3.4.4 Dissociation

When we are supporting families in the Focus Group with a view to ensuring that their children grow up emotionally healthy, we aim for the secure attachment described in previous Sub-Chapter, and the associated love, democracy and appropriate, healthy regulation of their emotional needs.

However, because of the importance of dissociation, we need to have some knowledge of the other styles, in particular the last one, disorganised attachment.

This is because, in disorganised attachment situations, harmful events (for example witnessing domestic violence, or experiencing sexual abuse, or even high levels of anxiety among significant adults) may trigger dissociation as a reaction to trauma.  Dissociation may manifest in seeming to be detached from reality, (whether this is related to a current event or a memory), detached from a sense of real self, or even our own identity. 

Remember that we mentioned in the Sub-Chapter on Attachment that the experience of secure attachment gives us permission to be critical of that to which we are attached?

However, in insecure (and very often disorganised) situations, sometimes care-givers (particularly if we are parents) have unresolved memories of trauma or significant loss and despite strong evidence to the contrary, have a kind of, idealised view of our parents and own childhood, dismissing the idea that relationships in our families or with our parents were problematic.  This can be accompanied by substantial lapses in memory of the reality of childhood experiences and/or situations.

Without this being brought into conscious awareness, the possibility of it being propagated through the generations, with children also developing a disorganised attachment style, is increased.

This, in turn, may lead to a tendency for children to dissociate in response to trauma in their own lives as the pattern is repeated. (Patterns repeating will be discussed in the Chapter on fractals later).

General

In describing dissociation it might be helpful to think first of the opposite – association. Association, as most people understand it, means making connections. In our day-to-day lives our experience of it is very important, and is a corner-stone of our conscious awareness. It is fundamental to our growth as children, serves to regulate our behaviour, assists us in our understanding of the world including our relationships and has high-impact-low-noticeability.

Dissociation, on the other hand, is a state of non-conscious-awareness, and I attempt to describe it below.

A form of dissociation (which is actually healthy) would be absorption in an exciting match or film; we may be not consciously aware of our surroundings for a little while – totally focusing on the match or film.  Very often people give the example of driving a car as a form of dissociation – we automatically go through the motions of driving and at the same time can be day-dreaming or listening to music or chatting with passengers. 

Children dissociate a good bit, in particular when they are playing, (often taking on adult roles – perhaps preparing themselves to be adults) or sometimes will have an imaginary friend.  When the playing is over, they can easily start associating again, and revert to their real selves and mostly their creative, intuitive and inventive side will have benefited from their temporary visit to another, imaginary world. This type of dissociation (including them becoming aware of when it is necessary to associate again) enables children to grow and it is normal and healthy in respect of their development.

In this link I give examples of a wide variety of dissociative experiences. You might find it interesting to read them.

Fear

Normally, when we feel threatened, particularly if it is a matter of life and death, we fight back to defeat the threat. If that’s not possible, we flee the scene if we can. If either of these two options are impossible or not feasible, we freeze and hope for the best that we won’t be noticed. Or we may flop, that is, go limp and resign ourselves to what is going to happen. Both the freeze and flop options are linked to dissociation – particularly the flop.

When we dissociate because of fear it is usually unhealthy and/or harmful, but we must also remember that it is a survival strategy.

Consider, for a moment, what happens us when we are ordered to do something that would be against our principles or core beliefs, like, perhaps, at one extreme, killing someone in war or a gangland feud, or (less dramatic), carrying out some unpleasant duty that disadvantages a junior colleague in the workplace – knowing full well that it is the boss who should be doing it.

I consider this to be a flop situation, akin to dissociation, because we cannot fight or flight or freeze.  We are more of a tool in someone else’s hands than an independent thinking human being.  Because we take orders from our superior officer, a leader we fear, or our line manager we don’t have to be personally responsible.  We temporarily suspend our own values, ethics etc. and play a role for however long is necessary, and then revert to being ourselves again when we leave the environment.

In such a situation if we, instead, associated, it would mean that we’d connect all the parts of our consciousness that were relevant to the situation. These could be our core beliefs about right and wrong, possible negative outcomes for ourselves and others, our empathy, our values, our conscience etc. and we might behave completely differently.

Interestingly, in our language we sometimes refer to dissociation if someone is behaving strangely by saying he’s not himself today.

(And, as an aside, if dissociation is related to suspension of reality, surely there is a kind of global dissociation ongoing in those of us who can live comfortable middle-class lives denying firstly the fact that our Western World lifestyle is a causative factor in famine, poverty and war, and secondly the harm that we are collectively doing to our planet).

