HealthyGamerGG - How Trauma Splits A Soul (Dissociative Identity Disorder)

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K explores the intersection of psychiatry and spirituality to answer the profound question of whether individuals with multiple personalities share a single soul. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, neuroscience, and yogic philosophy, he explains how severe trauma can shatter the psyche. He argues that the resulting dissociation is a desperate attempt by the mind to protect a person's vital spark of aliveness from an overwhelming tsunami of negativity. What to expect in this episode: The Consensus on the Soul: An exploration of how various traditions define the soul not as a religious concept, but as the central witnessing and experiencing force that exists beyond the ordinary mind. The Pokemon Trainer Analogy: A look at how a healthy person manages different aspects of their personality like connected "Pokemon," whereas in Dissociative Identity Disorder, the unifying "trainer" is lost and personalities switch without coordination. The Siege of Helm's Deep: A breakdown of how overwhelming childhood trauma forces the mind to wall off its "vital spark" of joy and innocence to protect it from annihilation. Depersonalization vs. Derealization: Understanding the difference between feeling like an "empty shell" with no internal self and feeling like the outside world is trapped behind a "glass wall" or fog. Avatars of the Ultra-Real: Why individuals who have been heavily traumatized often develop an uncanny capacity for mystical experiences and access to a non-ordinary reality that better-adapted people cannot perceive. The Brain Bisection Debate: Exploring neuroscience experiments where severing the connection between brain hemispheres creates two independent consciousnesses, challenging the idea of a single, transcendent soul. The "Dark Side" of Spirituality: Why internal protectors can sometimes turn into malevolent persecutors or "demons" that resist the healing process in psychotherapy. Standing in the Spaces: A technical look at how healing involves moving from defensive switching to the capacity to feel like oneself while being many, maintaining continuity across all aspects of life. Rewiring the Narrative: Practical insights on using autonomic rewiring and identity formation to help the mind handle high emotional energy without fracturing. Dr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is here! Order now: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanoja, but you can call me Dr. Kay. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. Today we're going to talk about something that is absolutely fascinating.

Does someone with multiple personalities share one soul? And I'm going to go ahead and say that the answer is yes, they do share a soul. So today we're going to be talking about what the soul is, not from a religious or faith-based sense, but it's crazy. But psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, psychologists have been exploring philosophers, have been exploring what the nature of the soul is for at least 100, if not more, years. And the fascinating thing is there's actually consensus from the psychoanalytic and psychiatric community about what the soul is. The other thing that we have to understand in order to answer

this question is we have to understand the fundamentals of de-personalization, derealization, dissociation, and multiple personalities. And once we understand what is going on with people with multiple personalities, and we try to arrive at some kind of consensus of what the soul is, that's how we're going to get to our answer. So we're going to start with the basic question, does a soul really exist? And here's what's really fascinating. If you look at the psychoanalytic tradition, if you look at spiritual traditions from Christianity, if you look at the yogi's perspective on what the soul is, they actually all describe something very similar, right? So when there's consensus between multiple different people who are investigating things, that makes me

lean into that being more correct. So we're going to start with this exploration of a guy named William James, who wrote this book called The Varieties of Religious Experience. And this was a book that I read about 20 years ago when I was first, when I first started doing neuroscience research at Harvard, it was something that my PI neuroscientist recommended to me because I was interested in spirituality. So William James, I think. is more of a philosopher. I don't know exactly what his training is. But he basically like talked about the varieties of religious experience. And he explored things like psychosis. And he said, okay, people who are psychotic are like a little bit divorced from reality. And then there are these people who will

have like these spiritual episodes. Those people are also divorced from reality. But there seems to be a difference between these two things. Okay. What William James was exploring was mystical states of consciousness. And then he's not the only one. So Beyond, who I think is a psychoanalyst, spoke of the ineffable reality of O, or the godhead is the ultimate source of transformation in psychotherapy. Christopher Ballas acknowledges a mysterious intelligence that moves through the mind and says that if there is a God, this is where it lives. And so Jung talked about this as well. He sort of noticed that, okay, there's the ego, which is like the mind that I am aware of, right? My personality with thoughts and feelings and memories and stuff like that. And then he describes something called

the ground of the soul, which is the self, which is separate from the mind. And he says, when people have experienced the self, they'll never forget it. So all these people basically agree that there's something else beyond our ordinary experience. So part of what I love about being a doctor is in medicine, we learn how something works when it breaks. Right? So if I break a leg, then I have difficulty walking. That's how I learn that the leg is what's responsible for walking. So my background is more in neuroscience and psychiatry.

