Why are my (non-DID) personality changes different to yours (DID)?
It can be rather difficult to try and explain how covert DID differs from natural trait variation. After all it has been shown that personality is stable yet malleable and it changes throughout the lifespan in response to major and common life events (Bleidorn et al., 2021; BĂźhler et al., 2024).
Sue, is a 24 year old straight cis woman. Sue took a big five personality test continuously over a year, this is what her trait profile is based on. The squares represent the median value while the blue represents the trait results range. As personality is stable but malleable there is a trait range that she falls within. When Sue goes to work she tends to be more agreeable, open, and conscientious. When she spends time with her family and friends her traits will shift along this range depending on who she is interacting with. All of these states are interconnected, her sense of self, her values, beliefs and memories remain the same regardless of which trait profile she present with.
Certain life events have shaped who Sue is. She can look back to certain life events and acknowledge how these events have shaped her personality.
As alters tend to front in certain situations, or have traits to make them better suited to managing certain tasks, their trait profiles can look distinctive to each other [or the can look the same, due to traits falling within the same ranges.]
Here is an example of a personality range for two different alters.
While the overall system personality profile might look more like this.
From an outsiders view things might look more like the figure below, this looks so similar to the personality profile of someone without DID that many people may say that DID doesn't exist, it's normal trait variation.
For the most part, your friends and family can't see the above transparent figure they instead see the figure below.
Major and minor life events can influence your personality, we hold these events as memories in our bodies, so what happens when you remove these memories?
The answer to this, there is possible personality trait presentation changes.
A non-scientific explanation to explain things to friends. This is basically just what I think, please keep that in mind, and research things if you want to claim something as fact.
References
Bleidorn, W., Hopwood, C. J., Back, M. D., Denissen, J. J. A., Hennecke, M., Hill, P. L., Jokela, M., Kandler, C., Lucas, R. E., Luhmann, M., Orth, U., Roberts, B. W., Wagner, J., Wrzus, C., & Zimmermann, J. (2021). Personality trait stability and change. Personality Science, 2(1), e6009. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6009 BĂźhler, J. L., Orth, U., Bleidorn, W., Weber, E., Kretzschmar, A., Scheling, L., & Hopwood, C. J. (2024). Life events and personality change: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Personality, 38(3), 544â568. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070231190219











