How exactly does dissociating (DID) help one process trauma?
In: 0
Generally, disassociating means that you no longer process things as happening to you. It’s pretty common for people, and usually is very brief and not necessarily even from something traumatic. That’s usually what’s talked about, but you can also disassociate via meditation.
DID occurs when the disassociation is extremely frequent and extremely early. It’s thought that it forms as a result of fractured personality development – children aren’t born with a fully formed personality, but gradually grow into one (this process is life-long, but most prominent in children). If you interrupt it via disassociation and trauma you might end up with several different personalities that handle specific things – one personality might be better at handling trauma, so appears when trauma appears. Another might form that holds certain memories so other personalities can function better.
It’s very hard to study given that most occurrences are in an environment that is not going to produce the child for study and intentionally provoking it is extremely immoral and unethical and would largely be useless as a study because of it. But at its core it is a protective measure that the brain uses to function when trauma would otherwise shut you down.
Hello! I have DID. Processing trauma, I feel like it’s more about surviving it? DID specifically forms from overwhelming, traumatic situations in early childhood. The child cannot process what is happening, cannot mentally handle what he or she is going through. DID occurs in ages when identity development is at crucial stages, and in a different child these states become one without any conflict. In DID, amnesia goes up with barriers to keep the trauma away. Then the identity states cannot come together because of the dissociative barriers, and develop as separate identities instead of a singular one.
As someone else said there is no “original”, there often is a host (simply the alter who fronts most often, this can change over time as well) who is kept unaware of the trauma and the other alters. The host may become aware as the amnesia barriers lower or figuring it out through seeing things like notes the host does not remember writing or have a different handwriting, items left in different places, unexplained memory gaps etc.
For us, some alters do hold traumatic memories. Some alters have no memory of these things and function like regular people. Some alters take the responsibility of trying to prevent further trauma, be it physical threats or emotional/mental damage. Some alters do not even have the capacity to understand trauma (like some animal alters) or are someone we wished we were or had around that (at least we think consciously or subconsciously) could have stopped the trauma.
*Obligatory note that it’s a complex condition and alters are not always able to be put in neat little boxes as far as role/what the alters do and especially why they formed the way they did. This is Explain It Like I’m 5 not an academic paper so if anyone thinks I did poorly explaining this please add your comments below for OP’s understanding.
Latest Answers