How exactly does dissociating (DID) help one process trauma?
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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.
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