Theology in the Raw - What Is Dissociative Identity Disorder? Micah and Nathan

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Micah is a 23 year old female who has been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, where she has over 100 alters (what some people might think of as personalities, though this isn’t the most accurate term). Nathan, her father, is a former Pastor. Micah was diagnosed in January 2019, which began a remarkable journey of understanding and healing. I wanted to have this conversation for at least three reasons. (1) I’m curious about lots of different things, especially kinds of people and experiences that I don’t know much about. DID is certainly one of those areas. I’m bringing almost nothing to this table. (2) I’m particularly curious about minority experiences—people and stories and experiences that most people don’t have. (3) I think there can be a lot of fear and misunderstanding, which can lead to stigmatization, around certain psychological conditions like DID—especially with movies like Split, which we’ll get into. So, I hope this raw and honest conversation will help reduce the fear, misunderstanding, and indeed the stigma surrounding Dissociative Identity Disorder and other similar experiences.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of theology in the raw. My guests today are Nathan and Micah. Micah is a 23 year old female who has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder or DID where she has over 100 alters. So what some people might think of as personalities, though this isn't the most accurate term as we'll see in this conversation. Nathan, her father is a former pastor and Michael was diagnosed in January of 2019, which began a remarkable journey of understanding and healing. You might ask like, why are you even having this conversation? Why talk about this? So I want to give you three reasons why I think this conversation is important, or at least three reasons why I wanted to have this

conversation on the Elgin Rob. Number one, I'm curious about lots of different things. That's it. Especially kinds of people and experiences that I don't know much about. There's something I hear about that I'm like, man, I don't know about that area, that experience, that person, that topic. Then I'm oftentimes very eager to learn about that.

And DID is certainly one of those areas. So I'm bringing almost nothing to this table. Um, and I learned so much in this hour long conversation. Number two, I'm particularly curious about minority experiences, people and stories and experiences that most people don't have. I would consider myself very much a, my majority type person with majority type experiences and a majority I think it's healthy and good and beautiful and necessary for people like me to be intentional about learning from minority experiences. Number three, I think there'd be a lot of fear and misunderstanding, which can lead to a lot of negative comments. And I think that's a good thing to do. And I think that's a good thing to do. And I think

that's a good thing to do. And I think that's a good thing to do. And I think that's a good thing to do. And I think that's a good thing to do. And I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think split in this conversation. So I hope that this raw and honest conversation will help reduce the fear, misunderstanding, and indeed the stigma surrounding dissociative identity disorder and other similar experiences.

So without further ado, please welcome to the Theology and Raw for the first time, the one and only Nathan and Micah. All right. Welcome to theology and Iran, Nathan and Micah. I am so excited. And I would say I've been a little nervous about this conversation because I am coming with such no knowledge of what we're even talking about. So most of my podcasts, as you know, I come in as a learner. I'm curious. I want to just, you know, draw on people's wisdom experience and just learn from that. This one I'm like, I don't even know what questions to ask, but why don't we just start with some really general

a 30,000 foot overview. What is a DID disassociative identity disorder? Did I even get that right? Yep. This is associated with identity disorder. Okay. And I'll, I'll let you guys decide what, you know, who wants to jump in and whatever. But yeah, tell us what it is we're even talking about. So DID or disassociative identity disorder is a diagnosis in the DSM-5. It's an advanced form of dissociation that occurs after repeated childhood trauma. These things don't necessarily have to be abuse,

but oftentimes it is. It can also be like medical trauma or natural disasters, war, that sort of thing. But typically, especially more in the US, you see people who have gone through pretty terrible stuff. It typically forms between the ages of seven to nine. The usual cutoff for forming DID is about after the age of 12. Mike, so if after the age of 12, somebody has not experienced DID, they probably won't then. Yes. Is that what you're saying?

Okay. Okay. There's a lot of research going on about it right now. It's an understudied diagnosis. This psychological community is pouring more resources into as I understand it, but it's complicated. It's a protective response to trauma can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can.

I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm going to make somebody who can. I'm Through no choice of your own. Yeah. I wasn't, you know, a little kid being like, I can't handle this right now. I'm going to make somebody who can.

My, my guy, I was, when I talked to Nathan about coming on and, and, and you said, Nathan, like my daughter would love to come on to, I'm like, really? Like, do you enjoy talking about this? My Micah? I mean, is this, is this hard for you? Or is it? I mean, I was, I was like kind of shocked, like, wow, she's going to come out and talk about this. That's awesome. For me, I, you know, at the very beginning of my diagnosis, I was diagnosed in 2019 when I was 17 years old, almost 18. I got very lucky to be diagnosed so early on that whole subject matter, even thinking about it, talking about it in therapy, was very difficult. My therapist, God bless her, is very patient and understanding.

After the five years that I've been working in therapy and learning about myself and getting more involved in the community around DID systems and just being a plural person in general. I've kind of learned that there aren't many people who talk about it because it is so stigmatized and it can be dangerous to talk about it publicly. You risk employment, you risk your reputation, all these sorts of things that I think in any way that we can get it out there more is important.

