Description
Your Research Analysis Essay will address the following ideas:
Introduction
Present a topic or issue relevant to your academic or professional field.
This will be presented in your introduction. Explain the overall background and background of this issue and include a well-constructed thesis statement that indicates your topic and the purpose you will develop.
Article 1
Discuss your first source article.
Identify the article, and then
Describe the perspective presented in the article.
Summarize the article’s findings on your identified topic.
Show how the article’s perspective contributes to your overall thesis.
Article 2
Discuss your second source article.
Identify the article, and then
Describe the perspective presented in the article.
Summarize the article’s findings on your identified topic.
Show how the article’s perspective contributes to your overall thesis.
Article 3
Discuss your third source article.
Identify the article, and then
Describe the perspective presented in the article.
Summarize the article’s findings on your identified topic.
Show how the article’s perspective contributes to your overall thesis.
Conclusion
Analyze the significance of the evidence cited and the connections you have made.
This will be presented in your conclusion. Connect the ideas presented to show why the topic is an important one, while highlighting your major takeaways from the articles and relating them to your thesis.
The Research Analysis Essay
Must be six to eight double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA Style
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Attachment & Human Development
Vol 5 No 4 (December 2003) 353 – 366
Unrelenting catastrophic trauma
within the family: When every
secure base is abusive
HOWARD STEELE
ABSTRACT This paper will present illustrations from Adult Attachment Interviews
conducted with adult female survivors of chronic ritual abuse in their family of origin.
A model of multiple personality disorder informed by the Adult Attachment Interview coding and classification system will be presented. A range of victim, perpetrator
and bystander personalities may be identified in the same interview, indeed in the
same speaker. For the speaker who believes herself to be one of a number of co-existing personalities, integration and coherence means death of a loved one, indeed death
of the sense of self. Possibilities of re-birth into a single integrated self are posited.
KEYWORDS: Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) – Dissociative Identity Disorder
(DID) – Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) – suicide – integration
INTRODUCTION
Recently, I witnessed the experiences of a normatively developing 11-year old girl
who had suffered a sprained ankle, following a painful fall causing her left ankle to
twist and bend. X-rays shortly after the fall confirmed that the ankle was not broken,
but it was pointed out that a child’s capacity for bending and swelling and injuring of
soft tissue is great compared to the adult whose bone would be likely to break under
similar pressure. Thus, for 1 week the child was advised to rest the ankle, not to apply
undue pressure and crutches were given as an aid to movement, lest the child would
sink into immobility altogether. One week later the well-rested foot was blue in
colour and cold and very sore at the slightest pressure. Another two X-rays revealed
no evidence of broken bones. The diagnosis was hyper-sensitive nerves, and
insufficient blood circulation, following the week-old traumatic injury such that
any pressure, even ordinary touch, triggered ‘memories’ of the trauma giving rise to
the palpable sensory experience of intolerable pain. The treatment recommended was
to ‘re-educate’ the nerves so that pressure and touch could again be tolerated, indeed
welcomed for the sense of life and joy they can bring. This contrasted with the view
of the young girl who had already formed a view of her immobile leg as ungainly, and
alien. It did not feel like a part of her, but she could not imagine living without it.
This epiphenomenon of an ankle injury is a metaphor for the ongoing experience of
the person with ‘multiple personality disorder’ or a ‘dissociative identity’. For these
Correspondence to: Howard Steele, Sub-Department of Clinical Health Psychology, University College
London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. Email: [email protected]
Attachment & Human Development ISSN 1461-6734 print/1469-2988 online # 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/14616730310001633438
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rare survivors of unrelenting trauma during childhood, growing up is an experience
(as we shall hear) of ‘being chronically unloved,’ alternately neglected then abused,
abused then neglected, so that survival was achieved through dissociation and
splitting into multiple personalities each of whom has only partial awareness of the
other(s).
