Published in the Baptist Times 5 August 2011
I've been praying for a man with dissociative identity disorder, formerly called multiple personality.
Previous psychiatrists had labelled him with different diagnoses because - his current psychiatrist believes - they thought they had met the whole person when they had only met one of his several identities. Tested while under stress, he behaved and reasoned in five distinctly different patterns - as though he were five separate people.
I asked how that was for him: it sounded frightening? Yes, it was, he said. He was not aware of changing personalities, but then he was not always aware of himself.
'Sometimes I can see myself and what I'm doing but it's like watching a film, from a distance, like I have no say in what happens. And sometimes it's like I black out for an hour, but when I come round I find it's been four days, or six months, and I don't remember anything. People tell me I've been looking like someone else and talking in another voice, and I don't know what I've done.'
It started, he said, in his teens. A childhood of unimaginable stress was relieved only by an imaginary friend. Then the 'friend' moved inside his head, talking to him and telling him what to do. One day it spoke in another voice and seemed to be somebody new.
He thought he was schizophrenic. But he feels that all those voices are somehow him. Life was too painful and complex for one young man to cope with, so he cloned himself into the family he so much needed, relying on their different strengths to protect and guide him. Then some of those 'family members' started behaving in ways he didn't want.
It sounds an extreme condition and it is, but only an extreme version of what assails anyone who suffers trauma - including the trauma of sin.
St Paul describes the human tendency to do the wrong things we abhor, instead of the good things we approve. The innocent part of our nature becomes enslaved by compulsion to sin and only Jesus Christ, who overcame every compulsion, can restore us to innocence.
For any trauma survivor the hardest task is to let go, not of the memories or the terror but of the patterns of behaviour that enabled them to survive the ordeal at the time. Those reliable 'friends' or coping strategies (or addictions or sins) have to be sacrificed, in the interests of freedom.
A psychologist friend, an ordained Christian in healing and deliverance ministry, believes everyone has 'sub-personalities' like satellites around the central core. 'The sub-personalities are a valuable part of the character, with different traits and strengths. They can become demonised, but they're not demons. They need to be welcomed, assimilated into the core personality and used for good.'
So we're praying, the dissociative man and a few friends, that he comes to know and become the person God sees - not a scattered collection of identities but an integrated whole, rooted in the unchanging 'I Am.'
A woman I knew was invariably smiling and gracious, full of compliments to everyone. Her husband was rude, confrontational and enjoyed making people uncomfortable, while his wife cooed mild admonitions but never seriously objected. They seemed to have split a whole character between them, with one partner being the sweetness-and-light and the other being the dark side.
It's not only an individual who can split himself into different persons, then: a couple can do it between them. Or a group, a society, a nation or a world?
If we mentally split off some governments, races or categories as agents of evil acting without our consent, we dissociate ourselves from any responsibility for the evil they commit in our absence of knowledge.
But when the Holy Spirit dawns - the spirit of wholeness, in which all of creation is one - we meet ourselves and see that 'all our integrity lies in tatters' and 'all doers of evil are scattered' - even within ourselves.