So that's where we look at damaging different parts of the brain. So if I have damage to Broca's area in a stroke, I'll have difficulty speaking. If I have damage to Wernicke's area in the brain from a stroke, I'll also have difficulty speaking, but in a different way. So what's really fascinating is these severe trauma disorders are actually damaged to our connection with the soul. Okay. That's what I sort of believe, and we're going to lay it out. So let's start by looking at dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization disorder, and derealization disorder, okay? So in dissociative personality disorder, which is basically multiple personalities, what happens is someone's mind has multiple people

inside it. So you can sort of think about this like a Pokemon trainer with Pokemon, right? So there's like Charzard, which is my fire Pokemon. This altar or this personality comes out in certain situations. And then I have my bulbosaur, which is like in other situations, this personality comes out. So with a healthy person, we all have aspects of our personality, but they're all connected, right? So there's Dr. K. Right. So give you my example. There's Dr. K. And then there's Alok. And then there's daddy, which is what my kids call me, not my wife. Right. So I have lots of different things. And then I'm a son to my mom. Right. So I have all these different parts, but they're all connected. In multiple personality disorder,

these things are disconnected. Individuals with dissociative identity disorder may report the feeling that they have suddenly become depersonalized observers of their own speech or actions, which they may feel powerless to stop. In some cases, voices are experienced as multiple, perplexing, independent thought streams over which the individual experiences no control. Strong emotions, impulses, and even speech or other actions may suddenly emerge without a sense of personal ownership or control, sense of agency. Alterations in sense of self and loss of personal agency may be accompanied by a feeling that these attitudes, emotions, and behaviors, even one's body, are not mine or not under my control. These people also tend to have amnesia. So when one altar is functioning, it may do certain things that the other altar is not aware of.

But basically, these people have multiple personalities. They sometimes feel really disconnected from them. This is a key theme that is also found in depersonalization and derealization disorder. The individual may feel detached from his or her entire being. I am no one and I have no self. He or she may also feel subjectively detached from aspects of the self, including feel, which includes hypoemotionality. I know I have feelings, but I don't feel them.

Head filled with cotton, whole body or body parts or sensations, touch proprioception, which is where my body is in space. So if you hold your arm up, that's proprioception. Hunger, thirst, libido. There may also be a diminished sense of agency feeling robotic, like an automaton, lacking control of one's speech or movements. So in depersonalization disorder, people feel like there's no self in here. Right? So I am like I'm sort of aware like watching a movie that my body has these sensations. I am aware that my mind has these feelings, but I don't actually feel them. It's sort of like I'm an empty shell and there's nothing on the inside. So derealization disorder is a little bit different. Derealization is characterized by a feeling of unreality or detachment from or unfamiliarity with the world, be it individuals, inanimate objects or all surroundings. The individual may feel as if he or she were in a fog, dream, or bubble, or as if there were a veil or a glass wall between the individual and the world around. Images appear two-dimensional or flat.

So depersonalization and derealization are sort of two sides of the same coin, which is when I'm depersonalized, the rest of the world exists, but I'm disconnected from it. There's nothing like here that is feeling it, really experiencing it. De-realization is when I'm stuck in a bubble. So the me in here exists, but it can't connect to the outside world. The outside world is a fog. Everything appears flat and colorless and not lifelike. So it's kind of like I'm ensconced in here, but the vibrancy of the world is not something that I can connect with. Hey, all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health.

So this is a guide that explores this process. how does experience shape us as human beings? Trauma is all about walling off or suppressing things that are overwhelming. They cannot control their emotions so their emotions control them. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. In my experience, depersonalization and derealization are sort of like less severe forms of dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities, but they're all along the same continuum. So if we look at what a person is, we have all these aspects of self. Okay.

So let's say there's Dr. K over here. There's dad over here. There's husband, lover, right? There's son. There's gamer. And then there is wannabe monk. Okay. And each of these personalities, each of these aspects of my personality,

are all joined by a continuous experience in here. In each of these instances, when I'm working in the emergency room as a doctor, actually, so let's do this. There's Dr. Knoja, too. I like that more. So there's Dr. Knoja, who's an internet personality. And there's Dr. Kanoja, who you, if you go to an emergency room with an overdose, may come and evaluate you to see if you need to be hospitalized.

Right? So we have all of these aspects of our personality. And they're all sort of joined together. So there's no amnesia between these things. Dr. Knoja remembers what Dr. K said yesterday on YouTube. Dad remembers what son was saying the other day. So all of these aspects of my personality are connected. And then there's Dr. Kanoja, right?

So Dr. Kanoja is the doctor who works in emergency rooms, is licensed to practice medicines, sees patients. So each of these are aspects of my personality. Okay? There's no amnesia between them. They're all connected by this. central force. And in the yogic philosophy, in yogic contemplative spiritual traditions, we sort of say that, okay, the soul is the thing that experiences all of the different

aspects of your life, right? So the mind has Dr. K and Dr. Kanoja, husband and son, and all those people behave differently. But I am the one. The me is the one that experiences all of them, right? You guys aren't Dr. Kanoja. You're not Dr. K. You're not married to my wife. You're not father to my children. And in the same way, you have many aspects. There's you at work, there's you at school. Maybe you're a parent. Maybe you're a child. Maybe you have a nemesis. Maybe you're a mentor. Maybe you're a mente. So you have all of these different aspects of your personality that are all joined because you're the one who lives them. Okay. So the yogis basically say this central witnessing, experiencing thing is.

