Part 1: Dissociative Identity Response….
As a child, growing up in an abusive family, I found a way to be able to have breakfast with the people who were hurting me…my family, without knowing what they had done to me…to go to school…to make friends…and so importantly…I was able to learn. I could seem to be living an ordinary life. What made this possible? It wasn’t denial…it was dissociation.
Dissociation – and dissociative identity disorder (DID) – created protective memory barriers that kept unbearable experiences out of my everyday awareness. It allowed me to keep functioning in an ordinary way, even though life for me was not.
As a child with no power to change my circumstances, or to protect myself from the people meant to protect me – my parents – these protective barriers were lifesavers. It’s what made it possible for me to keep going, to keep showing up in a world where survival depended on keeping the abuses of my family out of awareness.
From a neurobiological perspective, dissociation isn’t pathological…it’s not split personalities…it’s not sociopathic… it’s the mind’s brilliance at work…fragmenting awareness and memory into protective barriers because the truth is too much to know. It’s a dissociative response…or as my therapist, Dr. Dan Siegel explained to me when diagnosed in 1991, “Sally, it’s a brilliant adaptation.”
The problems of that brilliance show up later…when no longer a child living with that family. Then, the protective processes that helped us begin to interfere with living life.
This is the paradox of dissociation: adaptive in childhood, disruptive in adulthood.
In the next essay, I’ll explore how Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) reframes dissociation — not as parts of self, but as protective processes that function more like verbs than nouns.