Trump's aspirational defense rests on his being either an imbecile, delusional, or both

Top: A man's head seen from the front and back showing large ears and a deformed scalp by George Edward Shuttleworth, 1842-1928. Both images public domain

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist

It should be becoming clear to Trump's lawyers that the First Amendment defense just won't fly. This seems to leave him with two viable defenses.

Consider this from 

Not just the coup: Trump used the "aspirational" defense in the E. Jean Carroll rape lawsuit by Amanda Marcotte

There was no conspiracy to overturn the government. Trump is just a delusional old man babbling at people! And empty chatter ain't no crime! 

Trump himself is leaning hard into the argument that he's too big of an imbecile to take seriously as a threat.

There are two words above, delusional and imbecile, which alone or together can be used and indeed have been used successfully to keep people either from being tried for a crime or on being convicted from being sent to a regular prison.

This has to do with laws about competency to stand trial:

It is a denial of due process to try or sentence a defendant who is “insane” or incompetent to stand trial.1 When it becomes evident during the trial that a defendant is or has become “insane” or incompetent to stand trial, the court on its own initiative must conduct a hearing on the issue.2Although there is no constitutional requirement that the state assume the burden of proving a defendant competent, the state must provide the defendant with a chance to prove that he is incompetent to stand trial. Thus, a statutory presumption that a criminal defendant is competent to stand trial or a requirement that the defendant bear the burden of proving incompetence by a preponderance of the evidence does not violate due process

 You can more read about the relevant laws here.

The term imbecile was once used to denote a category of people with moderate to severe intellectual disability as well as a type of criminal.^[1][2] The meaning was further refined into mental and moral imbecility.^{[7][8]  (Wikipedia)}

We all remember stories like "Tensions escalate after Tillerson calls Trump ‘moron’" from 2017 using another old medical term now slang for to insult someone either with low intelligence or who may be smart but who does something stupid. 

Trump's bet is to avoid being tried at all with the claim that he's too incompetent to particpate in his own defense.  If found guilty of felonies and sentenced to incarceration The Federal Bureau of Prisons can accommodate him and provide apropriate treatment and programs:

This Program Statement provides policy, procedures, standards, and guidelines for the delivery of mental health services to inmates with mental illness in all Federal Bureau of Prisons (Bureau) correctional facilities.

For the purpose of this Program Statement, mental illness is defined as in the most current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

“A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinical significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities.”

Classification of an inmate as seriously mentally ill requires consideration of his/her diagnoses; the severity and duration of his/her symptoms; the degree of functional impairment associated with the illness; and his/her treatment history and current treatment needs. Mental illnesses not listed below may be classified as seriously mentally ill on a case-by-case basis if they result in significant functional impairment. Reference.

Trump could go down in history as the most famous felon who ever served his time in a prison psychiatric hosptial. He'd be on the list with John Hinkley (who tried to assassinate Presdient Reagan and spent 34 years as a prisoner being treated at St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital) and Boston Strangler Alberto DeSalvo who spend years in the DOC psychiatric facility Bridgewater State Hospital before he escaped and was sent to the maximum secutiry Walpole Prison.

Addendum:

Recommended reading for Trump if this happens to him:

What Life Is Like for the 'Criminally Insane' at a Maximum-Security Psychiatric Hospital

by SARAH KUTA

Excerpt:

How and why do people end up in forensic psychiatric hospitals? 

All the patients have committed crimes and have been sent there by a judge, but they’re not actually criminals—they’ve been judged not responsible for their crimes.

Some are there because they’ve committed serious felonies and are being held for competency evaluations, to see if they have the capacity to stand trial. Some are inmates who come from other state psychiatric facilities because their behavior has been violent or aggressive and they meet the criteria for involuntary commitment. Most, however, have been found incompetent to stand trial or convicted of a crime that was committed when they were under the influence of a mental illness, like Brian.

Can they ever get out? 

They’re sent there until they have recovered or are considered stable enough to gradually return to the community—no matter how long that takes. For some of them, this never happens, and they stay in the hospital until they die. There’s no federal agency charged with monitoring them and no registry or organization that tracks how long they’ve been incarcerated or why.

