I wish I had a magic wand to make things better, but therapy doesn't work that way.

Somehow the disorder hooks into all kinds of fears and insecurities in many clinicians. The flamboyance of the multiple, her intelligence and ability to conceptualize the disorder, coupled with suicidal impulses of various orders of seriousness, all seem to mask for many therapists the underlying pain, dependency, and need that are very much part of the process. In many ways, a professional dealing with a multiple in crisis is in the same position as a parent dealing with a two-year-old or with an adolescent's acting-out behavior. (236)

as my understanding of and competence in treating the disorder have grown, multiple personality has come to seem, though still horrendous, less unique and incomprehensible, and thus more manageable

Robin and Reagan are unique in that they date their creation not to a single traumatic event but to the need of the group to maintain a nonconficted, nonabreactive memory trace.
The other past-keepers are both reactive and information-providing personalities-they appear in my office to give me information the system seems to think I need, or in response to my touching a critical nerve in the Jo, Missy, Joan Frances, or Renee personalities.

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be “just like us,” so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple “selves” have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different “moods.” In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients.

When treating their first few DID cases, therapists typically focus too much attention on the alters. This focus tends to distract from what is fundamental–the patients’ pervasive dissociative/posttraumatic distress and maladaptation. Has something similar occurred in psychiatry’s view of DID? Have the compelling phenomena of alters distracted us from the matrix of dissociative and posttraumatic symptoms in which alters are embedded?
- Dell, P. F. (2001). Why the Diagnostic Criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder Should Be Changed, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 2 (1).