Do we have a core personality

So my T was talking about a core personality last session. She was talking about how she believes the core me is a positive person. How she thinks when I have done not so good things in the past that, that was an alter and not the core personality the real me. I have heard that thats not true. That there is not a core person in DID and I have heard that, that is true and we never do anything against our core personalities morals. I am so confused.

Well, you've said your therapist doesn't have any DID training (nor much or any experience working with DID), so I'm not surprised at her comments.

If she meant to say something like, "down deep, at your core, I think there's a goodness about you," that could make sense.

The moment she starts talking about a core personality, she's probably going off the rails in terms of therapy. It's not a DID term, what does she even mean by that? The word "core" has been used to describe some alters in some systems, ours happens to use it to refer to our youngest alter, but it does not have anything like a consistent definition.

Your therapist is winging it and it doesn't sound like it's fully working. Therapists winging it with someone with DID are rarely going to be doing the best for their client. Some can make things worse.

She needs to reach out to someone with more DID experience for consultation. This is a very common solution for therapists dealing with a diagnosis they're not so familiar with treating. It's usually done over the phone. Seeking consultation for a specialty you don't possess is the strategy of a professional. This would be at her time and expense but it would allow her to develop expertise and learn techniques to better work with dissociative clients, increasing her skills for her own future career. (Hopefully she's not a year or so from retirement and/or has no interest in learning and growing.)

If your T is proposing that any alter is not "the real you," she is just way off base and getting it wrong. Worse, she's bringing half-baked ideas and beliefs into your therapy and confusing the heck out of you.

"Core person" or "core personality" doesn't mean anything in many if not most DID systems. So using it is going to mess with a client and make them want to figure out what or who that is. Individual systems might use one or both of those phrases for their own system, but no, it's not an actual thing in terms of treating DID.

I second Johnny-Jack, your T need to get in contact with someone who could offer real knowledge. or at LEAST read the treatment guidelines! They are for free and can be found here https://www.isst-d.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GUIDELINES_REVISED2011.pdf
the current consent within the ISSTD is that there is ONE personality, that is fragmented.
Imagine a big company with different departments. In DID those departments work separate from each other and sometimes don't know much about what the other department is doing. But they are not independent and the whole company makes one personality.

I am actually worried about the view of the human personality your T is expressing. Every human being has the capacity for good and evil. people are complex. it doesn't make sense at all (!) to think in terms of a good core. people always have good reasons for their actions. even those that might be judged as not very social. she is setting you up for judgement of your other parts, who took more difficult roles for the sake of the whole system. Like I said, all people have light and dark sides. In DID we often see a separation here and some parts seem light and others seem dark. If we lose track of the reality that they belong together to create one complex personality with all the capacities needed to survive, including the dark, that is a terrible thing to teach. the logical path to follow if that was true would be to abandon, punish or lock away dark sides. when integrating them and being honest with ourselves about our capacity for evil would be the way to go.

Yesterday I thought I might be some kind of core personality who is psychopathic and made up all the alters but then today I accepted if I made them up I'd be able to control them and they would have purposes which I can't control them and none of them are people who would be useful to achieve psychopath type aims. Plus I haven't climbed a corporate ladder or anything that has a pay off.

I don't think there's a core. Personally for me I don't think there's even a set host. Unless I'm the host now and our host changed alot..that's possible. There are long periods years where it's a continuous alter but there isn't one overall consciousness who is always around if that makes sense. To me a core would mean somebody who is central to the whole system and knows everything. Which our closest to that would be the twins but they share what you need to know and no more. Mandy will literally tell you anything, she lived with the twins, but she's not around and I wouldn't call her a core. She's an alter kept at age 4-5 to hold all good feeling in childhood. The twins memory bank isn't a core because it's a collection of memory. Mostly it works but it wasn't working for me for three days and it was getting hard. I'm quick to pick up on things I should know but don't but still it makes it harder without a memory bank. Thats not a personality though so that's not a core.

Another way I'd see a core is if you overlapped every alter like their consciousness was coloured circles and the where they all overlapped together would be a core of self and all parts but it would loose being the core if it became one personality because it would only have what overlapped and not the parts of each circle that didn't so it'd only be a core with it being not a personality. I don't know if I explained that how I imagined it.

Thanks,

No-one (and the overlord)