what the soul is. So then there's another kind of like normal situation here, which is that if you look at the aspects of your life, okay, even though the mechanical aspects of your life may be the same, every day I go to work in the emergency room, I always see patients. But sometimes there is a zest for life. Sometimes there is a joy and there is a chemistry and there is an excitement. Sometimes I feel alive in the emergency room and sometimes I feel burnt out in the emergency room. Does that kind of make sense? If you look at the experiences of your life, sometimes there is a zestness to them. There's a feeling of aliveness and sometimes it feels more mechanical. So most of us will like alternate in this kind of general area where there's like we feel more alive at time, we feel less

alive at time. And what's happening in today's society is that we're becoming less alive alive and like more dopaminergic. Food manufacturers are figuring out how to activate our tongue to increase the sense of taste. All of these tech platforms and pornography and all this kind of stuff are sort of giving us these artificial highs. But no amount of like scrolling great shorts makes you like feel alive and feel that zest. And that zest isn't even associated with pleasure, right? So a couple years ago, I had the absolute privilege of going to the Bavarian Alps for vacation and while I was in the Alps, I jumped into this icy cold mountain stream. It is a horribly unpleasant experience, but it is absolutely invigorating and it makes you feel alive. So what happens

when we traumatize someone? We're going to talk about a medical principle called an abscess. So when we have a body that is healthy, we sometimes get an infection. And then what our body does in order to protect us from that infection, it walls off this infection. So there's a bundle of infection inside that has been walled off to protect the rest of us. When most of us experience trauma, this is how we experience it. We take there's some negative aspect of our experience that we wall off and we bury in our unconscious. This is why we get triggered, right? So what happens is once I have a traumatic experience, let's say my partner cheats on me, I, sort of move on a year later, I'm able to do my job, I'm able to live my life.

But if I'm dating someone and there's like an inkling that they're cheating, this abscess which has been walled off will kind of rupture and these thoughts will reemerge in my mind. Okay. So for healthy people, we have these traumas that we kind of wall off. Ideally, we process them. We talk about all that kind of stuff in Dr. Kay's guide to trauma, right? How to process trauma. But when the trauma is incredibly severe.

Okay. So when someone like a child has something really terrible happen to them, they don't know how to handle it. And this is not a situation where I'm mostly healthy and I'm a well-formed person. This is a situation where the trauma is so overwhelming that it suffuses my mind. And when the trauma is so overwhelming, our mind takes a different approach. Instead of walling off the damage, it walls off the good part. Right. So this is a situation. where, you know, the walls are overrun. We're defending, this is the siege of Helms Deep. And the walls have been over. So at the beginning, we're trying to hold the line, right? And then the walls get overrun by orcs. And then what we do is all the remaining people who are alive retreat inside, into the keep.

And we wall off this final keep for our last stand. This is what happens in severe trauma. The spark, the joy, the life within us, has to be protected from the overwhelming tsunami of negativity. Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear consciously. Later on, when our mind is developed, we can handle more trauma. But when this happens to a child, which, by the way, is a huge risk factor for dissociative

identity disorder or multiple personalities. I've never seen a case of someone developing multiple personalities when they're 40 years old. Okay. The young child who is abused, violated, or seriously neglected by a caretaking adult is overwhelmed by intolerable affects. That means intolerable emotion that are impossible for it to metabolize, much less understand or even think about. A shock to the psychosomatic unity of the personality threatens to shatter the child to its very core, threatens to extinguish that vital spark of the person so crucial for the experience of aliveness. And so central to that later experience of feeling real, such a shattering of the childhood psyche would be an unimaginable catastrophe. A soul murder is one investigator called it. So when the torrents are too big for the child to handle, this vital spark, this soul, this aliveness deep within the child is threatened to be completely overwhelmed. So what it does is walls that off. Right? But remember, this is vitalness. This is aliveness. This is the joy of childhood, which our psyche tries to maintain and preserve at all costs. Because this is the spark of life. This is the last thing that ultimately when this thing dies, our soul is dead. And that is what the mind doesn't want to happen at any cost. Fortunately, this shattering almost never happens, at least not completely. Instead, a life-saving split occurs that we call dissociation. Dissociation. Dissociation.

Seals over non-being, right? It protects us from non-being. It prevents the annihilation of the unit self. So then when we're walling this off, what happens on the outside? The unbearable affect is distributed to different parts of the psyche or soma. These parts cease to know about each other so that the personality does not have to suffer the unspeakable horror of trauma as a whole. We could say that the psyche shatters itself along inborn fault lines. So remember, these are the different aspects of me. Okay? And we have this vital aliveness that connects them all.

So when trauma is threatening to be overwhelming and is going to overwhelm all of this, what we actually do is we wall off the aliveness. This is a bundle of aliveness that we are then walling off. And then what our mind does to preserve ourselves, first thing we're going to do is wall this off. And once we wall this off, something interesting happens. these are no longer connected, right? These segments here are now separated. And then what the mind does in order to protect itself is it takes all the trauma and it sticks it into one person. So when you work with multiple personalities, oftentimes what you'll see is that there is like one person who tanks all the damage. You'll have one or two altars that basically deal with all the crap. So when you're threatened, there's a certain aggressive protective altar that take over, is not going to bow down when you start punishing, when a child is being abused, like physically or emotionally, the tank altar will kind of switch into gear and it'll tank

that damage. And then there's another altar over here, which is like the artist. The tank altar protects the artist altar from the damage. And this is what tends to trigger and we'll get to sort of healing and recovery soon enough. But this is sort of what the goal of treating people with dissociative identity is. disability disorder is, is we want to have them stop switching, right? We want, we want the artist to be able to tank a little bit of the damage, and we want the tank altar to be able to experience a little bit of joy, right, so that we don't separate out suffering and pleasure. We want to have everybody doing everything.