Don't call Trump's behavior inexplicable, Digby, when you wondered about this you gave the reason twice in your column

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist

Heather "Digby" Parton is one of my three or four favorite columnists. She writes for Salon. Today she wrote:

The legal dominoes finally start to fall against Trump

Trump has lost the shield of the presidency that kept him safe for four years and the rule of law is coming for him

What I want to address here is just one word, emphasized below, in one sentence:

Trump has acted in inexplicably suspicious and self-defeating ways since he first ran for president in 2016. From calling on Russia to hack his rival's emails to his strange affinity for the worst dictators on the planet to his pathological lying about everything, Donald Trump has acted in ways that only cult members could excuse as normal.

Digby ends this paragraph writing that "Trump has acted in ways that only cult members could excuse as normal" which contradicts her saying the reasons for his behavior are inexplicable. They aren't inexplicable. Only cult members, who themselves aren't normal, think his actions are normal.

When I say normal in this context I mean mentally or psychologically normal. When I say I say abnormal II use it in the way it is used in abnormal psychology courses. I don't mean normal like, for example, saying that most professional basketball players are normally great if they make it into the pros while the likes of Michael Jordan and LeBron James are extraordinarily great, thus abnormal.

If I, who as a kid in when playing playground basketball game of HORSE, was so bad I think in my entire life probably only managed to sink one in 10 free throws, to go out for the basketball teams would be an inexplicable and self-defeating thing to do and especially humiliating considering the girls liked to watch the boys play. the 

Digby then goes on to express puzzlement by using the word "vexing" about the reasons he behaves in ultimately self-defeating ways:

This Mar-a-Lago case is especially vexing. When he decided to tell the government to go pound sand, he was not some naif who hadn't been in government before and didn't know the rules. He'd been president for four years by that time and knew very well that he was not supposed to keep classified documents at his beach club. And if they had been taken by accident in his chaotic move from the White House, he also knew very well that he should just give them back. But he refused, once again raising suspicions that he must be doing something nefarious with them. His behavior ever since then has done nothing to allay those concerns. Again, nobody normal would behave this way.

I highlighted several words above which provide the explanation. 

I propose that Digby and others flesh out such descriptions with modifiers, for example psychiatrically normal, or write things like no mentally stable person would act in ways that are so self-defeating.

I'd like to say I am writing this to bury the analysis of Trump once and for all since I've written about his psychiatric diagnosis so many times before. Between the minuscule contribution I've made to this body of work and what so many other mental health professionals have written I wouldn't be surprised if his personality has been analyzed by experts more than all other world leaders including Hitler, Lincoln, and Churchill.

Trump is now (see "Psychiatrists warn Trump's psychosis will grow as he becomes more desperate"), and Hitler was, a despot whose behavior many experts tried to understand though psychology.  Lincoln is said to have struggled with clinical depression . It has also be speculated that Churchill suffered from bouts of depression and mania. 

One of the most quoted sayings since Trump became a threat to democracy and mental health professionals began to write about how dangerous his psychopathology made him (a best selling book by mental health professionals was even titled "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump") was from "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu written in the 5th century BC. In it's various translations it means in essence that the best way to win at war is to know your enemy as well as you know yourself.

The best way to assure victory in a war or battle is to predict what your opponent will do before they do it. There are two way which work in tandem to do this. One is to look at past behavior as indices of future behavior and the other is to fully understand the personality of your opponent.

About the blog:

Here's a mystery. For unknown reasons all week the blog has had the largest percentage of readers logging on from Singapore. All I can think of is that this had something to do with this:

World's spy chiefs connect in secret conclave at Shangri-La Dialogue security meeting in Singapore

Perhaps this spy drama is a fantasy. There are expats from all over the world living in Singapore. Perhaps through word of mouth some of them have been following the blog. I'd appreciate anyone logging on from there comment and let me know who they are and how they discovered the blog, and what they think of it.

If you don't see the Diquis comment section below click here.

Fearing for freedom's fate and feeling like the vexed man (or woman)? I grok how you feel. A shrink's advice.

