Apparently Normal Personality Quotes

“Those who are aware of their condition and experience themselves as "multiple" might refer to themselves as "we" rather than "I." I shall use the term "multiple" at times, in respect for their internal experience. It is important to point out, however, that I recognize that someone who is multiple is actually a single fragmented person rather than many people. On the outside, a multiple is probably not visibly different from anyone else. But that image is only an imitation: people who are multiple cannot think like the rest of us, and we cannot think like them. (In fact, since it is difficult for the multiple to understand how singletons think, some of them might think that is is you who are strange).
Just as a singleton cannot become a multiple at will, a multiple cannot become a singleton until and unless the barriers between the parts of the self are removed. Those barriers were put up to enable the child to tolerate, and so survive, unavoidable abuse. p20

[Multiple: a person with dissociative identity disorder (DID) or DDNOS.
Singleton: a person without DID or DDNOS, i.e with a single, unified personality]”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“The "apparently normal personality" - the alter you view as "the client"

You should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the "real" person, and the other personalities are less real. The client who comes to therapy is not "the" person; there are other personalities to meet and work with.
When DID was still officially called MPD, the "person" who lived life on the outside was known as the "host" personality, and the other parts were known as alters. These terms, unfortunately, implied that all the parts other than the host were guests, and therefore of less importance than the host. They were somehow secondary. The currently favored theory of structural dissociation (Nijenhuis & Den Boer, 2009; van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006), which more accurately describes the way personality systems operate, instead distinguishes between two kinds of states: the apparently normal personality, or ANP, and the emotional personality, or EP, both of which could include a number of parts. p21”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“My client who has only three alter personalities besides the ANP was unaware of her multiplicity until she encountered a work-related trauma at age sixty. She became symptomatic as the hidden parts emerged to deal with the recent trauma.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“The body may play host to multiple personalities, but Dr Laine explained, if that body was to function normally in the wider world then there had to be one personality in control, what she called the 'dominant personality'.
'So I'm the dominant personality?' I assumed, completely unprepared for the answer.
'I'm afraid not,' she said, adding it was her role to encourage me to reach my potential.
As if discovering you share your body with 100+ other personalities isn't embarrassing enough for your ego, it's nothing compared to the blow when you realise you're not even the main one!”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“Like many people trying to understand DID, Oprah wondered if the different 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 to life when the body is in those moods. That's not how it works. 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.”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“Peg's very young alters formed around her father's abuse. But when she was 8 another alter group formed, as Peg reported, from ritualized sexual torture by a neighbor who forced Peg to ritually injure two other children. By age 13 Peg had fallen victim to her older brother's sexual violence as well and this led to more splitting. In her teens and twenties Peg added more alters in response even to nontraumatic life disappointments, since the splitting mechanism worked so well to insulate her from suffering.”
― Roger Lewin, Broken Images Broken Selves: Dissociative Narratives In Clinical Practice