Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder As a teacher enters her classroom and demands attention, she carefully directs the students how to perform the next step of their multiplication problem that her students would never have thought she was anyone other than herself. However, she holds a secret that only her husband and his family know. This seemingly normal teacher was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, or otherwise known as DID. Dissociative identity disorder is a disorder that usually occurs after intense sexual or physical abuse and in which the individual splits their mind into several different personalities. This is why the old name for this disorder was called multiple personality disorder, and some people will still refer to this disorder as such. The owner of the blog “Sunshine and Shadows Life with DID” was a victim of child abuse at the hands of her father. , and it was never clarified whether it was sexual abuse, physical abuse, or both. She was diagnosed with DID in 2009 and started this blog in 2010. She refuses to express her real identity but goes by Sunshine on the blog. Sometimes she signs as one of her alters, but this is rare as she is usually herself when writing. Sunshine is a teacher and is afraid that the school district she works in will find out about her disorder because, due to their current policies, she could and most likely would be fired. Even though the fairness of the situation she currently lives in is questionable, she understands that it is what she must do to help support her two children and her husband ("Sunshine and shadows", 2011 ). Therefore, the question one may ask is how exactly does she keep the personalities at bay while she teaches? This...... middle of paper ...... had more alterations present, but they didn't come out in writing or she didn't talk about them in her blog. Additionally, people who suffer from dissociative identity disorder often experience more symptoms than their different personalities. They may also suffer from symptoms more related to depression, such as fatigue, insomnia, hypersomnia, mood swings, suicidal thoughts or tendencies, and they may also exhibit compulsive behaviors, anxiety , phobias, panic attacks and eating disorders (Johnson, 2012). Even though neither Sunshine nor Suzy expressed the majority of these symptoms in their blogs, that doesn't mean they weren't suffering from them. Also, we could certainly see mood swings between the two bloggers at certain times. Their posts went from high to low to low in a day or less. This appears to be nothing unusual..