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SPIRITUAL HELPERS I HAVE MET
Introduction
The first patient met with the multiple personality disorder
(MPD) entered my Santa Cruz, California office for psychiatric
in early 1972. The diagnosis was made by the psychologist I
called in for testing after she had been hospitalized following
a suicide attempt. After her discharge from the hospital, she
conducted an interview with her adversary alter-personality at
home, taping the entire session. When I listened to the tape the
next day, in addition to the voices of the primary personality
of the patient and her antagonist, I heard the voice of a third
entity who was trying to help my patient cope more competently
with her problems. This voice I later identified as belonging
to another entity previously unknown to the patient, an
entity I eventually called the inner Self Helper (ISH).
Since that lady arrived on my doorstep, I have examined at
least 60 other individuals who met my definition of the MPD.
In most of those who have been seen in a treatment setting for
some time, I have identified the ISH, who has been of great help
in therapy. In those patients who were the most fragmented,
other entities have spoken to me through the patient's body,
entities which identified themselves as spirits who were there
to help the patient cope with life and got the most out of
therapy with me. It is this group of helpers, the ISH and what
I call the "Higher Helpers," whom wish to describe in this
paper.
Multiple Personality Disorder
Of those patients who have been identified in therapeutic
setting as an having MPD, 85% are women and 15% are men. Ninety
five percent have a history of severe physical and/or sexual
abuse in childhood. Since they also have a histrionic
personality disorder and a very high capacity for self hypnosis,
their preferred mechanism for dealing with this abuse is to hide
inside their heads, creating a "non-me" alter-personality who
can be in charge of the body while the abuse goes on. If the
abuse starts before the patient's personality is fully formed
(ages 7-9), then the "primary personality" usually control of
the body to the alter-personalities until it is discovered
during psychotherapy. The body is therefore controlled by
whichever alter-personality is brought forth by whichever
emotion the patient feels at the time, in response to
environmental stimuli. Each alter-personality is programmed to
deal with a limited range of emotions in a limited number of
ways, the program having been designed to cope with the
triggering event in the patient's life. The most common emotion
creating the first alter-personality is anger. The second to
usually sexual stimulation. Then, for survival reasons, "helper
alter-personalties" are created to counterbalance these two
"persecutor alter-personalities," one positive personality for
each negative personality. This assembly line can continue
producing personalities indefinitely, since the source of
control, the primary personality, has by now totally abdicated
responsibility for any action involving the physical world.
The Inner Self Helper and Helpers
At some point of disorder, the ISH is dissociated from the rest
of the psychic energy, as it contains the ability to guide
the organism with good judgment and practical sense. It
attempts to bring order out of chaos and acts as an idea center,
trying to influence the alter-personallties to cooperate so that
all can have their needs met, danger can be avoided and basic
survival of the total organism can be assured. It is a
non-emotional, intellectual portion of the patient, an area of
concepts designed to deal effectively with both internal and
external problems. It is usually the ISH that guides the patient
into the proper therapist's office. When it is discovered by the
therapist, the ISH is an invaluable co-therapist thereafter.
(Since most of the patients have been female, they have identified
their ISH's as female. The ISH's themselves claim no gender and go
along with whatever gender the patient wants to apply to them. For
that reason alone, ISH's will be called by feminine pronouns in
this paper.)
In those patients who are severely disintegrated, manifesting
between five and fifty alter-personalities, the ISH may
be too inadequate to prevent serious suicide attempts, requiring
psychiatric hospitalization. In those patients, I have been
aware that the patient needs a more effective helper than the
weak, worn out ISH I am interviewing. Inevitably, I have found
that the ISH, at times of indecision, has someone higher to call
upon for advice. When I insist on meeting such an advisor
before allowing the patient to go home, the patient will go into
what appears to be a mediumistic trance state, and I will soon
be introduced to the first member of the hierarchy of "Higher
Helpers." As progresses, I might find that there were more than
one of these Higher Helpers, each one with a specialized duty,
but all working together an a board of directors, trying to
help this patient get well. Whereas the ISH has identified
herself as the best within the patient's mind, the Higher
Helpers identify themselves as spirits, not parts of the
patient's mental mechanism
Just above the ISH in the hierarchy may be the spirit of
someone who died in their own body several hundred years ago.
