Nicola Staff asked 4 years ago
Her incessant talking is simply a feature of how her mind works. In a sense, she lacks self-awareness of how odd this seems to an outsider. It is, in a sense, the guileless nature of youth and the fact she has been relatively sheltered that has enabled her to develop this habit. Pressuring her to stop this will not be very effective because it is quite an ingrained habit at the present time. It is not truly Dissociative Identity Disorder in terms of a diagnosable malady of that level of severity. In a sense, it is a carryover from more extreme dissociation experiences of her childhood, during which she got quite used to inter-changing personas, as a stronger one would take charge of the difficulty and then her dominant self would resume at some point, following an exchange of information and a discourse very much like what the mother witnesses. While that can be seen as pathological from one perspective, it is, in fact, a normal coping mechanism of the mind because it creates a kind of inner resource to compartmentalize tasks, challenges, and sources of stress, to allow a portion of the mind to maintain calm and carry out important duties and not become so distracted from emotions to be weakened and vulnerable. So this has survival value as an inner strength and capability. What is abnormal here is that she does this out loud and puts herself on display. If you think about the reality of consciousness and the mind, everyone talks to themselves. This is what thought consists of, and is normally a private activity. But many people will mutter or even talk out loud to themselves when they are alone, but then suppress this when others are around so they will not look strange or foolish. But it is not because they are in great distress or unable to govern their thoughts and control themselves, it is simply a manifestation of a strong urge to express the self, and have thoughts defined and processed in a way they are given due consideration as being rather important. That was a consequence of the hard-won life lessons from her abuse, so many of her thoughts are not fleeting images and flashes of emotional reactions never quite given a complete definition or a logical reason for being by the mind itself. In her case, while the thoughts she shares out loud may not all make sense to an observer, they make sense to her and that is what is important from her perspective.
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