A Multiple's View of the DSM-V Criteria (003) Transcript

Audio Episode New

<voices overlapping, music in background>
Hey!
Oh! Good morning — oh! Do we have to get up?
Keep it down; I’m trying to sleep.
Yeah, we want to make that recording.
What are we going to record today?
What? What recording?
You know, the one about multiplicity.
You know, the usual — we’re trying to make a difference in the world or something.
Oh, yeah.
Well — I just really wanna help people!
I have no idea what to say.
I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who have really good questions, and need really good answers.
Why talk to them? It’s not like anybody gives a shit.
Well what makes us an authority?
I don’t really think it matters how long we’ve been multiple, or how long we’ve known we’re multiple — we’re multiple!
<Aliessa laughs richly>

Welcome to Many Minds on the Issue, the podcast about dissociative identity disorder, by and for multiples, hosted by the Crisses. Hi, we're the Crisses. Today's podcast, we want to concentrate on the actual DSM criteria for dissociative identity disorder. There are five criteria, they're numbered A, B, C, D, and E. And these are the diagnostic criteria. So first, just a little spin off here into what diagnostic criteria means. Psychology is a young science, let's say. It's been around for about 130-150 years, as we know it today. It's actually a little less, but about 130-150 years. And major strides were made with Freud and Jung, and then Skinner and all the the other greats of psychology. And it went more from talk therapy, to results oriented therapy, mainly-probably from pressure from above from the people paying the bills. But also for results - for actually bringing people, you know, actual actional—actionable results, where Freudian therapy could take much longer to get anywhere. That said, there's still a good bit of talk therapy going on out there. And I can talk about that at some point from, from the multiples point of view. But as a student of psychology, I did actually take a good number of psychology courses and also read a good bit of psychology textbooks and manuals and philosophical debates and so on. As a person who has a, let's say, a vested interest in psychology, and just a curiosity about human—human behavior and human thought. So I spent several years in school, in college. When I went back to college a second time, I spent a good bit of time — the first time actually, I took a number of courses in psychology as well. Right out of high school, I took Psych 1. I think I took abnormal psychology and parapsychology. Then when I went back to school, I took experimental psychology and actually started doing a neurobiology class and all the other theories of personality and stuff like that. And I was actually trying to get myself a psychology degree when I burned out of school at about 104 credits. You know, that said, I actually made the executive decision not to go back to school. I kept piling up a bunch of books on psychology that I was really interested in reading, transpersonal and humanism, and all these different modes of thought, on psychology. But because I was in the middle of getting a degree, I couldn't read the books I wanted to, I had to read the books that were assigned. So that was also additional stress. It's like, I was really, really interested in psychology and wanting to delve into other modes of thought, and not just simply the usual path, let's call it. I didn't want to just study the usual path of the history of psychology and the history of the greats and memorizing names and stuff. I wanted to know more about what are people doing now, rather than what did people do back then. So that said, I also have a good bit of experience with persons with differences, having spent nine months in a mental hospital, having dealt with people with multiple personalities and other issues. Since then, in the let's call it real world and online, I have a good rounded idea, I guess, of psychology without being profession—professional.

So I spent a little time yesterday morning, writing out my breakdown of the DSM-5 criteria. I'll start at a just giving you the very brief breakdown and then we will go into in detail, starting from E and working our way back up. Criteria A is the actual identity disorder portion. The different personas, personalities, altered states, alternate states, people, fragments and so on that are inside of one body. Criteria B. It's the dissociation portion. So the first portion is identity. The second one is dissociation. The third one is disorder. So the third one is that it actually causes you problems in your life. Criteria. D, the fourth one, it just exempts anything that's part of, let's say, a celebration of your faith. That you allow angels to take over your body, then it no longer counts, if it's it's seen as acceptable, or normal behavior in your culture. They exempt it from DID. The other part of that one is that in our culture here in America, it's also accepted for children to have invisible playmates, pretend, you know, make-believe playmates. So that's also exempted, imaginary playmates, imaginary play. In E, that's where it's the exemption for anything that can be attributed to physical physiological effects. So either meds or drugs that cause some of these issues, or you have other conditions like a brain tumor, or something that's causing the condition - that would be exempted from this diagnosis.

