The Many Annes: A Step Into The Life Of A Multiple

            A turntable-mixed voice screeches between beat-boxed drumming, reverberating through stage speakers, “Eh, eh, eh, every. Eh, every. Everybody. Everybody is Annnnnne.” Anne Gregory––a 26-year-old self-diagnosed case of Multiple Personality Disorder––grabs the microphone on stage. Dressed in a yellow skirt, pink tights and a matching sweater over a Superman T-shirt, she cocks her hips to the right and plants a black, plastic boot-clad foot on the monitor beside her. Her head tips back, eyes closed, and her index finger twirls a shoulder-length brown lock of hair. Her lithe, petite body gently rocks and her choppy whispered lyrics translate through the microphone and speakers into ghostly echoes. While singing, she tucks her hair behind her ear and presses a button on her drum machine. A barrage of electronic beats resonates. Green-felt pool tables rest bare beneath dim yellow lights and a small group chatters quietly at the bar. It’s a slow Tuesday night and Anne’s first show at Luckey’s Club Cigar Store.

Through her music, Anne hopes to be the “poster-girl for multiples.” She wants to show how Multiple Personality Disorder, officially known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID, differs from that portrayed by the media. The majority of media attention the disorder has thus attracted, along the lines of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the John Cusack movie, “Identity,” depicts people with the disorder as murderous villains. Psychologists argue over whether the disorder even exists and it’s causes. The majority of documented cases, about 1 percent of the general population, involve physical and emotional trauma often linked to satanic ritual. Anne says she’s no exception.

But she has never received an official diagnosis from a certified psychologist because she can’t afford it. Since self-diagnosing herself in 2002, when she began seeing hallucinations of hooded figures outside her window and started hearing voices, Anne says she has identified at least 40 different personalities. These personalities include: Carly, who is mean-spirited, depressed and reads lots of Nietzsche; The Scientist, the uptight Dr. Spock character who dresses in black, wears glasses and acts like a homosexual male; and Jilly, who always wears her hair down, enjoys colorful skirts and is free spirited.

Experts describe DID as the existence of two or more distinct personalities in an individual that alternate in controlling the individual’s behavior. This is accompanied by blackout periods, otherwise known as switching. It is theorized that during early traumatic childhood events, memories can be repressed by psychogenic amnesia, which fragments a person’s sense of time and “self,” creating different identities to deal with emotional situations.

“I’m definitely a multiple,” Anne says. “I’m not making it up.” But Anne is not a psychiatrist and most doctors will tell you that self-diagnosis is not a good thing. However, Anne has done an ample amount of research on the subject, having read “Multiple Personality Disorder From the Inside Out” and the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” among others. And she speaks about it fluidly throwing around terms like “abreaction” and “multimodal hallucinations.”

Psychologist Nicholas P. Spanos argues that cases like Anne’s are knowingly or unknowingly created by the interaction between therapists, patients and society. In a sense, Spanos says, therapists created the disease and its cure much in the same way social interaction created demonic possession and its cure. Some professionals simply disregard the disorder as a whole, believing past memories of abuse to be pseudo-memories created from external encouragement, an opinion held by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

            University of Oregon psychology professor Pamela Birrell disagrees. “Children have a very fluid sense of identity and they have a very easy tendency to dissociate,” she says. “If children are subject to abuse––sexual, ritual­­­––they dissociate in order for them to put it out of their awareness. It’s a way of survival.”

However, memories and actual events don’t always correlate. “One thing we do know is that memories are notoriously inaccurate,” Birrell says. “You can remember things that didn’t happen and not remember things that did happen.” Anne says she has memories of abuse at the hands of a satanic cult, which fostered her disorder. Whether or not it is the other way around and her DID created these memories, we only have her word to fall back on. It’s more appropriately the job of a psychiatrist and the authorities to say if that word is trustworthy.

What is more important than Anne’s trustworthiness is her situation. There is no way to verify it. Few of her friends know of her disorder, let alone have witnessed its symptoms. She has brought no evidence forth to the police against her supposed abusers. She is a struggling musician and waitress living with a roommate in a small two-bedroom apartment and can’t afford diagnosis or treatment. And she would be a self-proclaimed crazy to anyone who found out about her disorder. Whether or not her story is true, there isn’t much she––or anyone else in her situation for that matter––can do about it.

In 2002, Anne says she participated in a study conducted by UO psychology Ph.D. student M. Rose Barlow. At a wooden desk, Anne sat in a small gray-carpeted beige-walled room. Papers piled high on the desk. Her curly brown hair hung over a survey. She circled answers: not at all, sometimes, frequently or always.

How often do you look down and realize you’re wearing something you didn’t put on? Frequently. How often do you look around and not know where you are? Frequently. How often do you feel like another person? Frequently. The questions made her giggle. She covered her impish grin with her hands, squinted and hunched her shoulders. She was the only person taking the survey who thought it was funny.

After finishing the multiple-choice section, the surveyor had Anne read short anecdotes and then had her recite them back. A girl goes camping with her dad, the anecdote reads. They make dinner. They cook marshmallows. Then they go fishing. The next day they go home. Anne had already read several of these stories, reciting them verbatim, but this time she paused. Then she stuttered and stumbled over her words.

Flash. Anne remembers being 8 or 9 years old lying on her back in a green tent. She refuses to take her eyes off a black spider dangling from the green canvas above. Something or someone repetitively rustles the sheets and rubs against the canvas. She is paralyzed, cold. Whatever is happening to her, Anne refuses to take her eyes off the spider and continues lying on her back for what seems hours.

She isn’t sure who it was this time. He or she may still be in the stale tent air not yet finished with her. All she can help think is that she desperately doesn’t want to look away from the black spider. Eventually, she stumbles out of the tent confused and disoriented after it’s over, wearing her pajamas into the San Diego campground beneath the early afternoon gray-blue sky.

As a child, Anne says she lived in an upper-middle-class San Diego community where she remembers being raised by what she calls, “Devil-worshipping parents.” She says they belonged to a cult that worshipped Aleister Crowley, an influential member of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis occults.

Anne says her mother was a feminist Satanist because she also worshipped the witch-queen Hecate. School was Anne’s one place of refuge from the cult, and she did particularly well in class, eventually earning a scholarship to Stanford. However, she only lasted a year in college because she was faced with getting an education or getting away from her family even though they were several hundred miles away.  She chose the latter.

Anne says her mother was living in a triangular house with an altar the last time she visited, and she showed Anne her knife collection. She had reddish-brown hair and dark-blue eyes. Her forehead was “all tucked up and gross,” Anne says, because of several plastic surgeries she had done.

Though reticent about her childhood abuse in her story, her song, “Satanist’s Daughter,” paints a gruesome picture, in which Anne is tied to an alter alongside another child. That same child dies and is subsequently buried in the desert.

            Until four months ago, Anne says her mother was stalking her. While at the Eugene Public Library, Anne saw her mother in the computer lab wearing a red wig. Anne promptly ran to the ground floor and told a librarian to call the police because an individual upstairs was potentially armed and on drugs. The police came but did nothing. Anne says that after telling them about her disorder, they treated her as if she were crazy.

This reaffirms Anne’s dilemma and anyone else’s in her situation. She has no one to corroborate her stories. Even if the authorities believed her, they couldn’t act on her word alone without evidence. Anne says she now carries a knife given to her by a coworker (who also taught her a few karate moves) when she rides her bike to work. However, having self-diagnosed herself with multiple personalities, it’s difficult to approach Anne and her tale without apprehension.