Ketamine for Multiple Personality/DID: The Client Experience

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is often misunderstood, stigmatized, or misdiagnosed, especially in high-functioning individuals who mask symptoms through adult-like coping strategies. Many live for decades without a clear diagnosis, struggling silently with memory gaps, emotional volatility, and identity confusion. How can modern therapeutic practices like psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy identify and support people navigating this complex condition?

Today’s guest struggled for years with DID that remained hidden behind a facade of accomplishments until various life stressors made symptoms unavoidable. Through intensive trauma therapy and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, they identified distinct parts within themself, recognized their trauma origins, and began the integration process. The guest emphasizes that psychedelics allow access to vivid trauma memories, the role of the therapist in creating safety and attunement during complex trauma work, and how gaining agency over their identities transformed their condition from a burden into a strength.

Join Dr. Signi Goldman in today’s episode of Living Medicine as she recounts an interview with an anonymous client about resolving DID through psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The guest talks about identifying and healing distinct internal identities, their early experience with DID symptoms, and how somatic touch can facilitate identity reconciliation.

This episode is brought to you by the Living Medicine Institute.

LMI is a training, resource, and membership program educating providers about the legal and safe use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

To learn more or participate, visit https://livingmedicineinstitute.com.

Intro 0:00

Welcome to the Living Medicine podcast, where we talk about ethical medical use of psychedelic psychotherapy, teaching skills, examining the issues and interviewing interesting people. Now let’s start today’s show. 

Dr. Signi Goldman 0:19

Hello everyone. This is Signi from the Living Medicine Institute’s podcast. Thank you for joining me again. Today we have something unusual and kind of special. It’s the third in a series of interviews with actual clients who have been through ketamine assisted psychotherapy for relatively complex diagnoses. Today, we’re actually going to speak with a client with a diagnosis of DID dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. This is a topic that’s pretty controversial, and probably there’s a lot of people out there with a lot of different views on this, so just know that this interview represents this client’s experience only and in their own words, that being said as a very long time provider of ketamine assisted psychotherapy, myself, I do feel that this client’s experience is representative of others that I have worked with, and therefore I felt justified in getting this message out so that it’s educational for those of you who are curious about this, or maybe running into this kind of work in your own practices, if you haven’t listened to the prior interviews I have done with clients. We had one with a young woman with complex PTSD, and we had another with a client with acute index trauma, both of whom were treated with ketamine assisted psychotherapy and described their experience. Those interviews were really interesting because of subjects like repressed trauma, memories and spontaneous parts work, so I encourage you to check those out. Unlike those prior to however, today’s participant did not elect to have voice or face recorded for this interview, so what you’re going to hear is a recorded audio interview done with the client, with myself reading both parts of the transcript. This is a non edited transcript that actually represents the spontaneous interview that we had yesterday. So as always, deep gratitude for the client for being willing to share their experience. And without further ado, here we go. So this is me as the psychiatrist and one of your cap therapists interviewing you about your experience with ketamine assisted psychotherapy as someone that has a diagnosis of DID known to some of the public, especially in its more pronounced forms, as multiple personality disorder, and we are interested in hearing your story and also your view the lens of how that all played out from your side, right? Because I know my side as the clinician, and I know I’m not the only clinician that you worked with. So why don’t we start by asking you, like, how you carry this diagnosis of the ID, and we can educate people a little bit about what that is at another time. But how long have you known? When did you first realize that you had that or start to suspect that you had those symptoms? Only very recently, even though it has been a lifetime of symptoms, the symptoms are so subtle. And I think this is one of the misconceptions in film and in research, is that this diagnosis is both very exotic and very rare, and I think it’s actually fairly common and very subtle, although it can be at the same time very debilitating, without the person really seizing on the particulars of the problem. What kind of symptoms did you have? Like, if you go back to when you were younger, that you now know were connected to this? When I was super young, I could handle any problem with the, I guess, mind and skill of a much, much, much older child. So I had the ability to dissociate from any kind of pain or emotional content that was happening in the trauma and be very effective, almost like a mini adult. Did you know that about yourself at the time? Or is that something looking back, you realize I didn’t know it at the time? I mean, I was the most responsible of my siblings. I knew I had to be responsible, and then, therefore I was responsible. That’s just the way it was. And when did you first start developing mental health symptoms that you were aware of, which I think was depression, right? Yeah, only in college. Edge, because I was really, really high functioning, and I could mask pretty much everything. If I was in a bad mood, which would actually, in retrospect, be like a huge dissociation. I would just call it a bad mood, withdraw from whatever was happening and come back functional. And often that only took a short amount of time, and you were not aware of having what we would now call parts, though, you did share that the counselor that you saw in college suspected that, yeah, so there must have been signs and symptoms then, then even, yes, yes, I think I was so high functioning, and that diagnosis is so laden with problems, I think it was maybe decided, although not discussed with me, to leave that alone and just call it depression or mood disorder. So in retrospect, you’re aware that you probably showed signs and symptoms of being very dissociative and maybe even having parts. Yes, I definitely had parts at that time, but I just didn’t recognize it like that, and it wasn’t diagnosed like that. And your belief now is that they didn’t want to stigmatize you because you were heading into a high functioning career setting and stuff like that. So you were never told that. And then fast forward up to more recently in life, you’ve been high functioning all the way through in a career and family sense, but tell the story of what happened in the last several years when the diagnosis of DID became more obvious. What was your experience of how that happened? So I would say multiple family stressors, along with the economic environment and career difficulties snowball together to basically put me in a space of not being able to function in my normal, grown up way of thinking. I was on a kind of familiar track to before, because it felt very familiar, but also very foreign to me to be in that kind of head space. And it was noticed by my family and spouse that I was having more difficulty doing what I usually did in my family and career commitments. And so then I began to seek out counseling. How did you appear to those other people, just like you were overwhelmed or you were depressed, I think most people wouldn’t notice it, only people that were very closely working with me or family would notice it. Notice what? Notice that I wasn’t as focused or that I was more emotional, whatever circumstance that happened, my reaction was more emotional than it required. What did you think was going on with you? If you had been asked at the time? I just thought adjustment problems with the family stress and career stress. I didn’t think I felt something was wrong, but I attributed it to just situational like I had done in college. So there’s a known understanding with dissociative identity, dissociative identity disorder, that some people lose time or go into parts and don’t remember. And I think when we’ve talked before, you’re not sure that ever really happened with you. When you were in college, you may have been switching and just not understanding you were switching, but you don’t remember, quote, losing time. I do remember sometimes where I would be in a head space where a lot of time would pass and I didn’t know what I had been doing in that time. And I remember driving on occasion and having to pull over because I had lost where I am or where I’m going. You said lost for a while who you were. Yeah, that happened, actually. That was more recent, but in college, yeah, it was just lost a sense of anything, of what I was doing and needed to pull over and get myself together. And is it the case that you now understand that as you being in a much or that you now understand that as you being in a much, much younger part that was confused? Yes, that’s how I would see it now, but at the time, you didn’t have that language, right? So a lot of this went kind of undercover for a long time because life wasn’t as stressful. And then when life got very stressful, a lot of the stuff that had been there in college re emerged, and you felt you were just stressed out. Other people noticed you were more distractible or emotional. And then what happened?

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