Now we're going to go into E, and I'll read it to you. "E: the symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance, eg blackouts, or chaotic behavior during alcohol intoxication, or another medical condition, eg complex partial seizures." In criteria, E we're eliminating, say blackouts and brownouts during alco—alcohol intoxication. There's an interesting thing called state dependent memory. It's kind of important to know this one. State dependent memory is what happens to normal people, when you walk out of a room, say you're in your bedroom, you're doing something, you say, "Oh, I need to get this from the kitchen." You leave your room, you get to the kitchen, and you're like, "I forgot what I came here for." That's a state dependent memory issue, because state can include your surroundings, how it influences your memory. So this is just normal memory issue. So what happens when you're intoxicated with alcohol is you've changed your state. You've change the chemistry of your brain significantly enough that you can actually black out, but you haven't lost the memory. You need to be drunk again to remember it. So you'll find the people dancing with the lampshades on their head on the bar will forget the incident. Friends and stuff will tell them you know, "You were crazy last night, you were dancing on the bar." They'll be like, "No, I wasn't, I don't remember any of that. I don't remember anything from last night," blah, blah, blah. And then the next time they're drunk, they'll be like, "I remember that." Yeah. So that's, that's what that's about. And that can happen from other medical conditions. And so those are physiological effects. So it's funny, this criteria actually excludes physiological issues, because technically, DID is not a physiological issue. Let that sink in for a second.

"Criteria D: The disturbance is not a 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." So this is again, kind of a two-headed criteria, we're gonna see a lot of that. So there's two different things under one letter. So firstly, the DID symptoms, symptoms A, B and C, cannot be a part of voodoo, where they actually take on a loa, which is a god, and it actually possesses them. So it's kind of like channeling gods. So that's not allowed. You can't say somebody is, is DID,because they're channeling gods in an, in a culture where that is acceptable and normal. Which could be conflicted by criteria C, which is the disorder part. I think that D kind of forgets that, you know, forgets "Oh, yeah, we just said there was a problem with it." If it it's positive, if it's normal, if it's something that gives you status in your culture, then it's not causing distress or impairment. So that would be number C, so we'll get there in a second. The other half of D is in children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates, or other fantasy play. Here's a note - most imaginary playmates are perceived as being outside of the body, and the child does not play out their playmates. Other fantasy play, that might make somebody think, "Oh my god, maybe my kid is multiple" would be if your kid comes to you and says, "I'm a fireman." Okay, it's one thing for your kid to come to you and say, "I'm a fireman", and be playing with their fire truck and stuff like that and it's 'when I grow up' imaginary play. Versus if the kid comes to you and says, "I'm a fire man, and I'm taking care of your kid. And your kid is upset right now over there. And, and I remember when I was a kid," blah, blah, blah, they come to you. They say, "Hey, my name is Joe the fire man, how are you?" You know, that? That would be a little odd. And that would definitely not be under normal fantasy play, I think. So I used to lay in bed and talk to myselves. And we would keep each other company at night because we were really lonely. And so we would actually talk back and forth and answer ourselves. We didn't know, we didn't know we were multiple. But we were talking to ourselves anyway. So that's one thing. Another thing is we used to play a lot of Broadway show tunes on LP vinyl albums, back in the 70s. So we had our own, like, record player and stuff. So we were playing that and we were dancing and singing alone in our room. This is the life of an only child, right? So we're dancing and singing and playing in our room, and we would play multiple parts in the play. You know, we'd be like fantasizing, we're on the stage - that's play, that's normal. But the switching between the roles, and singing the different parts with different voices probably wasn't normal. Not many kids doing that, right? I don't think so. Maybe them and a friend would be playing different parts. But I didn't have friends in my room - I had myselves. I didn't know, but that was definitely a good sign, right. So that's different than normal, you know, better explained by imaginary playmates or fantasy play.

"Criteria C: The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning." Pretty broad. I call this the 'disorder criteria'. You can have all of these other things, you know, you can have A and B without C, and then it's no longer a disorder, right? This is where you're uncomfortable with your life in some way, that the symptoms of DID are creating some kind of issues for you. Anxiety, you're not able to keep your appointments, you're not able to work. That's this criteria. This is where it's disabling. This is the disabled criteria. That in some way in your life, you're not able to take care of your independent living skills, you're not to eat, you know, not able to eat, dress yourself, keep your doctor's appointments, make your docu—doctor's appointments, remember to go to your doctor's appointments, and so on. So this is a—this is one of the places where I've, I've hit a brick wall a few times in my life. Last time I had significant problem in this area, I had signed up for food co-op. And I'm supposed to go in every Tuesday, I supposed to be working in the nursery section, so that parents can drop their kids off at the nursery and go downstairs and do their shopping and then come back and pick their kid up before they leave. Right. So they're counting on me, there's supposed to be two adults there. And I love it, you know, I love dealing with babies and I had my own baby with me. So I would bring my kid and, and let my kid play with the other kids and stuff like that and it's a wonderful thing. Well, if I'm not going to be able to make it, that's okay, as long as I call them, right? But I would come to on Wednesday and go, "Oh, shoot. Where did Tuesday go?" It's Wednesday, I missed my appointment. That's a problem. That's a significant impairment. It was a obligation I wanted to keep. And I didn't even have the courtesy of picking up the phone and calling and saying I wouldn't be there. And it must have happened like five or six times, maybe more - enough to get me kicked out. So not so good there. And my whole family was counting on me doing it, because I was taking on the responsibility of filling the volunteer slot in exchange for my whole family being able to use it. Use the co-op. Yeah, not so good.