But this is basically what happens in the psyche. But this creates a problem. Because remember that that zest of life, that feeling of aliveness, the childlike joy, the experience of chemistry and excitement. I remember my mom once went to a concert that she was pretty excited about by this guy named Bundit Jusraj. He's like a devotional singer. And my mom was sort of saying like, you know, if I had stayed there 10 more minutes, if he had kept singing 10 more minutes, I would have like died and gone to heaven. So she had this like really rapturous experience through devotional music. And so this is what the soul is, right? When we feel like activated and connected with our soul, that's what brings the zest in life. And so in order to protect ourselves,

from severe trauma, we wall off this child-like innocence. These self-divisions have survival value because they save a part of the child's innocence in aliveness by splitting it off from the rest of the personality, preserving it in the unconscious. This allows life to go on, albeit at a terrible price, a loss of animation and vitality that have always been associated with and sold living. So ironically, dissociative defenses save a vital core of the while simultaneously losing it or losing it partially, they preserve the seed by cutting it

off from the world at least for a time. So this is the basic problem with dissociation, derealization, dissociative identity. We have to preserve this childlike innocence. We have to preserve this zest. In preserving it, in walling it off, we actually disconnect it from all of our aspects, all of our altars. And this is exactly now, if we go back to the experience of de-realization, the experience of de-personalization, what are the diagnostic criteria? The diagnostic criteria is living without a soul. The world feels flat. You are trapped in here, but there's no connection. The mind is what connects to the outside world, right? Dr. Kanoja is the one who shows up in the emergency room. Dr. K is the one who shows up on YouTube, right? Daddy is the one who

tucks my kids in at night. And so the mind, all of my sensory perceptions of my kids and things like that, sensory perceptions of what people are saying in the emergency room, that's in the mind. And so depersonalization, de-realization, they still have those sensory experiences. You can ask them, hey, like, what is this taste like? This tastes good. You know, this tastes sweet. This tastes chocolatey and sweet, and it has some tang from the raspberries. Do you like it? I don't know. Is it delicious? I can't tell. So depersonalization and de-realization are on, both sides of this coin, but the core problem is the same, that the soul has been walled off. So the deliciousness has been removed from life.

And so the goal is to do a couple of things, okay? So I really like Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score. So he's a, you know, a trauma, he's a psychiatrist, I think, who focuses on trauma treatment. And as he's developed his treatment center, they've incorporated a lot of spiritual practices. So when I work with people with trauma, there's like a lot of stuff. that has to be done. Okay. So the basic thing that we want to do is reconnect with the soul and keep the altars from switching. So the goal of the therapy is normally like each of these personalities handles their own thing. Okay. So you can kind of think about this like a Pokemon

trainer with Pokemon once again. So it's like when I'm fighting a water Pokemon, I'm going to use Pikachu. When I'm fighting a grass Pokemon, I'm going to use Charzard. Right. So we, a normal human being has all these Pokemon, but we're all unified by the Pokemon trainer. The Pokemon are extensions of the Pokemon trainer, and we will pinch hit, we'll summon certain Pokemon to deal with certain issues, but the Pokemon trainer is always in control. So what happens when we have dissociative identity disorder is we lose the Pokemon trainer entirely, and the Pokemon are just switching however they feel like. So there is not a unifying sense of order.

Generally speaking, what treatment looks like is that we want to be able to not switch. So that means that when I have Charzard, Charzard may come out when I have a grass Pokemon. But the actual goal is when I'm faced with a water Pokemon, instead of switching to Pikachu, I want to stay as Charzard. So when the tank altar shows up and someone is expressing love and affection, instead of switching to the child altar, we actually want the tank altar to stay there. And once we have the altars not switching, then there is a sense of continuity between them.

That is what healing looks like. So that's how dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization, derealization kind of work. Okay, but we still haven't fully answered the question of, you know, whether they have one soul or not. But make no mistake that like this is like where Dr. K is stepping outside of some of my expertise. Okay, we're going to touch on philosophy and a couple of other things.

So there's this sense of continuity between all the aspects of our personality. In the Advait Vedantah or like yogic spiritual system, we have this thing called the Atman or the soul, which can't be described, which Christian mystics will also talk about. But is that just a part of the mind or is it something that is like not mental? Right. So is this just an abstraction of the mind? Or is there a real thing that exists out? of the mind, is the soul actually real? And this is where we're going to sort of depart

well-grounded science. And I'm still going to explore this because I think it's absolutely fascinating. Because I think there is actually something there that is beyond the mind. And I'm not the only one. So the first thing is it's really fascinating. But if you look at people who are heavily traumatized, there's a rupture between their internal self, the soul, and their external personality. That's why things feel derealized. That's why things feel depersonalized. But the interesting thing is that for a normal person, their soul is kind of intermingled with all of their life. They have like a zest for life. They have a joy of life. But for the traumatized person, if it's all packaged and sealed away, then one would think that, okay, if there's no soul