Is the phrase multiple personalities, is that outdated? Is that politically incorrect or is that something called totally different? Because that's, that's where my mind quickly goes. Yeah. So the word multiple personality disorder was a diagnosis in the DSM-5 for a while. It became outdated in the 90s. But because it kind of, I mean, when you think about it, when you think of DID, it makes more sense saying like, oh, yeah, this person has multiple personalities. Or you just say it in passing like, oh, this person,

I know, has multiple personalities. They're a totally different person at work. You can use it to label it. But it is, scientifically, when you look at it, it's not correct. So, but I never fault anyone for calling it multiple, multiple personalities. So there are even systems people with DID who still refer to themselves of having multiple personality disorder because they were diagnosed before the diagnosis was changed.

Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. There's a lot of psychological experiences or conditions or disorders that have gone through that where there was kind of an older term that just wasn't quite accurate or, or some can be stigmatizing. And so they have a more accurate term to describe it. So let's, how many people would be diagnosed like this to say in America, do we have a percentage? Like how rare is this condition? As more research has been done that they've actually discovered that DID as a disorder and it's many forms, uh, is kind of more, uh, it, it's more common than schizophrenia and it's more common than people who have

red hair. Oh, oh wow. I read here, I think it's what 1.5% or something. So, okay. So we're not talking about 0.001% of population. How many like people have a DI have DID they have, and again, well, again, so my mind just wants to say, you know, multiple, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, many people with DID have. It kind of depends on, first of all, the person's life

experience, how much trauma have they experienced throughout their life. And it also kind of depends on when they are what we call splitting, which is when a new altar is being created, or like a new personality is being created. It depends on how many altars they split. So how many people come forward when that thing is happening to them. So there are different kinds of splitting. There's monofragmentation and polyfragmentation. Monofragmentation is when you have one person splitting off at a time. Polyfragmentation is when there are two or more people.

So that can look different for a system. They can have polyfragmentation at one point and monofragmentation later. But typically, I would say most people that I know personally who have DID, I have a little small community of people. Most of them have around 20 to 30 alters, but there are, I have other friends who have, you know, numbers and like the thousands. So it really just depends on how their brain specifically copes. And yeah, I've got two questions because, because the, the, the alters you have experienced,

you, you know, long, like you're in a stage where you're not experiencing different alters, right? And if currently I am going through a pretty intensive trauma therapy. And so, you know, it's not really been done on people with DID before. I'm kind of a guinea pig. But currently, I haven't been able to switch into an altar. I haven't had anyone else. It's just been me. I do have people in the background. That's what we call co-conscious, which is when they're not in control of my body. Like I am the person in control of my body right now. Um, but say if I had another altar in the background, like, uh, I have an alternate Matthew, uh, say he was around, uh, he can see and hear and kind of experience what I'm experiencing, but he can't like, you know, speak outwardly or move my body.

So how many different alters have you had then? Is there any? I have, for most of my life, I experienced poly fragmentation. So I have up in the hundreds, we're not super sure. We counted for a long time and then we gave up on counting. Okay, so I, yeah, I'm sorry. My head is just filled with so many different questions. I want to go back to Nathan. So you were, Michael, you were diagnosed at 19. I would imagine

then this was, this was going on before that as a parent. How can you do it from a parental perspective? Can you walk us through that stage pre diagnosis? What was that like? Oh, Preston. Yeah. So our experience of MicA, especially in the middle school, I mean, middle school's awful for everybody, pretty much, right? Yes. 100%. Right? So, as we were walking through those years, our experience of Micah was someone that we felt was dishonest, constantly forgetting things or doing things and not taking responsibility for them, would never follow through and you know, struggling with grades and she's, I mean you can hear her talk,

she's articulate and brilliant, but that wasn't what we were seeing in school. Like it was just, none of this made sense. You know, the last thing we thought was, wow, our daughter has dissociative identity disorder. We didn't even know that was a thing, really. And so, she had been, we started taking her to counseling and later therapy just to try to get a handle on some of this. And so what we came to realize when the diagnosis occurred, and that's an interesting story,

that okay, she's not lying, it literally wasn't her. It's not that she failed her math test, it's that the alter that was out in the class learning these things was not the alter who was taking the tests. And they're literally different people. Uh, and so yeah, it, as soon as we realized what was going on, uh, it's things just started to fall into, into place. Can you describe the alters? And I would love for both of you

to, cause you had the kind of outside perspective and inside perspective. Um, I mean, when you say these are literally different, so like somebody might be one alter might be studying for the exam. And then when another alter is taking it, they're like, I don't have a clue what I'm looking at is would that be an accurate? Yeah. I mean, imagine it this way. And this is, this is not technically accurate, but imagine like you had triplets that were identical. Uh, and you know, one triplet and the, and the teacher in the class is only aware that there's one person and they don't know which one of these people is actually there.

And, you know, one might be here for this day, one might be here for reading or math or social studies or whatever. And then it's a completely different person the next day. Nobody around is aware of that, but these different minds are learning different things. is aware of that, but these different minds are learning different things. And our therapist we've worked with early on, just to help us get our minds around how do we process this, was, you know, her advice was you literally have to think about these as different individuals. They literally are. Whoever does these sorts of things has studied a DID brain under, you know, neurological scans. And it's different neural, it's different neuron paths that light up when different alters are active. Yeah, they are literally different people. Wow. Micah, how about for you, do you, so do you

remember, like when, when you have, again, if the language I've been using is experience a different altar, is that even the right language? Like when you experience or when you are a different altar or how? I guess using the word are because I am not, Oh, it's so complicated. Micah is an altar among altars. Yeah. I, I get, yeah, technically I am an altar among altars. I am no different than the other people in my brain. It just happens that I'm the person that I'm like, yeah, I look in the mirror and I go, yeah, that looks like me.

