One Brain, Many Selves: on identity, trauma & dissociation

How many selves can fit inside a brain?

There was never just one you. We assume there’s an essence, a core behind the word “ I ” But neuroscientifically that assumption does not hold.

I’ve always struggled with the word “identity”, coming from multiple backgrounds, speaking many languages, having contradictory preferences and desires- I always stood lost when I had to collect all those parts of me into a singular self.

The idea that there is somehow a solid essence behind where you grew up, your childhood, your favorite book, or ice cream flavor, made no coherent sense to me.

At one point, I even began a book exploring what it means to identify, though I never finished it. Unsurprisingly, that project took a nihilistic turn.

I came to believe that the very act of identifying is an act of reduction.To identify is to flatten complexity into something manageable, nameable, and palatable. I found it absurd to identify with a country, a flag, a profession, or a hobby. We are too plural, too fragmented

I wrote it under the title of The Collapse Of Identity originally in Arabic. I wanted to believe in that kind of freedom the kind that allows you to be everything and nothing all at once.

Here’s a quote from one of its early pages:

“What use is it to belong to this country or that one? or to be one face but not the other? I give you space so you can be everything.

Earth is the homeland, humanity is the tribe. Let me teach you love, so you may belong both here and there. Allow me to offer you freedom.”

After constant circling around that idea in literature, I began returning to it through neuroscience.

Today I want to explore one of the most radical disruptions of the unified self: Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

DID is dramatized in the media, often misrepresented. Like many neurodivergent conditions, it’s exploited for entertainment: crime documentaries, interviews with very extreme cases of it, books that were written to exploit the situation such as Sybil: a book published in the 70s that popularized DID, played a role in stigmatizing it, later made into a film, and years after, both the author and the patient got exposed by the journalist Debbie Nathan for fabricating many aspects of it for financial gains.

Through this portrayed media, we get to see an extreme misrepresentation, and because of that, during my research to avoid bias, I tried to stick to academic journals, people’s written experience and stay away from documentaries or film adaptations.

The irony really is, most of the time you cannot tell when someone has DID unless they tell you, the alter shifts are subtle, and many learn to downplay them for safety. These people do not dramatically shift alters, they don’t commit crimes and forget about it the next day as the media tells us.

DID begins when the brain splits experience from self. when a brain goes through trauma too heavy to carry, it decides to defend itself by splitting those traumatic memories into many selves: because a single self cannot carry on its own.

This, of course, isn’t just psychological, it’s neural and biological.

A 2018 study led by Dr. Simone Reinders used MRI neuroimaging to differentiate between dissociative brains and non-dissociative ones, a study that still stands as the largest of its kind on DID because it showed us that there was a scientific neurological basis for this disorder.

In those MRI studies, it was clear that patients with DID had a reduced volume in the hippocampus ( the memory center ) and the amygdala ( responsible for regulating emotions ) both of those explain the fragmentation of memories and the physiological toggle between emotions. Researchers also do say that chronic trauma especially in childhood stunts the growth of the hippocampus making it incoherent with memory formation

Alters (the multiple selves inside the brain) become the result of the fragmented memories. Each alter carries a different self narrative based on a limited recall of experience. Obviously each person’s experience with DID is very different, some might have two alters, another might carry fifty alters. It’s different because every brain is unique - brains recognize themselves, they recognize the trauma and sometimes the only way for it to function happens to be splitting that trauma into fifty selves.

Another thing dissociative brains do is they depersonalize: feeling as though the body or self does not belong to the brain at all. Dissociative brains also derealize: feeling as if the world is not real at all. it happens especially when the brain remembers certain events, it starts to completely depersonalize the self from the body or from the world.

The pattern becomes very clear to me now: whether it’s with dissociative brains splitting memories, OCD brains redirecting heavy events to obsessive irrational themes, or even neurotypical brains engaging in denial or distraction - Brains constantly try to protect themselves, sometimes even in harmful ways. Brains recognize trauma and, over time, they learn how to carry it, by splitting it, redirecting it, or even pretending the world or the self does not exist.

You don’t have to have a disorder to experience that kind of protection, although less extreme in normative brains - how many times have your brain started obsessively daydreaming or needing movies, books, games, addictions, just to ignore the reality you’re living? How many times does your brain “pretend” to be someone else in different situations? There’s different selves you play in a work environment, when you’re alone, when you’re around a lover, a parent, a childhood friend.

This all leads me back to, if our brains were so good at protecting themselves, do we not wonder if even the idea of being “one self” is merely just a protective aspect of the brain’s need for a coherent self narrative?

I recently watched a TED talk titled is there a real you? by Julian Baggini the author of the book The Ego Trick. Julian challenges the audience with their idea that there is a real self. we obsess over wanting to identify ourselves through many ways: our horoscopes, personality tests like Myers-Briggs, who am I quizzes..etc. Why do we do that? if our brains already had a fixed core identity, why then does it obsessively need to be constantly defined?

In his TED Talk he says

“there isn't actually a "you" at the heart of all these experiences. Strange thought? Well, maybe not. What is there, then? Well, clearly there are memories, desires, intentions, sensations, and so forth. But what happens is these things exist, and they're kind of all integrated, they're overlapped, they're connected in various different ways. - It's the shift between thinking of yourself as a thing which has all the experiences of life, and thinking of yourself as simply that collection of all experiences in life”

What really stayed with me from his talk is that he compared us to water. The chemical formula of water. When we think of that formula, we don’t think there’s an essence in the middle called water that contains two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Obviously we know that the “collection” of hydrogen and oxygen is water. And that idea sort of applies to everything including ourselves, especially ourselves.

We are a collection of memories, desires, friends, traumas, experiences, places we come from, what we like, homes we lived in, but that’s where it stops. They are simply what they are, not what we are. This isn’t a form of psychological play that we should tell ourselves in order to be fluid, it’s rooted in neuroscience:

Paul Broks, a clinical neuropsychologist, says: "We have a deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there, and it's hard to shake off, probably impossible to shake off, I suspect. But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together."

DID, to me, is the very radical proof that our brains contain many selves, it shows this extreme humanity that we all have within us. So I hope that if you take anything from this essay, it is to not lock your brain with fixed self narratives, labels, and names. Because you are always bigger than what you identify with, you’re more fluid, more complex. Embrace the many contradicting, beautiful, ugly, inherited parts of yourself, but do not identify yourself with it.

The moment we start chaining ourselves with identities and names, we limit who we are. But more importantly we limit how we see others and how others see us. We create fictional wars and stories and narratives within ourselves and we project them to others, when biologically our brains tell a different story.

Lastly, I’d like to end this by saying, this piece does not try to generalize nor romanticize DID. Its a very serious impairing condition and nothing here means to flatten the difficulty or the complexity or turn it into a metaphor. I’ve mentioned it to reflect on a broader point: the human brain’s capacity for plurality. The universality does not erase the clinical reality of the disorder. Thank you for reading

- lara ghandi