in the regular life, there's no zest, there's no joy, there may be a hyper-concentrated soul over here, Right? So instead of it permeating out, it's concentrated over here. And this is what's really interesting, is there is absolutely a correlation between people being heavily, heavily traumatized and their capacity for mystical experience. So if we look at a lot of people who have transformed their lives. So we can talk about people like, you know, Victor Frankel, who was in the concentration camps during the Holocaust, and he sort of had this deep spiritual connection. which then like transformed him. So trauma transforms people who are being destroyed into saints and into prophets, right? And this is like a really common theme. It's been a part of my experience where I'm not a saint or a prophet, but I was feeling terrible. I didn't have really bad trauma, like not in the way that we're talking about with dissociative identity disorder, but I can speak to how deep spiritual practice can transform your sense of self. So there's still a a deeper question here of what is that thing in the middle, right? And a lot of people will say,

okay, what you're describing is the soul isn't anything special. It's just some aspect of the mind. It's some aspect of consciousness. It's a hallucination created by the brain. There's nothing really special about it. I don't really think so, though, and I'm not the only one. I think there is something special about that part of us. I don't think it's a part of the mind. I think it is a transcendent part of us, that we really do have something like a soul, that there is this whole realm of existence that our brain is not capable of perceiving. Okay. And like I said, I'm not the only one. And this is something that has been observed by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists when working with victims of trauma. And if you have been hard, hard, hard traumatized, there is a decent chance that

you have access to a level of perception that normal people don't have. Now, I know this sounds crazy, right? Like, oh, this doctor is like, he's like talking all this stuff. You guys are special. But I'm not the only one. Like, so let's just take a look at some of the, what's been written, okay? So psychoanalytic work with some victims of early trauma supports these mystical musings in specific and dramatic ways. Almost all the highly sensitive people whose cases appear herein have had mystical experiences. So people who are traumatized frequently have these hyper-concentrated spiritual experiences. So let's understand this for a second. For people who are well adapted, my soul is connected to my personality. So there's zest and joy in all the dimensions of,

or some dimensions of life, some more than others. But if I'm traumatized and my soul has been sealed away and I exist in a depersonalized, de-realized state over here where I'm, mentally I'm functioning. I have thoughts and feelings, but I don't really feel them. It would sort of logically make sense that if there's no soul over here and it's all packaged over here, if we go over here, we will have like a concentrated soulful experience, which is interestingly enough what we see if we look at things historically, right? So you'll have these people who will later on become saints and prophets that go through a very traumatic experience. I think a well-documented, well, you know, believable version of this is Victor Frankel in

the Holocaust, where he sort of has this, like, perspective on spirituality and inner peace and things like that, that is triggered by trauma. Even when we look at, like, when I think about my life, I'm not, I've never had dissociative identity disorder, but it was at my low point in life when I was deeply depressed, failing at life that I went to India and something about being addicted to video games and, like, having an empty life that had no zest, but plenty of dopamine, concentrated a part of myself that then I opened up in India through spiritual experience. And so if we follow this, what we sort of end up with this is this idea that, okay, so

we're separated, right? So there's concentrated soul over here, empty life over here. And so there are almost two worlds that exist. And for most people, these things are intermingled, so they just see it as one world. So let's take a look at what this text shows. The true story of their soul's dual destiny on this earth as citizens of two realms. Ironically, trauma survivors are in a unique position to claim this larger vision because they are often forced prematurely into a non-ordinary reality, a spiritual and often mentalized world that helps them survive the unbearable pain of their early affect relationships. They become what James Grotzstein calls orphans of the real, but simultaneously they become avatars of the ultra-real.

Now, what the hell does that mean? I'm going to try to explain it. So early on, when we get hyper traumatized, like severely traumatized, we cannot exist in this coexistent state. So what happens is these people retreat into the soul. It's the only place that can protect them because the outside world is so damaging. The mind is so damaging, scary, dangerous that we have to retreat into this place. And then they're severed.

But the really interesting thing is that since there is this separation, they have this capacity for non-ordinary experience. They have this capacity for access to the ultra-real, some kind of weird, like transcendent reality. And this was something that, like, I connected these dots in a really random way. So when I was interviewing for residency, okay, so I went to McLean Hospital at this program called MGH-H. McLean, which is Harvard Medical School, arguably best program in the country. And one of my interviews was with this awesome person, and Dr. Kaufman, who's a neuroscientist who specializes a psychiatrist, does a lot of brain, fMRI research on, and focuses on trauma.

So we had a super cool conversation for like an hour about trauma and spirituality and what's going on there. And then two years later, I was in her class, and she brought in a patient who had experienced dissociation, depersonalization, derealization, right? She's trying to teach us about this stuff we're training to be psychiatrists. And the really fascinating thing is I started asking this person questions, and they were describing their experience and I was like, oh, does it feel like this? Does it feel like this? Does it feel like this? And they're like, yeah. Yeah, it feels like that. It feels like that. It feels like that. It feels like that. It feels like that. And there's this really weird connection where like I was like, oh, I know exactly what this person is is talking about. I felt this. But for them, it was really bad in some ways. And for me, it was like really good. So there seems to almost be like a positive and negative valence to these disconnected spiritual experiences, which is what William James talks about. Right. Like it can end up as something.

psychosis that can end up his trauma, or there's an ego death or dissociative experience in meditation, right? That's like a key element that leads to deactivation of the default mode network, healing and all this kind of stuff. Even if you look at studies on psychedelics, the healing or therapeutic value of psychedelics seems to correlate with the degree of ego death that someone experiences. This is a thing where, like, it's really bizarre, but people with trauma are like highly sensitive and have access to this other dimension of reality. So we were talking about the same thing. And so let's go back to the text.

