Most of my life I did not know I had other personalities. My family was horribly dysfunctional. My Mom was mentally ill. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic when I was about 12. I now know she was dissociative. Dad was a work-a-holic medical doctor but he also had emotional problems and absolutely no parenting skills. If you had witnessed how my parents communicated with their children, you would have seen insanity. They must have thought that either the television or school was going to raise us.

After a divorce in 1991 I started trying to get treatment for what I termed at the time was a split-personality. But even at that time I did not have the memories of the others. I just knew because of my communication problems with my wives/significant others.

It wasn't until 1995 that some of the amnesic barriers came down and I remembered some of the things that I did and said in the other states/personalities.

Even now those memories are limited. But I know if the people in my life communicated in a sane way I would not forget some things.

What I have learned is that when a person is put under hypnosis (deep hypnosis), there is an automatic amnesia function that occurs when the subject is brought out of hypnosis. It is the same automatic amnesia that occurs with most of our dreams. The brain, subconsciously, sees dreams as non-reality and deletes those dreams from our memory probably for memory storage purposes.

I believe that when we switch into another personality that we are switching into a hypnotic or semi-hypnotic state. When we switch back the above automatic amnesia function occurs. We lose those memories.

For a lot of us there are not serious differences in personalities. The differences are subtle. So it takes good communication skills on the part of your family members to see the dissociation. Dissociation is memory loss/amnesia!