Lying and Dissociative Identity Disorder

My wife and I have been on the healing journey from her dissociative identity disorder for 7 years. I’ve had a lot to learn as I’ve helped her heal in the trenches. And my time on wordpress began to expand my knowledge of the disorder as I saw how it affected the lives of others, too.

One of the women that I follow on wordpress did a recent entry in which she talked about how the mental health professionals she had sought help from had repeatedly disbelieved what she had told them. I was saddened and upset that the experts who should have been her advocate, instead treated her like a liar and denigrated her experience in spite of the evidence of trauma that they clearly noted.

And yet there is a component of dissociative identity disorder that may foster lies and exaggerations. If those of us who are helping don’t understand this aspect of the disorder, we could end up as damaging to our loved ones as those in this lady’s life were.

Before I enter into the subject of lying and d.i.d. I want to state that I would guess (as I only have real-life experience with my wife) it is rare for trauma victims to be perpetual liars about their past trauma or about how d.i.d. manifests itself in their lives. The trauma survivors I read on wordpress are clearly not narcissists! They find it shameful and horrifying that such things happened to them. There’s usually a part of them, often the host, who would do anything in the world to NOT believe what happened to them. They often wish the disorder and the telltale symptoms would simply go away. I could write so much more, but will leave it at this: I highly doubt people with d.i.d. are habitual liars in general especially when they are in a safe and loving environment.

However, there is a component of d.i.d. that fosters lying under certain conditions, and I want to discuss that so that we who help won’t hinder the healing process.

The first thing to remember is that d.i.d. develops in an environment of extreme physical, emotional or sexual abuse when a child is very young. This disorder arises as an abused child desperately tries to cope with massive, repeated trauma. Moreover, the victim will try to develop strategies to protect as much of his/her psyche as possible. Therefore, if lying is seen as a way to mitigate or escape punishment and abuse, the child may choose to lie rather than suffer more trauma. So a trauma victim can learn from an early age that lying is valid way to escape negative consequences. This doesn’t mean he/she will be a perpetual liar, but it does mean if things feel unsafe to a person with d.i.d., this habit may get triggered into action.

The second thing to remember is until a significant amount of healing has occurred, most people in the system will not be able to share memories with each other. So for an outsider like me, I can’t expect my interactions with one girl to be remembered by another. This is not lying. Until the dissociative walls come down, I have to treat each person in the system as I would physically different people who have their own set of experiences and memories. However, this understanding is often unavailable to all but the closest companions of one with d.i.d as it seems rare for someone with d.i.d. to ‘out’ her/himself in general.

The third thing I learned while helping my wife is maybe someone in the system simply wants to be believed no matter how outlandish a tale she tells. When Amy first came out, she used to tell me that she had been a spy in Europe for a time. At first I tried to refute her, but I finally decided to validate her and asked her to tell me more about it…and that was the last time she ever brought it up. I’m still not sure what to think about her proclamation as it was not typical of any of the girls or even of Amy in general. Maybe after a lifetime of being disbelieved, Amy had a need for someone to believe IN HER no matter what she told them. Maybe being a spy was simply a childhood game of imagination, and Amy wanted me to play along and not be an old fart. Or maybe it was a real memory wrapped up in the symbolic terms a child could understand. Whatever it was, it was important to Amy that I believe her without an explanation, and I was willing to be that kind of a person for her.

And lastly it’s important to understand that until each insider feels completely safe with an outsider, the rules of silence and secrecy may not allow him/her to tell the truth, or at least the entire truth. We on the outside do not have the right to expect any information that is not freely given. We must be willing to prove ourselves to be a safe and trustworthy person to each one in the system. That’s where I am right now with Jenny: my relationship with the other 7 girls did NOT earn me a pass with her. I must earn her trust just as I did the others.

As I read A’s blog entry and the comments past therapists had made about her, I was upset by the tone in those comments. I have learned enough about how our memories work to not make a big deal out of specifics and particulars. Only Tina in my wife’s system network shared many of her memories from the abuse with me: those memories were scant on details and mostly focused on some of the major lies and threats he told her and how she perceived herself as a result. A’s therapist seemed concerned about details and inconsistencies as if A’s memories were on trial. But my attitude was to validate whatever memories Tina shared and then work with her to change how those memories affected her self-perception today. When the evidence of trauma is overwhelming as it was to A’s therapists and to me for my girls, to get hung up on particulars and inconsistencies shows an incredibly naïve view of what is important. The trauma events in the past can rarely be proven ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt.’ What our focus as healing companions ought to be is changing the current self-perceptions that arise from those memories not whether the memories are perfectly accurate or not.