So often they report synchronous experiences that defy rational understanding. And many of them describe a blurring of the boundaries between ordinary and non-ordinary reality, which allows them uncanny access to an immaterial reality that is inaccessible to better adapted people. So here's what this means. People with trauma have access to this non-ordinary reality that better adapted people aren't even aware of. But then this begs a really important question, what is reality here? Because in this text, it's framed that there's an ordinary reality and there's a non-ordinary reality, that both of these are still reality.

Whereas the clear counter argument is that actually these people who are traumatized, there's just one reality. And if you are mentally ill, if you are broken, if you're hallucinating from meditation, you're not perceiving reality. That's like literally a hallucination, broad. Like, this is not a real thing. But when you sit with these people, like, I just don't think that's true. Like, my experiences with this stuff have really led me to believe that there is this non-ordinary reality that just like the text says, is not perceivable by people who are better

adapted. Okay? Now, this is also where, like, I'm not saying that this is true. This is just when my cookie crumbles, having sat with people who are traumatized and have these weird spiritual experiences, I think they are experiencing something that is real, that by virtue of the way that their soul has been hyper-concentrated, they get access to this thing. And I think for me, this makes sense that this is what transformed. This is how trauma transforms people, allows them to spiritually grow and, like, understand reality. in a way that better adapted people can't. That's what I believe.

I don't think that it's just a psychological fiction. But there's a lot of evidence that it is. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is oneself. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you're making a category mistake. We sometimes encounter psychological disorders or surgically created disunities. We'll get to that in a second. We're the only way to interpret or make sense of them. is to posit, in effect, two centers of gravity or two selves.

One isn't creating or discovering a little bit of a ghost stuff in doing that. One is simply creating another abstraction, right? So this person is basically saying, look, this self is not, like, you can understand it in a lot of different ways, but there's no, like, ghost inside. It's actually just a mistake of categorization. It's a mistake. It's just an abstraction. It's not a real thing. Like, you know, a family is an abstraction.

You can't touch it. It's not a real thing. It's just an abstract idea, and that's what the self is. There's no concreteness to it. It's an abstraction. The fact that these abstract selves seem so robust and real is not surprising. And remember that even a center of gravity has a fairly robust presence once we start playing around with it.

But no one has ever seen it or ever will see a center of gravity. So talking about the self is the center of gravity. And if you kind of think about a center of gravity, it's not like a real thing, right? it's like an abstract emergent kind of principle that things will rotate around, but that doesn't mean that it is a thing. As David Hume noted, not one person has ever seen the self either. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception and can never observe anything but the perception.

So Hume is basically saying, anytime I try to look for myself, I only exist in relation to a sensory perception. So I perceive light, but there's light there. I perceive sound, but there's sound there. So the self of me, and I'm not a philosopher here, so if you guys understand what Hume is saying, please leave a note in the comments. This is my understanding of it, right? This is my attempt to not just rely on what I know, but try to expand beyond that a little bit. But Hume is basically saying that the self doesn't really exist. It always exists in relation to something more concrete. And it can never observe anything but the perception. If anyone upon Siri, and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess,

I can reason no longer with him. Okay? So Huma is saying, look, there's no such thing as a self. This person is kind of saying there's the self is kind of the center of gravity that's a nebulous thing that we all kind of coalesce around. That doesn't make it real. It's a category mistake. Okay.

And there's also some decent neuroscience evidence that the self really doesn't exist. So a good example of this is what happens with brain bisection. So this is also a philosophy paper that talks about basically this experiment that has been done, this thing that has been observed, that we have these two hemispheres in the brain. And if you sever them, they each have independent consciousness. So normally we have two hemispheres of the brain that are connected. So these two hemispheres like talk to each other. But in some cases of like severe epilepsy and things like that, what will actually have to do is we sever the connection between our two brain hemispheres. and when we do that, something weird happens.

So, for example, my right brain will perceive an object. Okay, like if I show the right brain like a picture of a banana. And then if I ask the right brain, what is that? The right brain can't actually tell me. If you ask the person, what is that? They can't use the words because Broca's area or language proficiency comes from the left side of the brain. So the right brain, like if you ask them, like, do you see that? They can nod.

do you know what that is? They can nod. Can you say it? Right brain says can't speak. So it says no. And then you can even do something interesting where you can give it like three objects and you can say, can you pick up the object that matches the picture. And the right brain can do that. It can pick up the banana instead of the pencil or the phone. Okay. And then similarly like the left brain, you can do some other similar weird things with the left brain where the left brain, if you ask the left brain, why are you holding a banana? The left brain has no idea what the right brain saw, but the left brain will speak if you ask the person, if you show them that, okay, you're holding a banana, and the left brain sees that you're holding a banana.