So criteria B: "Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting." I'm going to repeat this because it's so important. "Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting." This criteria is very important. This is where a lot of multiples hit a wall. It's like, "Well, how do I know?" You know, you've been diagnosed and you look at the criteria, and you're like, "How do I know if I've forgotten anything?" It's very difficult to know if you've forgotten something, because you forgot it, right? So where is ordinary forgetting? And how do you know you forgot anything? I'm going to describe some instances of where you can tell you meet this criteria. First off, if you've just had a conversation with your doctor, and your doctor does not—mentions it to you and you do not remember it. That's good enough for the doctor to potentially check off this criteria. Seeing two or three instances of that would definitely be enough for the doctor. Because that's a gap in the recall of everyday events. That's the first part of that sentence. It's a little more than "How did I get in this room?" Because that can be normal dis—well, actually, there we go. Okay, so this is the dissociation criteria. I was gonna say that's normal dissociation, but if normal dissociation is happening enough, then it would also count. So let's mention what normal dissociation is. People can dissociate from things, such as highway hypnosis. So you drive the same highway every day, you commute to work. One day, you're preoccupied with some thoughts, and you get to your exit, and you don't know how you got there. That would be quote, unquote, "normal forgetting", that's called highway hypnosis. Other normal dissociation is the one I mentioned earlier, where you go from one room of the house to the othe, state-dependent memory goes poof, because you changed where you are. Then you walk back into that room and you get your memory back, that's state-dependent memory. You can easily go from one environment, we'll call it, to another environment - that can be mental, physical, emotional environment - to another and have memory gaps due to that. And it could be considered normal dissociation. Now we're going to come back to the dissociative end, which is significant events that are just missing. Say, you got married and you don't remember your wedding, that would be a good example of a significant event in your life that's just missing out of your memory. Sometimes you can look back in your memory and remember part of an event. This is a little bit more rare. You can remember the beginning of an event, and then all of a sudden don't remember how it resolves. Don't remember how it played out after that. I went over to so and so's house. I remember going there. But I don't remember what happened. I went over to so and so's house and I got to the doorway, and I don't remember even stepping foot into the house. I don't know what happened anything after that. Okay, that would be a significant memory without full recall. That's kind of rare, because our dissociative symptoms are—the reason that we're hiding things is to hide it from ourselves. We usually don't leave a trace like that, where you would get up to the front door, and then it all disappears. It's too much evidence is how I'd like to say it. We are smarter than that. But it does happen. So putting that on on the table. And I think that one of the reasons people look at this criteria and say, "Oh, but I haven't forgotten anything" is because they're looking for that kind of a memory. They're looking for some kind of evidence in their memory that something went missing. So let's look at some of the more common notable things. Significant sensory impairment in your memory. So if you have memories where something is foggy or dreamlike, or you remember it like you were in pea soup or underwater, where you go deaf in the middle of a memory and you don't hear anything anymore, those are sensory impairments in your memory. So you've dissociated part of the memory away. You know, the clarity of the memory, or how real it feels. So you derealized, you depersonalized in some way, you've distanced yourself from the memory. If you can't get total sensory recall of a memory, it could be in this category. Oh, another one is full dissociation from your body during a memory. If you feel like you were third person in a memory, like you're outside of your own body, like you're standing in the room watching yourself, that's dissociation. Having no recall of specific memory—memorable events like family vacation to a theme park, a traumatic event, a rite of passage like your sweet 16 is missing. That's a good sign. And one of the problems that I have - this is not fun. I have continuous recall, as it's happening. I have continuous recall a day or two later, although details start dropping out, and that's fine. That's normal, especially routines. You know, if it's like, "Well, every day I brush my teeth," I don't remember exactly me brushing my teeth yesterday. And that's normal, because I brush my teeth every day. So it's like gets melded in with every other time that you brush your teeth. Same thing with getting to work or riding in the same elevator. Our brain kind of, you know, just says "Yeah, insert being on the elevator here." So unless something funny happens on the elevator, you meet somebody new on the elevator, you're not going to remember that particular elevator trip, right? That's normal. Let's call it housekeeping in our brain to keep our brains from filling up with too much information, right. But back-editing is where there's a significant memory that goes missing after the fact. So a week later, I would have remembered. A month later, I would have remembered. But two years later, I forgot. Why? So here's my example for that one. And this is the first and I think only time this specific thing has happened to me - that I know of anyway. I go to a party, I'm mingling and talking to people and so on, somebody walks up to me and says, "Hey, Criss, Wow, it's so nice to see you." And I've never met this person befor. I swear, up and down in my head, we're