Doctors, therapists (people who help people), and psychologists (people who study how minds work), have come up with some information about multiples. Some is good and helps multiples, some is a little iffy and might not do them a lot of good. Some applies to almost all multiples, but some of it only applies to some multiples.
One thing they've come up with is a fancy name for "multiples" -- Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID.
Dissociation is where all your 5 (or more) senses, memories, feelings, and sense of being inside your body become disconnected from each other. In short, it means "to separate" or disconnect.
Identity is like who you are -- or what you make of yourself. How you see yourself.
Disorder means out of order -- broken, sick, ill.
So DID is essentially saying "sick people who have separated their self". That isn't very nice. My mom says that a lot of multiples don't like saying they have DID.
Some multiples don't think they were ever only one person, so they couldn't have separated themself into different people -- they never were one person to begin with.
Some multiples disagree with the "disorder" part and don't think that DID is a sickness. Sometimes only few people in their head are a problem, sometimes no one in their head is a problem. Sometimes the problem is just that a few of them need help, just like a lot of singletons need help.
With all this trouble calling it DID, my mom just calls it "being multiple" -- I guess it just makes it easier and less people fight about it. But she says that if a therapist is asked to help her, they're probably going to call her "DID."
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