That's me. Whereas some other people might be like, looking at the mirror and be like, that's not me at all. I look like an anime boy. So like, what is this five one woman? Can you describe some of the different alters that you are or have been? Yeah.

So I guess some of the most people who are around the most frequently are, there's Olivia, who she is kind of like, we, we joke that we're twins because we have very similar ways of speaking. We have very similar mannerisms. She's a bit more artistically creative than I am. I prefer to make like play music and write music and that sort of thing. She's very good at drawing and painting

and that sort of stuff. Olivia has a fine, we experienced a lot of Olivia in the middle school years. She has a very finely crafted sense of justice and she will tell you what's straight and what isn't. I have to ask. So artistic, artistic, like very, so, so Olivia can paint and draw in a way that I'll say Micah can't do as well. Was that, would that be accurate? Like are you tapping into different skill sets in your brain? I mean, is that, that's

mind blowing actually. She has alters that speak with perfect British accents. She has these are, they're literally different people. They have different preferences, different, there's different, different genders, different sexual orientations, different everything, different music tastes. It's literally different people. And so, when you think about it from their perspective, back before we understood the diagnosis and we were seeing more alters fronting, which is the term for an altar coming to take where the altar is actually a different altar is in control of the body. When a different altar would front, here they are in a situation

that they may not, they don't know what's going on. They're just here all of a sudden. And they're in a body that they don't identify with. And they're just trying to make sense of what's going on. When that happened, Nathan, as a parent, like again, pre diagnosis, did you think she, she was messing around with you making it up? Did you think she, did you, I mean, if I can ask, did you, were you thinking there was like something demonic going on or something? I mean, I imagine your mind went various places. Yeah, I could. We didn't experience it that way. It was more like here's a perfect example.

And in literally the weeks before she was diagnosed, she would there was an instance where she just flew into a rage, just angry. And again, it was in the middle of an argument or some sort of I forget what it was. It was a it was a heated conversation and, you know, immediately angry, took her glasses off, threw them across the room. Well, that that was Matthew. Matthew came out and he was in those days very angry because in his role, there's different roles in a system of altars. And he would always come to the front to in a protective role. He was he's a protective altar. And, you know, so he would come out and he was always angry because he, you know, he's a tall,

you know, country, good old boy, you know, kind of a guy. He's in this little short female body and he's like, I hate this. I hate everything about it. I hate, you know, every time I come out, I'm fighting with my sister or something's going on. And, you know, it was just very difficult for him, you know, since things have stabilized, he's wonderful. We love Matthew. But that's, that's the sort of thing that we, and so from a parent perspective, well, gosh, my child is flying into a fit of rage, which is a legitimate thing a kid can do. In our case, it was a different altar had fronted.

Micah, do you remember? I mean, when w when you have been different, when you're different alters, sorry, what was the term? I'm not manifest fronting, fronting. When, when you, when your different alters have fronted right, right now, do you remember those experiences or are these all kind of subconscious? So the whole point of DID is to have a level of separation and amnesia between these different alters. That's the main way that DID is used to cope with trauma, is that, well, if I don't remember it, then I can continue living my life as someone who is mostly well-adjusted and not experiencing the symptoms of PTSD as

prominently as someone who does remember their trauma. Like, I recently have been able to kind of tap in and uncover those traumatic memories. I don't fully have the memory of what what the sort of beginning of it was, but I have like various sensations and feelings. But before I started my therapy, before I started, even was diagnosed, I had absolutely no clue. I would lose time for months. I would be, I wouldn't be the person that was out.

So I would come too and it's like, I remember it being April and now it's like October and I don't know what's going on or where I am or what's happening, what am I expected to be doing right now? It was, for a long time it was really scary because I just didn't know what was going on. I thought it was normal for people to lose time because around the age of nine, I was

diagnosed with ADHD. I was like, oh, it's just ADHD. People with ADHD don't remember stuff really well, so that's probably it. It's just that I don't remember stuff well. No, that's not how ADHD works. You don't lose months of memory at a time. But it was just kind of like my brain wouldn't even let me think about it too much. Because if I thought about it too much, I'd be like, oh, something's wrong.

Oh, I need to tell someone that something is wrong because this isn't normal. I was just like, yeah, it was fine. Everything's fine. But the goal of therapy and working in therapy is to kind of break down that level of amnesia between each other. And so that if someone were to come out, I'd be able to kind of know what was happening. Okay. Interesting. We call the total like loss of

memory a blackout because it's like when you're blackout drunk and you're just like, I don't even remember how I got home. Some of our audience can maybe relate to that in the course there pre Christian past. You're like, wait, what? One of the highest values I have in life is living in, learning from, and experiencing other cultures. There's no better way to think globally, and every Christian should think globally, than to actually experience the globe. This is why you need to check out the English Language Institute in China, or it's called ELIC.