searching around, we're like, "Who,who is this person? Let's find a name. I don't recognize her." Blah, blah, blah, we're all running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to figure out who the heck this person is. And she saw it on our face. I'll talk about that at some point. Cuz that's, that's pretty funny. So she sees it on our face. And she's like, "Oh my God, you don't remember me?" And we're like, "No?" LIke, with a, like guilty, like, "No?" And she's like, "I almost became your roommate." I was like, "What?" So she had come over to my house. While I was pregnant, she come over to my house and we had talked , and she looked at the room that we had for her to live in and, you know, we got to know each other a little bit, blah, blah, blah. And then it turned out she, she moved in with her boyfriend or something. So she didn't end up moving in. Now, of course, I don't really remember that. I know it's true. I kind of very vaguely like, remember we needed a roommate and somebody came over. But I do not remember this woman. I do not remember the conversations. I kind of remember that we had a conversation, but the conversation is completely gone. I don't know what happened. Anyway. So a significant amount of my memories during my pregnancy got tampered, with whether from my head or from the state-dependent memory of being pregnant, you know, the chemicals and the brain chemistry changes and stuff. Whatever it was, that happened, I lost significant memory of what was going on, at least for a small period of time around that event. In fact, I only remember vaguely the person that did end up moving in and meeting him and stuff. I remember him very well for the next seven years we live together. But the meeting him was a little glossed over too. So I think it was around the same time. So I have something that I call back-editing, where I could have told you all the details of it a week later, a month later, and then for some reason, a year later, it's gone. Some somebody decided that we don't need this, [wooshing sound], you know, or, or there was something about it needs to be covered up. Something sensitive, something whatever. And so they said "Nope, can't have that." [Wooshing sound.] And they took it away. That happens to me. So back-editing memories is another sign of dissociative memory gaps. I you know, in my article on this criteria, I coined the term dissociative gap to to include all of these different types of dissociative memory issues that can happen. And here's another—I don't know if it's a memory thing or not. But I still think it falls into the dissociation category. So I'm going to stick it with this criteria anyway. This happens to, to other multiple so I want to make mention of it. Sometimes you're poking around in your memories. You're you're trying to find evidence. You're poking around at people in your head, you're doing some kind of work with dissociation or you're talking about something to someone. It's getting too close to The Problem. And what can happen is you immediately start falling asleep, you get foggy. You go from being perfectly alert, like you'd had six cups of coffee, to sleepy, like eyes drooping, falling asleep nodding off. That's a dissociative defense mechanism. Somebody or something in your head is trying to protect you from something and is pushing you away from it. And it's interesting, because if you back off, you can immediately wake up. So if you're getting too close to something sensitive, and you find yourself getting sleepy, that may be a good sign it's time to back off, because somebody is defending it. And maybe they're smarter about that. You know, one of those Hindsight is 2040 things. If you found out you might be like, "Yeah, you were better off with that than me." So I don't—when that happens, I stopped poking. I'm like "Okay, okay, I didn't mean to get that close. All right. I'm backing off. Now I'm backing off, here's me backing off." And then I wake up. So just so you know, if you're in therapy, and your doctor is asking questions, and you start getting sleepy, that may or may not be a place where it's okay to have that happen. You may fall asleep and somebody else may wake up and tell them about it. Because that's kind of how it happens sometimes, for some people. When I get too close, somebody makes me sleepy. Another good example of a dissociative memory gap for me - we read this horrific first person account by Trudy Chase called When Rabbit Howls. For the longest time I wouldn't read y books by multiples, or about multiples, in particular. Like about their abuse and stuff. So for about 10 years of knowing that I was multiple, I didn't touch any of those books. So eventually, I did read a few of them. And When Rabbit Howls was the one that, let's say left the biggest impression on the Crisses. We sat there with a pen while we were reading and everything that twigged us out, like twitch, twitch, twitch, twigged us out, made us sick to our stomach, where we were feeling physical, like reactions to the book, we underlined. And then we wrote them down in a notebook. all the passages—well, I don't know if we got to all of them. I don't want to know right now. But we started writing down passages in a notebook. And then whatever our reaction was to it. And this is all I know. Really. And then some pictures were drawn in there too. But we got, we got somewhere where we needed not to go in that book. So then we wrote on the cover of the book, like "Keep out. This means you. Yes, you Crisses." You know kind of messages on the notebook and, you know, made sure it's like very loudly obvious this is the book that we're supposed to go into. Every time we don't listen to ourselves, and we go in that book, we regret it. And we have successfully back-edited the vast majority of whatever is in that notebook. And that's in our adult life, like in the last 14-15 years. So whatever's in that book is welcome to stay in that book, and whoever in here was working on that notebook can take it out and pick it up and work on it whenever they want to, but we're not touching it. So that's a—that's that. So that's memor.

