Copyright

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-748-12570-8

Copyright © Kim Noble 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk

This book is dedicated to our much-loved daughter
Aimee, the sunshine of my life, and our wonderful
therapist for her footsteps in the sand.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jennifer Todd, Wendy Glaister, Lisa Dixon, Klare Stephens, Anna Tapsell, Campaign Against Pornography, Helena Kennedy QC, Michael Fisher, DCI Clive Driscoll, Lydia Sinclair, Dr Rob Hale, Pearl King, Valerie Sinason and the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, Professor Howard Steele, Saul Hillman, Nancy Dunlop, Ina Walker, Suzanne Haddad, Julia Harrop, Shirley Hickmott, Ami Woods, Debs McCoy, Andrew Simpson at Springfield Hospital, West Thornton Primary and Junior schools, Susan Booth, Fiona Tamplin and Riddlesdown Collegiate, Palma Black, Sharon Jendon-Rose, John Morton, Henry Boxer, Gillian Gordon, Beth Elliot at the Bethlem Gallery, Malcolm Wicks MP. Thanks are also due to Robert Smith for his continuous support, Jeff Hudson for taking on this difficult challenge, Anne Lawrance and Claudia Dyer for their sensitivity and understanding, the team at Piatkus/ Little, Brown Book Group, Anita and Derek, Saatchi Online for allowing separate personalities to have their own artist web pages and Outside In for accepting us as individual artists. A special thanks to Dr Laine and her husband, Andrew.

In memory of my Mum and to my Dad and his new wife, Jackie. To my sister, Lorraine, and her husband, Lol.

To my family and friends including those sadly lost along the way. To my next-door neighbour and friend, Jean, and in memory of her husband, Stan.

To my invisible friends inside, who at times are too visible!

To all those with or without DID who have emailed me about their hopes and fears.

PROLOGUE

Shattered

Kim Noble was born on 21 November 1960. She lived with her parents and sister and enjoyed an ordinary family upbringing. Her parents both worked and from a very early age Kim was left with a number of childminders – although they weren’t called that in the 1960s. Sometimes it was family, sometimes neighbours, sometimes friends. Communities stepped in to help in those days. Most were kind and loving.

Some were different.

They didn’t look after Kim Noble. They took advantage. They subjected baby Kim to painful, evil, sexual abuse. Regularly and consistently from the earliest age.

Kim Noble was helpless. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t complain. She couldn’t fight. She didn’t even know that the abuse was wrong.

But she did know it scared her. She knew it hurt.

Yet she was so small, so weak, so dependent on her abusers for so much, what could she possibly do? And then her young, infant mind found a way. If it couldn’t stop Kim’s physical pain it could do the next best thing. It could hide.

At some point before her third birthday, Kim Noble’s mind shattered, like a glass dropped onto a hard floor. Shards, splinters, fragments, some tiny, some larger. No two pieces the same, as individual as snowflalkes. Ten, twenty, a hundred, two hundred pieces where before there had been just one. And each of them a new mind, a new life to take Kim’s place in the world. To protect her. At last, Kim Noble was happy. No one could find her now.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

This is mad!

Chicago, September 2010. I never imagined the day I would find myself sitting in a television studio on the other side of the Atlantic. I certainly never expected to be invited by the most powerful woman in world media, Oprah Winfrey, to appear during the final season of the planet’s leading chat show. But here I am and, as I take my seat facing Oprah’s chair, I can barely contain my nerves. The most-watched programme in America is about to be filmed and I am that episode’s star guest. And yet, as soon as Oprah sits down opposite, my inhibitions disappear.

Oprah’s studio audience is here to see her. I don’t kid myself that I’m the draw. The hundreds of people packing the auditorium reserved their tickets a year ago, months before I was even booked to appear. But the reason they love Oprah is she asks the questions that the normal American man and woman want to ask. I watch her lean in, gather her thoughts and build up to asking the Big One.

‘Do you remember what happened to you as a child?’

Three hundred people fall suddenly silent. A few sharp intakes of breath. Then nothing, as they all crane forward expectantly for my reply.

‘I remember parts of it,’ I reply. ‘Not any abuse.’