Okay, so ELIC is an organization that specializes in helping people fulfill their calling to live with purpose overseas. Through partnerships with the government and educational institutions in the hardest to access countries in the world, ELIC places teachers on campuses where you have the opportunity to build authentic

friendships with students, colleagues, and with neighbors. They've been doing this for more than 40 years in more than a dozen countries, not just China, all throughout Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa with programs ranging from two to four weeks to nine months to even more than a year. I didn't even know this at the time, but I actually had a former ELIC teacher, Dr. Brad Vaughn, as a guest on the podcast back in June, 2023. It's episode 1083. If you want to check it out and hear more. So if you want to explore a very meaningful overseas experience, then go to ELIC.org forward slash TITR. So they even created a special landing page for our listeners. Again, that's ELIC.org forward slash T I T R check it out. Oh, the brain. I mean, the brain is so fascinating. I feel like we're there's so much more to

learn about the brain. We've barely scratched the surface on this for sure. Okay. So I, I know a lot of people are thinking, and I'm thinking like the movie split. Is that like, can we talk about that? Like is, is that, is that, did the split the guy have, is that, did he have DID and in your opinion, how accurate is that movie? Like we'd love to have you tease that out of it. So I guess I'll start off with the, with the good things. Cause there are only two good things I can say about the movie split. Okay. The rest of it is when I find him, I'm just kidding. But the first thing is that they got the diagnosis, right? Okay. They got that

right. They established in the second movie that he experienced abuse from his mother, and that's how he had DID, and that's what gave him the, ooh, scary serial killer guy. And the second one is that they accurately, in my opinion, they accurately depicted little alters slash child alters. I think their depiction of the nine-year-old alter that he has was very accurate. They didn't treat it as some weird, scary guy. He was just treated as a child when he was in front.

Other things, people with DID are not murderers. They are not possessed. They are not evil. And are not evil and they don't hurt people. People with DID are more likely to be the ones who are being hurt because of what people with DID who become part of a DID system, what they have to experience in the beginning of their life, you know, if abuse is all you know, then that's what's gonna happen to you because you're gonna seek out those relationships.

As humans, we seek out what's familiar and what's comfortable. So seeking out abuse just becomes part of who you are, what you do. Like this seems familiar, I'm comfortable with this. I don't know how to handle someone giving me unconditional love and attention. Typically people with DID are repeatedly victimized by others because they're easier to take advantage of.

So they're alters because of the link to past trauma, the alters are much more likely or exclusively going to be somebody who is more on the oppressed side, not an oppressor or somebody doing bad things. Yes. Most people with DID that I know are neurodivergent in some way as well, so that adds their vulnerability. There are a lot of systems who are people of color who are more vulnerable. It's it's most of the time it's very vulnerable groups of people. Okay. So yeah, your different alters, they can be different ages, different genders, different, different ethnicities. Is that, is that a thing? Like there's, there's no

kind of thing that's off limit on what kind of, uh, of the possible different alters that could, could there could be. Yeah. So the way I like to say is that, um, I do have alters who are, who internally identify as a different ethnicity than my body is. I'm white, but I have alters who, um, in like my mind's eye and my, in the inner world, they identify as maybe they are, you know, they may be Asian, they may be black, they could be Hispanic, you know?

There's a whole big variation of how they identify, but we're all white because I am white. It's a big point of discourse within the DID community because I mean how do you even begin to Sort of address that when there are people who are white and experience, you know Don't have that experience of someone who is a person of color but have somebody in their brain who? feels as if they are one. And so that's a big point of discourse, but just the way that I like to say it is we're all white, but some people in my brain internally identify as different than that.

Okay. Yeah. Wow. Let's can we go post diagnosis? What was that experience like when you had a term, a label for this? I mean, what did that do? I guess for both Mike and Nathan, when, when you realized that this is not something Mike is consciously just choosing to do or acting out or whatever, like there's something much deeper going on here. Can I tell the story of the day we were diagnosed, Micah? Okay. So. I don't remember that, so. Yeah, you weren't there. So our therapist had an inkling that perhaps this may be what's going on. And so she had Micah participate in an exercise where she would set a reminder on her phone every hour

that said, open the journal, write or draw something, turn the page and don't look back basically. And so she did this for several days and months. Okay. Yeah. And November to January. Okay. And then this morning at her therapy appointment, I was sitting in the waiting room as I usually did and her therapist comes out and says, I have something, I have someone you need to meet and it's going to be shocking, but just try to be present with what's going on. So apparently as our therapists look through this journal, there's multiple different hand writings, pictures that were drawn that look like a

four-year-old drew them, like a horse that's like an oval with stick legs and a stick neck. Multiple different handwritings that look like a four-year-old or a seven-year-old or whatever because they are. They were written and drawn by those ages of people. And so I walk in and I see who I think is Micah sitting on the couch drawing a picture and she looks up and in a very young sounding voice goes, hi daddy. And it's Ashley. Ashley is at that point was seven years old and she's drawing a picture of a unicorn because Ashley is all things pink and sparkly and unicorns and that whole thing. And so we sat and had a conversation. Her therapist

basically said, picked one of the pictures and said, I would like to talk to the little girl who drew this. And Ashley came, came out and she stayed with me that day for about three or four hours. I didn't know how to process that. Other than, and honestly, I didn't believe it at first. I still was thinking that perhaps this is Micah being deceitful. This is some giant lie. Maybe she's found, you know, whatever. And I actually, the therapist thankfully in the providence of God had an appointment the next hour, but she was free the hour after that, which is very rare. And so we went, I actually had a business appointment. We just went and sat at a Starbucks

and I went and talked to a business person, a person I do business with for about a half an hour. And I actually, looking back, it's so funny, but I actually left my camera recording in the car just to see if what Micah would do. Uh, and it wasn't Micah, it was Ashley and she was sitting there kind of singing and doing just like you would expect a little seven year old girl to do.

