SPLIT, by Maggie Walters

SPLIT, by Maggie Walters

Blue Gum Publishing, 2024

Wow. I have never read a book quite like this. 

Somehow, author Maggie Walters manages to tell us about life and love as lived by multiple people – alters –  within her body. In pulling off such a feat, she got me thinking about life and love in so many rich and rewarding ways.

But it’s tough to begin with. Maggie gives us plenty of context and warning before telling stories of her childhood sexual abuse and its effects, but there’s no way around it – she was treated just so terribly. 

But we should also support survivors to define themselves beyond what happened to them. We should go for a comforting walk if we need to, then come back and read on. Because there’s so much more to Maggie’s remarkable story. Just as there is for any survivor of the worst kind of trauma on the planet – mistreatment by another human.

And there are so many survivors. For every Maggie whose story is known there are all the kids and the adults they grow into, whose stories aren’t known. Dr George Blair-West’s introduction informs us that the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder) has a prevalence of one percent in Western populations, similar to that of Schizophrenia and Bipolar I Disorder (both also now linked to childhood trauma).

He says that DID is the only psychiatric condition where the psychiatrist can only make the diagnosis if the patient wants them to – the alters can remain hidden, just as so many stories of childhood abuse remain hidden.

There must be so many people living with so many people within them, who never see a mental health clinician like me, or never tell us what’s really going on inside. Is that because being multiple works so well they don’t need help? Or is it because they can’t trust us, because of the very breaches of trust that activated their ability to become multiple, when caregivers who were supposed to be safe became sources of overwhelming danger? 

Then there’s the social stigma – there are still people who think Schizophrenia means having multiple personalities, and most of the rest of the world regards both as, well, kinds of crazy. While the validity of mental illnesses as constructs is ever more challenged, there’s still a dominant medical model that fuses suffering with faultiness. Of course people don’t speak up about being multiple if they think they’ll be laughed at, locked up, avoided, pitied. In other words, shamed. 

Shame hides us for our own safety, but limits the life we can lead. I think it’s so wonderful that Maggie has chosen to refuse to hide, and in telling her story shows the way for any of us wanting to recover from hurt and shame.

She does this by demonstrating the remarkable survival abilities of children’s nervous systems. The degree of criminal mistreatment she was subjected to required her nervous system to create new conscious selves to endure daily life. Each time she was overwhelmed a new alter was created that adapted to the new conditions. Maggie estimates she has 30-40 alters, but she has lived most of her life as Maggie, with a long period as Annie, the alter that was mostly to the fore from early childhood to the end of early adulthood.

This first person account from more than one person did make smoke come out of my ears at times, in a good way! It made me wonder ‘how do we know who we are?’. I think this is another reason why people who are multiple would keep that secret – sharing their experiences requires listeners who aren’t multiple to use their imaginations to leap over philosophical hurdles, hidden assumptions. It’s such a gift to have those assumptions lit up, to give my imagination a chance to do a bit of leaping.

How do we know who we are anyway? I am interested in dissociation and self-experience from philosophical and sociological as well as clinical viewpoints. Dan Siegel for example, speaking at the Australian Childhood Foundation’s Childhood Trauma Conference in Melbourne in 2022 talked about the collective origins of humanity colliding with the capitalist individualism threatening our species and the planet. He said ‘the separate self is a toxic lie’ and we should all use the pronoun ‘mwe’. Imagine 3000 clinicians all trying on the word ‘mwe’ at the same time!

Meanwhile Dick Schwartz’s book No Bad Parts, introducing Internal Family Systems, is well-regarded and IFS trainings are very popular among my psychologist colleagues. He says the multi-part self is normal. It’s important, though, to distinguish self-parts we can all observe within, from ‘distinct identities…accompanied by changes in behavior, memory and thinking’ as described in the criteria for DID.

The ‘disorder’ part seeks to acknowledge the suffering most people with DID report, but it unwittingly worsens the suffering by locating the problem in the sufferer. 

We as a society are disordered because we did not (and still do not) prevent such serious child abuse requiring such incredible adaptations.

We are also disordered as a society because we haven’t yet shown the necessary imagination and compassion to survivors that would mean they didn’t have to keep their nervous systems’ adaptations hidden.

Happily, this book fired up my imagination. It’s no small challenge to make a story in which so many selves participate, into a coherent tale for general readership, but great writers have a gift for empathising with their readers, and Maggie is such a relatable guide. 

She knows it could seem weird, that what she endured was awful and is hard to read about, and she sustains us with her humour, her poetry, and her descriptions of what has kept her going – her love of her kids, her husband – for all their ups and downs – her faith, her communities, and being in nature.

The take-home message from this book is a slow exhale of hope: hideous treatment by others doesn’t have to rob you of life. The brain and body are amazing. Relationships can heal as deeply as they can wound, more so perhaps. Connection to community, purpose and nature ease what can at times be a lonely journey, even with more than one of you on board.

No one person can save you, but with the right people around you (and yes, within you) you can save you. 

All of you.