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Julie Cohen is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist MFT and a Child Mental Health Specialist with a private practice in Los Angeles Her areas of focus include depression anxiety panic post-traumatic stress bipolar…
FAST FACTS
I have worked for many years with victims of chronic trauma and abuse. Many of my clients had a clear cut PTSD diagnosis and along with that suffered greatly from dissociative symptoms. Dissociation is best understood by viewing it on a continuum. One end of the continuum are mild symptoms such as excessive forgetfulness including forgetting your keys or getting in the car and not remembering where you are going. On the severe or extreme end of the continuum are severe dissociate symptoms that included the diagnosis of Dissociate Identity Disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder or MPD).
The dissociative symptom that I see most often falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. And although not a severe symptom, its consequences if not treated could be deadly. Here is how this usually presents in session. A client might say, "I was driving to work and was so consumed by the thoughts of my abuse that I didn't see the car in front of me stop. I had to slam on my breaks and pull off to the side of the road." Or, "I walked out into the middle of the intersection and the light was red. All these cars almost hit me and people started screaming at me. I never even noticed the traffic signal. I don't know where my mind was..."
So this is a little different than typical thoughts of dissociation where memory is completely wiped out and a person as if awakening from a trance says "where am I?" Often I will ask clients who present with a history of abuse, "do you ever have times where you forget where you are or feel lost for a few moments?" Typically, the response will be reciting a situation involving stepping into traffic or almost causing a car accident.
I don't have a scientific answer for this but clearly; in every person that I work with who has this symptom there is an excessive amount of worry and anxiety. There is almost always intense persistent ruminations about the past abuse or potential abuse. This is most common with people who are still in an abusive relationship or worried about potential threats of harm. On a positive note, when the threats of abuse and abuse stop, the ruminations usually diminish significantly.
If these symptoms resonate with you the most important issue is keeping yourself safe. Either this means finding help to get away from your abuser and/or gaining awareness of your dissociative symptoms. If you are in an abusive relationship check out the "help" icon on this page for crisis referrals. If you experience symptoms that are mentioned here I would strongly encourage you to seek professional help. Finding ways to decrease your anxiety is essential to healing. Also, you may want to consider not driving or be extremely cautious when crossing the street.
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Thank you Julie for the subject matter. It helps more than you know. This is exactly why I do the whole DS thing. :)
I don't think about my trauma constantly anymore, Well... I don't cry constantly anymore. -Don't feel much of anything really-. But when I leave my house I get very distracted because I am Sooo paranoid. I am always looking around for certain people, certain cars, ANYTHING related to my trauma. It's pretty bad when you need a Xanax every time you leave the house. I don't get so anxiouse now when I leave, but I'm not out of the house long before I catch myself tripping on the trauma stuff. And yeah, Spacing off. It keeps my world so small, I hardly ever leave the House anymore. Only when I have to. But I am trying to get over it and move on. Its just really slow going and I have absolutely no support in the world other than this site, and my youngest son.
I was diagnosed with ptsd BEFORE my last and most devistating trauma. I also have ADD and bi-polar. So I don't know how much is disociation, how much of it is just not focussing, and how much of it is just me being an "Airhead". ??? I guess that's where therapy used to help. Too bad I no longer have that luxury.
I too would like to know how others deal with it, and what if anything we can do......
I don't know what DID or FAS is....Have to look those up.
I think my dissociative thought might not only be related to trauma but perhaps also to components of ADHD.
My mom died a few months ago and she and I had not spoken in years. I didn't want the abuse to continue. But now that she is dead I feel as if something is not finished and I can't ever finish it. I miss her tremendously, but I can't remember anything really good that went on between us since I was about five. All I remember is the anger between my parents and my mother telling me that I was just like my father and his family and that hated me. I remember watching her hit my father in the head with soup ladles, big conch seashells and on one occasion, a baseball bat, and I remember her screaming and yelling and hitting sometimes for days at a time. But no one ever said there was anything wrong with her. Psychologists said there was something wrong with my Dad...but what I thought I saw was that he was being harmed and she was doing the harming.
When I said to her that she was hurting me and other members of the family, she looked at me and asked me how I could think that my own mother would want to harm me. It took me years to realize that I wasn't accusing her of something that she wasn't doing.
I was the eldest of six kids, and we hadn't spoken in years either. My mother said if you spoke with someone that she was angry with, you couldn't associate with her...so no one dealt with me for years. Now my sister calls every day and it's the first time I've ever had confirmation that I wasn't just imagining things and I think I wasn't awfully sure. Everyone else seemed to get along with her, except me. So I was really confused...and angry and hurt.
It's ridiculous for me to be this sad and still reliving my childhood and every trauma I've ever had in my life, over and over again, in my own head. I've been told that I'm very depressed and that I have ptsd, but I don't know all the other terms I hear in here. I'm 59 years old and it's time to stop this....but I'm not really sure how.
I would have liked some more explanation on what causes the dissociation.
I read your article with interest because I believe I move up and down on this scale you mention. However, I believe neurological imbalances, misfires, whatever one wants to call a damaged nervous system is caused not only by the factors you mention butcam be brought about due illness, I was "officially" diagnosed with lyme disease in 1996 was treated up to approxiamately 2 years ago changing antibiotic combinations as they quit working. I hope I am not being impertinent to suggest this dissacotion can be caused by a medical factor. I just have realized this is what is happening to me and haven't researched it, maybe research already has drawn a correlation of dissacoiation and neurological damage due to damage incurred by illness. alisa!
Apparently you are focusing on cognitive parts of dissociation. I am more used to thinking about it in physical terms, again on a continuum. On one end being a woman who can't accept that she is attractive (and she is shy or doesn't dress up), and on the other end a woman who cannot feel anything, positive or negative when being intimate. I think I'm going to print this out and bring to my psych and ask what she thinks of it.