Dissociation
For me dissociation was a literal blockage of feeling. In trauma, I couldnāt feel real feelings. But I could feel something ā I would often be sort of annoyed, or depressed; Iād have a sense of impeding doom, or of a lost connection to my body: I couldnāt respond to the sensations of hunger, thirst, being tired, etc.
This anti-response to the external world was a natural state of affairs for me. I went all my life not being bothered by school, by what happened in my family, by an unfair boss, by toxicity in my relationshipsā¦ Which is funny, because that state of not-caring emotionally was in stark contrast to a pathologically-exaggerated intellectual arousal. I would agonise endlessly trying to analyse the situations that I was in - but never to experience the real agony behind it. All of that was to escape it. And escape I did not.
Now after all these years, I realise that this attempt to escape it was what psychologists call dissociation. At its worst, I remember being so out of it that I literally felt my consciousness being outside of my body. And that was worryingly a very cool thing to experience at the time.
Body vs Mind
The body was the seat of all the repressed emotions that I could not bear to experience. Whereas the mind, the internal world that was eerily identified with just the ego, just the internal voice, was a place of constant struggle to repeatedly, and quite successfully, diminishing my true emotions. The body is the quivering of voice, itās the eyes tearing up, itās the lungs filling in with air to sound off a wall-shaking sigh of absolute despair. The body is the smallness that succumbs to sadness. The body is the frailty we all sadly share.
Whereas the mind, the mind in a person with trauma, is a narcissistic mirror image of the body.Ā Itās the seat of all the coping mechanisms that we identify with abuse: dissociation, splitting, etc. All of these things are reactionary, and have a purpose ā to shield one against the true agony of trauma, against the realisation of the ultimate betrayal. Because, as children, which is when these defence mechanism originate from, we cannot face these nihilistic emotions; they are so overwhelming that they might as well be just death anxiety.
The Dilemma of an Abused Child
An abused child has a dilemma: either its going to go through the total disintegration that would follow from accepting the feelings of absolute abandonment and being unwanted in this world, or it can obscure reality, as it were, to preserve the positive image of the abusing parent, to keep the taboo going. To somehow, step by step, see how far it can go living in such emotional poverty. Because whatās the choice here? And that strategy is life saving. It works. Children who chose the former, often become extremely disturbed, fail to develop these defence mechanisms, and somehow lose even more of their reality by extinguishing the positive parental imago in their inner life, which while fake, could support it in building at least a fake construct.
On the other hand, the children who give in to the demands of their narcissistic defences become functionally unharmed. They can at least function in the world. Still, they think the world is good, while they are bad; but in reality itās a nightmare prepared for them by their parents, and the evil they so intensely feel, is the evil of their parents projected or taken onto themselves.
And dissociation is the main tool used to ward off the unwanted realisation of the ultimate betrayal and of death anxiety that lies at the heart of trauma ā because when it appears, it really is a question of biological life and death. If a child could recognised the aggressive, or not-good-enough nature of their parents, it couldnāt go on in any way in the process of building a personality. It couldnāt go through the process so well described by the object relations theory. So dissociation allows the child to build a ādouble-thinkā structure in their mind, as Judith L. Herman calls it in her book on CPTSD. That double-thing structure is the mental equivalent of holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time. Which in my opinion, and in my recovery, was one of the most crazy-making aspects of CPTSD. One belief is: āI was beatenā because the person isnāt psychotic, and can maybe with some effort remember it, and the other belief is: ābut I wasnāt abusedā. Which is a contradiction. Intellectually a person with trauma would try to rationalise that disconnect, by for example saying: āchildren were beaten back in the day.ā But the strength of that argument is laughable.
Emotions without Thoughts, Thoughts without Emotions
I think the ability to ādouble-thinkā is caused by dissociation. I think that a thought without an emotional component, in oneās brain, is just static. We have all sorts of thoughts that donāt feel like āoursā. Try to meditate for the first time in your life, and observe the cacophony of all the mental images that pop up. Or ask anyone with an OCD, and they can attest to the fact that thoughts are often not ours, they kinda live as potentialities in oneās mind. And since the dissociation forbids a person from feeling - then no thoughts are truly yours. No thought can be fished out, so to speak, from that primordial soup of possible mental cognitions by the true self, and taken on board as oneās own by the virtue of embedding it with a feeling state.
On the other hand, I think that my acting out, you know: addictions, reckless driving, self-harm, all of these were the flip side of the same coin - these were emotions unattached to thoughts.
Overcoming Dissociation
And here I think is the main hint about healing dissociation. And I for sure used it in my recovery: dissociation ends where the true self begins. In this context, dissociation is a stopgap structure of a false, trauma-based self. Dissociation is a method to allow for swimming in that primordial soup of thought potentialities because one needs to operate at that super low level of non-relating - because without it one is threatened with complete atomisation: one would stand face to face with those fake, temporary, stand-ins in oneās own internal landscape: for example the internal critic that got hijacked by the perpetrator of abuse in childhood and made into a fascist tyrant. One then would look it in the face with proper and accurate coupling of thought and feeling states, and on the strength of that one would say: ābegone you fucker, you are not mineā. And that is scary because it reveals that primordial soup of everything and nothing at the same time that is where the true self should be to imbue it with meaning. And that is scary. That is chaos. That is death. It takes a lot of courage to see future pastures where a vortex of nothingness is.
In my recovery I remember that after a couple of years of trauma-focused therapy, my true self was making its way. It was expanding like an army overtaking a stretch of land taken from it by an invader. It was getting bigger and bigger. And just like that, I had a mental breakdown. When, once, I used to be sad, and depressed, I had an attack of not sadness, depression, or suicidality, but of cosmic agony. I wasnāt crying. I was a howling ghost. I wasnāt angry, I understood people who want to see the world burn. I wasnāt sad, I was protesting against the ultimate unfairness of the world. I was shouting at the clouds. For the first time in my life, I felt something.