take several forms, namely:

• Child alters

Alter who appears younger than his actual age. Trauma that occurs in childhood is often associated with the development of this type of change. Child alters develops as long as the child continues to be a victim of violence.

A child will develop into a child alter because the experience of violence has been a very painful experience and a traumatic experience. So that the child will develop another personality that accepts pain while the main personality leaves the body and forgets the incident.

Personality changes can appear in the form of a family. Not only children, personality changes can also have a relationship with one another. For example, as younger siblings who take turns protecting the main personality from traumatic and painful experiences. When Child alters controls the body, people with DID can become childish in speech and behavior.

• Persecutor personality

This personality change is a personality that punishes other personalities, it is this personality that is involved in mutilative (self-destructive) behavior, such as self-harm, so that the worst is an attempt to commit suicide.

The Persecutor personality is usually associated with behavior that tends to be dangerous, for example by taking drugs to overdose or angrily, threatening and being rude to people who behave violently towards them.

The Persecutor personality usually appears because he has experienced violence, so he protects himself, protecting his main personality through violence as well. Usually these personality persecutor traits tend to be similar to the person who caused the personality to appear. If the father is the one who molesters the child, then the personality of the bully that appears is similar to the characteristics of the father.

• Protector

protective type, also known as the helper personality. The function of this alter personality is to advise on other personality changes or perform tasks that cannot be performed by the main personality, for example in engaging in sexual intercourse or hiding from people who threaten the safety of the main personality.

The helper personality sometimes has a function to replace and control changes from one personality change to another, or as a personality that acts as a passive observer and reports the experiences he or others have experienced to all other personalities. Apart from the three alters already mentioned, there are many other types of alters that may appear in other topics.

Another characteristic of a person with multiple personality disorder is usually that there are times when they experience amnesia. They tend to say that they sometimes have no memory of another personality controlling the body. They don't know what they have done, even if they have committed a crime like murder or rape, they won't remember it.

This means that one personality is aware of what he is doing, but the other personality has no memory or awareness of it. People with DID tend to find objects they don't know, don't know where they came from, maybe suddenly be at home, or often lose their own things. In fact, it is their other personalities that either carry or lose them.

A person with multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder will display the characteristics of other disorders, such as depression, mood disorders, suicidal tendencies, sleep disorders, panic, phobias, excessive use of addictive substances, hallucinations, and even so. You have an eating disorder.

The term dissociative identity disorder tends to refer to one of the defense mechanisms described by Freud as dissociation. This defense mechanism is considered to be the main cause of DID. Originally this concept of separation came from Pierre Janet.

The basic concept of dissociation is that consciousness is something that is usually integrated with life experiences, involving the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of the person concerned. However, in a state of stress, or in a state of experiencing traumatic experiences, awareness can be suppressed in such a way that in the end the experience cannot be remembered or forgotten and cannot be accessed by consciousness when the person's consciousness returns to normal.

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