Um, and from that, I was convinced that yeah, there's, that there's something going on here. I don't understand. How did that, do you remember the diagnosis? Micah? Or I have no recollection of it. Um, I, I think it was halfway through the second appointment. I came back, I came back at some point that day and I was with Dr. Lay. So it was, I can't quite remember it. It was very hazy. Uh was still dissociating. Those first few weeks are very fuzzy for me.

But I remember being like, what do you mean someone else came out? Who is Ashley? And what are you talking about? Because up until then, you didn't have any, your memories are just as Micah, not your different alters. Right? Yeah. All I knew was, you know, sometimes I just forgot for a few months. That's it. It's not that big of a deal.

I just forgot. You know, like I go to a concert and then I'd be on my way home and I have no recollection of the concert at all, but it's probably just because I was so excited. So you know being told that some seven-year-old just came out I'm like yeah sure okay okay and at that point I what was interesting was that I had come across the YouTube channel multiplicity in me. I had just been randomly recommended one of their videos and I was like oh that looks interesting looks interesting. What the heck is DID? And so I click on it and I watched the video and like, Oh, that's fascinating anyways. And so I brought it up to Dr. I was like, wait,

like this. And she, you know, looks it up really quick. And it's like, Oh yeah. Just like that. And I'm like, no. When you did become convinced that, that, that you have DID, what did you feel? Like what were you like? Did you freak out? Was it relieving? Was it just confusing or I don't know how to describe the emotions I felt when I fully re when I was like, not even really convinced, but like, you know, I just had to accept it. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to accept that this was my reality. I remember crying quite a lot and being, you know, cut in a sense, I was devastated because, you know, it's like, I'm going to therapy, I'm going to get better. I'm going to be, you know,

like a normal person. I'm going to, you know, figure out whatever's wrong with me and then I'll be able to move on from whatever this is." And there was a grieving to that sort of idea and that sort of optimism because it was like, oh, a lot of people with DID don't get better. A lot of people with DID struggle for the rest of their lives. This isn't just a diagnosis that lasts a little while that I can get a handle on fully and finally say, oh, I'm better and I'm never gonna have to worry about having a backslide of some sort. It. It's not something you take a pill for.

Yeah. Right. There's no medication that my therapist can give me to make it go away, to make it better. Not only do I have to learn to cope with the symptoms of it for myself, I have to learn to cope with the symptoms of it for other people. I have to learn how to work with these people. I have to, you know, it's essentially like finding out that you have a sibling that you never knew about

and now they're moving in and you have to share a room with them. And so it's like, I've never met this person before. I don't know what they like, what they don't like, who they are, what they believe in. And I was terrified, quite frankly, because in some regard, I was like, well, I know people say that it's not like the movie Split, but what if I do? What if I'm the outlier and there is some kind of evil person in my head? Oh gosh, yeah.

So it was scary for a long time. But I think as I got to know everyone, especially in the first few months where I really got to know a lot of the people in my system that I'm particularly close with, Matthew and Olivia and, and Sam and Oliver and Raven and everyone like that. I was like, okay, these people are cool. Wait. So now you, you can get to know the other alters now where in the past you didn't

because there was such a thick wall between the different alters. Now is that wall more fluid? I guess it's not a wall of its fluid, but you know, you know, like the, yeah, you can actually have, what does like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like being, you know, like a solid, I can't break through it. I don't know who this person is. I can't see them. I can't hear them. I can't interact with them. Turn them into a tissue paper so I could just kind of like stick my hand through and be like, how you doing? You know, just kind of

be able to see. Turn the wall into a window. So, and I would say essentially, you know, through my therapy work and stuff, we've successfully been able to do that. I feel less isolated, I think. My system feels less separated from each other and from me. And communication is way easier than it was at the beginning. In the beginning, we had to write notes to each other and write reminders, leave sticky notes, write in a journal. That was how we talked to each other.

I remember there were a few times where Olivia would be out and she would tell my younger sister, hey, can you tell this to Micah? I can't find the notebook. I don't know where she left it. And so Mel would be like, hey, this is what's going on. Olivia said this. And I'd be like, oh, well, the notebook's over here

where I always leave it. She's like, that's not where you always leave it. I'm like, oh, whoops. Do you feel like you have some kind of relationship? I mean, it's like, do you have, I'm just trying to word this right. But like this internal community of like, like, would you be disappointed of all of a sudden through psychotherapy, whatever, like all the alters are gone and now you're just Micah and there aren't like, would you feel like I lost relationships? I mean, is that even a

fair question to ask? It depends on system to system, but for me specifically I would feel a loss if I... What we would call that is fusion. So a fusion can happen on a small scale or on a larger scale. Fusion is when two or more alters come together to form one altar. So that's kind of like when, if you've ever seen Steven Universe,

when the crystal gems do a gem fusion, they come together and make a new gem. Or if you're mixing paint, if you take red and blue, technically the red and the blue never went away. They've just become something different together. So fusion is not like the loss of an altar, it's not death, it's nothing like that. That altar is still here, it's just different. For like the channel, the YouTube channel I mentioned before, Multiplicity and

Me, for them, their goal in therapy was final fusion, which is what it sounds like. It's taking each altar and fusing them into one whole identity, one person, so they're no longer experiencing the multiplicity part of DID. Is that a goal in therapy? Is that what they're trying, striving for or not necessarily? It depends on what the system wants. So there's final fusion where you become one person or there's functional multiplicity where the goal is just to break the system down. So that's what we're trying to do.