De-personalisation

This is the very distressing form of dissociation that causes our normal cognitive function as to what is good for us to be suspended and we behave in a way that we would not if we were in full conscious awareness.  Sometimes, in severe cases, there is loss of identity and sudden changes of gestures, moods, regression to childlike behaviour, and even identification with a false self.

In modern research, there is strong evidence of intergenerational transmission of dissociation that is related to memories that parents carry which have never been resolved – mentioned already – which I will describe more fully in the posts following.

This, of course, tallies with beliefs about the intergenerational nature of trauma.  I do not intend to go into it here but writings in journals about dissociation are recommended for anyone interested.

An example of de-personalisation would be a young child, who cannot fight, flee or freeze being severely punished or abused by an adult carer.  In an extreme case he might imagine that he is another little child. He might even give the other child a name.  This is simply a survival strategy; a natural dissociative response to the protective layer (the armour that we described already) being breached to the extent that it has no opportunity to heal.

This has a completely different flavour to the healthy dissociation described above in children’s play.

When the abuse stops, he may revert to being himself again, and he might carry on doing well at school, because the different child is the one that suffers, and is able to endure and survive the abuse.  Or he may, alternatively, drop out of school – because, though yearning for acceptance and belonging, the different child charts a path that invites punishment and rejection. 

When he grows up, and behaves in a way that causes upset to others he may be considered to be mentally ill, neurotic or schizophrenic etc. if or when he goes looking for help and he describes the symptoms of his distress. A common manifestation, which you might have heard of, is hearing voices. This suggests that there is another self which has a lot of power and is influential in the person’s decision making processes.

(In respect of further study or reading, the websites of Dr. Valerie Sinanson and Dr. Ellert Nijenhuis, both psychotherapists and founders of the European Society of Trauma and Dissociation, and their colleagues, are doing groundbreaking work in this field. And in her book, A Simple Guide to Trauma and Dissociation, Betsy de Thierry has succeeded in transforming what can be a difficult subject to get our heads around into language that is readable and easy to understand).

Dissociation and Memory

The emotional pain that comes from abuse in childhood (and gives rise to dissociation) is often accompanied by the suffering that arises from the perception of betrayal by the person responsible for one’s care.

That is, the memory of the person who we perceive to have failed to prevent abuse can be more painful than the memory we have of the abuser.

John Bowlby very elegantly explains why this is so.

1. Because of our inborn tendency to do so, we have a lot of emotional investment in the attachment relationship and we want, very badly, to trust our primary caregiver.

2. Our trusted primary caregiver appears (to us) to deny the existence of the abuse by the other parent (or indeed another member of the family or even someone outside the family).

3. It is too difficult for us to accept that the trusted caregiver does not protect us from harm, so we may collude with the trusted caregiver’s apparent denial of the abuse.

4. We dissociate from the traumatic experience – that is, temporarily become someone else while the abuse is going on – i.e. it is happening to someone else, not to me.  This is the early onset of a pattern of dissociation.

And while I like to use the term parents when discussing attachment and related topics, research shows that mothers do have a little more significance, as studies have shown that severe trauma in the lives of mothers up to two years before the birth of a child, or at the time of birth itself, can be a risk factor in development of dissociative tendencies in children.

For people who are brought up in good enough homes the world may often, inevitably, seem chaotic and uncertain.

But because of secure attachment and the consistent messages of love and acceptance from parents, a positive internal working model, that is, a coherent narrative, [1] (expressed consciously and received through many unconscious and unspoken signals) from childhood will see individuals through to adulthood.

It is normal to have different personas for different environments and contexts, but our coherent narrative grounds us in the reality of who we are and what we expect from life.  So if we do something we regret, or feel ashamed of (and take it from me – we do – because we are human), we can repair the damage, and (hopefully) learn from the experience.  We can do this whether we are 9 or 90!

However, if we have trauma from birth or before (and/or has been passed through generations as described in the previous post) we may not have this coherent narrative.

Attachment Theory suggests that dissociation can arise from sustained incidents of trauma in childhood (and/or long periods of neglect) where a child is extremely fearful, (in many cases fears for his life), and the normal choices of humans, (i.e. flight, fight or freeze) don’t work.

Instead, because the level of terror is too high and too persistent, what does work, (like the child in the example in the previous post), is the resignation, or flop option. This can be accompanied by adoption of another identity (or, in some cases, other identities).  This adoption can be accompanied by loss of memory, sense of self or even sometimes, consciousness.

This is quite different to absorption in a match or an entertaining film, or indeed, activity such as sports, playing music or engaging deeply in art or crafts, sometimes called a flow experience by psychologists.

