If there’s one thing that really drives my friend and colleague Jade Miller nuts, it’s the idea that Dissociative Identity Disorder is “fascinating.” She’s weary of the entertainment and publishing worlds that exploit and sensationalize the stories of people with DID, and consistently portray them as dangerous or criminal. So scroll on by if you’re looking for shallow fascination. But if you want to learn more about the relevance of DID to regular human experience, I can’t recommend Jade’s work enough.
Jade provides support for people with DID through Peer Support for Multiples. She is also a consultant for therapists, and a source of support for several Into Account clients. She’s the mother of three, and the author of Dear Little Ones, a beautiful series of children’s books designed specifically for “littles”–the young personalities that often emerge within the consciousness of a person with DID.
Jade’s upcoming memoir, Edelweiss, tells the story of her own internal system, and how she came to understand her own multiplicity in relation to the trauma she experienced, which included extreme child abuse and sex trafficking as an adult. While she was being trafficked, she also experienced profound betrayal from an evangelical “healing ministry.” Jade’s life story is compelling and extraordinary, but her work–both her writing and her advocacy–leans into the ordinary aspects of multiplicity, or living with “parts.” Rather than engaging much with popular debates about DID’s role in the “memory wars” or Satanic Panic, Jade brings gentle, sustained attention to the day-to-day realities of living with dissociation and multiple selves.
I’ve been a beneficiary of Jade’s educational work for a long time, so I was overjoyed when her agent found a place for Edelweiss on the Publishizer platform. Publishizer works to help authors attract publishers through crowdfunded pre-orders, so one material way to support Jade’s work right now is to pre-order her book.
To learn more about Edelweiss, read my interview with Jade below. We talk about the commonness of dissociation, the way that evangelical ministries can mess with our heads, and finally, perhaps most importantly, what our cultural attitudes towards childhood and children have to do with all of this.
Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director
A note for readers: Jade and I use several terms that may not be familiar to you. Here’s a quick guide:
Multiple: A person who experiences life as many selves sharing one body (definition directly from Peer Support for Multiples)
DID: Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), the diagnosis often given to multiples
Multiplicity: the condition of living with multiple selves
Parts: the multiple selves existing within one body
Fronting: Being the personality who interacts with the outside world
illustrations by Germán Zaninetti, for Dear Little Ones
The Language of Parts
SK: What motivated you to write your memoir?
JM: I think for me, it was realizing that a lot of the information out there that’s commonly understood is wrong. And also seeing that the way that people write about it doesn’t help draw lines of connection to us [multiples/people with DID] and other humans. It just further stigmatizes multiples. I don’t think that that’s helping us as a community, I think that’s actually hurting us. And I’m not sure that they even realize that’s what they’re doing. So it just strikes me as ironic that so many people who have DID, who have been exploited and stigmatized are actually contributing to their own exploitation, by exploiting their parts, to sell their story as spectacle. So the primary selling point is always like, come look at the spectacle.
I wanted to write a book that was different because I want more accurate information out there. I also want people to understand that we–multiples–are more like the rest of humanity than we are different. Because I think that’s really important. I think part of seeing multiplicity as something that doesn’t need to be stigmatized is realizing that we all have some very common threads of connection there.
SK: That tracks completely for me in terms of how I have experienced being educated by you informally, through working together on various cases. And also just being friends with you. Part of what has helped me understand your multiplicity is realizing that multiplicity is a normal part of the way that human beings experience the world and that we all have parts. Those of us who aren’t multiples don’t experience them as individual autonomous entities, but they’re still there.
JM: For sure. I think something I have noticed over the years, too, is that most people express some element of multiplicity, even if it’s not to the same extreme as someone who is a multiple. But I feel like it’s not unusual. We all use parts language all the time. We use parts language in a lot of conversations, but we’ve been socialized to not really notice or think deeply about what we’re actually saying.