So that's what we where you become one person or there's functional multiplicity where the goal is just to break down those barriers and function less like there are totally different people with totally different memories coming out and more of like a, you know, it's still a different person coming out but everyone else can kind of remember what's going on. So for me personally, that's my goal. I want to function as a person with experiencing multiplicity. I don't want my system to go away because I got some cool people in here that I like, you know, I like hanging out with them. I like, I like, I like everyone that I've met in my system. They don't have any crazy murderer people or anything like that.

So I enjoy being part of a system because growing up, I was kind of a weird kid. I was the weird nerdy kid that no one really liked or hung out with. And so it's kind of like having childhood friends that I never knew about in a way where it's kind of like it heals my inner child a little bit, that lonely little girl sitting on the playground pretending to be a Power Ranger. It kind of heals that part of me, I think, in a sense. And it's also just like, I feel like, you know, not only me, but my family have formed different relationships with different alters and have, you know, these, you know, special

bonds with them that I would never want to go away and they don't want to go away. So that's kind of how we're choosing to go through therapy. Can you speak into that, Nathan? Like did you once diagnose past diagnosis? You're like, okay, we have a good idea of what's going on. Like, did you start to almost form a different bond at different altars? Almost like you have several different children. Is that, I mean, it's exactly like that. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, I remembered what so many stories here, one in particular, when I met Olivia for the

first time, I immediately knew who she was. Okay. I know we've met, you know, like she was out for a while during middle school. She handled that difficult set of years. I know this person. I recognized her mannerisms. I recognized the way she walked, the way she said words, her tones of voice. It's distinct. The littles, though, are different. littles though are different. There was a period, so after when the D.I.D. diagnosis happened and the brain started to realize it was safe and some of these walls started breaking down, one of the things that happened in Micah's story is that a lot of her littles and other alters, but a lot of littles, kids, started to wake up again, essentially. They'd been dormant. And so there was a period for, gosh, probably a couple of months where every,

you know, maybe once a week, sometimes more often, we'd be, you know, it'd be nine or 10 o'clock in bed, my wife and I would, nine, 10 o'clock at night, my wife and I would be sitting in bed. And we'd hear, Micah's room was in the lower level be sitting in bed and we'd hear, uh, Micah's room was, uh, in the lower level of our house and we'd hear this trudging up the steps and we're like, okay, where somebody's about to come out. Um, and you know, it's this, this little, this scared face kind of peeks into our room and it happened over and over again. And you know, here's this little person, uh, in Micah's body, but clearly, I mean, this is a child who has come to, in a sense, after being dormant for maybe years for most

of them. They're in a room they don't recognize. There's a dog with them in their bed that they don't know. And now they're just trying to come up and see what's going on. They don't know what's happening. And so we talked to them, we asked them their name. Sometimes they didn't have a name. We started out, who's class are you in at school? That would kind of tell us the last time they were out. Oh, that was the first grade teacher. That was the second grade teacher or whatever.

And we would just go through that. We almost had a series of questions that we would ask just to kind of figure out where they were and where they fit. Are they a boy or a girl? How old are they? Do they have a name? I had a bookmarked in my phone a list of one of those baby name websites where we would just literally, they didn't have a name, we would read through this list of baby names until they found one that sort of fit that they liked.

And so we, you know, that would usually take about an hour or so. And then we would explain to them, okay, sometime here, you're going to go back inside and here's what's going to happen. You're going to appear around this house and you're going to go in and there's people there waiting on you and they're going to love you and they're going to know what to tell you and what to do. And it was at this point we'd understood more about Micah's inner world, which is a key part of this. There is an inner world. Micah likes to describe it kind of like playing the Sims where you've got, you know, there's all

this, there's stuff going on and there's an inner world in Micah's brain where all of her altars can function together. The inner world has taken several different shapes as Micah's brain where all of her altars can function together. The inner world has taken several different shapes as Micah's therapy has progressed and more altars have been together in that space. It's looked like a small house for a while. There was a bigger house and now there's kind of a castle. But the altars are able to come together in that space and they're literally interacting with each other. In the inner world, they look like what they look like. Ashley is now a nine-year-old girl, and little Sophie is a four-year-old spunky African-American, she's a pistol.

I mean, she is amazing. They function together as a family. You know, the inner world is something that a lot of folks with DID don't have. And it's something I think God was gracious to us because early on in Micah's DID story, she had an altar who was out at school and they were reading the Chronicles of Narnia and the story of the magician's nephew of how Aslan creates Narnia. Sorry. Carmine decided, you know, we need a place like that. And so he created it in the inside and people started to be able to come together. That can take years to develop in psychotherapy. And that's something God gave us, God gave Micah early on.

How, how long, when an altar fronts, how long does that alter is that alter, I guess fronted? I mean, is it five minutes? Is it five days, weeks, or is it? Yes. Yes. And yes, it could be as long as short as anything. It depends on, yeah, it could be as long as, or as short as, uh, we needed to be. Um, especially at the very beginning, I couldn't control when other people were coming out. Like I couldn't just be like, all right, it would be much more convenient for Matthew to be here and then transform like a transformer. No, it was more of like, I'm going to play all of Matthew's favorite music and I'm going to sit and eat his favorite food and hopefully he'll be here. And so that sort of thing was kind of how we entice people out now. So you can actually draw different alters out by playing music or doing things that the alter likes. And is that typically happen or is it hit and miss?