Murmurs buzz around that vast hangar of a room. Oprah looks momentarily thrown. If you watch carefully you can almost see her thinking, I was told this woman had been abused! What’s going on? Backstage you can imagine a huddle of researchers thrown into panic.

Oprah maintains her composure. Then, ever the professional, she rephrases the question.

My answer is the same. ‘No one did anything to me.’ But I know what she means and decide to help her out.

‘I have never been abused,’ I clarify. ‘But this body has.’

And then she understands.

Throughout our interview, Oprah referred to me as ‘Kim’. I don’t mind. I’ve grown up with people calling me that. It’s all I ever heard as a child so it soon becomes normal. ‘Kim, come here’, ‘Kim, do this’. It was just a nickname I responded to, not something to question. Why would I? I didn’t feel different. I didn’t look different. A child only notices they’re out of the ordinary when adults tell them. No one ever told me I was special in any way.

I’ve grown up accepting lots of things that seemed normal at the time. Like finding myself in classrooms I didn’t remember travelling to, or speaking to people I didn’t recognise or employed doing jobs I hadn’t applied for. Normal for me is driving to the shops and returning home with a boot full of groceries I didn’t want. It’s opening my wardrobe and discovering clothes I hadn’t bought or taking delivery of pizzas I didn’t order. It’s finding the washing-up done a second after I’d finished using the pans. It’s ending up at the door to a men’s toilet and wondering why. It’s so many, many other things on a daily basis.

Oprah found it unimaginable. I doubt she was alone. I imagine millions of viewing Americans were thinking, ‘This is mad!’

After all, it’s not every day you meet someone who shares their body with more than twenty other people – and who still manages to be a mum to a beautiful, well-balanced teenaged daughter, and an artist with many exhibitions to her name.

To me this is normal.

In 1995 I was diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder – now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID – although it was many years until I accepted it. DID has been described as a creative way for a young child’s mind to cope with unbearable pain, where the child’s personality splinters into many parts, each as unique and independent as the original, and each capable of taking full control of the body they share. Usually there is a dominant personality – although which personality this is can change over time – and the various alter egos come and go. Some appear daily, some less regularly and some when provoked by certain physical or emotional ‘triggers’. And usually, thanks to dissociative or amnesiac barriers that prevent them learning the source of the pain which caused the DID, they all have no idea that the other personalities exist.

This, I was told, is what had happened to Kim Noble. Unable to cope any longer with the trauma of being abused at such a young age, Kim had vacated her body, the doctors said, leaving numerous alter egos to take over. I am one of those alters.

To most of the outside world I am ‘Kim Noble’. I’ll answer to that name because I’m aware of the DID – and also because it’s easier than explaining who I really am. Most of the other personalities are still in denial, as I was for the majority of my life. They don’t believe they share a body and absolutely refuse to accept they are only ‘out’ for a fraction of the day, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I know how they feel, because for forty years that was me.

I am currently the dominant personality. Simply put, I spend the longest time in control of the body. (On an average day two or three other personalities usually come out and do whatever they do, and in between I return.) I run the household and take primary care of our daughter, Aimee. I pay the bills (even though they’re all in Kim Noble’s name) and make sure we live a normal family life.

I wasn’t always in control, however. As a child I probably only came out for a couple of hours at a time – and perhaps not even every day. As I grew older I seemed to spend more and more time in control of the body, until finally, with the encouragement of our therapists and doctors, I acknowledged the DID and took charge.

Why did I become the dominant one? I don’t know for sure but I think the body needed me to. The woman known as Kim Noble turned fifty in 2010 and I suppose if you look at me I match that age in my knowledge, my experience and my behaviour (although I feel much younger). I’m told that the others who were dominant personalities before me are similar in that respect. But not all of Kim Noble’s alters are like us. Even if they did accept the diagnosis of multiple personalities, many of them would not be capable of running a home. Many of them, sadly, struggle to cope with being alive.

Some of the alters are much younger – frozen at a particular point in time – and several aren’t even female. This seems to surprise people the most. There are three-year-old girls, a little boy capable of communicating only in Latin or French, and even a gay man. Some know their parents; others feel lost. Some are well balanced; others struggle with the scars of their past. One is happy with a lover, some have friends; others are mute, reclusive. Some exist to live life to the full; others have tried to take their own lives.

