Jess Hodak has four separate personalities or 'alters' including a young girl, a wolf and an angry middle-aged man. Photo / Twitter
Jess Hodak has four separate personalities or 'alters' including a young girl, a wolf and an angry middle-aged man. Photo / Twitter
Jessica Hodak has at least four alternative personalities, and not all of them are human.
When the 25-year-old woman from Queanbeyan, NSW feels threatened, she drops down to walk on all fours, barks and growls as she disappears into a creature by the name of Bolto.
Ms Hodak has no memory of when she is Bolto, and the wolf dog is not the most frightening of her personalities called "alters".
Most dominant is a six-year-old girl called Celia, who giggles, loves pink and is around the age when Jessica experienced the first trauma which sparked her multiple personalities.
Only recently did she see Celia for the first time, when her youngest alter was captured on video talking with Ms Hodak's mother, Maggie.
Another personality is Kazumi, a "forest priestess and fairy of the moon", who is not an alter but a conscious creation by Jessica to front as a mental health spokesman and sufferer.
Ms Hodak suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a mental state characterised by two or more identities who control a person's behaviour.
Jess Hodak said her alter Brendan was the nastiest and Bolto is a wolf dog who emerges when she feels threatened. Photo / Twitter
"I'm just an average girl covered in tattoos who was diagnosed at 17 and I'm now trying to get a message out to other people in regards to mental health," she said.
Once known as Multiple Personality Disorder, it has been the topic of Hollywood films and TV series from The Three Faces of Eve (1957) to Sybil (1976 and 2007) and 2011's United States of Tara.
In The Three Faces of Eve, Joanne Woodward played timid housewife Eve White who during blackouts emerged as sensible Jane or wild, sexy Eve Black.
The real case behind Eve, DID sufferer, Chris Sizemore, had 20 personalities and underwent hypnosis to unearth the underlying trauma of witnessing in childhood two deaths and a terrible accident. The role won Woodward a Best Actress Oscar.
Woodward also appeared in a 1976 TV movie Sybil based on the life of real DID sufferer, Shirley Ardell Mason.
In the United States of Tara, Toni Colette played Tara Gregson who shifts between alters of a wild teenager, 1950s housewife, boorish Vietnam vet and Chicken, her five-year-old self.
Colette won two Emmy and two Golden Globe awards for playing the Kansas mother diagnosed with DID.
Far away from Hollywood and TV dramatisations of her affliction, Ms Hodak - who said she was lucky to have two supportive parents - is the true life embodiment of a DID sufferer, struggling to make a living but determined to bring the condition to the attention of others.
She undergoes hypnotherapy at Canberra's Hyson Green Mental Health unit to uncover the trauma at the core of her condition, which took years to diagnose, and she sees a psychiatrist.
Ms Hodak's "always accepting and gentle" mother, Maggi, told her that her alter Celia is just like she was, before the trauma that sparked her DID.
"I was sexually abused as a child and then I was nearly abducted when I was 14 years old," she said.
Ms Hodak has not revisited the childhood sexual abuse, but hypnotherapy has taken her back to the day she was waiting for the school bus and men tried to drag her into a car.
"I've never run so fast, I went into full flight mode," she said. "It's not only the ones who don't get away you know. A week or two later, a girl was abducted from Calwell [a Canberra suburb]."
As an eight-year-old, Ms Hodak developed a rare physical condition, sphincter of Oddi dysfunction, which causes spasms in her digestive organs, and meant undergoing 27 operations.
Meanwhile, her alters appeared - Celia, Bolto, or Brendan - which made school and socialising difficult, because she never knew when they would emerged.
Like the Hollywood versions of women with her disorder, after each visitation she is unaware of what has happened.
Ms Hodak sympathises with people who have DID but are undiagnosed, or who cannot get proper treatment they are judged just generally mentally unwell.
At the age of 17, she went to Dr Murali Reddy, a Canberra psychiatrist who diagnosed her.
"I was a text book case of DID," she said, "although clinically too young to suffer from it."
Dr Reddy told news.com.au that controversy surrounded DID, which could go unrecognised and be masked by other disorders, like severe depression.
Jess Hodak goes by Kazumi the fairy moonchild on social media, but the character is not one of her alters. Photo / Facebook
Ms Hodak said she wanted to get well, but she was not sure she wanted her alters to vanish.
"Not completely. I think they'll always be with me," she said.
She has undergone DBT (Dialectical Behavioural Therapy), learning exercises to avert the onset of an alter taking over.
"If I feel myself getting quite angry, I will stop and recognise what I am doing and do grounding and self-soothing techniques," she said. "Sometimes it's too far gone and Bolto will come out."
But for someone who has attempted suicide when she couldn't cope, she wanted to work hard towards living a normal life.
"And I want to help others. They can contact me anytime on any of my social media pages," she said. "I want eventually to be able to fund people to get treatment, which is very hard to find.
"There is light at the end of the tunnel, and I want to be that light for sufferers."
Ms Hodak told news.com.au that seeing herself on video as Celia, gently laughing and talking with her mother Maggie, was immensely positive.
"I never know what's happened. I'd never met Celia on video," she said. "I had a sense of what she might have done and how she acted. But seeing this little girl who wants to have fun was the most beautiful experience."
