It has been fourteen years since First Person Plural was initially published in the United States and more than twenty other countries. For a while a great many people from all over the world were interested in my little family, which was in no small part due to Oprah Winfrey having introduced our story to the world. When I say my little family, I’m speaking of my wife Rikki, our then twelve-year-old son Kyle (who now goes by Kai), me, and the 24 parts of me that I called my guys and mental health professionals refer to as alter personalities. I am a multiple, a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Rik and I wrote the book—oh yes, she wrote it with me—the prose was mine, true, but the remembering, weaving, and editing of our story were very much her undertaking. When we wrote it, we had no idea that anyone would want to read it or that our story would resonate with so many people. Maybe they picked the book up because the topic of Dissociative Identity Disorder is intriguing and mysterious. Since most people know the condition has something to do with terrible abuse, they expect some trauma, horror, and serious drama, all which seem to add entertainment value. The fact is that First Person Plural is a love story about a family struggling to overcome a challenge—albeit an unusual challenge—but nevertheless just a human challenge. What many people have told us over the years is that they relate to our story because we faced adversity and kept our family together. That was Rikki’s doing; she kept us together during the really hard times, and once I was able to face my denial, the difficult and lengthy process of healing began in earnest. The last fourteen years have been eventful, not only for me and my guys, but for Rikki and Kai as well. Many people have asked how we have been doing. As the book is now being made available in electronic form, it seems appropriate that I take the opportunity to tell you a bit about what’s been going on.
By far the most important occurrence in our lives was that my and Rikki’s beloved son Kai grew up. After high school, he attended a music conservatory in London for seven years, where he specialized in the contrabass (the largest instrument in an orchestra’s string section). He received an undergraduate degree and went on to complete his Master’s degree and receive two Fellowships to continue his studies. He has played with the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and the Welsh National Opera, and was principal bassist for the world-famous violinist Nigel Kennedy on several international tours.
The little boy who played such a pivotal role in the story you have just read now plays Mozart and Beethoven. Rikki and I raised him with the hope that he would pursue a life of artistic beauty, of physical and spiritual health, of humor and of love, and he is doing that. The difficulties brought about by my condition, which he witnessed first-hand as a growing boy, caused him to develop into a kind and compassionate young man, sensitive, perhaps overly so, to the emotional pain of others.
While living in London, Kai began corresponding with a girl named Alexandra with whom he had gone to high school in California. Over the course of two years their long-distance friendship blossomed and in the summer of 2009, they arranged to meet in Florence, where Kai was doing a summer course. Rikki and I happened to be visiting him and witnessed their falling in love. We fell in love with Alex, too, and in 2011 she became our daughter-in-law. In fact, I married them in a civil ceremony that took place in a little park overlooking the ocean just down from our house. Kai and Alex currently live in California, though their careers could take them anywhere.
Twelve years ago, my dear Rikki was diagnosed with breast cancer. Blessedly, it was Stage One and we caught it early. She underwent a successful operation to remove the tumor and several lymph nodes and she was bombed with chemotherapy and radiation. The treatment drained her life force dramatically over a period of a year and caused Kai and me no end of desperate worry. All the while, her spirit remained remarkably strong, even when she could barely lift her head from her pillow. It took at least another year for her to fully regain her pre-cancer strength, which she did with exercise, diet, and a lot of laughter. My Rik, the love of my life, is strong and healthy today.
As Einstein informed us, time is subjective and experienced differently by each of us. The same fourteen years that was a lifetime for our golden retriever was not much more than a long weekend for a Galapagos tortoise. As for me, the last fourteen years were long, short, and non-existent, because, as a multiple, I experience time differently from my alter personalities—the separate parts of my mind. Since alter personalities are formed as an unconscious protection from overwhelming trauma experienced most often in childhood, many tend to have childlike characteristics and mannerisms, from vocabulary to overall understanding of the world, and they are, in essence, stuck in the time period in which they were formed. As you read this book and were introduced to my alters, you saw this manifested in a number of different ways. Over time, these separate parts of the self usually do not age, unless a deliberate effort is undertaken to make that happen. That is often decided by the multiple and therapist together, and is done because the multiple’s life would be improved by having one or more alters age. Over the years, my alters did not age, with the exception of Clay who wanted to have a birthday party, and so became nine. My system did change over the years; some alters came out less frequently, blended with others, or ceased to come out at all.
