MPD & DID Best Books, Attachment, Trauma & Multiplicity, Quotes & Notes

"As Bowlby himself tells us, we cannot know what we cannot bear to know."

We propose that dissociating individuals are those victims of childhood (sexual) abuse who coped by refusing to conceive of the contents of their caregiver's mind and thus successfully avoided having to think about their caregiver's wish to harm them. They go on to defensively disrupt their capacity to depict feelings and thoughts in themselves and in others.
This leaves them to operate upon inaccurate and schematic impressions of thoughts and feelings and they are thus immensely vulnerable in all intimate relationships.
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The switching from one state of consciousness to another that is accompanied by facial, postural, motor, speech, affective and cognitive changes in DID is made possible because no core sense of identity exists to which external and internal experiences are invariably referred. 
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For these 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).
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Pg 39
For adults with DID, 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.