13 Personalities are "inner family" for Californian

San Diego Union, Spring 1984

By Lynn Smith, Los Angeles Times

Nancy Ross was alone in her kitchen smoking a cigarette. She heard Alice say, "Go ahead and finish it... it'll be the last one you'll have."

She withdrew as if behind a curtain, she recalled. When she returned, she was standing on a bench with a telephone cord around her neck.

She suddenly realized that what her therapist had been telling her was true: She was sharing her body with someone else.

Ms. Ross, 40, of Redondo Beach, Calif., said she eventually learned she was living with an "inner family" of 13 personalities, each with a name and a purpose.

They included the Actress, a promiscuous flirt; the Nun, a righteous moralist; the Kid, a mischievous 5-year-old; and Richard, the gatekeeper who directed their comings and goings.

There was also Alice, a suicidal personality who didn't care that, if she killed herself, Nancy would die.

Stories of selves-within-a-self are not as rare as commonly thought.

They gained respectability four years ago when multiple personality was added to the American Psychiatric Association's list of official diagnoses.

It is estimated that the incidence of multiple personality in the general population is one per 20,000.

While stories like "The Three Faces of Eve" and "Sybil" have fascinated the general public, therapists nationwide are treating thousands of multiple personalities.

There is much debate over the nature of multiple personality disorder, the causes and treatment.

The vast majority of multiple personalities were physically or sexually abused as children. Most are women.

It is agreed that creating separate personalities is a type of "dissociative reaction."

Ms. Ross' therapist, Ted Barnes of Santa Ana, Calif., believes it is a sophisticated defense mechanism intelligent children adopt to handle continuous terror or pain.

In general, multiple personalities unknowingly lead multiple lives for two or three decades until amnesiac blackouts force their separate lives to collide or flashbacks bring back the past, Barnes said.

Like other multiples, Nancy Ross has lost chunks of her life. She knows there was physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

She remembers times in her childhood when she would hear familiar footsteps nearing her bedroom and would life on the floor hoping to be mistaken for a lump of clothes.

She remembers she was struck at school by nuns who told her horror stories of what happened to children who didn't believe in God.

At 20, she married to leave home. She has little memory of that five-year marriage. Less than a year after her divorce, she married an abusive alcoholic.

Along the way she migrated from New York to California, becoming a waitress, a secretary, a cab driver, a house cleaner, a live-in companion and a licensed massage therapist.

She lived with another man for 10 years. He lived, she said, with the Kid and Cynthia, an angry, destructive personality.

There were other men, pursued by the Actress, she said. But after each conquest, the Actress would retreat, leaving a surprised lover to confront an angry personality in the morning. It was usually Alice, a lesbian.

Four years ago, she said she was traumatized by a pregnancy that ended prematurely.

Two years later, she made an appointment with Barnes and after three sessions, personalities began to emerge under hypnosis. Her voice and body language would change with each. Ms. Ross described the changes as 'familiar yet foreign'.

She resisted the suggestion she might be a multiple, which is typical of multiples, Barnes said.

Meanwhile, Ms. Ross said, her inner voices were becoming stronger, telling her she was worthless and ought to kill herself.

She began awaking in strange places. She found her house in total disarray after a semi-blackout. Dishes were smashed, and the telephone cord had been slashed.

The culprit, she learned under hypnosis later, was previously unknown to the other personalities. In a deep, growling voice he told Barnes his name was Wolf.

Last month, Ms. Ross and Barnes spoke together at a workshop of the Orange County Mental Health Association. By going public, Ms. Ross said she hopes to prove that multiple personality is a real and devastating illness.

When more professionals accept that, more multiples will receive help, she said.

Barnes does not intend to "eliminate" any of Ms. Ross' other personalities.

Not only is it difficult, but many "integrated" multiples -- including the real-life Sybil -- complain of extreme loneliness and depression without their "inner families", he said.

Under hypnosis, Barnes said he has practiced "family therapy" with Ms. Ross and her personalities.

Barnes calls his patient a "recovering multiple," much like a "recovering" alcoholic in that she may never be "cured."

However, Barnes does not believe there are regressions once therapeutic progress begins.

After two years in therapy, Ms. Ross can call on the others' particular strengths in stressful situations without losing control. She has not experienced "total splitting" (losing consciousness) for six months, he said.

At Barnes' suggestion, Ms. Ross sent the Nun on permanent retreat. Wolf has received permission to rip up old magazines and newspapers but nothing else.

After Alice was told to stay in a closet for a while, she no longer speaks to Barnes, he said.

"But Richard said she (Alice) would soon." When Alice seems violent, the others "gang up on her" and do not let her out, Barnes said.

Ms. Ross believes there is no constructive purpose in confronting her childhood tormentors. But last Christmas, she returned home for a family visit.

When she saw the face that belonged to the familiar footsteps, streetwise Richard and a motherly personality, Catherine, came out to help, she said. When the family played Bible Trivia, Richard joined in.

"I can't handle religion," she said.

The difference now, she explained, is that she does not lose consciousness when the others "take the spotlight. It's as though I step aside and look over someone's shoulder," she explained.

Therapy has been painful, said Ms. Ross. Not only did detailed memories of childhood incest return, she remembered she was raped in her second marriage.

In one way,Ms.Ross is grateful for her inner family.

"They lived my life for me when I wasn't able to do it," she said. "it was my defense mechanism and it helped me stay alive."

But her new life is a drastic improvement, she said.

"I never thought I could be happy," she said. "But I am."

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