The account provided here of multiple personality disorder is assembled primarily
from the experience of administering Adult Attachment Interviews with adult
females suffering from this rare and controversial Axis 2 disorder. Given the longrunning controversy concerning the veracity of reports of childhood experiences of
abuse, the Adult Attachment Interview is a highly relevant contributor to this debate.
This is because rating and ultimate classification of an attachment narrative hinges on
careful attention to the truthfulness of the account provided. Truth (having evidence
for what you say) is one of the four maxims of coherent conversation applied to
AAIs, the other three being relation (staying ‘on task’), economy (saying neither too
much nor too little) and manner (adhering to conventional standards of polite
conversation), as Hesse (1999) has discussed.
This paper draws on the author’s experience of working as an attachment research
consultant to the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London (Director: V. Sinason),
interviewing several individuals, with confirmed or suspected Multiple Personality
Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), early in their therapeutic
consultations with the Clinic. The resulting profiles emerging from these Adult
Attachment interviews are remarkably similar in that when the patients engage with
the challenge of describing and evaluating their attachment history, severe evidence of
distress emerges with clear signs of dissociation in the interview context itself. When
the adult listener/speaker is addressed, it is not long until the interview elicits other
voices, personalities or alters whose origin and viewpoint depends on a particular
mode of experiencing and responding to extreme, organized and repeated abuse
perpetrated by attachment caregivers throughout childhood. This paper provides an
attachment theory account MPD or DID, drawing on material provided in AAIs
obtained from patients with this core personality disorder, and importantly, applying
insights obtained from the rating and classification system applied to Adult
Attachment Interviews (See Hesse, 1999).
The view advanced here has much in common with Liotti’s (1999) account of
dissociative identity disturbances. He sees these personality organizations as resulting
from both a lapse in, and a partial attempt to achieve, the human individual’s ongoing
species-specific need to reach a personal synthesis or integration of meaning
structures deriving from one’s experience of the care-giving environment. The
ordinary logic to the organization of the care-giving environment is that it
approximates some variant of the cooperative breeding principle which has evolved
to facilitate optimal emotional, cognitive and physical growth for the newborn baby
(Hrdy, 1999). Neither mothers nor fathers nor other caregivers are invariably
available to their babies. But the variance that typically exists is within a normal
range, permitting the baby to survive and often thrive. By contrast, for young
children who are the target of repeated experiences of severe interference, abuse and
neglect, survival is not insured, and the possibility of arriving at a coherent personal
synthesis or integration of meaning is gravely compromised. Radical defensive
strategies are required to ward off the pain of having one’s primary attachment
strategy (after Main, 1990) assaulted. For adults with dissociated identity problems,
or Multiple Personality Disorder, we will see that their childhood experiences involve
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repeated exposure to ‘care-giving’ figures who were cooperating in the perverse intent
to abuse, disfigure, and ultimately destroy the developing personality of the child.
For adults with MPD, they have often experienced from earliest childhood
overwhelming evidence of an obstacle to their pursuit of the primary attachment goal,
i.e., the wish to be heard, seen, held and understood. Quickly, they would have
learned that to expect such understanding was radically mistaken. They learn instead
to retreat and advance with another, deeply self-protective goal in mind, i.e., the wish
to be dumb, invisible, left alone, and not interfered with. In such circumstances it is of
course adaptive for the developing individual to restrict awareness of the previously
mistaken (yet inherently secure) goal together with the horrid pain experienced when
pursuing that goal. Indeed, physical closeness rather than becoming paired with the
experience of the alleviation of distress, is instead associated with the experience of
being physically (sexually) penetrated, starved, tortured, and made to witness, be
responsible for (or be the victim of ) human child sacrifice. It is thus likely that adults
with MPD, who provide credible accounts of growing up in a context where abuse,
killing, and perhaps eating of children was a core thread in the ‘family’ culture into
which they were born. Moreover, this culture often has an identifiable history
extending across multiple generations. This, it should be added, is what is meant as
ritual abuse (see Sinason, 2002).
