In the typical process of trauma therapy, the therapist and the dissociative trauma survivor will spend a lot of time talking about how difficult it is to be multiple, and it certainly is. For the typical multiple, there were years and years of pain, horror, and abuse that required the need to split over and over again into several different personalities just to survive the unthinkable.

But the point of this article is to talk about what an outsider/single sees as the benefits of being multiple and having Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID/MPD). Yes, there really are some advantages to being divided!

I see the following ten benefits in multiplicity:

  • Being able to do more than one thing at the same time. Talk about having the ability to multitask! I have known situations where one personality can be comfortably talking on the phone while another personality is busy doing the day’s work. How cool is that?!!!
  • Always have someone to talk to. When you are friends with each other on the inside, you never have to be alone. Your best friends can be there with you, at any time of the day or night.
  • Being able to keep the joy from a child’s perspective. Children can be so innocently filled with wonder, joy, and happiness. They know how to be carefree and happy and be amazed at the simpler pleasures in life. Children’s parts, once safe from trauma, can keep that feeling of joy close to them throughout their lives.
  • Being able to take a break even when the outer body has to keep going. When you’re divided, you can go back inside and rest, sleep, or think, and let someone else be in charge of managing whatever is going on in life. Having that ability to step away and separate from outside life can be helpful at times!
  • Having the ability to remember much more of life’s experiences. In my opinion, once a person with dissociative identity disorder finds safety and learns to connect with all their inner people and breaks down their dissociative walls, it seems to me that people with DID actually remember more of their lives than “normal” singles. “. . This includes remembering more of the good times as well as the bad.
  • Having the ability to understand life and events from a variety of different perspectives. People with DID don’t have to imagine what it would be like from a different perspective – they often have someone on the inside who actually sees things that way!
  • Blocking the bread. While blocking pain isn’t always a positive or helpful skill, there are times and places where having the ability to block pain, both physically and mentally, can be of great benefit.
  • Is it very possible that you need less sleep? I can’t prove this, but it seems to me that a significant number of people with DID can function quite effectively on less sleep than the average single person needs. Perhaps this is because the various parts can rest and sleep internally? Does taking turns resting inside make your overall physical need for sleep less? I don’t have real answers for this, but it’s not uncommon for this to appear to be the case.
  • Looking younger. Again, I can’t prove this, but in my years of working with multiples, people with DID look considerably younger even as they physically age. You’d think years of trauma, abuse, and stress would have a negative effect on physical appearance, and while there are obvious scars, there also seems to be a common knack for not physically aging as quickly as singles do. You all almost always look younger than you really are. How cool is that?!
  • The ability to fit in with a variety of different people. While some divisions of the system were formed as trauma-based ways to match up with various groups of people (and some not as great as others), the flip side of that ability is that people with multiple personalities can literally fit in. easily with a wide variety of people in a variety of ages.

The point is that despite the difficult beginnings required to split into multiple personalities, there are many good and positive attributes to being multiple.

For those of you who are multiple, what do you enjoy about your multiplicity? What strengths do you have? How has multiplicity improved your life? What qualities of being a multiple would you like to keep and never lose?