 

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist

About Fraz Xaver Messerschmidt and The Vexed Man . 

More about the artist.

For those not familiar with the word grok, it was coined by science fiction master Robert Heinlein in his classic book Stranger in a Strange Land. It means  "to understand intuitively or by empathy.

I don't actually feel like this most of the time when I follow political news. I know people who do, if not most of the time, much of the time. I also know people who become so upset by it that they turn off and tune out the news. 

I was reading this optimistic Washington Post OpEd by Greg Sargent titled "Opinion Biden has a theory of MAGA that just might be working"...

The photo is of President Biden in his embodiment of Dark Bandon Badass wearing his 3025 Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses. Full-discloser, while I am not really all that superstitious, I have a pair on order which should come in a few days. I am hoping that by wearing them I can send good vibes to the president.

This ad was in the middle of the essay:

Greg Sargent concludes his column this way:

Yet Biden also plainly believes that conducting the nation’s business on a bipartisan basis is inherently stabilizing. That sometimes requires treating the opposition — or a large swath of it — as a mostly conventional political party, which risks mitigating perceptions of the threat it poses.

In the debt limit outcome, that tension proved far more navigable than many, including me, expected. How this tension will play out in 2024 is hard to predict, but for now, the Biden theory of MAGA has mostly been vindicated.

I hope his conclusion, that the Biden theory of MAGA has mostly been vindicated, proves to be true. 

How does this relate to feeling like the Vexed Man? 

In general I see myself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I like to believe that I'm not a glass is half full or glass is half empty kind of person. I like to believe that I look at the glass and factor in evaporation rates of the liquid in the glass and based on the humidity and the likelihood of rain I determine whether the glass will fill up or be depleted. 

When it comes to the possibility that in the next election the United States will take an irrevocable step to becoming a fascist autocracy with a bigoted anti-woke America first agenda I eschew hyperbole and try my damnedest to be objective.

This isn't to say that from time to time I don't succumb to the shpilkes. I do. 

My recommendation to those who feel overwhelmed by anxiety about the future of the country is to be kind to themselves and make a concerted effort to spend some time every day to take a distraction break. 

Do the things that are likely to give you pleasure. Spend time with people you love, treat yourself to a meal at a favorite restaurant, if you don't subscribe to a streaming video service pick the one that most appeals to you and find movies, or better yet long running TV shows, to watch. 

Take a drive in the country or just go for a walk, plant a garden, hell, if it suits you go to the city dump and shoot rats with a .22 riffle.

If you can afford it, there's retail therapy. This involves the process of shopping and then the pleasure in getting what you buy.  You don't have to spend a lot. Shop for a pair of happy socks, buy some inexpensive costume jewelry, or if you like gadgets or tools go to an electronics or Lowes type store and buy something on impulse.

Consider redecorating a room or just getting rid of a worn out piece of furniture. The idea is to treat yourself.  You can always do what I did, buy a pair of Ray-Ban 3025's.

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I am aware that these glasses are the same sunglasses worn by Tom Cruise in his Top Gun movies and that Ron DeSantis, referring to himself as "Top Gov", also wore them, or glasses that looked like them, in a 2022 ad pretending to be a tighter pilot.

See: 

Former Navy Pilot Rips 'Pathetic' Ron DeSantis Over 'Top Gun' Stunt

If you don't see the Disqus comment section click here. 

About the blog:

If you are new to my blog, welcome. Scroll down here to see all of the tags I've used and all of my blogs since 2012. The blog only became totally political in the last two years. However if you are interested here's what I wrote about politics in 2016.

Weekly stats by country:

For some reason I had many readers from Singapore this week. Could it be that major country spy chiefs are meeting there this week in a secret enclave?  The international readership varies but usually after the US the most logons are from Russia.

How many women supporting Trump are like Margaret Anderson from "Father Knows Best?"

 My perspective as a therapist who helped women break free from abusive husbands on women condoning Trump's abuse

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist. More about me.