Sometimes the different identities may be unaware of the other – the well-known story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is based on this phenomenon.  And many, (though not all) people experiencing dissociation may live chaotic lifestyles.  So, feeling a healthy shame or guilt (as most of us do when we do something that we deem to be wrong) or expressing genuine regret, might not be an option to heal relationships.  Regret may be something that we might have because our actions have disadvantaged us in some way, not a genuine felt reciprocal human response.

This is because my sense of responsibility for my actions is dulled by the belief that it wasn’t really me who did it!  (I will be revisiting this in my description of grandiose narcissism).

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I have discussed dissociation at some length in this blog because I believe it to be a causative factor in criminal behaviour, particularly very violent crime where the perpetrator is high on drugs and/or no memory of the incident.

I also believe that some knowledge of what might be going on in people who have suffered trauma can be very helpful for practitioners in community work, and indeed may act as a safety or protective measure for the practitioner him/herself when supporting such people.  It also posits the need for good supervision and support.

Finally I encourage community workers not to be too scared of such terms as dissociative identity disorder, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, bi-polar depression etc. The psychological, psychometric, or psychiatric tests or tools that search for certain proof, consistent diagnosis etc. are the province of medical or academic professionals.

Detailed study of such factors can be, (and are) very helpful, but I believe that it is more important for us to remember that much of what is labelled as mental illness (almost always involving human beings in deep distress) arises from trauma that occurred at some stage along the life-course (most probably childhood) that was ongoing and enduring. 

Of course, support and focused therapeutic work (often long-term) by qualified and experienced professionals is most beneficial, if not necessary for this delicate and difficult work.

But immediate response, attentive listening, compassion, meeting people where they are at, and empathy is what I have always felt is the first – and most important – stage in ensuring that people feel heard and their distress is eased.

[1]. A coherent narrative can be a series of consistent messages about the world and the importance of our place in it – i.e. we are of value, have a strong core identity and sense of self, our environment is relatively safe, our care-givers will be there for us, if we ask for help we will get it, we have something to offer the world, our talents are allowed emerge, etc.

The French philosopher Pierre Janet who was also a hypnotist, and who lived at the end of the 19th Century was influential in introducing the concept of dissociation as a response to trauma. (At that time, what we now know as dissociation was referred to as hysteria).

In Janet’s day there was a lot of controversy and much debate on the causes of the disorders or conditions referred to in the Sub-Chapter on Dissociation. That debate is still going on.

That is, their origin in severe physical and sexual abuse (or acute loss) in childhood is disputed by some professionals and researchers, who propose other causes as possibilities.  Some of these are listed below:

1. Dissociative states are induced by therapy.  In other words, they do not exist at all until they are suggested as a possibility in therapy sessions by the practitioner.

2. Children have a very vivid imagination and it is normal for them to have imaginary friends, and then as a natural follow on, make up stories etc. as adults.

3. They are the result of illnesses going undiagnosed in childhood.

4. Current trauma in adulthood affects how a person evaluates his childhood, and he can invent experiences to make sense of the present.

5. There are problems with the functioning of the brain, such as inability to concentrate in certain emotional situations and contexts.

Or a kind of ‘middle ground’……

~ Trauma causes us to be prone to fantasising, which in turn induces us to adopt different identities to escape from societal pressures around personal, adult responsibilities.

~ Neuroscience suggests that the brain has the potential (in everyone) to adopt different self-states, and that the experience of trauma facilitates this.

However I have been in contact with people in deep distress for over 30 years so I’m not going to sit on the fence on this one.

My own experience points me very firmly in the direction of early childhood traumatic experiences, and much of what I have read, studied, and absorbed in various workshops and seminars etc. that I have attended affirm that experience.

That is, I believe that there is a cause and effect relationship between childhood abuse, disorganised attachment, inadequate emotional nurturing, lack of appropriate, really helpful support, feeling wanted and loved, and subsequent harmful dissociation – and I believe this because it makes sense to me.

And there is another reason why I believe that child abuse has lifelong, enduring negative effects that cause us to behave in ways that are destructive to self and others.

When I consider the root foundations that I discussed in the Sub-Chapter on Universal Theories, I have overwhelming evidence that the experience of ongoing and enduring trauma in childhood:

~ Seriously hinders the natural emergence that manifests in all humans.

~ Inhibits the integration of our true self that happens naturally as we grow to be adults.

~ Inhibits the processing- which is time dependent – that is necessary for healing.

~ Gets in the way of healthy, loving and at-ease relationship.

~ (Very important in respect of dissociation) impedes the formation of a firm and confident identity and the pride that emanates from that,

And………..

~ Blurs our sense of consciousness which is necessary to make sense of our world and live a stable, ordered, rational and balanced manner.