I continued my therapy, traveling sixty miles twice a week to spend two hours in the home office of Doctor Marilyn Rice, a specialist in treating people with dissociative disorders and post-traumatic stress. The specific treatment, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Retraining (EMDR), has for the past twenty or so years been shown to be highly effective in helping war veterans and others who have experienced significant emotional damage to physically process the traumatizing events, thereby diminishing their potency. EMDR is based on the principal that traumatic events, when not fully processed, keep replaying over and over, causing an individual to react emotionally to memories, as well as sights, sounds, smells, and/or tastes occurring in the present that are associated with the past events that were the source of significant emotional or physical pain.
The work involves repeatedly taking the individual, or in my case, individual alter personalities, back to the original traumatic events, allowing them to be processed, using eye movement, until they no longer produce the unwanted response. Essentially, EMDR, when carried out properly, clears away damaging mental debris and allows an injured mind to heal. In my case, there was a significant pile of debris. Each one of my alters had his or her own memories of abuse that had occurred many years ago, but were still causing emotional pain in the present. The work was extremely grueling and the sessions left me totally drained of emotional and physical energy. Doctor Rice and I were able to tell if we had gone too far in the course of a therapy session if it took me more than a day for me to be able to function at all. If I was down for two days or more, she backed off a bit.
In the end, most of my alter personalities were able to rest; their jobs in my system were no longer needed. Wyatt, Clay, Switch, and Roger (who hadn’t yet appeared when First Person Plural was written) are still distinct alters who make appearances in my present life, although they have healed from the traumas from which they were created and no longer cause me internal distress. The rest of my alters have either integrated back into my core self or reside in a quiet corner of my mind and never come out. Rikki says that she sees glimpses of some of those who have integrated. Lief comes through with his fierce determination when I have something difficult to do. Per is present in my quieter, more reflective moments. And Bart’s sense of humor prevails, as laughter has always been a huge part of life in our household. I don’t feel the need to fully integrate into a single personality. But if it happens, that’s okay, too. I will always be a multiple and I will always appreciate the job that my alters did to save me from the disastrous consequence of childhood sexual abuse. I still feel the effects of my childhood trauma. Anyone who has been sexually abused knows that it is hard to ever feel truly clean. And I believe that there was some permanent damage done to my nervous system. I have a difficult time in noisy situations and don’t do well in restaurants or crowds. Going to the movies disorients me, and malls are definitely out of the question. But I have healed from much of the emotional pain, and although I have not felt the need to confront my abusers, I have forgiven them, which brings me a certain inner peace.
Although writing First Person Plural was very difficult for me, I did realize that I loved the process of writing. After its publication, I wrote my first novel, The Medici Dagger, an international adventure about a damaged, yet resourceful, stuntman named Reb who sets out to avenge the deaths of his parents whom he lost in a suspicious fire when he was ten. The story involves Leonardo Da Vinci, my personal hero, who wrote in one of his notebooks that “all objects yield to effort.” I embrace that conviction and have lived by it.
I enjoyed writing The Medici Dagger so much that I wrote a follow-up called Futurecard in which Reb again plays the protagonist, this time against nano-terrorism. I also wrote two screenplays which I hope will find their way to the screen, and am working on another memoir—a follow-up to First Person Plural—called Guitar Lessons, which chronicles the challenges I faced as a multiple parenting Kai.
After Kai went off to university and I concluded my therapy, Rik and I embarked on a wonderful adventure, living in London, Spain, Italy, and Costa Rica—not that we were rich jetsetters. We weren’t then and we’re not now. We were just living out a lifelong dream to travel and experience different countries once Kai left home to go to school. In fact, we divested ourselves of everything that wouldn’t fit in a suitcase or an overhead bin (an interesting experience in itself) and went from place to place, renting small apartments or houses. Rik made each one of them our home, in her usual loving and nurturing way, which provided me with a sense of familiarity and grounding that allowed me to be in different environments without getting too disoriented.