Criteria A. This is where we get into the actual identity issues. That is the people issues. "A: Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personalities 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." Okay, we got to break this one down, right, because it's long, and there's many sub-criteria hidden in that one paragraph. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states. Okay, we'll stop at the comma. The definition of personality state is given in the rest of the paragraph, so we can come back to that. By two or more distinct personality states. Now. I don't think I went into this. Okay, so this is a young science, I was saying this earlier. This is a young science. It's based on observation. So this isn't about what the doctor doing the diagnosis thinks. It's not about their opinion about you. It's what they see. We really have to make that clear. It's not about them thinking maybe you have, it's that they've seen these criteria. So when you're diagnosed as DID, it means they've seen these signs. It does not mean, you are multiple, it does not mean they're correct, it means they've seen these signs. Okay. However, there is room for opinion here. Because that last sentence: "These signs and symptoms may be observed by others, or reported by the individual." If you go to your doctor and say, "Hey, there's a lot of people in my head, and they front and they take over and I have these memory issues," you're likely to get slapped with a DID label. If someone else, say, a nurse practitioner, somebody in a psych ward, if a mental health professional of some kind who is not able to give a diagnosis, because they're not at that rank, sees the symptoms, they can report it to the doctor, who can then diagnose you as DID. And it is possible, let's say on a parent report, and so on that the signs and symptoms could be written down and observed by others, and reported, and then you could get that diagnosis. So it is possible for family and friends also to report these symptoms. And it's up to the doctor whether or not to accept them, because there's a may in there. So it is not required for somebody to come up to them and say "You have to give my son or daughter this diagnosis." That wouldn't fly. But if somebody did report these to them, and they observed some things themselves, maybe didn't have a whole picture, they could still apply the DID diagnosis. Disruption of identity. These—remember, they they spent a lot of time on these words. Okay, so each of these words is really loaded. "Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession." Now, I happen to know there was up for consideration, dissociative possession disorder, and it was not mentioned in DSM-4, anything about possession. So they have decided to carefully roll in that it could be described in some cultures as an experience of possession. So now they no longer have to accept dissociative possession disorder into the DSM-5 or 6. If they keep that word in there, if somebody says that they're possessed, if, if that's the experience, it's now folded into DID. So that's an interesting, let's call it a development since DSM-4. So we'll set aside the possession issue for the moment and go back to disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states. "The disruption" mentioned above "of marked discontinuity." Marked means notable, repetitive, something that stands out. This lets the doctor off the hook if they don't notice. And it it also lets the doctor off the hook if it only happened once. They don't have to diagnose it right away. So "the disruption of marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency." Sense of self, that's my self image. That's what I think I am. That's who I think I am. My sense of self. So it's interesting that this is an objective criteria about a subjective observation. Okay, so the doctor has to see or hear about, you know, and be told about this discontinuity and sense of self. If you report, "sometimes I don't feel like myself," that's enough, right there check mark. 'Discontinuity in sense of agency.' So we're skipping over 'in sense of self' and bridging the words here as if those words aren't there, just to make sense of it. The disruption of marked discontinuity in sense of agency. Your sense of agency is your sense of self control, to define the the psychology term. Your sense of agency is how well you can be in control of your circumstances, in your actions, and so on. So if you report that your hands are doing things without your cognitive desire to do them, or if you report that you feel like a passenger in your body while you're body's going around doing things. If you report saying things you didn't mean to say to someone, that would count as a loss of your sense of agency, or loss in the continuity of your sense of agency. On to the next. 'Accompanied by related alterations', okay, that's fluctuations or changes, accompanied by related changes, 'in affect.' What is affect? Affects a word not usually used outside of a psychology. Affect is not effect, but affect. Affect is your appearance of emotions. It's the emotions on your face that someone else can read. It's how your behavior, how your behavior is showing your emotional hand. So raising an eyebrow, or smiling or frowning or crying, these are all affect. These are observable changes in behavior, that can belie the emotions behind them. Changes in affect, changes in your emotions. The doctor has to observe it. But really, it's changes in your emotions, changes in your behavior, changes in your consciousness. If you're getting sleepy, if you are alert one moment, and more languid and relaxed the next. If, you know, these are changes in your consciousness level. Or, if you are go from ordinary reality to a little bit of a non-ordinary reality, your higher self, talking about things for more of a 20,000 foot view, talking about life, and so on. That's change of consciousness. Changes in memory, changes in perception. This would be how you see the world. So if you are like, "Yeah, mom's cool" one minute, and "I hate mom" the next, that's changes in perception. Changes in cognition, let's say ability to do math, or how you think. One minute you're logical, the next minute, you're creative, that's changes in cognition. And/or sensory motor functioning. This was an interesting realization I had the other day. And it's here in the criteria, but it's kind of hidden in there. Sensory motor functioning. We can have alters who have disabilities, such as being blind, such as not able to hear. Sensory motor functioning can also include, say, a child alter not being able to write, or not being able to manage tools, because their sensory motor functioning isn't high enough yet. But also hidden in here is all of the, let's say, muscle memory type of stuff. This is why your handwriting changes. Because we have muscle memory for how our handwriting works, but muscle memory is one of the things that is compartmentalized in some multiples. So we don't all have the same handwriting. Might look drastically different, but you if you went to a handwriting analysis person, they be like, "Oh, yeah, look at this." You know, this D is here, and that D is there, or, or this is printed and that's in script. And that's unusual when you're writing fast, for somebody to change between print and script when writing fast. Usually you choose one or the other, you know, that kind of thing. How you walk, how you sit, your posture, your unconscious movements, like how you talk with your hands, or how you flick the hair out of your eyes. These would all be differences in, in behavior and sensory motor functioning.