For children who experience such unthinkable catastrophic trauma, it may be
relevant to think about how chaos or catastrophe theory applies to their
experiences. Recently, Lewis (2000) has provided an account of non-linear
dynamical systems theory or chaos theory, distinguishes among three scales of
influence upon the developing sense of self, each comprising discrete types of
cognitive-emotion interactions with probable psychological and neurobiological
mechanisms at work, (1) emotional interpretations; (2) moods; and (3) personality.
Moving across these domains of experience from (1) to (3) there is a decreasing
amount of flexibility and plasticity in the neurobiological and psychological
system, such that the most profound constraining influences upon brain
development and functioning arise when an experience is persistent over months
and years and comes to be embedded in the personality structure of the individual.
Change is possible and to be expected in response to changes, sometimes subtle,
sometimes catastrophic, such that discontinuity in development is judged to be
normative. While catastrophe theory emphasizes discontinuity in one’s developmental profile over time, the phenomenon of MPD requires that we acknowledge
the possibility of radical discontinuity within time, arising out of overwhelmingly
terrifying and repeated experiences, that consolidate into distinct, encapsulated
personality organizations.
This proposal does not, of course, apply to normal development, but it may be
normal for people developing in extremely abnormal and abusive caregiving
environments. Normally, from an attachment perspective, we would agree that the
cumulative quality of one’s interactions with caregivers over the first many months
of life inform the child’s evolving internal working model of the self-andattachment figure(s). This sense-of-self-with-others guides the selection and
interpretation of information relevant to attachment, qua survival. Out of these
early interactions with the caregiver are formed the child’s evolving personal
synthesis of meaning structures. When experiences are more-or-less sensible or
coherent the child will develop an organized and coherent sense of self and others
that is oriented toward trust and hope (the well-known secure pattern) or toward
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mistrust and despair (the insecure avoidant and resistant patterns). With respect to
the tendency toward avoidance or resistance, personal integration and the resulting
sense of self is skewed toward under- (avoidant) or over- (resistant) awareness of
negative experiences and emotions.
Crucially, it is caregiving factors not child temperament factors that are
identified in multiple research investigations as the primary determinants of early
infant-caregiver patterns of attachment (see Vaughn & Bost, 1999). In other words,
a well-cared for child, whatever his or her initial temperament, will develop a
secure attachment – though it is admittedly particularly challenging to care for a
baby who is initially a highly irritable child. The word ‘initially’ is written in
italics above on account of the consistent evidence that babies with negative
emotional profiles in the first few months may come to develop a more positive
emotional outlook by the end of the first year. For example, if cared for by
parents who themselves have a co-operative marriage and/or other sources of
social and emotional support available to them, ‘irritable’ infants may develop a
more agreeable emotional profile by 9 months (e.g., Belsky, Fish & Isabella, 1991),
and a secure infant-mother attachment at 12 months (e.g., Crockenberg, 1981; van
dem Boom, 1994).
When infants’ experiences of their caregiving environment are nonsensical, such
as being abused by the parent who alternately provides care, the possibility of
arriving at a coherent internal synthesis of the meaning of the attachment
relationship is fundamentally compromised (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999). The
insecurity arising in the child’s attachment to an abusive caregiver goes beyond
the ‘normal’ insecurities known as avoidance or resistance (see Boris & Zeanah,
1999). The term given to describe the abused baby’s internal experience is the
very same term Bowlby used to describe the adult’s normal response to the loss
of a loved one, i.e., disorganization and disorientation – the loss of a sense of
place and time – not knowing where one is or where one is going (Main &
Hesse, 1990; Solomon & George, 1999). These considerations are especially
relevant to the current paper as the early and ongoing childhood experiences of
persons with Dissociative Identity Disorder invariably involve abuse. We turn
next to detailing the picture of these individuals’ experiences which emerges from
interviewing them with the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan &
Main, 1985) but first review efforts to date, of applying the AAI (developed in
the context of research with non-clinical, low-risk, samples) to clinical and highrisk samples.
