The Order of the Palm: A Tender Account of the Only Multiple Personality Reunited By Her Marriage Partner

About the Book

What would happen if an ordinary man discovered that his wife was a multiple personality?  What if the “professionals” were too booked up or incompetent to help?  What if all that stood between them and a horrible decent into madness were one woman’s indomitable spirit and the ingenuity of a simple electrician?  It happened.  All of it.  In over their heads and against all odds, they forged unfathomable courage into a victory never before won—documenting the cure that had never been imagined.

The Order of The Palm: a tender account of the only multiple personality reunited by her marriage partner is their story.  Told in the words of a man overwhelmed by unimaginable events, their story is the chill wind of child abuse turned to inspiring triumph of tenacity, courage, and healing.  More than a riveting, never before told story, it is a roller coaster ride that sheds more light on multiple personalitys than has ever been possible before.  Through the eyes of a blue collar worker, The Order of The Palm connects the dots of this confusing disorder, underlining why splitting into more than one person is the only escape for the most grievously abused innocents.  

Contrary to popular belief, multiple personality (Dissociative Identity Disorder—DID) is not uncommon, afflicting somewhere between three and four million across the US alone.  Masters of camouflage, they go mostly unnoticed, mingling silently among us and drifting amidst an indescribable dark sorrow.  

These most courageous human beings are often subjected to debilitating drug therapies while therapists search for the right diagnosis—a process that, on average, consumes over eight years of trust, trauma, and time.  Even when properly diagnosed, they will seek help from those who are hopelessly unprepared, those who practice textbook theory they’ll never understand, and those who look to the hobgoblins of errant, secondhand advise that seldom rises above “old wives tales”.  

The Order of The Palm doesn’t have all the answers—but it has important ones—not just for multiples and their loved ones, but for all survivors of childhood abuse. For in a most ironic twist, treating his own wife took the electrician back to where he had to go, back to his own abusive childhood.  And what he discovered there was perhaps the most surprising gift of understanding: Multiple personalitys were wounded in the same way that all other children are emotionally injured.  This damage would be to the same vulnerable spot, while the diagnosis just reflects the defense a child uses to survive.  Going back to that injury, in all its horror, was the way they found—the only way.  And this is where the multiple and the electrician went again and again.  The experts say a husband should never treat a wife, that multiple personalitys need year after year of therapy, that when they are cured they still suffer relapses under stress, that an electrician isn’t qualified.  

But then, it worked.

In less time, with less devastation, without hospitalization, drugs, or relapse; it just worked.

About the Author

The electrician and his son stared at the machinery. It had power, but my dad dug into its unfamiliar bowels anyway. I bellyached, “It’s got electricity, why do we have to mess with it?” “By the time a repairman gets here, some cows may be sick and some dead. This family is depending on us, and we will fix it. If the first fifty things don’t work, then we’ll think up fifty more.” After he’d fixed it, he knew more than a trained repairman. Sometimes a good man sinks his teeth into a responsibility that isn’t his. Not because he has to, or wants to, but because he won’t sit by as something bad happens. Don’t listen because I have degrees, or say I’m such a swell fella, or, God forbid, somebody thinks I’m an “expert”. Listen because, when my time came, I couldn’t sit by either.