Our own lives.

Like a lot of people trying to understand DID, Oprah wondered if our multiple personalities were the different facets of Kim coming to life. In other words, one of us is Angry Kim, one of us is Sad Kim or Happy Kim or Worried Kim, and so on, and we come out when the body is in those moods. That’s not how it works. We’re not moods. We’re not Mr Men – we can’t (in most cases) be defined by a single characteristic. We’re rounded human beings, with happy sides to our personalities, frivolous sides, angry sides, reflective sides.

Oprah couldn’t hide her surprise.

‘Like a normal person?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘because I consider myself to be normal.’

And I am. When I’m in control of the body my life is no different to anyone’s reading this book. I have the same thoughts, the same feelings, hopes and dreams as the next woman. The only difference is I’m just not here to live those dreams as often as I would like. None of us are.

The different personalities come and go from the body like hotel guests through a revolving door. There are no signals, no signs, no warnings. I’m here one minute and then somewhere else. In between it’s as though I’ve been asleep – and who knows what has happened during that time? I don’t see anything, I don’t hear anything, I don’t feel anything. I have no understanding of what happens when I’m not there. I may as well be in a different country. It’s the same for all of us. We are either in control of the body or completely absent. We’re not witnesses to each other’s actions. As I’ve said, the majority of us don’t even know – or accept – the others exist.

Coming back after a personality switch is like waking up from a nap. It takes a few seconds of blinking and looking around to get your bearings, to work out who you’re with, where you are and what you’re in the middle of doing. The only difference is with a normal nap you soon realise you’re in exactly the same place you went to sleep, whereas I could disappear from my sofa and wake up again at a pub or a supermarket or even driving a car and not have a clue where I’m heading.

It’s not only me who has to come to terms with it, of course. The other personalities find themselves in exactly the same positions and respond as best they can. Shortly before flying over to Chicago I drove into my local petrol station. When I pulled the trigger to turn the pump on nothing happened. Everyone else seemed to be getting fuel so I went into the shop to ask what was wrong.

The lad behind the counter was staring at me in disbelief.

‘I can’t believe you’ve got the nerve to come back.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about you driving off last week without paying.’ As he spoke he showed me a picture of the car and me – so he thought – behind the wheel.

A few years ago I would have argued and shouted and told him to get some new glasses so he didn’t accuse innocent people. But I knew what had happened. I’d driven there, filled up – and then there’d been a switch. I don’t know who it was but they obviously realised they were in the car, they had no recollection of putting petrol in, so naturally they drove off.

Simple, really – but I could see it looked bad.

Luckily, because I was a regular customer, the guy believed my ‘silly me’ act when I told him I’d just forgotten. Standing there while he went through his little lecture about calling the police next time was utterly humiliating, especially in front of a growing queue of people. But it was less painful than trying to explain DID. I’m not ashamed, embarrassed or shy about it, but sometimes you have to pick your battles.

If that episode had happened before I accepted I had DID, the outcome would have been very different. In fact, I’d probably still be arguing with the cashier now. It wouldn’t matter that it was all captured on film. I would have known I was innocent and fought and fought – just like I always did when people accused me of things I hadn’t done. Sometimes it seemed like my whole life was spent defending myself against crimes I hadn’t committed. I seemed to lurch from one argument to another, at school, at home, at work or with friends, and all the time I’d be saying the same thing: ‘It wasn’t me.’

You can imagine how confusing life must have been – and how it must still be for the personalities who refuse to accept the truth. Yet somehow I coped. These days it’s the innocent parties who have to deal with us that I feel sorry for. For example, a few years ago I called the police about something and a couple of officers arrived at the house. I went into the kitchen to make them a coffee but by the time I’d returned, they’d vanished. Then I realised the time. It was an hour later. There must have been a switch. Only when I spoke to the policeman later did I learn the truth: another personality had arrived and literally screamed at them to get out of her house! That took some explaining …

I have a thousand stories like this. All the personalities must have. Life is a constant struggle, even when you know about the DID. Sometimes, though, the only thing you can do is laugh. A while ago there was a problem with the computer so the dominant personality at the time drove over to our therapist’s house. Our therapist’s husband is very good at fixing things like that. Unfortunately, when they went to fetch the machine from the back seat of the car, it wasn’t there. Obviously one of the other personalities – not me! – had come out and discovered a computer in the car and had done something with it. Whether they took it to a repair shop or sold it or lost it or just gave it away, we never discovered.