If someone who doesn’t identify as multiple says, Well, part of me wants to stay home and a part of me wants to go, what are they talking about? The main difference between them and someone who does identify as a multiple would probably be that they don’t lose time between those two different parts of themselves. So I just want people that understand that we have more in common than things that we don’t have in common.
Dissociation is a coping mechanism that’s open to pretty much everyone. Not everyone uses it, but most people do on some level, if not to the extreme that trauma survivors do.
SK: What’s an example of dissociation that someone would use under non-traumatic circumstances?
JM: I think about kids in school a lot, maybe older kids. They’re in school, they’re in maybe a class that’s easy for them, and the teacher’s going over material they already know. But they’re not allowed to leave. They might dissociate in class because they’re bored. Boredom is one non traumatic reason why people might dissociate. Just because they can’t escape where they are, but where they are is unbearably boring.
SK: Switching gears a little bit, can you talk about some of the individual parts that make up your system?
JM: So, most people don’t realize that I’m not the original, who was born into the body. So I don’t identify with the legal name. But I came to the outside world about ten years ago, and I was under the impression at the time that hopefully it would just be temporary, and it stretched out longer and longer. And I don’t know that it will be temporary anymore, ten years later. So I have the original, who I call Emily in my book, because I changed names. Emily is the legal name person. And then I have a few littles that are still around, they’re not really like traumatized, they just like to be around. They’re inside. They don’t really go to the outside very much, but they just have this little posse and they all play together and cause a ruckus. I have another protector part; I don’t know if she will make it into the book. There are different parts of me that remember different parts of some of the abuse and trauma. So I will probably make several of my parts into a composite in the narrative, just to make it less confusing.
SK: Can you say a little bit more about the relationship between being a multiple and memory, and what it means to have different parts holding different memories?
illustration by Germán Zaninetti, from Dear Little Ones Book One
JM: Children are not resourced to be able to handle the kinds of emotions and sensations and things that come with abuse. Our minds brilliantly have a way to protect us from that, so that we don’t either die or go crazy. They cut out that part of an experience and put it somewhere else. And a lot of times, whichever part experienced the thing that our brain cuts out becomes its own separate persona. So I might have a memory of going to a baseball game and I don’t remember anything unusual about it. There might be a different part of me that remembers, oh, we had a scary experience in the parking lot at that baseball game. So combined together, we might have one complete memory or you might have like 50 combined together and make one complete memory There’s no specific way that memories are divided up. Individual people will handle it differently.
SK: I’m thinking about when you appeared and had to start fronting. Do you feel like you could say more about that, and about how you’re planning on representing that process in the book?
JM: In the book, Emily is working with a minister in a “healing” ministry. They have their own theories in that circle about how to heal traumatic memories. And I think the consensus in my system and even with that minister was that Emily didn’t have capacity to go through the process of uncovering all that there was to uncover. I don’t think Emily had the capacity because she was very exhausted at that point, by trying to just live life and heal and balance everything that was going on. And part of what makes me, Jade, different than Emily is that when I first began fronting, I really didn’t feel a lot. I didn’t feel a lot of emotions, I actually didn’t feel a lot of physical sensations. And then we (Jade and her parts) started suspecting that we were actually still being abused. In the present day, it was actually vital that I be there, because I just had the capacity to endure that many other parts didn’t. I was the only one who could really, I was the only one who could take it. So I don’t think we would have survived physically without me fronting the body. And I don’t know how things would have been emotionally if it wasn’t me.
The book is structured like a braided novel. So a braided novel is shown from two or three different perspectives. And their stories all intertwine. That’s how I’m writing the book. So it will start with Emily. And then, right about the time that I come in, I will start talking from my perspective.
SK: Do you have a memory of when you emerged as a personality within your system? Like even before you started fronting?
