She lived with 87 personas in one mind before finding wholeness and breaking free
Author Jim O’Shea’s books chronicle “Margaret’s” DID struggle, trauma, and final integration
Jim O'Shea was Principal of Our Lady's Secondary School, Templemore, for twelve years. On retirement, he set up a counselling practice and wound that down in 2019.
He does some voluntary work in the Cashel Family Centre, and his main hobby now is writing. He began writing in the 1970s, when he published his PhD thesis on the role of the priests in politics in the second half of the nineteenth century.
He has written nine books. Six of these have been devoted to psychological issues that he encountered in his counselling career, such as the impact of childhood on us, the death of a child, and abuse.
One is a novel, "I'll Meet You at the Roundy O", explored his childhood in the village of Grange in Gortnahoe in the nineteen fifties.
For nine years, he counselled a woman named 'Margaret' who had dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder and is technically called structural dissociation, where a person has different ego or dissociative parts.
Margaret had eighty-seven parts, each with its own traits and outlook. He met all of these, conversed with them, befriended them and counselled them over those nine years. Basically, he never knew who would be arriving at his clinic for a counselling session.
Margaret's journey was frequently a painful one for both client and therapist but ultimately ended in success when all the parts were fully integrated, indicating that Margaret's brain was fully integrated.
People with DID have fractured brains and live in constant anxiety and traumatic pain, depending on the level of the DID. Margaret, says Jim, had the worst of the worst: quaternary structural dissociation (the others being primary, secondary and tertiary).
Jim counselled Margaret on a pro bono basis in return for permission to write her story, which was one of horror and unspeakable childhood abuse. Volume I was reviewed for the Tipperary Star in 2022, and gave an insight into Margaret's suffering on a weekly basis.
In the last few weeks, Jim has published the final two volumes of this extraordinary and courageous woman. Volume II contains 422 poems that Margaret wrote during her journey with him. She has no recollection of writing them, so they were written by one of her dissociative parts.
Some of these poems are powerful, hard-hitting, ironic and sometimes witty. Many are of a religious nature, showing her deep, though sometimes ambivalent spirituality. In a sense, they bridge the other two volumes and are a poetic account of her life over seventy years.
These volumes are not textbooks, says the author, and their sole aim is to honour Margaret, and how she patiently bore her suffering and ultimately triumphed.
The books can only be purchased through Amazon, but for those living near Thurles, Bookworm can obtain copies.