That sums up the criteria. So when we put this together, all these different little disparate parts. Being dissociative identity disorder, as described requires two or more, quote unquote 'personality states.' So either there's the person that walked into the office and at least one other. The remainder of the criteria describe what they mean by a personality state and really breaks it down into a good definition of identity or person. Other than having separate bodies. It can be self reported observation, so you can even work walk into the office and say it yourself. So here is how I summarized all this. "DID is the existence of two or more observable or reported identities or people sharing a body, where these two identities are defined as having a distinct sense of self and self control, separate from each other, including different feelings, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, intellect, senses, and or abilities." I'll say that again. Okay. That's my summary of this criteria. "DID is the existence of two or more observable or reported identities or people sharing a body, where these two identities are defined as having a distinct sense of self, and self control, separate from each other, including different feelings, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, intellect, senses, and/or abilities." I just want to add in one more thing, because this is actually a little bit of a note of contention in some communities. The DSM-5 actually puts in the experience of possession. So it is actually part of the criteria now that even if the person reports that we are not the same person, we are not all parts of in my case Christina - that's not how we perceive it. It's my experience of possession. Okay, I wouldn't call it possession, but they are spirits from outside of my body who came in. So that's actually now part of the criteria, which is actually kind of good for me, because that's one of the places it makes it kind of a little woowoo for people. But the way I experience it, and their past life memories, you know, and stuff are pretty vivid to us when they share them with us. So my experience of it is that these spirits from outside of my body came and joined a whole bunch of shattered Christinas. But whatever Christina was, we don't have any evidence of anymore. And what was left was in pain and suffering and having trouble and requested for this group of adult spirits to "Hey, why don't you come over here and help us?" And the only way they could help was to come on inside. So hopefully that makes it clear why we think the experience of possession may also be really important. These are people from outside of my body who came and joined us to help us out. Not possession in a bad way. But in this case, an experience of possession in a good way. This has been really long. Hopefully I'll trim it down. And I'll be back again with an interesting topic next time.

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