Surviving Through Dissociation
There's this game I played as a kid called "Mousetrap". There's an enclosure with a start and a finish and a maze of obstacles in between. You put a marble at the entrance, and as it goes through the maze, it sets up a whole series of chain reactions and then exists at the other end.
Our conscious mind is like this system set up to handle different types of marbles. The marbles represent expected life experiences. As the marble megotiates the obstacles in this maze learning takes place. IF the marble is oversized for the system, there is no way it can get through. That's how I think of overwhelming trauma. It doesn't fit through our existing system. So if we get a weird marble which doesn't fit, we have to modify our system. Until then, we have to drop it into our unconscious. Dissociation is like rerouting the marble into the unconscious--it takes anything that gets dropped into it. There are not restrictions on what fits.
---Maya
"Common Dissociation"
The unconscious mind is like a great holding area or reservoir of unprocessed events. Anything we don't or can't assimilate consciously goes there. The unconscious holds irrelevant things such as images of strangers we see on the street. It also holds important things that need to be brought into conscious awareness but may be too big to fit our existing system (conscious mind). There are times when people are unable to fully assimilate the significance of an overwhelming experience such as a car accident. One of the passengers calmly calls an ambulance, administers first aid, and reroutes oncoming traffic. Once the ambulance arrives, she falls apart and cries hysterically. In order to take care of the immediate priorities, she dissociated her feelings and emotions temporarily. The dissociation allowed her to break up the oversized experience into manageable pieces. These were assimilated as soon as it was safe to do so. If the accident survivor didn't assimilate the dissociated part of her experience, she would suffer PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) symptoms: re-experiencing the traumatic event, avoidance of stimuli associated with the event or numbing of general responsiveness and increased arousal."
"Shaping Our Conscious"
"Children are commonly seen to dissociate--not because of trauma, but because every time they get a new type of experience, they have to modify or expand their faculties in order to assimilate it. In the meantime, the experience is dissociated and held in the unconscious. There, they 'play with it,' using their imagination until they work out a way to make it fit. Children go through a very high rate of new experiences and may frequently dissociate as a normal response to an unfamiliar event. They are continually modifying and expanding their system, or conscious mind. This is a process of growth and learning. As they mature, children may dissociate less and less, because there are fewer and fewer experiences that don't fit their conscious system.
Children rely extensively on adults fo rinterpretation. Their developing comprehension is largely fashioned after that of their parents or caregivers. If caregivers are emotionally damaged, their own skewed view of the world is imposed upon their children.
Parents in destructive families have unresolved emotional issues that are being held in their own unconscious. They couldn't or wouldn't find a way to make these emotions fit their conscious system. Instead, the unresolved issues are offloaded onto their children. As children expand and develop their consciousness, they take in experiences that don't belong to them--emotional baggage that belongs to their guardians.
Unresolved issues in the parents' unconscious are misinterpreted for the child. This is a common phenomenon known as projection. For example, if parents feel shame but cannot admit it, they may deny it, separate themselves from it, disown it, dissociate from it, and project it onto their children. They then condemn their children as being shameful. In psychology this is described as retaliatory defense. In other words, the shame the parents have within themselves but cannot accept is expressed by shaming the children. In fact, the less parents are able to accept the "monster" within themselves, the more readily they are able to see it in their children.'
Emotionally damaged people cannot or will not take responsibility for events in their life. Instead, they assign the responsibility to others, usually their children: 'It's your fault.' As a result, children assume responsibility for negative events in the family's life. A powerless child is never responsible for problems or bad events. The adults in charge are responsible. However, because these lies are reinforced consistently during a child's developmental years, skewed interpretations become increasingly molded and ingrained. The more the lies are reinforced, the more the children get set in their view of things. Over time, the views become very hard to change. The child spends the rest of her or his life learning how to live with their alien legacy.
Emotionally troubled parents frequently force skewed interpretations with abuse. If the abuse is extreme, as practiced by destructive families, a child's conscious world becomes overwhelmed. The exteme abuse is dissociated into the unconscious, but it cannot be made to fit, even in a misinformed way. The trauma remains dissociated. To survive, children tap into extraordinary coping skills, fashioned from within their own unconscious.
"Clinical (Amnestic) Dissociation"
Our instinctive reactions to an assault are fight or flight. However, neither works when children are abused by sadistic adults. The only option left is to freeze, and take flight through the mind. A common initial coping mechanism is to escape the body:
"I began to remember some really specific things from my childhood, like being over my father's knee in the kitchen...my sister and my brother, you know, everyone watching. He pulled down my pants and beat me. And seeing spots on the floor, and going into spots. There were gold and red and blue spots on a white background. That was the kind of pattern it was. And so I found that very interesting that I could do that--just be that little spot. Now I understand my first memory of dissociation." --Jeanne
This is an example of dissociating an experience, which many children use to survive overwhelming trauma. It is the beginning of clinical (amnestic) dissociation, which allows a shutting out ofan unbearable reality. It is held unassimilated --in effect, frozen in time. A dissociated experience can be split up to store the emotions separate from the knowledge of an event. In dissocaiting and experience, children split off a part of their self to hold the trauma. One survivor said these dissociated aspects of self feel like 'compartamentalized intelligent energies.' Another said she felt 'fragmented'. In some cases the dissociated aspects of self, immediately or over time, form their own and separate sense of self.