JM: I have memories of being a child in the body. I also have memories of surfacing about 10 years before I started working with the ministry. Aging and growth are sort of weird topics within multiplicity, because, again, there are no rules. Everybody’s system does things a little differently. There seems to be times when some parts are stuck at a certain age, and sometimes they age. And it’s not clear why. But I remember both being a child in the body, and I also remember, surfacing in my system about 10 years before meeting that minister, and I was still a child at that time in my system. I grew up a lot over that 10 years before I met the minister.
Broken Attachments
SK: Can you talk some more about that minister and her “healing ministry”?
JM: You know, I think there’s a whole world of people out there who don’t understand that conservative Christians have created their own brand of psychology in order to try to heal people rather than having them go to therapy. And there are probably instances where it goes well, there are many, many, many other instances, some that I’m privy to, that it does not go well. Mine did not go well.
So the external journey of my book is realizing that I’m multiple and escaping from trafficking. The internal journey, though, is about my attachment to this minister who became a mother figure, and how having that attachment broken affected me, and led to me leaving the religion of my childhood.
It’s important to realize that there are just as many instances of licensed therapists committing abuse. So people often think that going to someone with a license is a safeguard, but I mean, anyone can act unethically. I’ve had just as many stories in my inbox of a therapist abusing a client, as I have of a minister or ministry doing that.But I think ministries in general are targeting wounded people, because that is supposedly their clientele. Those same wounded people don’t always have the skills to recognize the red flags in the relationship, and there’s no governing body. For the most part, there’s no accountability that can be enacted if it goes wrong.
I’ve had many people tell me that something similar happened to them, where they had a mentor within a ministry who claimed them as a spiritual child, and then abandoned them when they didn’t perform or when they didn’t heal, or when they didn’t, X, Y, or Z. I think it’s just a problem in general with Christianity, because the religion dangles this carrot of attachment and belonging and relationship. But then they switch to grading your performance, your adherence to their guidelines and standards. If you question any of that, you’re out. All I did was question.
Many people who have DID also have attachment disorders. So it’s very tricky sometimes. With my DID clients, for instance, it’s okay if they are attached to me. But it is not okay for me to give them the impression that I can be their mother. Attaching is human; I would be more worried if there was no attachment after months of very deep sharing. But me pretending to be something I’m not and can’t be, is where it’s unethical and potentially abusive. And that is what this minister did to me, before abandoning me.
SK: I want to talk about that phenomenon right there, that tendency to identify oneself as some sort of spiritual parent. I’ll see it even in comment sections on social media: “I’ll be your mother!” So often, this comes from a good place, but for somebody who has been repeatedly abused or abandoned by parental figures, they don’t need a casual invitation to be someone’s “child.” Parenthood is a lifelong commitment. I feel like we throw that terminology around way too much.
JM: It sounds so naive to me now, but when I look back on it, I thought she was doing it on purpose in order to reparent me. I thought that was the goal. I thought she was out to prove that there were good parenting experiences, and she was ready and willing to give them to me.
SK: And why would you not think that? That’s what parenting language implies.
Inner children, outer children
illustration by Germán Zaninetti, from Dear Little Ones Book One
SK: How are you going to write about the process of parenting your littles?
JM: My goal is to make it relatable. Even for people who aren’t multiples: we all realize that there are younger parts of ourselves that may need something. Like when things come up that cause us pain. Why is that?
SK: It seems like there’s a cynicism in our culture about the idea of having an inner child, or reparenting yourself, or giving attention to the child parts of ourselves. These concepts have been around for a long time, but to a lot of people they seem worn out and worthy of mockery. And those concepts have been exploited and misused, for sure. But it’s easy to forget or dismiss that reparenting our child parts is a really vital skill for a lot of people, whether or not they are multiples.
JM: In my observation, it is very common for people to view children the way they view their actual self, not their adult self, but like their deep inner selves. Because if people don’t like children, there’s something about that child that reminds them of themselves and they don’t like it. So I think a lot of the mocking and resistance has to do with the way the culture feels about children in general. We’ve come a long way. I mean, we’ve come a long way from the like, swaddle it, feed it, put it in the crib it by itself, we’ve come a long way. But we still have a lot of work to do.
