# Book w/ Dissociation section: Healing the Hurt Within



## HereIsEverywhere (Dec 22, 2008)

The book is pretty boring, too packed with long case studies for my taste but the section on dissociation is pretty interesting.

"For some children however, who are subjected to abuse, neglect, chaos or other stressful childhood experience, dissociation is more than a normal defence mechanism. It is a means of survival, a coping technique in a situation which is intolerable, a creative and highly effective learned response born of the child's self hypnotic statement (made originally during experienced danger) 'I am not here'. It involves both denial of and detachment from the trauma whether the experience is current, real, threatened or remembered. It enables the child to escape, to not know, not feel and not be."

*****(this part esp. interesting to me because my 2 year old sister says "I'm going away" and closes her eyes or buries her head when she gets upset. I fear she will have DP eventually like me)****

Continuing on:

" 
How Dissociation is Experienced

Dissociation may be experienced by the child as observing oneself from outside the body as if 'floating on the ceiling while watching one's other self being abused in the room below'. It is often said 'It wasn't me it happened to, it was a dream', and described as 'a feeling of everything being unreal even though recognized'.

As the degree of dissociation increases (this appears in general to be relative to the extent and frequency of the trauma) the individual may experience dissociative amnesia and dissociative fugue. This is a trance-like state which provides 'escape' during the traumatic experience after which there is usually total amnesia both regarding events and the passage of time. The same trance state is often witnessed by the therapist as a client accesses the memory of the traumatic experience.

At the extreme end of the continuum of dissociation is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). For diagnosis of this complex form of dissociation to be made clinically the primary criteria (DSM-IV) is 'the presence of two or more distinct personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self)'. DSM.

The Effects of Repeated Trauma

When an individual is subjected to repeated traumatic events, which keeps them in a state of dissociation or denial concerning the experience, processing of the trauma is unable to take place. This results in the splitting off not only of the actual experience but also of part of the self. This is often experienced by the child as 'I went away and someone else came to take over'.

The role of the splits is to protect the host personality. This they do very effectively. However, the more parts that split off the greater the internal conflict and uncertainty, and the smaller and less cohesive the sense of self is (identity confusion). The very nature of dissociation requires the core person to be 'missing' and therefore means that it becomes impossible for the individual to maintain the consistent and continuous sense of self and time that is fundamental to the normal development of the psyche. This results in a 'vertical' splitting. Instead of the sense of self being continuous and connected through the passage of time, dissociation creates a pattern of separate, unconnected 'snapshots' of different selves.

This vertical splitting of the self differs from the horizontal splitting Freud described as repression in that with DID we become aware that the unconscious is actually easy to access in a safe therapeutic relationship."

There is more but I didn't want to overload this post with info.

Thoughts? I think this is a great bit of information especially for those of us that believe we've always had DP and wonder why. I dated a guy that was just about as close to having DID as you can get without actually having different personas (thought the personalities were night and day) and I think this explains why that might be perfectly. I love that psychologists and laymen alike are starting to realize all disorders happen on a continuum.


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## flipwilson (Aug 19, 2006)

I get so confused with this topic. I had a very shit childhood but i do not remember dissociating at least not how i experience it now. I look back and do remember being numbed or sleeping quite a bit in my youth to escape but it was never like "oh wow, things don't have meaning, or everything looks 2D". The only time i actually became aware of experiencing another state is after smoking weed. One hit in August 05 made everything feel like a dream and I kept say "man i don't feel like anything exists", but i woke up the next day fine. Then in August 06 I smoked 4 monster hits, had a panic attack and have been detached ever since. Is this the same thing i did when i was younger but only now in my older age i am aware of it, or now i don't control it?


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## HereIsEverywhere (Dec 22, 2008)

flipwilson said:


> I get so confused with this topic. I had a very shit childhood but i do not remember dissociating at least not how i experience it now. I look back and do remember being numbed or sleeping quite a bit in my youth to escape but it was never like "oh wow, things don't have meaning, or everything looks 2D". The only time i actually became aware of experiencing another state is after smoking weed. One hit in August 05 made everything feel like a dream and I kept say "man i don't feel like anything exists", but i woke up the next day fine. Then in August 06 I smoked 4 monster hits, had a panic attack and have been detached ever since. Is this the same thing i did when i was younger but only now in my older age i am aware of it, or now i don't control it?