At least I can drive, however. Not all the personalities are so fortunate because many of them are children. A fifteen-year-old called Judy occasionally appears once I’ve parked. From what she’s revealed to our therapist, the first few times were quite scary until she realised the car wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t think the body would allow itself to be endangered by having a non-driver in control of a moving vehicle. Now the worst thing that happens is Judy just hops out and catches the bus home – leaving me to work out where our car has got to. Every minute of every day throws up new adventures.

Speaking of driving, sharing a body, I think, is a bit like being the driver of a bus. Regardless of how many passengers are on board, there’s only one person in control. The only difference with us is that any one of those passengers can take over the steering at any point.

Oprah wasn’t alone in assuming that our mind must be a crowded place with all those voices arguing with each other about which way to go like some kind of Pushmi-Pullyu. That, after all, is what it’s like for many people with DID whose fractures aren’t as extreme as Kim Noble’s. Yes they have multiple personalities but these personalities can hear what the others are saying, they can see what they’re doing and they can sometimes even talk to each other. You can’t imagine them losing a computer or throwing policemen out of their house or not realising they need to pay for things. Even if a particular alter didn’t do something naughty at school, at least it would realise why it was being told off.

Life must be so much simpler for them – but thank God I’m not like that!

My thoughts are my own. When I’m in control of the body, that’s it – there’s no one else. It would drive you crazy having all those voices in your head. Imagine being able to see what other people are doing when they’re in charge of your body? It makes me feel sick even thinking about it. It must seem like having a gun to your head and being forced to do things against your will. No matter what you see or what you hear or what you remember, there would be absolutely nothing you could do.

As for having personalities watching me go about my business, that’s no way to live, is it? I can’t think of anything worse than being spied on all the time. Picture it: you’d always know that whatever you did, whatever you thought, wherever you went, you’d never be able to escape.

I’ve spent enough of my life locked up under twenty-four-hour guard in mental hospitals to know how much I would hate that.

So, who are the other personalities who influenced my life without my ever realising they existed? Thanks to Dr Laine, the therapist who has treated me and all the other alters of Kim Noble, as well as observations from our daughter who tells me what the others are like, I’ve learnt quite a lot.

Bonny was the dominant personality before me. She was ‘out’ and in control of the body for the majority of the time, just as I am now. When she was in charge, I was just another one of the other personalities coming and going. It’s impossible to imagine now and it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. Even when, years later, I was told again and again that I only ‘existed’ for an hour or two a day, I rejected the very idea. How would you react if someone told you that?

Were they saying I was a role that this Kim Noble woman likes to play? Or that she’d made me up like a character in a film? Or that she changed into me? Were they suggesting I was Frankenstein’s monster?

That wasn’t what they were saying at all, I know that now. But I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to understand. I was just like all the other personalities who are still refusing to listen today.

One day, perhaps, they’ll accept the truth as I did and then their lives will make a bit more sense. As much as I hated discovering I was just another personality, the relief of not being so confused all the time was incredible. Whether I liked it or not, at least everything began to make sense. Even that feeling of always being in a rush, needing to get things done, of time running out, suddenly became clear. Without realising why, I’d somehow always known I only ever had a few minutes to achieve things.

Bonny took charge shortly after our daughter Aimee was born. She is the one who fought the council for access after Aimee was snatched at birth by social services. Unfortunately the stress of that struggle took its toll. If it hadn’t, if Bonny hadn’t cracked up under the pressure, if she were still the dominant personality, then I wouldn’t be writing this book and we would never have become artists.

And I would still be in denial about DID.

When Bonny retreated to the background, Aimee was devastated. Bonny is the one she called ‘Mum’. It took a while for me to earn that honour.