APPLYING THE STANDARD CATEGORICAL
SCORING SYSTEM TO NON-STANDARD
EXPERIENCES AND CONDITIONS
Early efforts to apply the Adult Attachment Interview in clinical contexts have
revealed that loss and trauma experiences are highly common in psychiatric samples
(e.g., Wallis & Steele, 2001). With respect to specific (sometimes comorbid) diagnostic
groups, borderline personality disorder has been associated with high prevalence of
unresolved and insecure-preoccupied interviews (Patrick, Hobson, Castle &
Maughan, 1994, Fonagy et al., 1996); eating disorder disturbances have been linked
to unresolved and insecure-dismissing interviews (Fonagy et al., 1996); and suicidality
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has been associated with unresolved and ‘disorganized’ interviews (Adam, SheldonKeller & West, 1996). There have been two forensic studies reporting on the
administration of AAIs to prisoners incarcerated for crimes against people and/or
property (Van IJzendoorn et al., 1997; Levinson & Fonagy, 1998). These Dutch and
British studies provide convergent evidence that the prison population is likely to
include individuals who have been physically abused in early life, prone to denying
the significance of these experiences, and presenting with an overall dismissing stance
toward attachment.
In ways that are becoming increasingly evident, the very meaning of the
commonly used adult attachment classifications (dismissal, preoccupation, autonomy-security, and unsresolved) may require expansion and redefinition for
individuals from prison and hospital samples. As Turton, McGauley, MarinAvellan & Huges (2001) discuss, many apparently unique speech acts occur in
interviews from these sample. For example, Turton et al. describe a deeply
entrenched attitude of self-derogation (one not seen in standard low-risk samples)
which is highly common in many forensic and psychiatric samples. More recently,
Lamott, Fremmer-Bombik & Friedemann (2004), have written about ‘fragmented’
attachment representations in a forensic psychiatric sample of women convicted of
murder or manslaughter.
EMERGING RECOGNITION OF PROFOUND
THREATS TO SELF-INTEGRATION AND
ORGANIZATION OF FEELINGS AND THOUGHTS
CONCERNING ATTACHMENT
As Adam et al.’s use of the word ‘disorganized’ suggests, what the standard
scoring system takes for granted, i.e., a primary, integrated and more-or-less
organized mental and emotional stance toward attachment, may be fundamentally
lacking in some speakers. This was a phenomenon noted by one of the individuals
closely involved with the development of the interview coding system who has
also studied a great number of interviews from clinical populations (Hesse, 1996).
Hesse’s (1996) brief report suggested that a likely conclusion from considering
some interviews, particularly those from clinical samples, is that they should be
assigned to a ‘cannot classify’ category because they contain deeply divided states
of mind concerning attachment. For example, a speaker may be insecuredismissing with respect to a physically abusive father, e.g., speaking of him in a
cool, non-feeling and uncaring manner, while being insecure-preoccupied with
respect to an occasionally very caring mother who failed miserably at protecting
the child, e.g., speaking of her in a heated, angry and involving manner. This is
but one of many pathways that may lead to an attachment interview that is
impossible to classify in a singular way—the common element to all these
pathways is severe and repeated experiences of trauma. The long-term debilitating
consequences for victims of ongoing abuse during childhood have been described
as ‘soul murder’ (Shengold, 1989) suggestive of the severe failure at personal
integration and meaning making being suggested here. It was expected then, that
the attachment interviews collected from patients near the start of their
psychotherapeutic treatment at the London Clinic for Dissociative Studies would
be impossible to classify in any singular way.