My system tries to look at everything and make sense of it. If I have a feeling coming, it has to fit. But if the feeling is too big or grotesque for my system, my unconscious goes, Okay, great big rage coming. I'll make a person who's ten feet tall to handle it. It's like a dream world--anything goes. Next time the great big anger comes, my ten-foot-tall person comes out to hold it. I may give him a name, like Ogre. Ogre is mean and nasty and he can protect me. If the big rage comes at me a lot of times, Ogre has to "stay out" more and more often. The longer Ogre stays out, the more he has to interact with his surroundings. He begins to develop a memory of his experiences, a pattern of behavior, and his own identity. Pretty soon, I have an alter personality called Ogre. --Maya
Because Ogre holds overwhelming trauma and feelings, his existence is kept from the child's conscious awareness. Now Ogre "comes out" to handle the abuse. A dissociated identity, like a dissociated experience, can hold only a bodily feeling, only an emotion, or only the knowledge. One hundred abusive incidents may be held by one identity or by one hundred or more identities. People are often perplexed about hearing that someone has a hundred alter personalities. However, it may be helpful to think of each identity as holding an abusive experience. Taken together, the identities hold a person's overwhelming traumas and express a survivor's entire life story. The possibilities and combinations are virtually limitless. The world of imagination has no bounds.
When the abuse is over, the original self "returns" and resumes "normal" life, having no awareness of what has just transpired. If severely abused children were forced to experience the trauma they just lived through, they would probably not survive.
Some children maintain a complete split between their everyday life and the abusive episodes. They may be seen smiling when posing for family photographs. Violators often use such photographs to prove there is nothing bad going on.
Someone asked me how it feels to be a survivor, and I tried to explain it like this. Pretend that you just witnessed your family and entire extended family executed, and you have to go to a party. You've repressed the experience, so you can't tell anybody what happened. Instead, you keep smiling and making small talk, while inside you know that something is terribly wrong. And the question that keeps running through your brain is "How long can I keep this up?"--Josie
As abused children grow, their problems typically mount. The load on their unconscious becomes increasingly great, and they feel overwhelmed. As some identities stay out more and more, they may begin to take over and operate in the child's day-to-day world. If the abuse continues or increases, the original self may stay out less and less and, in time, stop coming out at all. The survivor is then functioning through identities who "switch" to cope with day-to-day life.
I don't control who comes out. When someone asks a question, the one who knows the answer comes out. --A survivor
In the November/December 1992 issue of The Sciences Magazine, Dr. Frank W. Putnam writes the following about survivors with dissociated identities:
"The (presenting) personality is almost never the (survivor's) original personality--the identity that developed between birth and the experience of trauma. That self uaually lies dormant and emerges only after extensive psychotherapy."
"The Realm Of Possibility"
Fear and resistance are typical initial survivor responses to learning about dissociated parts or selves. Multiplicity can feel frightening if a survivor doesn't know what it is. Dissociated experiences/identities are frequently greeted with awe. It's natural to fear the unknown. However, once survivors understand the ingenuity of their own system, most develop admiration and respect for it. They no longer see it as awful but awesome.
There's a saying that "necessity is the mother of invention." Pushed beyond normal limits, people have discovered extraordinary abilities. These abilities are in evidence by survivors who used their powers of the mind to survive. Multiples are introducing the world to new realms of possibilities that have yet to be fully understood. With knowing and understanding comes appreciation. Regardless of an identity's name, description, or personality, its main and common purpose is always to protect the child. Alters can manage extraordinary feats in their determination to keep the child safe. Sometimes these feats are beyond the range of normal human experience or comprehension.
Each idenitity within the same person may have unique neurological and physiological responses. For example, some identities may require glasses, while others have perfect vision; some identities are allergic to smoke, while others may be chain smokers; some identities are almost deaf, while others have exceptionally good hearing; different alters within one person will register unique electroencephalogram, electrocardiograph, blood pressure, and pulse readings. Alters may have different allergies and different ailments and unique responses to medications.
Professionals who work with multiples often remark on their high level of creativity and awareness. Tom Hurley (in Noetic Sciences Investigations) echoes "Multiples...tend to be highly intelligent, perceptive and sensitive." In the same issue of the same magazine, Brendan O'Regan writes:
"If it is true that most of us are using only 10 to 20 percent of our capacity, then it would seem that multiples...may well be using much more than the rest of us. The possibility of tapping into these potentials in a healthy context could have enormous impact for our knowledge....If we do not take these phenomena seriously, and consider their implications for our understanding of the cognitive system, our evolving model of the mind may be led seriously astray...."
Source for this was the book: "Safe Passage To Healing" by Chrystine Oksana
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