I mean, especially for systems who have gotten to know each other. It's a method that a lot of people recommend for learning how to do a controlled switch, is what we call it. So a regular switch is just totally out of your own control. It just happens and somebody's here. It's like one minute I'm Micah, and the next minute I'm Olivia, and I'm ready to paint a beautiful picture.

Or one minute I'm Micah, the 23 year old, and the next minute I'm Sophie, the four year old and the next minute I'm Sophie the four year old who is a ninja in her brain so you know she it really you can't control it and there are still points where you know there will be people around and I'm like I I need you to give back and they're like I literally can't I'm so sorry I'm stuck here but for the part, after working in therapy and sort of breaking down those barriers and reducing the amnesia, turning the brick wall into a tissue paper, I'm more able to be like, okay, I'm going to focus really hard and they're going to focus really hard and we're going

to try and visualize us switching places. That is how later on I've been able to do it. It takes a lot of energy to be able to do that because when the idea is formed, the whole point of the disorder is you don't know that you have it. Doing things like controlling a switch, even the people we call the host, which are the alters who front the most, who are in control of the body, who typically handle daily life, don't have specific special scenarios where they come to the front, those people typically can't access the inner

world if the system already has one. So, you know, even just getting those sorts of people to be able to access it takes, for some people, it takes years. I got really lucky that my system was able to bring me in. We, you know. I feel really lucky that I have such smart and creative people in my brain. Not only that, but that were eager to welcome me in. A lot of systems even experience hostility towards each other. I don't know who you are and I don't want you coming into my house, like, I don't want you messing up what I have going on.

I want you to stay away. And so for some systems, you know, certain people may never access the inner world or they may never be able to build one themselves or you know it really varies but I definitely got lucky. How have I guess for each of you it might be a little different how have you navigated friendships relationships family society work I mean have you been rejected by people when you start talking about your DID or how people responded? I would imagine it's a

diverse range of responses, but. Yeah. I mean, online I get called slurs sometimes. So, you know, there's, you know, after sort of one big issue in the community, I think is there's not a lot of empathy for specifically younger systems. So people who may somehow figure out that they have DID at a younger age or on like, you know, like, like a 13 year old being like, I think I might have DID because this happened to me. And the whole community being like, no, you don't because you're cringe. You have anime boys in your brain and that's cringe. You know, there's a lack of empathy for younger people. But I think it really varies. There are some people who are like,

well, you don't look exactly, your system doesn't look exactly like this system that I know. So you're faking, you're lying. For the last five years of your life, you've been lying. And there are other people who are like, I have DID too, like, this is really epic and awesome and we're going to be friends now. We're best friends now and you can't get rid of me because we got to stick together.

Most of the people that I know in real life, I've known for years. So I kind of struggled to make new friends, but that's just because I'm an awkward person. And so like, most of my friends knew that I was a weirdo and this is just a new weird thing that Micah has and I got extra friends now. Plus Micah, which is really cool. I think it's a generational thing too. There's generations that don't, they're still not totally comfortable with some of the things that the study of psychology has brought to light in the last 20, 30, 40 years. They're still not totally comfortable with some of the things that this, you know, the

study of psychology has brought to light in the last 20, 30, 40 years, right? And that's especially true, I think, in the church. I mean, gosh, I was one of those people, Preston. Like, I, you just need Jesus. That's all you need and everything's going to be okay, right? That was me for many, many years and I was dead wrong. Like, I was just wrong. The brain is an amazing thing that God has created.

DID is something, you know, God allows this to happen as a protective response to trauma. And you know, we need to understand it. And so, we share this carefully with people. You know, there's people you can kind of get whether they're going to get it or not. You know, you, you can identify those people where it's safe to share this with. And honestly, when you let people into the story and how Micah's brain works, it's my goodness. It's just fascinating. It's a fascinating thing to me. Well, I, cause I mean, I asked because I mean, yeah, that it was kind of what you get at now. Like there's Christians who would probably just say, no, I, I, this doesn't exist. I mean, like, I mean, I don't

want to put words in his mouth, but John MacArthur famously, you know, denying, I don't know, all forms of mental disorders, illnesses or some, I don't, I don't, you know, but there's, there are people who would just flat out say, no, my, my belief system does not allow me to agree that this is even a thing. Um, right. I mean, it's unfortunate. I used to play for that team. That was, that was my whole perspective. Uh, it, I'll tell you this, it's a lot easier, you know, to just deny all these things, uh, and not even acknowledge the question, but it's not true. Uh, and so, you know, how do we, with grace deal with, you know, how do we with grace deal with,

you know, someone who has this magnificent thing in her brain like Micah? It takes understanding and patience and love. And I'll tell you, you know, Micah's disorder has made me a better person because it's forced me to really stretch what love looks like. And there's been a reward on the other side of this. For me, it's almost like having grandkids with her littles. It's an amazing thing. And as difficult and as painful as it is in many different ways, there's also some fascinating things and some blessings

in it. I just, I just had to point out, I'm just so impressed with, I guess, both of you, but Mike in particular, just how joy you're so joyful. And, and, and I want to say resilient and like my word, there's a lot of people I know, Christians who have not gone through something as potentially cataclysmic as under, as, as real as, as being diagnosed with this. And yet people, I know people have not had to go through this that are not nearly as joyful as you guys seem to be. So I'm just so impressed with your posture.