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OBSERVATIONS FROM ADMINISTERING THE
ADULT ATTACHMENT INTERVIEW TO
INDIVIDUALS WITH DISSOCIATIVE IDENTIFY
DISORDER
Some technical considerations when administering the AAI to an individual with
Dissociative Identity Disorder
Presented with the opportunity of interviewing people with DID, I had first to
consider whether I would address each personality in turn, or challenge the speaker
to provide a singular account of past attachment experiences and current appraisals.
I favoured the latter strategy believing that to follow the former strategy could be
judged as colluding with the presumed multiple personality structure, and what
guarantee would I have that ‘all’ personalities would be available to be interviewed?
I therefore begin each interview by telling the interviewee that the questions I
would raise follow an established procedure for learning about the possible effects
of early family experience upon adults’ thinking, feeling and behaviour. I would
further point out that the interview is in wide use throughout the worlds’
universities and research centres. Finally, I state that I am interested in the extent to
which listeners can call on one voice from within to tell the story of the different
things that have happened with parents and other cargivers during childhood, as
well as telling of how one currently thinks and feels about all that has happened in
one’s early family experience. Notably, for the beginning of every interview –
always including my above mentioned introduction – the individual’s therapist is
present. After a few minutes, and well before the question concerning ‘please
provide five adjectives that describe your childhood relationship with your mother’
is asked, the therapist asks the interviewee if s/he feels comfortable with the
interviewer, and thereafter takes his or her leave. Notably, on a few occasions,
where the safety of the interviewee and those around her is judged to be at-risk,
accompaniment may be provided by chaperones (often nurses). On one occasion
when the interviewee suddenly shifted into a particularly violent ‘alter’, I was
grateful for the restraining presence of these chaperones. Because the interviewees
are all in therapy before and after the administration of the AAI, there is the
possibility of allowing the interview to inform the therapy and for the interviewer
to be informed by the therapist about the interviewee’s experience of being
interviewed. To date, at the Dissociative Disorders Clinic in London the AAI
informs the course of therapy only insofar as the individual patient may refer to it.
Interestingly, interviewees have often reported to their therapists that the stance of
the interviewer was experienced as a threat, i.e.,, insofar as he assumed there might
be only one voice which could be relied on to tell the story of one’s early family
experiences. Nonetheless, all patients so far asked to be interviewed, have agreed.
Multiple dissociation in the context of the Adult Attachment Interview
The interviews have occasionally produced narratives that arise from multiple
identifiable personalities who each speak for a time before retreating and giving ‘the
floor’ to another voice and discrete personality organisation. Further, each of these
persons appears to have an identifiable origin in the speaker’s gravely troubled
childhood history. Curiously, when different ‘alters’ appear in the same interview
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they predictably correspond to different attachment patterns, serving distinctive
functions. Notably, some of these distinctive personalities appear more child-like or,
alternately, more adult-like and metacognitive than others. It appears as if each
personality has a particular life course, linked to their birth and capacity to rise above
or succumb to the abusive culture which constitutes the family of origin for all these
victims of catastrophic child abuse.
Schematically, Figure 1 depicts the associations I have observed between speech
patterns identifiable in Adult Attachment Interviews from patients at The London
Clinic for Dissociative Studies and personality organizations evidently born out of
trauma. All those connected with a traumatic event, i.e., the perpetrator, the victim,
the bystander, and, hopefully, the survivor can be seen in this model, together with
the adult attachment patterns they are likely to be associated with.
Figure 1 points to each of the increasingly well known adult attachment patterns
and the personality types they are arguably linked to. The surprising message of this
paper is the co-occurrence in the same interview of so many incompatible attachment
orientations. Usually an interview can be reliably assigned to one of 15 Adult
Attachment Interview subtypes. For the current sample, however, the same interview
may qualify for membership in many different subtypes, including a mix of
dismissing, preoccupied, autonomous, and unresolved subgroups.