Another concern I had with the comments A’s therapists from the past had made may arise from our differences in self-perception: I kind of felt like the comments were rather arrogant and demeaning to the lady. A therapist spends a lifetime being treated as an expert in his/her particular area of expertise. And after being treated that way for so long, any person will begin to believe in his/her elevated opinions. But as a husband I have to live with the realities of a reciprocal relationship with my wife. Only Shelly out of the 8 girls in my wife’s system has told me, “I think you are perfect.” (I tell her to be sure the other girls hear her!) But the rest of the girls have a more realistic view of me. They know my faults and foibles. And so even though I have gained a lot of confidence in the last 7 years as I have learned to help them heal, I still approach them as equals. And they keep me humble any time I think my opinions and suggestions should be accepted by them more gratefully, lol.

And though A’s post didn’t talk about this, I have repeatedly seen on blogs where a therapist will categorize a patient as uncooperative if they don’t do what the therapist dictates. But I try not to make the girls feel trapped or cornered by me when I am trying to help them. By that I mean I don’t want them to feel obligated to accept my suggestions or help. To do so in the beginning would have potentially elicited evasion or deception from the girls because I was still proving what kind of a person I would be to them. In the beginning the girls couldn’t separate if they felt trapped by me from how they were trapped by their abusers in the past. So I tried to make it clear that the girls were never under obligations to do what I suggested, and there would be no consequences to our loving relationship when they refused my help or suggestions. Even now I must be careful never to be coercive in my desire to see them healed. My intentions may be noble, but I must wait upon each girl to decide for herself what course of action she will take as she heals.

In conclusion these are my suggestions to those who are helping their loved one heal from past trauma:

1) Validate whatever memories they may choose to share. Our job is not to look for inconsistencies like a trial lawyer. Our role is to be possibly one of the first people to believe in our loved ones when their primary caregivers from childhood obviously were AWOL or worse. Even if the claim is outlandish like Amy’s was about being a spy, what does that matter? I would rather err on the side of believing my spouse than prove that I’m just one more person that feels she is a liar.

2) Validate whatever feelings they may share. If they say, “I wish I were dead.” “I feel like a worthless piece of shit.” “I hate myself.” or whatever vile or self-deprecatory thing may come out of their mouths, don’t negate those feelings. We are NOT helping by negating how they feel. In fact, I will argue that those feelings are perfectly reasonable in light of the hell our loved ones had to endure as vulnerable children. Wouldn’t you want to die if you had to suffer repeated abuse with no hope of escape? Did not their abusers treat them like ‘a worthless piece of shit”? And self-hatred is completely rational when the child was the object of such hatred by his/her abusers. And so when we contradict their feelings or downplay them, we show ourselves to be obtuse and unsympathetic to the realities of the abuse.

Instead of saying, “I’m glad you aren’t dead!” say “I’m sorry you hurt so badly it hurts to keep living” while you give them a hug. Instead of saying, “You aren’t a worthless piece of shit to me” say “I’m sorry that the things in your past make you feel that way” as you offer to do something you know he/she appreciates. Instead of saying, “Well I don’t hate you!” say “I know you do, but I love you and am glad you are a part of my life.” We must learn to validate the feelings of our loved ones which they have based on the past, and then give them a reason to reevaluate their feelings and self-perceptions based upon their current experience of the loving relationship they have with us.

3) Affirm that your love and relationship will remain the same no matter how they respond to your efforts to help them. Right now I am trying to help multiple girls with multiple issues to keep them moving forward. Progress is always slower with them than I wish. They are slow to change and cautious because the trauma in the past taught them that sudden changes could bring dire consequences. So I try to affirm that I will love them no matter how they choose to respond to my suggestions. I know exactly how difficult it is to maintain a healthy and stable relationship when one person has d.i.d., and yet the stability or lack thereof will directly affect this entire area of lying and truthfulness and our loved one’s ability to heal from the past and move forward.

Honesty, lies, memories, trustworthiness. It gets kind of messy because of how dissociative identity disorder takes hold in a person’s life. Sometimes there are lies when a person in the system will fall back to past strategies for avoiding negative consequences. Sometimes there are inconsistencies because one person in the system will not know what another person did. And there might even be exaggerations or fabrications if someone in the system wants to ‘prove’ whether their healing companion truly is safe and if she/he believes in them no matter what the facts are. So our place is simply to believe in the ones we love and make them feel safe above all else. They need to know that we believe them when possibly everyone from their childhood didn’t. They need to know that we believe them when even many experts today don’t understand what is going on.

Blessing,

Sam, I Am