Meet Jessie:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRDqs2t2Y8[/youtube]
^ Here we have another interesting case of DID. Once again, by amazing coincidence, we have 5 personalities. This girl has four boys dwelling within her: Ed, Jamie, Jake, and Ollie.
Ollie, for some reason, did not make an appearance in the above video. I’ve not watched any of Jessie’s other videos, so I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I’ll bet Ollie is the traumatized one who did not want to make an appearance in the video.
Things I find fascinating about the case of Jessie:
-
All boys. Why does Jessie consistently choose boys? Is it her choice? It’s also fascinating that only one of them (Ollie notwithstanding) appears to be gay (Ed), which means that not only is the gender consistently opposite of Jessie’s natural/original gender, but the sexual orientation is often opposite as well (though I’m really only speculating here since Jake and Jamie, even though they act straight, might in fact also be gay–which is really weird to say because you have a male oriented sexual preference dwelling inside a female body, yet this isn’t considered a straight female, but a gay male living inside a female body ). I’m also curious to know how Jessie’s husband feels about these boys and visa-versa. When Jessie’s husband makes love to Jessie, do the boys (at least the straight ones if they are straight) black out? And even if they do, they have to know that they are technically married to a man and that he occasionally makes love to them, or at least their bodies… awkward. This also makes me wonder: assuming at least Jake and Jamie are straight boys, do they miss the opportunity to make love to a woman? To have a girlfriend?
-
All different ages. We’re not told in this video how old Jessie is, but Jake is 24, Ed is 26, and Jamie is 28 (all 2 years apart). Is this indicative of how long they’ve been a part of the host? Depending on how old Jessie is, that means they entered into her life at an extremely young age.
-
Fully articulated American accent. I’m speaking of Jake here. Jake apparently is American! Or Canadian maybe (any other country speak with our accents?). Now, learning to speak with a different accent isn’t that hard. It most likely was an acquired skill that evolved over time. What would really surprise me is if Jessie acquired Jake at a very young and started speaking in a perfect American accent right from the get-go. ← This would really give the impression of being possession by a foreign spirit.
Now again, the question of spiritual possession comes up: in this case, the three alters being presented here seem rather innocuous–relatively good, or normal, spirits–and not only that but very human–that is, if we are to go with the interpretation of “spiritual possession,” I’d place my bets on human souls who have departed this life and have been given the opportunity to “possess” another person’s body for a while (as opposed to a non-human entity like an angel or a demon). There’s also the possibility of psychic connection which I’ve entertained: other human beings concurrently living somewhere else on this Earth forming a psychic connection to the host and speaking through here. Now, this is all notwithstanding Ollie, the fifth personality, whom we didn’t get to see. It’s quite possible that Ollie is the “demonic” personality (which would explain the lack of appearance, especially given Jessie’s desire to not portray DID in a bad light). And on this note, there is a readily available psychological explanation for why cases of DID so often feature a “demon” personality, thereby confounding it with cases of actual demonic possession. It’s because cases of DID are usually born from trauma, and the initial split is often one whereby one personality takes on the trauma and all the horrible memories while the other gets to live relatively trauma free with their own set of memories which aren’t nearly as horrible. The traumatized personality is “shut off” (i.e. repressed into the unconscious) so that the host or the person as a whole can go on living life without having to suffer or relive the trauma. This, however, means that the traumatized altered is, when expressed, going to come off as a possessing demon or at least haunted by demons–it is going to seem very dark, disturbed, very bitter and angry, spiteful, maybe full of hate, and quite possibly “evil”–and if not these, then certainly being the victim of these, thereby giving the impression of something very “demonic” in its midst.
One last thing to note about Jessie: in the intro to her video, she speaks as the host–the normal (original) person she thinks of herself as–and she decorates the video with a lot of innocent seeming, pleasant, happy themes–like something out of a medieval princess fairy tale:
I’m talking about the music and the superimposed banners and such. She sounds British from the accent, so this may be common among Brits given their long history, but it also seems to serve her purpose of trying to distance the reputation of DID away from the crazed, inner-psychopath, demonically possessed (gee, I’m helping a lot here, ain’t I ), stereotypical image, and closer to something you might find in a kids fairy tale book. ← I would expect this to come quite naturally to cases of DID.