For example, with respect to autonomous-secure classifications that arise in
interviews from adult speakers with DID or MPD, three of the eight autonomous
sub-classifications can be observed, ranging from the coherent escape from extreme
adversity noted in F1b and F3b interviews to the continuing involvement but ultimate
freedom from past trauma evident in F4b interviews. At the same time, I should
emphasize evidence of unresolved mourning and alternate (insecure) patterns are
rarely far from the surface, and thus, all these interviews fit the ‘can’t classify’ (Hesse,
1999) group. Here, in this argument, is an account of why the interviews of some
speakers are impossible to classify in any singular way.
Figure 1 also indicates that dismissing patterns, especially the derogating Ds2 subtype is typical of aspects of the victim of trauma which become organized through a
turning of passive into active, so that the speaker assumes a protective stance toward
more vulnerable fellow personalities, derogating the abusive attachment figures and
AAI patterns
Personality organisations emerging from trauma
Dismissing
Perpetrator/bystander/witness
Preoccupied
Victim/bystander/witness
Autonomous
Bystander/witness/survivor
Unresolved
Victim/bystander/witness/survivor
Figure 1 Adult Attachment Interview patterns and personality organisations born of
catastrophic trauma
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anyone who questions the ‘solution’ achieved by living with MPD. An example of
this self-protective hostility (toward the interviewer) is given below in the interview
excerpts.
As Figure 1 suggests, preoccupied patterns (especially the passive E1 sub-type)
seem to be a common vehicle for victim personalities to express themselves. In every
interview I have conducted with survivors of ritual abuse, there is evidence of a
number of still, small voices (each with their own claimed personality) that appear to
be in close contact with one or other core traumatic experiences. Frequently, these
voices are too timid to be heard, but a clear sense of preoccupation surrounds them.
Their ‘identity’ is often alluded to by stronger voices or personalities with whom they
are ‘twinned’. These fellow personalities are frequently very assertive (survivor or
observer personalities), even hostile Ds2 in style. Importantly, their self-proclaimed
strength, function and origin seems to derive from offering some protection vital to
survival for the other passively preoccupied (victim) aspects of the self or multiple
personality organization.
Present in almost every voice I have heard in the interviews I have collected,
there is a common thread of unresolved mourning regarding the past losses and
traumata suffered. Thus Figure 1 shows how, across perpetrator, victim, survivor,
and witness/observer/bystander personalities, the unresolved classification is often
appropriate. Absorption and guilt with respect to past abuse or loss, on the one
hand, and an unsuccessful denial of abuse on the other hand, are some of the
frequently evident signs of how the pernicious influence of past horrors intrude
upon the present.
A further note about Figure 1 would concern the face validity of this approach.
This stems from every report of catastrophic trauma on record at the London Clinic
for Dissociative Studies. Namely, there are victims, there are bystanders, and there are
perpetrators. In the interviewing I have done, I have met with many victims and many
bystanders/observers. The perpetrators are present too, but this is less obviously
presented in the occasional highly derogating (Ds2) voice that appears, where the
listener’s fear is palpable. Where this identification with the aggressor becomes a
dominant personality organization multiple personality disorder may be averted in
favour of a psychopathic or anti-social personality disorder. This would appear to be
the choice made by many of the brothers of the women I have interviewed. The
disturbance and fragmentation, in these cases, would be an outer- rather than innerdirected process evident in the interviews I have collected. The paper turns now to
these women who have shared their stories of having survived unrelenting trauma in
response to my administering the Adult Attachment Interview.
