Traumatic Dissociation

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Adriana Imzh

Sometimes during a trauma something completely magical happens to a person - it crumbles like a Lego and is rebuilt. There is really something magical in this: it is as if a person turns off some of his parts, takes some aside, and brings some to the fore.

And when the trauma ends, the part that was in the foreground - for example, a miserable, whimpering child or a victim paralyzed with horror, or a helpless young man - it seems to be encapsulated.

This has both a biochemical and a structural rationale - our brain is designed in such a way that we survive, so that we do not come into contact with pain as much as possible.

Therefore, the sick part of the personality is covered with armor, which protects the rest of the personality from pain. But this, paradoxically, does not allow this part to live, develop, be realized - and inhibits the whole person.

This option reminds me of an attempt to hide Job in an ordinary one-room apartment and pretend that he is not there. And he is. He smells, suffers, cries, sometimes reshapes the whole existence. And in some cases, a person's life after an injury turns into a process of winding another layer of polyethylene around the injured parts.

To some, such reflections resemble madness - because with strong dissociation, it really happens: a person begins to hear voices or lose the integrity of the personality. And it's scary.

But I believe that one of the best strategies for dissociation is to attach the sick, injured part to the resources of the whole person. Show her a safe place.

Technically, it's like adopting a seven-year-old from an orphanage. And I always tell my clients that our brains are different (due to the structure of the brain, other departments and structures are turned on during an injury, which is why it often does not help to think rationally), but the ears are common. Therefore, if you do not think some things to yourself, but speak out loud or at least write (it is better to speak due to the fact that sometimes a traumatic experience happens before the development of reading skills), this may work better.

I invite my clients to arrange excursions around their apartment, to tell the news, to say that there is now someone to take care of the injured part.

And it often turns out that the dissociated part really resembles a prisoner of the If castle - he does not know what day it is, what is happening, who all these people are and, in general, where everything comes from.

When she is told about the events: look, we have grown up, the drinking dad does not live with us anymore, we have our own room (apartment), a supply of food in the refrigerator, I studied at the university, I work at work, I have a cat - she often reacts distrustful and inadequate, may even swear or try to show other forms of aggression.

But over time, he begins to respond - crying, sobbing, throwing things, hiding in a corner and demanding something. And then - slowly - he begins to talk, share his misfortunes and memories, and over time, he gradually joins the whole structure of the personality and becomes a conscious experience.

For example, an overweight girl suddenly has a very thin, hungry young lady inside who screams when she tries to approach: "Don't get close! You will try to make me starve again!" make fun of me! " Or a girl, whom her mother forbids to cry at night, threatening to hand over to a psychiatric hospital. Or a little first grader who's desperately trying to do her homework perfect, and it's already three in the morning, and it's the fifteenth attempt, and her hands are shaking and smearing the ink.

All of them had no idea that they had already grown up, that schools, mothers, diets, ridiculers were not around.

And we arrange such a meeting - ourselves from the future with ourselves in the past, something that, perhaps, many of us dreamed of. And the one - from the future - says, maybe, not quite rosy things in the spirit of "they offended you - and now you are an astronaut", but the truth: "You did it, you grew up, you work, you have a family, you are beautiful, you you earn good money, you are not drunk, you no longer have to answer for your mother "and so on. And - necessarily - "I am with you, I will no longer leave you alone. I will always be there and will try to help you."