And then you ask it, why are you holding the banana? The left brain will just make something up. I feel hungry. Because it is completely divorced from the consciousness of the right brain. So some of these split brain experiments suggest that we actually have multiple consciousnesses within us, right? There isn't some unifying thing at the center. there's actually, it's just tied to the brain, and if you sever the brain into two pieces,

you sever consciousness into two pieces. So in this paper, Thomas Nagel points out that when you bisect the brain, you end up with basically two consciousnesses. So this isn't a situation where there's like one soul in the center or one consciousness in the center with different minds attaching to it. Each segment of the brain has its own part of consciousness that can be split apart. There is nothing transcendent like the soul. And so I present the, is an example of kind of the contrary perspective, right? So, like, it's important to consider that there are these brain bisection experiments that basically show the soul, as I've defined, it can kind of be severed into two pieces and is tied to different parts of the brain.

But I think that, like myself and many other psychiatrists who have worked with people of trauma, can't shake the idea that there is this non-ordinary reality, that it isn't a hallucination. Trauma survivors often have a deep understanding of a sacred, world that sustains them, even in the most depriving and abusive of human environments. This world is not merely a byproduct of failed attachment bonds in infancy, nor is it a compensation for infant mother neglect or abuse. This world is an everlasting fact of humankind's experience on the planet, and the trauma survivor knows this better than most. To acknowledge that the spiritual world is real, and following trauma, it is recruiting. It is recruited.

accruited for defensive purposes, a position I take throughout this book, differs from saying that the angels and demons that haunt or hallow the imagination of trauma survivors are hallucinations or nothing but derivatives, artifacts, or of a defensive process. So basically, Kalshjad is saying, look, there are two ways that we can look at this. One is that our perception of the non-ordinary reality is, in fact, a defensive structure. Our belief that we can perceive beyond the ordinary is our mind manufacturing a defense to protect us. The spiritual realm is a manufactured defense of the mind. Versus the other take, which is the spiritual realm is real and is recruited by the mind for defensive purposes. This is also something that you have to decide for yourself, okay? because the key aspect of this soul or this non-ordinary reality is that it is near-gun-nir-rup.

It doesn't have form. It can't be described in words, right? So if we go back to the Christian mystics, they're like, it's this little thing that's deep down there and you can't see it. Anytime you look for it, it disappears. If you try to describe it, you can't adequately describe it. And this is what I think, Hume, the mistake that Hume made, I think Hume made a really simple mistake, which is that he was not trained in a sense. series of practices that access the non-ordinary reality without perception. The yogis came to the same

conclusion at some level that Hume did. They said, okay, when I take my experience of reality, it is always tied to a perception, right? Just like Hume said, there's always light, there's always darkness. Like anytime I feel myself, it is in relation to something. But the yogi said, okay, hold on a second. Let's try to get rid of perception. So they developed this technique called Pratiyahara, where we start to exist outside of perception. And that is a step that I don't know if Hume ever achieved, whereas the yogis achieved that, and then they spent decades in that state of mind exploring further. So I'm with Kalshed on this one, that I think there is a spiritual realm that is recruited

for psychological purposes, as opposed to it being a psychological defense that is manufactured. but I think that is a very good argument to make. And I personally don't believe it. I think it's wrong. I think it's incomplete. But I think if that's where you fall on this spectrum, like I think that's a fully defensible position and one that we want to represent here.

There's one other element that I really want to talk about, which is actually what I wanted to talk about all along. But we need this context. Okay. So here's the other really scary thing about trauma and the spiritual connection. The benevolent spiritual presences that seem to have saved their souls, begin to lose their protective power. Under the pressure of repeated disappointments

and disillusionments, these inner objects often turn malevolent. Inner protectors turn into persecutors, and the better angels of our nature displaced by the demons of dismemberment, disembodiment, psychic deadening, and primitive defense. This is also a spirituality, but a spirituality of darkness and dread, and also a mysticism, but one of violence, demonic possession, and loss of the soul. But the traumatized soul in its suffering descent between heaven and hell and psychotherapy will sometimes find itself surrounded by dark forces that resist healing, and this is also a spiritual problem.

So here's the thing. Basically, Kalshed is saying, look, there is this spiritual realm, but unless we engage with it in the proper way, the spiritual realm can be damaging in and of itself. And the whole reason that I went into all of this crap, why didn't I just stop with the end of dissociative identity disorder, is to get to this point. So if we assume for a moment that there is a transcendental, non-ordinary reality, a spiritual reality, this is what I have seen. This is why I'm saying this, because I've worked with trauma survivors who are tortured by this. They're afflicted by, it feels like malevolent forces.

Like, I know this is insane to say. I know it's insane to say. I know it's insane. I know it's insane. But when I sit with these people, there is a limit to what psychotherapy can accomplish. And I think Kalshed and a bunch of other analysts or psychiatrists who have worked with people have like, we felt this because we're in the room. We're trying to do the psychiatry. And we're doing the good psychiatry.

