Hypnosis and Dissociative Disorders of the Self

Think about your daily routine. From the minute you wake up in the morning, to the moment you get back into bed at the end of the day, you generally take on a wide number of different personalities. The way you conduct yourself with your family would not be the same way in which you conduct yourself with your friends, which is definitely not the way you conduct yourself at work. Surely, if you spot a courageous fool walking around with a foul mouth at work, spewing hate and inappropriate language left and right, you would learn to avoid him. You shift your normal personality to best fit your environment, as a result creating a whole new one.

At the end of the day, when we settle back into bed, we once again become the person that we truly know we are. Our abilities to transcend through different personalities is fascinating, but what’s more fascinating is that we are constantly aware of who we truly are. There is a statistically small group of people in the world that suffers from a personality disorder that takes away from their given ability to differentiate their personalities. This is known as dissociative personality disorder or better known as multiple personality disorder (MPD).

MPD had only been inducted into the DSM-III in 1980, having been most often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia before. The correct definition is when “a system of thought can be split off from the primary personality, congealing over time as a secondary personality that is unconscious, but which can be accessed by hypnosis.”

The majority of cases of MPD are developed in patients who have suffered a variety of traumatic events during childhood. These events can be abuse (physical, sexual, psychological), suicide, death(s) in the family, etc. One study found that 93% of 53 personalities discovered in 12 cases were the result of a traumatic experience during childhood (Bliss, 1984). What is even more amazing is that a large percent of the people who were suffering from these disorders didn’t even realize it.

Their symptoms were simply discomforts during their every day lives such as bouts of depression, sleepwalking, inability to keep relationships, fits of rage, etc. Through the induced state of hypnosis, doctors were able to coax out the different personalities that laid dormant, trapped in the shell of one particular body.

An article published in Psychology: Theory, Research & Practice brought together many different studies that were done on the subject of MPD. It made references to 3 particular cases of MPD involving three different women. All three women have suffered some sort of abuse, whether self-imposed or external. Between the three of them, there had been a whopping 21 different personalities.

They described a variety of different symptoms such as hearing voices (both internal and external), amnesia, lucid dreams, and erratic behavior. When placed in a hypnotic trance, the personalities surfaced and explained their stories to the psychiatric staff. The personalities ranged from young children, to old women, to even alien bodies that could only be set free if the host had passed away. Each personality even came with their own set of fears, possibly explaining their origin in association to that particular emotion.

With the help of hypnotherapy, researchers were able to find the root of the problem and discomfort that plagued these women’s lives. Not only has hypnotherapy been proven to change lives from the inside out, but it has also helped aid diagnosis of disorders, such as MPD, many of which would have been otherwise misdiagnosed and drugged without seeing any effective results. Hypnotherapy can help reveal inner most thoughts that you yourself may never have even known you had.