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE INTERVIEWS
One woman presented with a surface personality that was pleasant, polite, and
valuing of attachment (she was in fact engaged to be married). Yet this same speaker
was also troubled by what she described as a distant and difficult relationship she has
with her mother who rejected, abused and abandoned her (suggestive of a mildly
preoccupied and resentful type of hard-earned security/autonomy). But as the
interview progressed, a series of different attachment patterns were represented by a
series of distinct voices/personalities. Curiously, at no point in the interview did I
deliberately seek to elicit another voice/person with a different view from the one
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being expressed by the ‘current’ speaker. Staying with the present example, a marked
shift was introduced by a question about who cared for her after her mother
abandoned her at age 5? A different more hostile voice emerged to tell me that ‘care
means chronically abused and ruined emotionally’. This was now a male voice, not a
female one, who had a tough observer ‘big brother’ status in the interviewee’s life. He
spoke with severe disapproval of any attempt by the surface personality to repair
relations with her mother, saying ‘I think she should tell her mother to fuck off after
all she’s done to her . . . make her face up to reality, make her listen to what we went
through’. The content of what ‘we’ endured includes ongoing ritualized abuse over
many years perpetrated and maintained within the context of being in the care of
governmental social services. Interestingly, beyond the horrendously abusive
experiences suffered within the context of services set up to protect children, what
was perhaps the strongest source of ongoing suffering for this interviewee (in all her
persona) was the abandonment by her own mother. This relates to a theme uniting
many of the narratives provided by individuals suffering from DID, i.e., that it is
often not the abuse per se, but the betrayals by trusted caregivers and family members
which appear to have the most profoundly disruptive influences upon the developing
child’s attempts to maintain an integrated sense of self.
Adult Attachment Interview questions concerning memories of being upset and
hurt are often the impetus to a different personality appearing as one alter sees the
opportunity to rush to the aid of another incapable of giving words to the details of
pain experienced during childhood as in ‘she can’t answer that ‘cause she doesn’t want
to know but I can tell you what we went through’. For these individuals who
dissociate within the context of the Adult Attachment Interview, showing evidence of
(some of) their different personalities, the dissociated identity disturbance seems to be
very much ego-syntonic (to borrow from a psychoanalytic lexcion) or accepted as the
only working solution to severe relationship problems.
Yet at the same time, there is pronounced fear or anger at the suggestion, or
possible suggestion that the diverse persons should become integrated into one. This
would, of course, mean the death of all but one. I was made to feel keenly aware of
this issue when interviewing a woman who began to speak of the abusive
experiences in her past and was doing so in fearful and tearful preoccupied manner.
Immediately, it seemed, an ‘alter’ rushed to the rescue and demanded in a harsh,
male and accusing voice, ‘who the hell are you?’ When I remarked on my affiliation
with the therapeutic goals of the Clinic of Dissociative Studies, the male voice/
person lunged forward cursing me and attempting to attack me for wanting to kill
him. I was thankful on that occasion that the speaker had been accompanied by two
minders or helpers who needed to physically restrain her from (potentially?)
assaulting me. The situation was only alleviated when I clarified by status as a
‘researcher aiming to understand how childhood experiences influence the person or
people we become as adults’.
Other attachment interviews with this same population point to a concerted effort
on the part of one personality to tell the story of her upbringing, from a metapersonal perspective, referring at times to previously dissociated experiences which
become integrated. This evident attempt at achieving a coherent personal synthesis is
not without its pitfalls, namely in terms of the heightened fear and anxiety that
accompanies the one who has achieved control over others whose identity is not
entirely denied. One such interview began with the female speaker confessing how
desperately anxious she was at facing the task of telling the story of her childhood
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experiences with caregivers. An hour-and-a-half later when the interview ended, she
confessed how very hard it is to hold herself together free of a severe anxiety (panic)
attack. This she indicated was only managed by fixating her attention on the next task
she has to execute, e.g., walking to the bus stop, then waiting for the bus, then paying
the bus driver and so on. Were she to let her mind wander from the task at hand, an
overwhelming flood of fearful anxieties awaited her. When the speaker alluded to
‘other personalities’ in her interview; namely, others who could convey the
unintegrated details of her terrifying past, she did not ‘split’ and assume another
voice/personality. Instead, what I observed was a woman struggling to achieve a sense
of integration and coherence with respect to an extraordinarily painful childhood
history, including ritual abuse (including animal sacrifice) and the painful experience
of being betrayed by her older brother. This was an older brother who had helped her
to survive the concentratio