Click to enlarge image

In my 40 years as a psychotherapist I had many women in therapy who were married to men who were abusive. That's why these two articles piqued my interest this morning:

Click above to read

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The salacious and tawdry nature of what Trump did made the coverage of the recent E. Jean Carroll trial more compelling to many viewers. Let's face it, if there were reports of Trump emotionally abusing a wife or girlfriend it wouldn't have received the media attention it did, although Ivana's serious accusations made the news.

Since I worked in a community mental health center I not only counseled many women myself, but all of our clinicians also did.  Our program was in Mason, a rural suburb of Lansing, Michigan and most of our clients were blue collar with many of them working in auto factories. The area was mostly Republican. 

Rarely did we have female clients who were physically abused. By far the majority who came because of marital problems were emotionally abused by spouses who demeaned them, bullied them, had no empathy for their feelings or in the worst cases relished controlling and demeaning them. 

There is one case I can write about since our therapy was referred to in "The Burning Bed" The True Story Of An Abused Wife" which is a book about her. The book is about Francine Hughes. She became famous because she set her husband's bed on fire when he was sleeping and he died. Subsequently she was acquitted of murdering him by reason of temporary insanity. 

Although her husband did psychically abuse her, he also attempted to thwart all of the gains in self-esteem she made in therapy.  We talked about her wanting to advance her education. Then when she started at the  local community college he burned all her books. He did things to her that were much worse, but this act was symbolic and in retrospect his demise could be seen as karma.

If you search "abuse of women" on Barnes and Noble's website you come up with not merely 260 books, but 260 pages of books. If you go to the library or a bookstore you will see a large portion of the self-help section devoted to these books.

As far as I know, what hasn't been the subject of studies is how many of the women who support Trump who believe that he has physically abused women or has publicly demeaned and disrespected them would put up with the same behavior in their spouses or boyfriends. 

I think it would be enlightening to determine what percentage of these women have been or are in relationships with men who abused them, whether physically, emotionally, or both. 

We can speculate that there is a segment of society where women end up putting up with husbands who while not really at the extreme on a scale of abusiveness are still misogynistic. The 2018 NBC News article "Misogyny has become central to the Republican mission — and the GOP is dying as a result: Women are recoiling from the GOP because of Trump, but the problem is not just Trump, and it never was" says that this may hurt the GOP. 

Excerpt:

You cannot pivot from your core identity. You cannot reshape a Republican party that likes or helps women, because it would no longer be the Republican party as we know it. The GOP is right to worry about its woman problem, because no party can survive if it loses women. But the Republicans’ best hope, at this point, is that women who have been shocked into new political awareness will become more complacent once Trump has left the picture.

For the rest of us, we can only hope that those women realize their problems go deeper than one bad president — and that their collective anger continues to erode the foundations of the GOP until the whole rotten structure tumbles to the ground.

The political problem with women who will vote for Trump no matter what his behavior with was, or his attitude about women all his adult life has been, is a psychological and societal problem. It is rooted in women's beliefs about themselves and is a combination of their accepting outdated views that women should be subservient to men and low self-esteem. 

A segment of society is stuck in the 1950's when "Father Knows Best" began on radio in 1949, and then aired as a television show for six seasons and 203 episodes.

This is from Common Sense media:

• Parents need to know that the classic series Father Knows Best is pretty mild when it comes to iffy topics, but reflects overtly sexist and subtly racist attitudes by today's standards.
• Everyone gets along and tries to do the right thing. Dad is recognized as the head of the household. "Good" women are characterized as being feminine and not "like men"; the Anderson children are raised according to this standard. 

 Check out the expressions on the stars faces:

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I may be reading my own bias into this but it seems to me that Jim is far happier than Margaret. She can't fairly be called "a long suffering wife" because she was depicted as being satisfied with her marriage. Today if she came to me for therapy for depression I would work on how this was related to her self-esteem and how her husband might be holding her back from pursuing endeavors to build her feeling better about herself.

Today no show would be named "Father Knows Best" unless it was a parody.

There is no way that Jim Anderson would abuse Margaret. However, he was a husband of his times and in subtle ways he treated her as his inferior and she accepted this. 