This one will give a brief description of life and death in some
country at least 200 years ago, and assignment by God to help
this poor lady out. One claimed to have been an Indian squaw
in Montana who had been multiple in her lifetime. She had been
cured by the Medicine Man, so she was sent to my to help her get
well from her multiplicity. Others have had no mental
illness but were nice folks who would have helped others out if
they had lived longer. They give consistent stories which cannot
be proven or disproven, so I could never check out their
stories to see if some person by that name ever really
lived in the area they say they lived in.
Above that type of helper might be a spirit who reports she has
never had her own body and has always been in the spirit
dimension. This one acts exactly like the one who had been
incarnated, but she has not yet had a body, so she has no
personal appreciation for the difficulties we folks with bodies
have in carrying out the ideas she thinks are good for us to
follow. She commonly works with one who has been incarnated
before, guarding and helping specific personalities that are her
special charge.
Above that level will be Higher Helpers who claim to have been
on earth in bodies many thousands of years ago, in a high
religious role. One claimed to have been an Aztec Christ figure
4,000 years ago. This one had not had any incarnation since
spent her time helping sick people, the latest one being my
patient. She also ran a school for helper spirits and had four
student spirits at the time. Each of her students had been under
her tutelage at least 200 years prior to graduation as an
independent Higher Helper.
I have had several patients, each very fragmented, who had an
entire council of Higher Helpers, and they regularly met
together to decide the next plan of action. I was considered
an expert advisor to this group, and they regularly sought my
advice. If I suggested they try some new and untried therapy
technique, they would give it a try, and let me know its
results. Usually my ideas failed to work, but they still seemed
to think I might come up with ideas eventually. In two of these
patients, three of the spirits, all never incarnated, were named
Faith, Hope, and Charity, a trio of names commonly used for
good traits in early America. In dealing with these entities,
I learned that I could never succeed with the patient if I
doubted their honesty. I once thought Faith lied to me and
told her so. She faded away for several weeks, returning only
after I learned she had told me the truth, when the other who
had told me the story admitted fabrication. When I apologized to
Faith, she returned to her previous helping function, indicating
that if I did not trust her, the patient would not trust her
either, and, therefore, she was powerless to function as a
Helper.
How do the Higher Helpers participate in therapy? First, they
know the true state of the patient's mind and can tell the
therapist what in really the patient's concern of the moment.
With one patient, her husband was due to leave for a week, and
she had been talking suicide to him. One of her
alter-personalities told so that the lady had decided that since
she had helped her husband get through his emotional turmoil,
she no longer needed to live. She had previously postponed her
suicide when she had promised an old lady on a beach that she
would stay alive as long as she had someone to make happy. Now
that her husband was happy, she had no reason to live any
longer. The Higher Helper came out and told me that that story
was totally false, and that the patient was really suicidal
because she had just told me all about her father molesting her.
This violated her mother's injunction against telling family
secrets to outsiders, and she believed she should die for
violating mother's rule. But she was also expecting me to hate
her for her sexual actions with her father, which did not
happen, as I was totally accepting.
To counter her suicidal drive with the husband out of town, I
asked the Helper to come up with a plan. She suggested that I
enter into a contract with the patient to meet with before her
husband came home from a very stressful meeting, in order to
discuss with her how to help him recover from his own reaction.
The patient considered agreements binding and she would postpone
her suicide if we had an agreement to meet the next week. I
offered her such an agreement, she accepted it, and all went
well. Although I was misled by the patient, as an
alter-personality, the Higher Helper would not let the body
leave the office as long as I was misled and developed a plan I
could execute to keep the lady alive until her husband returned.
That is just one example of how the Higher Helper and therapist
can work together. I have to be careful not to let the Higher
Helper come out too often. Otherwise, the patient may become
jealous of the attention I pay to this pleasant intellectual
entity and then ignore her advice inside her head. Secondly,
the Helper weakens by being exposed to human beings and is less
effective when she returns inside. The limits of exposure to
human contamination is 20 minutes twice a day, the same time
recommended for meditation. Thirdly, while outside, she cannot
control the disorder inside the patient's mind in order to
keep the hostile entities under control. So, whenever possible,
I try to have the patient ask the Helper any questions and then
give me her answer. That leads to the patient trusting the
Helper more and avoids me having to paraphrase and repeat to the
patient what the Helper said. Eventually, the patient questions
and listens to the Higher Helper on her own whenever she needs
direction. Since a Higher Helper's allotted time out is short
and therapy complex, most of my discussions with these entitles
has revolved around treatment strategies. But occasionally we
will discuss philosophy and religious belief systems. All
Higher Helpers consider themselves under the guidance of a
Supreme Being. All Higher Helpers consider reincarnation of
souls to be a fact and are surprised at our cultural rejection
of what they consider to be self-evident to any intelligent
person. Their beliefs come from what they have been taught by
those spirits who have been their teachers and have nothing to
do with the religious background of the patient herself.