We're doing the evidence-based psychiatry. But something is missing. there's almost a spiritual injury or a spiritual force that is preventing their healing. And until we grapple with that, when I grapple with that, when we grapple with that, when we work on the spiritual level, that's when we see real transformative healing, which people will also allude to, or we've alluded to earlier, that the real transformation in psychotherapy happens via the soul, which I don't know if I agree with that. I think there's transformation at every level. So the reason I mentioned this, and I may have lost a lot of people here, but like I do it on purpose, okay? Because when I've worked with these trauma survivors, all you all have been told that this is ordinary reality and you're crazy. And so there are things that you feel, things that you see, things that you're aware of that better adapted people have no idea about.

And so you think to yourself, okay, I'm fucking crazy, right? I've been traumatized. That's why I'm perceiving all these things. And so you pretend they don't exist. But if they're real and they're messing up your life, that's why your life isn't getting better. And as a clinician, when I grapple with these things, that's when we start to see improvement. And so the reason I even went down this tangent is to let y'all know that you're not crazy, right? You may have a psychiatric illness.

You may have dissociative identity disorder. You should get treatment for that. But just because you have dissociative identity disorder doesn't mean that some of the things that you're experiencing aren't necessarily. real. Right? So there is psychosis. There are hallucinations. Those are not real. But there's a spiritual element to this. And this is why it's so hard to tease apart. What is psychosis? What is hallucination and what is real? That's what's hard. That's what's fun. That's what's exciting to me, right? grappling with some of this stuff. And also helping people. So if you're dealing with this, like, what do you do? Okay. So we're going to take a look at a paper called standing in the spaces, the multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship.

Okay. Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities with. without losing any of them. The capacity to feel like one self while being many. So remember that when we talked about the Pokemon analogy, health is being able to be one you and not have to switch out Pokemon. Right? So in the dissociative identity disorder,

basically what happens is the Pokemon trainer disappears completely and it's just Pokemon swapping out. And literally what we try to do with these people, and if you're someone who's struggling with this stuff, this is one of these things that like don't watch a YouTube video and expect it to get better. This is something where, like, you need treatment. Okay?

So the right thing to do is to go to a therapist who specializes as trauma informed at a minimum, specializes in trauma disorders, has experience with dissociative identity disorder. If they're trained in parts work, I think that's like a bonus. So parts work, like internal family systems, is kind of this idea that we have all these Pokemon within us, but then they're unified, right? So for most people. So Partswork is kind of getting the Pokemon to all get along. But the goal for a lot of this treatment is to keep people from switching altars, right?

So to be able to be a Pikachu fighting a water Pokemon or a Pikachu fighting a fire Pokemon or whatever Pikachu is weak to. It's being able to hold yourself without having to use the defensive switch, right? So instead of being one of these cheese Pokemon players who's always swapping out Pokemon to like exploit your enemy's weakness, that's what the multi, that's what the parts of you do. That's what the personalities within you do, right? They specialize in dealing with certain things, and they turn on and off because they can't handle an unfair situation. That's the goal, is to sit in the middle of all of these people.

It's not even to get rid of the altars, right? That's, I think, they serve a function. It's to be able to maintain yourself within the altars, some sense of continuity. Now, part of the reason that this is really hard is because there's a lot of other stuff that goes into it. So one of the things that I've been lucky enough to see in my training is residential treatment. And this is where some of the spiritual stuff and things like that come in. Because I think that you should work with a therapist. That's good evidence-based treatment.

But there's a lot of other stuff. Like this is what I cover in Dr. K's guide, which is like there's autonomic rewiring. Right. So if we think about why an alter switches, there's a certain physiologic activation, which activates the brain in a certain way and triggers the switch via hemispheric lateralization. This is something we talk about in the guide. it's also like a form of dissociation and stuff like that. So there's literally like changes in your physiology that you can make, right? You can rewire your nervous system to not go into panic mode.

Then there's stuff around emotional regulation. The other thing that triggers a switch is emotions that are too high. Because remember, we're trying to protect the inner child, right? So when that emotional energy becomes too high, this is what caused the fracture in the first place. This is what causes us to swap out Pokemon is when the emotions get too high. when the physiology gets too high, when the emotion gets too high. Then there's a lot of stuff about forming a narrative identity. That's like literally part of my evidence-based approach when I'm working with a patient is figuring out how to form an identity. And there's a lot of evidence that

shows that PTSD fractures your sense of identity. Trauma fractures your sense of identity. I used to know who I am. Then this thing happened to me, right? I used to be a straight A student top of my class, and then I got kicked out of school for academic dishonesty. I don't know who I am anymore. So what is the process of developing that identity? And then, of course, there's the spiritual element. And what I've seen working in residential treatment facilities is that there's the trauma therapy, there's the evidence based up. But the cool thing about the residential treatment facilities is we're doing yoga twice a week. We have a meditation group that I'm running, right? When I used to work at McLean and stuff like that, I would go to all these residential treatment

facilities, including trauma treatment facilities, and I would teach meditation. I would teach spirituality. And I saw a huge impact on patients. And so the reason we make resources like this is because I think there's a lot of stuff that you can do that isn't treatment that will still help you. So a lot of people have asked like, hey, has Dr. Kay made a video about depersonalization, derealization, dissociative identity disorder? I have now. And I hope you guys enjoyed it. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.