You said something really important, Nathan. I just want to draw attention to it. It's just so people don't pass over it. That this condition is, is a, is, is a way that the body copes with trauma. It would it be, would it be accurate to compare it to almost like your immune system, your immune system responds to something that's trying to harm you. Like, so there's a positivity to this. I mean, and we can get lost in the weeds of yeah. What, what, what part is negative? What part is positive? I don't know, but like, like there, there is at least a very positive element to this. It is, at least that's the intention is trying to address something that is harming you, this trauma and the ongoing experience of that. Yeah, I kind of describe, you know, different, like, honestly, I think of dissociation like

a specific kind of brain immune system response. Because, you know, people who dissociate, it's usually you're dissociating. I mean, people could dissociate in like daily life, like, oh, I don't really remember driving home. That's because you dissociated because it wasn't really that important. Your brain's saving energy. But it also, people who have PTSD, that is a result of the brain doing something incredible. You're experiencing such an intense, scary moment of fight or flight that your brain

saves all of its power just to get you out of there alive. It doesn't even file that memory away like it normally would because that's going to take too much energy. We have to keep pumping adrenaline so that we don't die. And you know, of course it results in flashbacks and that sort of thing. But in the moment there's, you know, you know, non-zero chance that without that happening, you wouldn't have even made it through. That is such a helpful way to understand it. Golly, that's very articulate. And yeah, like

you said, when you're driving into you kind of see, it seems like you black out or whatever, like you're, so we all kind of experience a sliver of, of, of the brain, the power of the brain to be able to do that. Golly. So much. Yeah. I've dabbled in neuroscience kind of research and stuff, and I'm just blown away at how powerful the brain is and how little we know. With all of our technological advances to say that we are at the kind of beginning stages of understanding the full complexity and power of the brain, that's fascinating. Exactly. And that's one of the things that really, when her diagnosis became known and I started going down the rabbit trails in my mind of what all this means. Just realizing how her inner world operates. Her altars are going, each one of her individual altars of whom there are well over a hundred, we don't know how many, each of them have a daily

life experience. Like there's a, the way I've tried to describe it to people is like if you look at your computer, you've got all these little icons that are kind of either on the top or on the bottom. All these things are running in the background of your computer. And Micah's brain is that way. It's like all these things are running in the background where when let's say one of her littles

would come out at night and we'd be able to visit with them for a bit, we could ask them, well, what'd you learn in school today? And what'd you have for lunch? What'd you do after school? What games did you play? And they, they just described their day like anybody else. And all that is going on in the background of Micah's mind every

day. It's, it is just fascinating. What, what would you, both of you, well, we'll start landing a plane here. What would you want to speak to the audience listening? Like, you know, I talked in the intro, which I haven't recorded yet, but I plan on explaining, you know, why even have this conversation, you know? What would you want people to gain from this conversation? I think that, you know, the most important thing is that if you have somebody in your life who, you know, might have been diagnosed with DID or suspects that they may have DID, I think the most important thing to do for them

is to listen. I think for me and my parents and, you know, my sister and my extended family, I feel like I'm a pretty rare case when it comes to DID of having a very strong relationship with my parents. It didn't start out that way. I think we've become very close after finding out what was going on. And I mean, I can't blame them because they thought I was some kind of pathological liar that couldn't be trusted. And so I just think that it's important to listen to them because that listening to people who are hurting brings healing.

That's a good word, Micah. I can't top that. I know, yeah, go for it, Nathan, good luck. Yeah, right? Man, I think as a parent, I think every parent wishes they had done more. I wish that I had been more aware, I wish I think every parent wishes they had done more. I wish that I had been more aware, I think, of where my kids were when they were younger and just how they're doing.

You know, and I wasn't. And I really wish the church as a whole would really own the discussion about mental health,, more compassion and grace, uh, and understanding each other. Um, because it's a real thing. Uh, that's certainly a piece that I missed. And I think, um, if I had to do over again, that's, I really wish that I would have had that emphasis. Well, that's a good word. Well, both of you, I can't thank you enough for your honesty, your joy. I just, I just, I'm so like impacted. Your joy is of you, I can't thank you enough for your honesty, your joy. I just, I just, I'm so like impacted. Your joy is contagious. And I know that joy is not fleeting.

It's not just giggliness. It is. It is. There's a deep seated, deep rooted joy that you could just radiate from both of you. So thank you so much for the really intriguing conversation. And yeah, thanks for coming on the all general. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you, is that something you would even want or probably not? I don't even know. Or, um, I used to run an Instagram account. I am still logged into it. I just don't post that often on it, uh, called it's a bullion stat system. If anyone is, you know, if they have questions and they, they, they're like burning and really trying to ask me, I, I, I do still get notifications

on there. I still respond to people who may stumble across my account and be like, what is this? Yeah. So, yeah, if they have any questions, they can find me there. Okay. And we could talk offline to What that could look like so thank you both for coming out the all's and I really appreciate the conversation. Thank you, Preston This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Greetings and God bless. This is Tyler Burns. And this is Dr. Jamar Tisby. And we want to invite you to check out our podcast, Pass the Mic, Dynamic Voices for a Diverse Church. Pass the Mic has been speaking directly to the core concerns of black Christians for

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