How Common is Multiple Personality Disorder?
I reckon we all have it
What we’ll be discussing in this article:
Carl Jung’s archetypes
The golden shadow
Our inner personalities
Dealing with these personalities
Multiple personality disorder
A term like “Multiple Personality Disorder” will usually strike fear into the hearts of people.
I mean, it’s a worrying thing to have to deal with. Imagine having another personality living inside of you. One with it’s own opinions, desires, memories even.
The medical field doesn’t really use the term anymore though, it’s been replaced by Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). “DID is a mental health condition characterized by the presence of two or more distinct personality identities, each with its own memories, characteristics, and attributes.”
Of course it is a scary thing to think about, although it is quite rare. According to a paper published on the National Library of Medicine, written by Ulker Atilan Fedai and Mehmet Asoglu “The prevalence of dissociative identity disorder (DID) is 1%.”
Carl Jung’s archetypes
However, it leads me to ponder upon where does Carl Jung’s idea of the archetypes fall into the equation.
We’re all familiar with them by now, the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the self. But they were further developed when he also wrote about the mother, the father, the trickster, the hermit etc. in his book “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.”
The golden shadow
Since then the idea has further evolved, in particular when one of his proteges came up with the idea of the “Golden Shadow.” If our shadow side holds everything that is repressed then the golden shadow is our inner potential for greatness and ultimate creativity.
I’m a huge fan of the work of Hal and Sidra Stone and I use their voice dialogue method occasionally in my therapy sessions with clients.
Let me give you part of the blurb from the back cover of their book “Embracing Our Selves.”
Our inner personalities
Evolving further on the idea of the archetypes, the Stones posit that we all contain many inner personalities and that we can engage with them to get to the root of issues.
For example, you might suffer from a tendency to be controlling. In a therapy session I could ask you to imagine yourself as an inner personality called “the controller” and we would discuss your roles as “the controller” and seek to find out why a sense of control is needed.
From my time counseling and my own research, I’m very much convinced that we have a multitude of inner personalities within ourselves.
They’re always there and waiting for a chance to make themselves known, usually with the best intentions but sometimes they get things wrong.
The thing is, we pick up habits and tendencies from our youth.
For example, we see a father figure shouting and kicking up a fuss when they’re experiencing anger and in our young minds we gather that this is the correct way to deal with anger.
Thus our inner personality, or personalities, connected with that emotion also learn that this is the correct way to react and when you’re angry and so this becomes how we also react.
However, you come to learn that it’s not the correct way to deal with anger at all, yet occasionally you still do.
So who’s in charge? Your sense of self, i.e. the egoic you, or, is it, for example, the inner father archetype or the controller etc.?
Dealing with these personalities
And so we must learn to deal with and integrate these personalities. They want the best for you but because they’re not conscious in the same way that the egoic self is they learn how to behave differently.
By giving them a voice in a therapeutic setting we can learn about their, and our, real inner issues and get to the root of our behavioral problems.
Hi, I’m Paddy. Thanks for reading my article about inner personalities.
I’m a counselor and writer.
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