I can't answer that for you. The drug trigger certainly adds a certain dynamic I'm not totally aware of. For me I don't think the drugs triggered, they only expanded my idea that reality isn't what we think it is. In a way I think it was a good thing but maybe not... More of a trigger for me was an abusive relationship ending than any of the drugs were.

I remember weird thoughts as a kid but I didn't think much of them. I always used to spend summers with my dad and come back and say everything looked smaller. He always said it was because I was growing. Maybe it was just as simple as that. I feel like if something similar happened now I'd obsess and think I was crazy. When you are a kid you don't always know how weird you are. Probably for the better. Things I do now that I think of as weird seemed totally ok as a kid. For example staring at really small things. Like threads on clothing, grass, or pebbles that make up the cement in the pool. I forget how spacey I look. The other day right after I kissed my girlfriend the full moon caught my eye and I jerked my head up to look at it because it was so pretty. But then she imitated me jokingly and I realized how crazy I must have looked just zoning out like that.

I think as kids we are much more open to the world. We aren't yet totally molded into ideas of reality. I was really shy and did have feelings of invisibility a lot though. I knew that wasn't right. I eventually realized I was actively making myself invisible because I was so scared of people. Wearing neutral colors, not talking, not getting up during class even to use the bathroom, etc.


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## Anla (May 1, 2007)

Yes, and repeated trauma at any age can lead to dissociation. I had what I realize now was a pretty normal brain for 40 plus years. But with repeated emotional trauma and the lack of opportunity to end it and process the mess, now my brain shows the processing damage that is characteristic of DP/DR.

The good thing is that now I am very active warning people of what may happen to them if they allow others to stomp on their brains. And I can advise what to do if they are caught in an awful job situation...


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## HereIsEverywhere (Dec 22, 2008)

Anla said:


> Yes, and repeated trauma at any age can lead to dissociation. I had what I realize now was a pretty normal brain for 40 plus years. But with repeated emotional trauma and the lack of opportunity to end it and process the mess, now my brain shows the processing damage that is characteristic of DP/DR.
> 
> The good thing is that now I am very active warning people of what may happen to them if they allow others to stomp on their brains. And I can advise what to do if they are caught in an awful job situation...


Wow. That is quite funny how that can happen later in life. But I can def. believe it. Mine def got worse during and after my abusive relationship.


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## Rebekah (May 16, 2009)

Anla, please do give all the advice you have for dealing with abusive people. My insane boss abused me for over a year, and I finally got the guts to deal with the situation. Please look over the scholarly research article entitled, "The Role of Childhood Interpersonal Trauma in Depersonalization Disorder," partly written by Daphne Simeon, M.D. who is a well-known researcher and doctor. The full article is at The American Journal of Psychiatry, 2001. It's too lengthy to copy here and I can't post links, but it's available on their website, I can't remember what it is exactly. I read the abstract at neurotransmitters.net. Anyway, it states that there is a very strong correlation between emotional abuse and DP. I was always shy in school, and in first grade my teacher wrote on my report cared that she hoped my "blank" days would disappear. I guess I DP'd then, but the difference was without the fear. Now, after the pot smoking, I have the fear and bad feelings associated with that incident. Thanks for bringing this subject up. I see how important it is to deal with abuse in healing DP.


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## HereIsEverywhere (Dec 22, 2008)

Rebekah said:


> Anla, please do give all the advice you have for dealing with abusive people. My insane boss abused me for over a year, and I finally got the guts to deal with the situation. Please look over the scholarly research article entitled, "The Role of Childhood Interpersonal Trauma in Depersonalization Disorder," partly written by Daphne Simeon, M.D. who is a well-known researcher and doctor. The full article is at The American Journal of Psychiatry, 2001. It's too lengthy to copy here and I can't post links, but it's available on their website, I can't remember what it is exactly. I read the abstract at neurotransmitters.net. Anyway, it states that there is a very strong correlation between emotional abuse and DP. I was always shy in school, and in first grade my teacher wrote on my report cared that she hoped my "blank" days would disappear. I guess I DP'd then, but the difference was without the fear. Now, after the pot smoking, I have the fear and bad feelings associated with that incident. Thanks for bringing this subject up. I see how important it is to deal with abuse in healing DP.


Here is the link:

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/con ... 158/7/1027

I was shy in school as well but always a good students and not very shy when it came to answering questions so I suppose if I ever zoned out, no one would have noticed. But I don't think I did that bad. It was more the way I thought that was weird.


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