Before Bonny there was Hayley. I only discovered her when I found lots of old bills lying around addressed to her in Richmond, Surrey. That’s where Hayley lived during the 1980s – while Bonny lived in Croydon and I had my own flat in Fulham. Three addresses for three different personalities – I don’t know how we afforded it. Just one example of how complicated our lives have been.

Hayley was a force of nature – she had to be, considering some of the things she endured. During her six or seven years as the dominant personality we got our first – and only – long-term job. Unfortunately, that was around the time that she was exposed to the activities of a paedophile ring. When Hayley reported the ring to the police, she received anonymous warnings to be quiet. Threats of physical retaliation escalated until one day a man threw acid in her face and someone tried to set light to her bed with her in it. Fire is the most harrowing experience for any human and it has continued to affect us all. The good news is Hayley was a strong person – at least for a while – and she continued her fight against the attackers. The bad news is the effort caused her to burn up. Like Bonny, after years of fighting for our rights she faded into the background, cowed and exhausted.

And then there are the others, the ones who come out sometimes every day or every week or every month. They all have their own patterns, their own triggers. For one it’s water – one of the personalities, Spirit of the Water, can’t resist coming out whenever there’s a toe to be dipped or a shower to be had. For another it’s food. Judy takes over for most of my mealtimes. Salome, a highly religious Catholic woman, always emerges when we go near a church.

And then there are the children.

Katie, at three, is the youngest alter to regularly come out. She used to be around a lot more when Aimee was younger because they loved playing with each other. Sadly, the older Aimee gets, the less Katie wants to play with her. She just wishes Aimee would stop ageing – like her.

At least Aimee had some fun times with Katie. I don’t think the little boy called Diabalus has had much laughter in his life but I don’t know because he doesn’t speak English. When he first came out he only wrote in Latin. After that he spoke to our therapist in French. If Oprah thought my life was mad before, what would trying to fathom how this personality is fluent in two languages when I can’t speak a single word of either have done to her? It tips most people over the edge.

Another child with communication problems is Missy, an elective mute. She and Aimee have wild times together, especially when they’re painting. But something in Missy’s life has made her too terrified to speak.

Which brings me on to Ria. That’s the name I’ve given the frightened twelve-year-old who seems – apart from Kim – to have suffered the worst of the sexual abuse. Ria thinks her name is ‘Pratt’ because that’s what her abusers called her. It was actually on Oprah that Ria revealed for the first time the extent of her memories. It was so harrowing I could barely watch it – literally. Every time Ria came onto the screen there was a switch and it was Ria herself watching TV. It took four or five attempts before I stayed in control long enough to learn her secrets.

Ria remembers being abused. I don’t know how many of the others do but their various ways of suffering suggest previous trauma. Judy, for instance, is bulimic. She’s convinced we’re fat even though we don’t have a spare inch anywhere on us. Then there’s anorexic Sonia, who, far from throwing up, refuses to eat anything. I can tell when she’s been at mealtimes because I’m usually starving afterwards. Abi used online dating sites to combat her loneliness, while Ken, a twenty-something gay man, is depressed by the homophobia he experiences on a daily basis.

They all have their issues. Dawn’s suffering, however, has nothing to do with the child abuse. Perhaps that’s why it’s the one problem I identify with most. Dawn was the personality who gave birth to Aimee. She was also the one who witnessed our daughter being taken by social services. The trauma sent Dawn into hiding. By the time she returned too much time had passed and she refused to believe Aimee was her little girl. To this day she’s still searching for her baby. To Dawn it’s as real as the search for Madeleine McCann, even though Dawn knew Skye was alive.

Then there’s Julie, whose erratic behaviour – squirting fly spray on bus travellers and trying to drive with her eyes closed, for example – contributed to our being diagnosed as schizophrenic. Together with Rebecca, they nearly got us sectioned for the rest of our lives.

Rebecca started it all. Whatever her memories, she is the alter who is struggling most to deal with her past. Rebecca is the one who took the overdoses time after time. She’s the one who got us locked up in mental institution after mental institution. She’s the one who nearly ended it once and for all in a hotel room in Lewes.

