Split: a life shared: living with Multiple Personality Disorder

How does a child survive years of unimaginable abuse?

As a young adult, years after her physical abuse has ended, Maggie Walters (continually struggles with an unpredictable temper and socially difficult behaviour) has to leave yet another job due to her unpredictable temper and socially difficult behavior. After several false starts she finds a therapist who she trusts, just enough, to start talking about the childhood locked away behind the anger and isolation she has learnt to live with.

Eventually she is diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, MPD (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID).

Gradually, she understands. It was not Maggie who survived her childhood. The instinct to survive created an alternative identity called Annie, who with a myriad of other ’alters’, lived through the abuse inflicted on her.

Decades later, with a husband and three much-loved children, Maggie strives to live a normal life despite a past which has left her internal world with a hidden, dark secret. Every day, unseen by those around her, trigger incidents fill her head with voices, the chaotic remnants of her other selves who lived the childhood she couldn’t. This is the ’normal’ which Maggie has learned to live with.

In SPLIT Maggie tells the story of managing this ’normal’, of understanding and accepting her past, and standing proud in the life she has built from the ashes of her broken childhood.

It is a story not only of survival, but of self-acceptance, of the triumph to simply live. You will not read another book like it.