Reade Saunders

There are adults who do not walk through life as whole persons, but as a gallery of selves—each one trying to make sense of the others, or deny them altogether.

What the DSM once called Multiple Personality Disorder—now formally termed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—is not the theatrical split so often misunderstood in popular culture. It is more subtle. More tragic. Less visible. It is the psychic scar tissue of early trauma, where the mind’s only defence against overwhelming emotional pain was to fragment, to compartmentalise, to exile parts of itself in order to survive.

As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes it, “The child who is not held cannot learn to hold.” In DID, the child does not learn to contain trauma, so they break into containers instead.

The adult with such a condition does not appear monstrous. She may be articulate, professional, even charming. She may recall some events with vivid clarity and others not at all. Her narrative will be inconsistent. She will interpret contradiction as betrayal, challenge as attack. Her ability to parent becomes a paradox: within her fractured psyche, she may truly believe herself to be loving—even while acting out roles that sabotage intimacy, stability, or trust.

When such a person becomes a mother to adult children, she often performs motherhood as a role—rather than living it as a truth. She may oscillate between personas: the nurturer, the accuser, the victim, the advisor. Her children, in turn, experience emotional whiplash. They learn to scan for which version of her has shown up that day. They may even mirror the fragmentation themselves, becoming fluent in performance rather than presence.

And when she becomes a grandmother, the cycle repeats with added distance. Now she is an observer. Yet her fractures demand continuity. So she may align with her grandchildren’s other parent, not because of clarity or loyalty—but because the part of her self that once felt victimised recognises itself in them. It is not strategy. It is reenactment.

As Jordan Peterson puts it: “You can’t twist the fabric of reality without consequence.” The internal splits of the dissociative adult bend the relational field around them. Love becomes a function of which part of the self is speaking. And when there is no unified self, there is no consistent love.

Still, there is tragedy more than malice. In moments of coherence, she may weep with remorse. In others, she will believe she has done nothing wrong. And in all moments, she will not see the full picture—because no single part of her can.

There is no villain here. Only a person made of fragments, trying to parent children who needed a whole.

And the cost is paid by those children who, in order to survive her, learned to split too.