How many Republican women are living their lives as if they are in a re-boot of "Father Knows Best"  is impossible to determine.

Somewhat related:

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Candid essay by author who has multiple personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder) prompts ignorant and hateful comments

 

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired clinical social worker, psychotherapist

An article in HUFFPOST by a woman who describes her experiences as someone who has dissociative identity disorder, or DI.D., which was previously called multiple personality disorder, caught my attention because I have had more experiencing treating such clients than most clinicians in general practice. 

Below are samples of the comments to the article in HUFFPOST which prompted me to weigh in with my own comments since some of them were either ignorant or hateful. Reading the candid article by Jamie Marich (below) also prompted me to excerpt and re-post portions of the blog I wrote about Herschel Walker not having to do with him since he has claimed he had dissociative identity disorder.

Here's the HUFFPOST essay:

I Have Multiple Distinct Dissociative Identities — And It's Nothing Like What You've Seen On TV

Here's a sample of comments:

• This is complete nonsense. There’s no such thing as multiple personalities. One can have delusions that one has multiple personalities just like one can have delusions that one is a fire truck.
• Check yourself into the booby hatch.
• They/Them/Them
• Borderline. Personality. Disorder,
• Some people are just plain nuts and can't be helped.
• Undoubtedly taxpayer dollars are being funded to support this useless bum who will never be anything more than a burden.
• Actually… It sounds exactly like they describe it on TV.
• If men can wake up one morning and decide to be a woman, you can certainly whomever you want
• Does she just have a very active imagination coupled with a fiercely independent nature that allowed herself to become more than one identity? I guess we could all do this if we so desired. Serious role playing. It might even be fun in a more accepting society. I have no desire to do this, probably because it’s not socially acceptable, and my mother would have smacked me down if I tried. I also just like the one “me” and don’t like complications. Like invisible friends, some things you simply choose not to do, be or have when you grow up. Most people anyway.
• Uh Ohhh...
• A new letter... P... Plural.
• That goes with the B for bisexual...
• And the D for dissociative and the PTSD which brings us back to...
• This is written backwards.
• If you start with the logical part at the end (Think about the last time that you were bored...)
• Then the workshop stuff... Then all y...
• "Hollywood is obsessed with exploiting the lives of people with dissociative identity disorder". How do you figure that? When was the last time a movie was made on the subject? How many movies about it have actually been made in the last 50 years? What do you do, sit in a chair and watch those 6 movies over and over? Who's obsessed? people aren't concerned nor to they give a moment's thought to such things. Hollywood is obsessed with John Wick, Marvel, Violence, CGI, Star Trek, and action movies. Whose lives were "exploited" exactly? It's called drama and entertainment. "Dramatization". It's not MEANT to be real. No actual people were harmed in making those films. Playing victim isn't going to advance your cause - is that your 4 year old? Do you realistically think everyone should go out and get a degree in psychology? I'd be surprised if even half the country made it through high school.
• Ohhhhhhh, "pronouns", she's "woke"! wait, they're "woke". All four of her! We need laws to prevent her 4 year old and 9 year old from engaging in adult activities! Child self abuse! Calling Ron DeSantis
• How does she know what I've seen on TV? What if I saw HER?
• My first thought at the idea of having a 4-year-old identity inside a 43-year-old body is that it’s not the same as being a 4-year old.
• A 4-year-old is learning all the time and the things that she learns will help her as the 5-year-old she soon will be.
• A 4-year-old identity is a simulation of a child. It would be frustrating to deal with such an identity knowing it could never truly mature.

Scroll down for my comments and the replies to them:

I wrote a long essay about Herschel Walker who has claimed to have DID. In it I describe my own experience as a therapist who treated at least five clients with complex DID (and several more with a questionable diagnosis of DID). There are those who understandably question the validity of the diagnosis but the majority of the MH community believes it exists (and it is in the DSM-5). Here's my essay: https://www.halbrown.org/2022/10/herschel-walker-or-one-part-of-him-may.html

In my 40 year career as a therapist I had eight clients who I was the first torecognize as having alter personalities. Some were simple, for example one with two alters who I ended up hiring as a mental health worker in my day treatment program after the dangerous alter was integrated. I had various others DD clients with between 3-10 alters. The most complex manifestation of DD was with a client who had more than 100 alters including sub-alters (alters of alters) who died of suicide after I moved out of state and she was picked up by other therapists. Her death came when her most malevolent alter decided to kill her body believing he would live on.