In hindsight, being diagnosed with DID and knowing about the other personalities earlier would have explained to me why I got into so much trouble at school, why my parents and teachers were always calling me a liar, and why I was kidnapped, as I saw it, by one asylum or therapy centre after another. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have thought I was being experimented on by doctors who accused me of having anorexia, bulimia and schizophrenia. And maybe I would have believed them when they said they were doing it all for my own good – to stop me trying to kill myself again.

If I’d known the body really was doing these things, then forty years of my life would have made so much more sense.

But, as impossible as my life seemed being hurled from one crazy situation to another, like a pinball pinged around by unknown players, it was still preferable to knowing the truth. Because to accept that my body really was doing these things would mean accepting something else.

That it had been abused as a child.

And obviously our brain didn’t want us to know that.

The whole point of DID, as far as I can tell, is to protect a person from trauma. It’s a defence mechanism that kicks in to stop something unpleasant from ruining your life. As Oprah pointed out, it’s no different from anyone pushing a dark memory to the back of their mind in order to get on with their day, whether it’s being told off by a teacher at school yesterday or splitting up with your partner. If you don’t deal with the pain or anxiety – if you can’t resolve it or stop it or forget it somehow – you’ll spend every day thinking about nothing else. Your life will be as good as over.

Some memories are too big to bury in one mind, though, and that’s why Kim’s fractured into so many others. If she saw an abuser locally or someone who reminded her of them, or if their names were even mentioned or their memory flitted into her head, she could just vanish.

The tragic downside, of course, is that the abuse still happened. Kim’s body was still subjected to unspeakable tortures – except other personalities were now the victims. Kim had no way of knowing, but her disappearances opened the door to the ordeals suffered by so many others. We – our therapist, Bonny, Hayley and me – know Rebecca was abused, and Ria and Diabalus and so many others. We don’t know how many times they suffered before they too found a way to hide, leaving another poor soul in control of the body. But we do know that their lives would never be the same again.

I was lucky. I was never abused. That’s how I was allowed to grow, unlike the child personalities stuck forever at such a young age. Not only was I never a victim, I had no idea it was going on. If Kim Noble’s alters were co-conscious, like most DID sufferers, then I would know everything. We’d all know everything and we all would have seen it happen, whether we felt it or not. How would that help Kim then?

That’s why the body makes it so hard for the personalities to ever accept we have DID. Because in order to accept it you have to come to terms with the fact that men or women have abused your body – and thought they were abusing you. It’s very plausible that I have met my body’s abusers. I don’t know who they are. I don’t want to know. But many of the other personalities do. They will never forget and they will never recover.

From the moment I became the dominant personality I promised I would discover as much about the life – or lives – of Kim Noble as possible. After a lifetime of confusion, I needed to have the facts – however unpalatable I found them. However, trying to tell this story when, for a lot of my life, I was only around for a fraction of a day at a time has been hard.

Fortunately I’ve had wonderful help from the one person who knows more about Kim Noble than anyone – our therapist, Dr Laine. Just as I often used to come out during sessions that Bonny or Hayley had travelled to, so the other personalities have all had numerous sessions themselves over the years. Sometimes one of them will have a genuine need to see her, or perhaps she will want to see them on the dominant personality’s behalf. (For example, if there is a concern about how a personality is behaving.) It is through therapy sessions with Dr Laine that we have learnt so much about the abuse each personality has suffered and their other trials. So she knows my story, she knows Hayley’s story, and Bonny’s, and Katie’s and Judy’s and Diabalus’s and so on and so on. You’ll see scenes from some of their lives at the start of each chapter.

Of course, I’m well aware that if Bonny were still the dominant personality then this book could read very differently. The same is true of Hayley – and I hate to think what would be written by Judy, Ken, Rebecca or any of the others. We all have such different memories; we’ve all experienced so many different things.

For my own part, I admit, for a long while the tempting thing to do would have been to give up when the whole world seemed to be conspiring against me with lies, brutality and incarceration. I wouldn’t have been the first personality to fade away and I wouldn’t have been the last. But I didn’t. I struggled on to lead the life you’re about to read and I came out the other side. A life as a proud mum and a successful artist.

My name is Patricia – and this is my story.