Animals and dissociation

Dissociative Identity Disorder has this quirk that you don’t hear talked about often, and that’s animal alter egos. I’ve personally met more than I can count on both hands having a DID diagnosis and having one or multiple animal ego states. I’ll give an example of the first animal ego state I developed at the age of 9: after many years of therapy I’ve discovered he’s probably based off the fox in Courage the Cowardly Dog. This is a fox with a personality that can imprint on my imagination, that can then further imprint onto my susceptible to fiction ego. I’ve found voice actors can do this to me far more than read words, including comics. Not that I’m not susceptible to that either, but there needs to be a voice actor. I hear voices, inside my head, never outside that aren’t there, and they can mimic voice actors. If the voice actor is acting an animal character, can you start to see how people with DID can develop animal personalities?

This is not to the fault of the media, I think it’s a very interesting phenomenon for how common it is for people with DID to have animal personas. Some people go a step further and just be a furry, but this isn’t required to have an animal persona.