When we engage in behaviors that align with white supremacy culture, we actively recreate the very circumstances that hurt our clients. So much of trauma is about loss of autonomy, about being unheard. It is of the utmost importance that we listen to our clients, even if we don’t share their experiences or can’t quite understand them.Both dissociation and multiplicity are deeply unique and personal experiences. Sometimes the medical model homogenizes them on its endeavor to understand. If the experience doesn’t fit the understanding, it’s more likely to be diminished or dismissed. The reality is, however, that both dissociation and multiplicity do exist on a spectrum and are impacted by epigenetics, culture, neurotype, race and ethnicity, social stratification, and other extremely important sociopolitical factors.

 

 

 

 

 

It is of the utmost importance in our understanding of dissociation to maintain our curiosity of how it’s being experienced. No one wants to feel misunderstood, pathologized, or unheard due to preconceived ideas. One huge and important example of this is honoring what each system (group of dissociative identities in one body) wants to call themselves, both individually and as a collective. If one group wants to be known as a system instead of a person “with DID,” amazing! If one group wants to call their members alters or insiders instead of self states, also amazing! Each collective gets to decide how they will identify or be known. The Plural Association, a multiplicity-led advocacy organization, facilitates a yearly survey for those who experience multiplicity and found in 2025 that 23% of systems surveyed preferred to refer to self states as head mates and 21% preferred to refer to self states as people. Rules are made up, we just work toward everyone working together.

 

Another example is in the prioritization of therapeutic goals. There are many therapists who believe that integrating all members of a collective into one is the successful outcome in therapy for those who experience multiplicity. I understand the idea to be if all members are integrated into one, there will be more functionality for the person as a whole. This isn’t true. While amnesia can impact functioning, no member of a collective needs to go away in order for functioning to “improve” (also who gets to decide that?). We are actually treating the underlying trauma when we do this work, we are not asking for an automatic biological response to stop in order for treatment to be considered successful. We are supporting nervous system safety if possible or identifying ways to use dissociation in supportive ways. It’s there to be helpful, it’s important we use it when we need it. The same survey by the Plural Association found that 88.4% of respondents wouldn’t stop being plural (experiencing multiplicity) even if they could take a magic pill. Even referring to multiplicity as being fractured or split can imply brokenness; there are many other ways to understand or describe these experience that don’t have the same implications.

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There can be a trained negative response to clinical language, like in situations of ritual and sadistic abuse. Receiving mental health support can also just generally be stigmatized so clinical language can feel aversive or othering. Scientific understanding is important (there is no science denial, here), but it is not more important than the lived experience. Therapists and providers are not the arbiters of reality or truth. The medical model is helpful is many ways but unfortunately is impacted immensely by white supremacy culture. Tema Okun identified and described the framework of white supremacy culture, which is understood here as a set of opinions, principles, and standards that uphold whiteness is inherently valuable and that Blackness, Indigeneity, and other identities of the global majority are both valueless and threatening.

 

We see this play out with the medical model through things like the belief there is only one right way to do things and through paternalism which are issues with therapy as a whole. One right way to do things might look like endorsing integration of parts as being the most important treatment outcome and believing anyone who disagrees is either colluding with the client if a therapist or if a client is malingering. Paternalism could show up as a therapist being dictatorial about what a client calls their collective members or insisting a client stop dissociating because the therapist “knows best.”

 

We resist white supremacy culture when we listen to and elevate the voices of those with lived experience of dissociation and multiplicity, even when it does’t fit into our expectation of what it should be. We also resist it when we encourage and incorporate feedback from clients and apologize when we make mistakes. Being open to and engaging in peer support with people who will constructively challenge our understandings or thoughts is also immensely helpful. The ways to support those who experience dissociation and multiplicity while incorporating cultural humility are endless.