I just think that people’s dislike of children in general and maybe disdain for the concept of an inner child frequently comes from their own disdain of their own child self.
SK: That kind of insight is part of why I appreciate talking to you about trauma so much. I feel like in abuse advocacy, there’s a kind of false divide between people who specialize in working on child sexual abuse, and people who work directly with adults. And in a superficial sense, I definitely fall into the world of people who are working with adult survivors. But for me, when you look past the different legal obligations that you have to minors versus adults, the issues are completely intertwined. The consequences of how we’re treated as children permeate the entire field of anti-abuse advocacy.
I’m often working with adults who are survivors of child sexual abuse that was never properly dealt with. That is the majority of child sexual abuse survivors. And those survivors are frequently very concerned with the question of what it means to honor children as people. That question is at the heart of the problems we’re facing. Children are one of the easiest categories of marginalized people to exploit because they’re so dependent on adults and so easy to control.
JM: This reminds me of the shock that I hear from my clients when they ask me what my stance is on hearing abuse memories from their littles. And I say, Well, my stance is to believe them, always. And people are shocked. They’re like, but what if they’re lying? And I’m like, if you’re not suing anybody, I don’t care. Children are saying what they’re saying in their best attempt to tell you something hurts. I don’t care if the details are correct or not.
I got this keen understanding when my own oldest was probably five, that children can tell you something that’s not correct, but at the same time, they’re not lying. Because a lie is premeditated. And children can sometimes think that they know what’s happening, and be wrong. But they’re not lying. People don’t seem to be able to understand that nuance.
SK: Yeah, there’s a real resistance to understanding what is happening developmentally with children when they’re trying to say that something’s wrong, but they don’t understand how or why the thing that is wrong is wrong. We punish children for not having an adult understanding of what it is that they’re experiencing.
JM: Yeah, and not being able to put it in words that we can find reliable or believable. I mean, the amount of times that I’ve gotten sort of this shark Pikachu face when I tell people that I’m just going to believe their littles.
It doesn’t even matter what I personally think about what I’m hearing if a little is telling me something so outrageous that I happen to think maybe it’s not possible. It doesn’t matter. They still need attunement and they still need attention. Which is another thing that people are so reluctant to give children, whether it’s their own inner child or an actual child. This whole “attention-seeking” thing is just children needing attention! So do adults! I mean, we need attention. We just need it. It’s not bad. The question is always, “But what if it’s just attention-seeking?” And I always say, then let me give them some.
SK: I’ve come to just loathe that term, “attention-seeking.” Once you scrape the surface of how we talk about sexual violence and abuse, even in ostensibly trauma-informed settings, that phrase comes up. Survivors are always held under suspicion of being attention-seeking. And I’m not sure that people who accuse them of that even really know what they mean by it. It’s a phrase that we use to shame and stigmatize people who are asking for help.
That term haunts us. Even in situations where the term has never come up, survivors are super aware that they have to frame their concerns in a way that won’t bring that “attention-seeking” label upon them. Because if it is? Then they know that the truth of what they’re saying is under question. And it goes right back to the way we talk about children who need attention. It’s a way of infantalizing adult survivors.
JM: And there’s nothing wrong with needing attention. I think that’s really the root of the issue. People think that there’s something wrong with needing attention. I need attention as an adult, you need attention. It’s a need that we have. It’s not wrong. I would say to anybody who calls a survivor attention-seeking, do you think there’s any amount of attention worth saying all these things compared to just having a life free of abuse? There’s no amount of attention worth all of this.
If you enjoyed this interview, please pre-order Jade’s book, Edelweiss.
The post Edelweiss: Author Jade Miller on multiplicity and her upcoming memoir appeared first on Into Account.