We returned to California periodically because each of us had to undergo spinal surgeries. Rik’s surgeries were on her lower back, which had caused her constant pain for years. My operations were on my neck, which is now completely fused with the exception of the top vertebrae. I’m a bit of a Frankenstein with regard to moving my head from side to side, but less so than you would think. We are both strong and healthy now, determined to eat good, fresh, organic whole foods, some of which we grow ourselves, and get exercise every day by running, hiking, swimming, surfing and practicing yoga.
We eventually settled back in California, bought a small, funky old beach house in a quiet spot on the Central Coast. Rik spent a year transforming it into a lovely, open, funky new old home where we hope to remain permanently.
Sounds of the ocean refresh the soul and calm me when I begin to feel out of control. Families of dolphins swim casually by, sometimes leaping playfully to our delight. Seals pop their heads up while we surf to have a look at the odd wetsuited floating creatures, and there is a family of otters who tie themselves up in the kelp just offshore at night so they won’t drift away in their sleep.
Every so often we see the high spray from the exhalations of humpback whales as they pass by in the distance. This past summer something unusual happened. Pods of whales came in very close, maybe seventy-five feet from shore, and stayed for three weeks, feeding, along with dolphins and scores of pelicans, on bait balls of anchovies that seemed to boil on the surface of the sea. Rik and I would head down to the water’s edge and watch and wait with almost breathless anticipation for the enormous creatures to breach. For minutes at a time there’d be nothing, or maybe a fluke breaking the surface, and then without warning an enormous gaping mouth would emerge, fill with foaming water and hundreds or even thousands of tiny fish, then clamp shut on the unfortunate ones and sink back into the deep. The grey giants voraciously devoured what seemed like millions of fish, not with cruel intent, just to eat. What was certain death or a frantic near-escape from gaping jaws for the anchovies was, for the whales, just another lunch. The same scene has played out the same way in this beautiful place for millennia and will continue to do so long after we are here to witness it. The insignificance of the drama was what was so significant. I couldn’t help but project the scene on my own life—on what had happened to me.
On many occasions I had been the anchovy in the monster’s jaws, and as significant as it was for me personally, and for my future wife and son, it was also essentially insignificant. The fact is that bad things—dramatic life-changing things—happen to many living things, whether they are witnessed or not, and life continues. I was a victim in a drama that began in my childhood and played out in my adult life, but I was also blessed with the love of a strong and emotionally healthy wife and a child who loved me and needed me, and they saved me from the huge jaws that threatened to take my life. I continue on a path of healing.
Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren’t alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals.
A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that period, many of them are repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal.
Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stockpots that are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, the internet, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact.
But even as we accept the complex and impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis for their distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections.
We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not ameliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.
At this point in time there are still people who question the validity of the DID diagnosis. The fact is that DID has its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because, as with all psychiatric conditions, a portion of society experiences a cluster of recognizable symptoms that are not better accounted for by any other diagnosis.
It is possible to induce the symptoms of DID, and, sadly, some people have experienced this at the hands of inept or untrained therapists. It is also possible to mimic the symptoms of DID, and a few have done so to seek some personal gain. Let the former be an arrow that points to a truth about all therapies, including that which you receive from your family doctor. There is a risk in saying “Ahhh.”
Regarding the latter, think for a moment about the boy who cried wolf. His false cries did not mean that there were in reality no wolves. If you recall, there were—and there still are. That fable would have had a much happier ending if only the people had paid attention to what really mattered: the boy was crying.
There will always be a few who will say that DID does not exist, and their words will be kindling for those whose fires are fueled by debate. As for me, for the most part, debate is what I use to catch de fish.
Love yourself and others, appreciate beauty, art and music, laugh as often as possible, empathize with others’ pain so that it may be diminished even if only for a moment, appreciate the flavors and textures of a finely cooked meal, let a cool breeze caress your skin on a warm summer night and drift off to a peaceful sleep. Thank you for reading our story.
Cam West