The X-Ray for My Multiples
Personal Perspective: Inside a brain with dissociative identity disorder.
Posted May 26, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Some time ago, the Tokyo Broadcasting Company reached out asking if I’d appear in a scientific documentary about the brain. My first instinct was to tell them no—my mind was in way more turmoil than I wanted a camera crew to observe. But my wife Rikki reminded me that there are more than 100 million people in Japan, some of whom might benefit from seeing what I live with. And I was particularly interested in one of the segments that they proposed. I said yes.
What I live with is dissociative identity disorder or DID. I’m a multiple. Once considered rare and even bizarre, DID is now understood to be one of several post- traumatic conditions that result from early childhood adverse events. How this disorder forms is complex and still inexplicable. Why it develops is simple enough—because the child needs it to. Misunderstood and often misrepresented, DID is, in essence, a highly creative and adaptive survival strategy that arises when a child faces severe and repeated abuse. The mind fragments so the child can survive emotionally, go out to play, and go to school. Traumatic experiences are separated from consciousness and stored somewhere in the mind. Years later, those fragments can emerge as distinct identity states called alter personalities, each with its own unique characteristics, names, memories, and roles within the system. Some hold the actual memories of abuse. Some help to moderate emotions, keeping the child stable. Some protect the child from fear , while others actually keep the child from telling the secret of the abuse. There can be a few or many, and at that time, I had 24.
In addition to observing my family and me in our daily lives, the TBS suggested something that had never been done before. For that, we flew to Los Angeles and ended up in Beverly Hills, where Dr. Margaret Ayers kept her practice. Through a gate, two weathered wood-and-iron benches faced a magnolia tree. A door opened, and a poised middle-aged woman stepped out to greet us.
“Ah, Cameron, I recognize you from television,” she said. “Wow, you brought a crowd.”
She was referring to the actual crowd behind me—my therapist, Dr. Marilyn Rice, Dr. Colin Ross, a foremost clinician in trauma and dissociation, several members of the Japanese film crew, and their American interpreter whose New York accent could cut sheet metal.
Margaret Ayers was a renowned neurofeedback specialist who had co-invented a real-time digital encephalograph—a machine that tracked brainwaves through electrodes placed on the scalp. She used it to help patients shift their neurological patterns—treating alcoholism , head trauma, strokes, cerebral palsy, and even coma recovery. But she had never used it to examine the working brain of someone with DID. No one had.
Her office felt like a cross between a laboratory and a small theater with seats in a semicircle around equipment—clinical precision imbued with palpable anticipation. I sat in the hot seat. The film crew swarmed silently around us. Ayers applied eight electrodes to my scalp with a conductive gel, her movements confident and practiced.
“Try to relax,” she said. “Your SMR-Beta waves look normal. That’s a good baseline. Which alter wants to come forward?”
There was never a “who wants to.” Switching is not a polite hand-raising exercise—it’s a seismic shift. I felt the familiar volcanic pull inside as control loosened.
“Whoa,” Ayers murmured, and I heard her ask Dr. Rice, “Is this what usually happens?”
“The switches are like this,” Dr. Rice said. “Everyone wants to come out.” She directed my alters. “I’d like everybody except Clay to go to the comfort room.” She was referring to the quiet internal space we’d created as a safe retreat for my parts—my guys, as I called them.
A few seconds later, the switch completed. I receded to my usual observation post—somewhere behind and above—while Clay, my 8-year-old alter, took over the body.
“Hi, Marilyn,” he said slowly.
“Hi, Clay,” Dr. Rice said. “Do you know where you are?”
“We’re in Dr. Margaret Ayers’ office in Los Angeles. We talked about coming here.”
“Are these in my brain?” Clay asked, reaching for the electrodes.
“Nope,” Dr. Rice said, stopping him. “They’re on your scalp.”
“Don’t let her scalp me!” Clay’s fear was real. He’d been created during cowboy-and-Indian reruns, and the words held danger for him.
“It’s okay. Nobody is going to hurt you. Your scalp is just the skin on your head,” Marilyn reassured him.
Ayers said quietly, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Someone else whispered, “I don’t think anyone has.”
“And Clay’s aren’t just different; these are the brainwaves of a child,” said Ayers.
The interpreter relayed this to the crew. A small wave of astonished Japanese murmurings filled the room.
“Bob, can you rewind?” He did. “Here. This pattern during the switch? That looks exactly like a seizure.”
That didn’t surprise me. Switching feels like a neurological earthquake inside my skull, even when the outside world sees only a twitch or a blink or a facial shift.
The session continued. Clay cooperated. Others stayed back. Over the course of the appointment, Ayers gathered six distinct brainwave patterns—mine and those of five alters—each with its own rhythm, frequencies, coherences, and disruptions. Six internal states mapped by a single machine, generated by a single brain.
Of particular note were the patterns of my alter, Roger, whose experience of abuse had included being held down until he couldn’t breathe. When Roger comes out, the whole right side of my face slumps as if I’d had a stroke. My breathing is labored, and my voice slurs. Not surprisingly, Roger’s EEG patterns indicated brain damage. Mine did not.
Brainwaves measured by an encephalograph are precognitive. They aren’t controlled by conscious thought. You can’t fake them. Actors can mimic mannerisms, postures, and speech. I am definitely not an actor, though in some interviews and reviews of my memoir, I was accused of being one, of making this up. A person could pretend to be a multiple, but it would be impossible to sustain the ruse. I’m just a man whose self shattered into multiple selves.
I spent considerable time processing my denial of the abuse I’d endured and the emotional pain that ensued. In one early hospitalization, they made a video of several of my alters speaking with a therapist. That went a long way toward dispelling my denial and helping me to accept the role my alters played in protecting me as a child. For some of my alters, it was a disappointment. They’d hoped to see themselves as they pictured themselves—a young boy, a teenage girl. They recognized their voices, but all they saw was me, the same man whose body they knew they inhabited.
The scan readouts were different. They were, in a way, family portraits, and my alters—young, older, male, female—were excited to see their own personal snapshots. For me, watching my brain reveal its internal architecture was humbling—and oddly validating. Not because it “proved” anything, although to anyone who questioned the validity of DID, it clearly proved the existence of distinct identity states, but because it reflected the lived reality I’d struggled to explain.
DID is often portrayed as theatrical. The reality is quieter, more physiological than most people imagine. That day was fascinating to a group of people who studied the mind and a doctor who taught people to manipulate it to heal themselves. But for me, it was not about science or spectacle. It was about witnessing the truth of a mind that had adapted to keep me alive.
Excerpted from: First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple . Blackstone Publishing, 2026 (25th anniversary edition).
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Cameron West, Ph.D. , is the author of the bestselling memoir, First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.