I think this is an illuminating article which hopefully can lessen the stigma associated with the disorder.

My comment:

I believe there are two schools of thought among those working with DID clients. One is that the goal of therapy should be integration of all the personalities, the other is to achieve peaceful coexistence and cooperation between the personalities crucially eliminating periods of amnesia. With either goal the problem is that in many, if not most, of those with DID there is at least one alter that identified with the aggressor, or abuser, in their life who is the person who was responsible for the person developing DID as a coping mechanism, a means for survival, using the amnesic dissociation. Unless that alter is rendered harmless they are always at risk of them taking control and, like with my client, with dire consequences.

Replies:

•  I suspect it should be up to the client. If they want to integrate, the work should be toward integration. If not, help them develop the coping skills they need. It's the client's brain. They should have the first say in how it works.
• What a load of mystic nonsense. I probably have more experience and every bit as many credentials as you have. I have always tried to understand this particular subject from different perspectives, only to be shaken back into reality with actual client experiences. I have come to believe validating multiples/alters is just neglect of authentic client needs. Perhaps even abuse. Boundaries, reality testing, and some form of cognitive behavioral therapy loaded with education and diversion are what Borderlines need. Not magical thinking.

My comment: 

I consider DID to be a condition of where the person accidentally, not by choice, used self-hypnosis and created alters with amnesia which were used to avoid experiencing extreme trauma. The presentations of the client are frequently what you call theatrical. Some alters can be diagnosed as histrionic personality. In fact, various alters can have their own psychopathology while other are psychologically what would be called normal. Unless someone has actually worked with someone with DID and observed how different the alters, seen the extent of the amnesia between alters, are and gotten to know them it, is easy to consider it an ordinary personality disorder or just theatrics. This disorder more than any other demonstrates the power and potential of the mind. I have some concerns about the author of this essay, mainly that she doesn't describe whether she had a malevolent dangerous alter and how this was handled in therapy, but her basic description of her life experience dealing with DID rings true.

Reply:

•  She’s just driving a long-active, attention-seeking fabrication. It is much simpler. She has an ordinary personality disorder, and therapists like you have cultivated this theatrical behavior.

Every once in a while I find myself either reposting an old blog story or going back to update it. Because Herschel Walker is no longer in the news I won't repost all of the article about him and his dissociative identity disorder. You can read it here if you are interested.

What I will do is repost the portions of that article that have to do with dissociative identity disorder below.

During my 40 year career I have treated five patients with dissociative identity disorder of DID. I could write a book about them and my experiences in trying to help them avoid engaging in the self-destructive behavior which was caused by one or more personalities, or alters, trying to hurt or even kill the others. In some cases these alters didn't know that killing the body of another alter or alters would also end their lives. The belief system of such alters sometimes didn't include a recognition that they resided in the same physical body as the other alters. In fact when in control these alters often had far greater physical strength than the others and didn't experience pain.

Having read the comments I want to add that some of those who made them consider DID to be a personality disorder. It is not. It is considered correctly to be a sub-type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is because it develops as a way someone undergoing extreme stress as a child, generally repeated sexual abuse by a family member or someone close to them and their family.

It should be understood that because the personalities, also called alters, are not only different ages and genders, but if evaluated separately would also have their own different psychiatric diagnoses. Not only that their IQ's would be different and there have been documented case where some would need eyeglasses and others would have perfect vision. Some could be extraordinary strong even though their body weight and physique wouldn't suggest this.

The following is based on my own experiences with DID patients, extensive reading, and attending workshops presented by experts. It is adapted from my Herschel Walker essay.

DID develops as a way to cope with extreme childhood abuse. It is usually sexual abuse of a female by an adult male in the family, usually a father, step-father, or other caregiver. DID in males in less common. The most well known case of a male with DID is Billy Milligan. 