Religions of the patients have ranged from Catholic to Jewish to
mainstream Protestant, and the patients have continued to attend
the churches of their choice, with the blessing of the Higher
Helper.
The Higher Helpers can tell the difference between
alter-personalities, helper spirits and evil spirits by the way
they look inside the mind, as well as by their behavior. In the
case of evil spirits, they will recommend an exorcism only when
the anger energy within the patient's mind attracting that
spirit into her has been neutralized by psychotherapy. Once the
patient has turned off her "emotional electro-magnet," which
attracted the evil spirit to her in the first place, any worthy
individual may call upon a Higher Power to send the evil spirit
out of the patient, back to wherever it belongs.
Higher Helpers are very cognizant of their roles vis-a-vis the
therapist. They inform the therapist of the patient's
reaction to whatever has been done so the therapist has accurate
feedback. They never will tell the therapist how to do what
needs to be done, but they will tell him or her what needs
to be done, in what order and by what deadline. It can be
quite disconcerting to the therapist to be told, "Marla needs
to learn tolerance of others by the end of this session,
Doctor. You'll know how to do it when she comes back." The
amazing thing is that the doctor does, indeed, find he or
she knows what to do when the time comes, and all works
out well. Faith in one's intuition is essential in doing such
therapy.
In the use of medications, Higher Helpers have an uncanny
ability to discern the effects of one medication versus
another, even if both are being taken together. They will
advise the psychiatrist of the benefit or lack thereof of each
medication. But they will never tell the psychiatrist to use any
specific medication. Their training is not in pharmacology, and
they realize that. All they can do is recall the specific
effects of any drug the patient has taken in the past and let
the psychiatrist have information the patient would not
otherwise be able to give. Whenever an entity which claimed to
be a Higher Helper told me to give a specific medicine, I
later discovered that this "Helper" was an alter-personality or
an evil spirit masquerading an a Higher Helper. The patient was
a former drug addict, of course, and these entities were leading
me into the position of feeding the addiction. When therapy has
been successfully completed, meaning that the primary
personality has resumed control of the body and has incorporated
into herself all of the alter-personallties, the Inner Self
Helper or one of the Higher Helpers will remain available to the
patient as a constant advisor on handling everyday problems. If
each of the Higher Helpers had been responsible for a limited
group of alter-personalitles, all of whom are now fused into the
primary personality, those Higher Helpers seen to integrate into
each other also, so that the entire guidance function is located
in the Higher Helper who has always had the assignment of
helping the primary personality.
Conclusions
During the therapy of patients with multiple personality
disorder, especially those who are severely disintegrated, as
manifested by the abdication of the primary personality and the
creation of numerous alter-personalities, an Inner Self Helper
appears spontaneously to help with therapy. When this portion of
the patient's mind reaches the limits of its ability, it can
summon forth entities which identity themselves as spiritual
helpers, assigned by a Higher Power to help the patient cope
with problems of living and become one person. In doing so,
they must interact with the therapist, who finds their
information invaluable and their guidance enlightening in the
furtherance of therapeutic goals. Their religious belief systems
have nothing in common with the beliefs of the patients, who
have attended traditional churches, if any.
Investigation into the alleged backgrounds of these spirits has
been impossible due to the limited information they divulge, and
any attempt to check out their credentials to met with
therapeutic difficulties since the attempt itself implies lack
of faith in the reality and reliability of the spiritual
helper. Therefore, to do successful therapy, the therapist must
accept them for what they claim to be, and, as long as the
therapy is progressing satisfactorily, there is no reason to
be skeptical about who or what they "really" are.
RALPH B. ALLISON, M.D
Printed in the AASC Newsletter (of the Association for the
Anthropological Study of Consciousness), vol 1, no. 1, March,
1985, pg. 4-5
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