Dissociation

A lot has been coming up for me that is forcing me to deal with my dissociative processes more than usual.  I have known about them for years, but sometimes I feel like I have found a successful way to function, so if it’s not broke don’t fix it kind of thing.

Although, this wasn’t working so well yesterday.  I was thinking about my mom a lot.  She died almost twenty years ago, and I have an anniversary coming up, so I am thinking about her more than usual lately.

For the most part, I know I don’t have the classic definition of a dissociative process.  I have read many books by survivors who have dissociative identity disorder, and that isn’t the experience I have had.

Part of this is because of the experience called programming.  I hate the word programming even though I know it doesn’t mean that I am a robot.  What I mean when I say programming is that when an alter state is present, a perpetrator was talking to the alter state with full awareness that the victim is using this as a defense mechanism at one point.

It is the most bizarre moment to have someone start talking to you like this and addressing what you have done to try to protect yourself.  There is a sense of confusion and terror that comes over you and it almost like you are having a dream rather than a real experience.

That is what programming actually means–a perpetrator talking to a dissociative state with full awareness that the person is dissociative.

So I don’t have a lot of organic parts of myself that have created their own identities.  I don’t feel like breaking into pieces was ever something that protected me.  I even resent it for the most part.

When I was younger, I think I felt safer ditching school than I felt changing alter states.  At least when I would ditch school, no one would be able to come after me in the light of day because there never seemed to be any safe place within myself to go.

That isn’t to say that I think people who have dissociative disorder feel safe when they switch because I think this would still be pretty terrifying to not feel in control over an experience like this.

This is the more or less the way I respond to the what the therapists have said to them in the books that I have read.  The therapist will often tell them that their parts helped them to survive and I don’t know how to apply this to myself in this situation.  I don’t understand how having different parts of myself helped me escape if I didn’t have a choice over what they believed.

I think this is part of what is making it so difficult to process a lot of this right now.  It is literally giving me a headache because there are still so many blackouts that I don’t have an explanation for that happened to me throughout childhood, and I am really conflicted about giving up control to gain a better understanding of what really happened back then.