For reasons not known, some victims are capable of creating alter personalities which experience the abuse and then instead of developing totally amnesia for it create, through a kind of self-hypnosis, another personalty which has no memory for it. 

In DID a patient can have only two personalities, one with the abuse memories and one with no memory of them. Other patients may continue to create new alters to deal with other incidents of abuse, and then use this ability to continue to spin off alters to deal with other life stress. In very complex cases an alter can have one or more alters.

Sometimes people with DID never seek treatment because despite periods of amnesia they don't feel much distress. Someone with DID may end up walking along a dark country road in the middle of their night in their pajamas and switch alters and have no memory of how they got there. They may accept this because similar things often happen so they'd just walk back home.

They may be used to finding things around the house they never saw before because another alter bought them. 

It must be noted that amnesias like these are hallmark features of DID. It can be incidents of amnesia that prompt them to seek therapy.

It is an unfortunate aspect of the disorder that in the worst cases the patient has an alter that identified with the authority figure who abused the actual patient who is perceived by this alter as a different person. While originally a protector they can develop to be a destructive force in the patient's life.

For the safety of the therapist it is crucial they develop a working relationship with any malevolent alter. They may want to sabotage therapy, or worse. I had a client who had a handgun and insisted on searching her handbag prior to each session.

A hallmark of DID is amnesia.  During many of the times when certain alters are in control various other alters have no memory of what was happening. For the therapist in complex cases figuring out the ways the amnesia functions between numerous alters is, to say the least, a challenge.

Here's a clinical example from my own experiences (with all names changed):

One of my patients first came to me with the presenting problem being that she was losing things, and when I pressed her to explain she reluctantly told me she was also losing track of time, sometimes entire days. In that first session I said matter-of-factly "is there someone here who'll tell me what happens when Alice doesn't remember what is going on. Alice was very puzzled by this question but I told her to bear with me and I asked again three or four times. She then changed her facial expression, looked me directly in the eyes, and said in a slightly different voice, "she's so stupid she doesn't keep her valuables in a safe place." I asked who I was talking to and my patient said "I'm Denise." Then I went on to talk to Denise and when I realized I was dealing with a full-blown case of DID I also ended up "meeting" the malevolent and dangerous personality who I eventually had to tell with in almost all of our sessions. This was George who eventually was created as a protector when Alice was being sexually abused by her father but when she was an adult also became her most destructive alters.

Successful treatment of someone with DID usually means working with the healthier alters to form alliances among them so they can resist having the dangerous alters take control. All of the therapy involves with these alters must be conducted with the therapist knowing that the dangerous alter is aware of your intervention and observing the session. That personality sometimes takes over so the therapist has to deal with him (with females it is usually a male) and works both an advocate for the vulnerable alters and tries to create a relationship with the dangerous alter. There are times when the therapist "makes deals" with the dangerous alter. 

Curing DID is exceedingly difficult and those therapists who claim they have done this may be deceiving themselves. A complete cure means that all the alters have integrated into one, that the memories of being abused have been dealt with in therapy, and there are no incidents of present day amnesia. The reports of amnesia with someone with DID means that another alter or alters were in control during the period of lost time.

A more modest goal, and with some the only realistic goal, is to work on developing a cooperative relationship between the alters. This seems to be what the author of the HUFFPOST article achieved.

Updated comment and my reply:

Comment: Thank you for sharing, The information you gave is very informative. 

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  Hal Brown
  18 seconds ago
  
  You are welcome. There are so many examples of how extraordinary this manifestions of DID are that I could have doubled the length of my blog describing just what I experienced. I would add for therapists with these clients that it is best to work with a co-therapist, have a good inpatient back-up facility available, and be able to see the client 2-3 times a week. One example from my practice is a client told us her malevolent alter observed what she saw with a third eye and then it appeared as a raised reddish circular welt in the middle of her forehead. After the session we asked each other incredulously "did you see what I saw?" Another example of when a malevolent alter took control in the hospital was when he took control of her 100 body and toppled large heavy tables over. It took rarely used chloro hydrate injections to calm him down.

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