We do not question WHY we would need these coping strategies. It is just accepted as a matter of fact that we have become slightly flawed and weak and would attempt to escape living life whenever possible. We see ourselves as different ‘slightly defective’.
Social Media are still favourite ways of feeding our dissociation addiction. As an alcoholic has bottles hidden all over the house, We have Facebook,twitter, Instagram etc. What will happen if there is an empty moment, and we did not have a phone or tablet to whisk our mind away from actually living in the present? What would happen if we actually had to ‘be’ instead of constantly dissociating???
The only way we have learned to deal with our difficulties is to dissociate. The idea of their being any other option is foreign to us. We even trained our children to deal with their difficult emotions by dissociating. When our children are very young and having trouble managing their emotions, We would tell them, “Go into the next room and do not come out until you have changed.” We have learned to become very obedient; we leave the room in a tantrum state, but soon will emerge, smiling, pleasant, and happy. Any vestige of a problem is gone without a trace.
Having dissociative parents, you learn dissociation from them – both by being taught it directly, and by example. Parents who dissociate are unable to help a child go through their emotions. They are unable to help the child learn that an emotion is nothing to fear, but something that is very valuable and precious, helpful in living life. We sincerely believe that switching off an emotion is the best way to deal with it. We had never heard of the concept of self-soothing, it was pleasant to do some so-called ‘self-soothing ‘ activities, and I felt mildly better when I did them. But the concepts of staying with an emotion, sitting with it until it changes, and using a self soothing technique instead of switching, are all foreign to us.
We are too terrified of emotions to ever do this. We are afraid of fear itself, and will go to immense means not to experience the emotion of fear, or any other emotion, without ever realising that we are doing this. We have control of ourself. We feel we can handle anything.
We become careful with organised groups of people, and with individuals who might not be safe. We learn what to look for, how to tell whether or not something was safe, how to tell whether or not we are accessed. Eventually, we realise we are safe, our children are safe and well on their way to healing, we all have our safeguards in place.
We have no reason not to live in the present, We are relatively free from harm from external sources, so there was no longer a need to dissociate, so we are DONE with dissociation, right? we lived happily ever after, end of story?
Obviously WRONG!
Long ago, decades ago, We have made the decision that life was not worth living – it was something to ‘get through’ as smoothly and mindlessly as possible until we could die. The rule had been to imperceptibly stay as non-present as possible, while going about the business of doing what we had to do to ‘survive’, to pass as human. That was a rule we learned deep, deep down.
Einstein said: “I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.” That can be exceedingly difficult. When we embark on this journey of recovery we have not realised that healing required CHANGE on our part. We wanted the constant pain and anguish to stop, but we didn’t want my actual self to be different. We did not want to have to uproot the very foundations of our beliefs and actions and metaphorically relearn how to walk again. We wanted to be free of the continual anguish we experienced, the continual need to cover up our lapses due to dissociation; the continual sporadic loss of time, the hop scotching nature of our abilities – sometimes being able to do certain things; other times have no concept of, or even any desire to have certain abilities.
We wanted relief of all my symptoms, but we did not really want to “heal”.
When we are finally ready to start dealing with our addiction, we gradually realise that we then have to deal with what caused our addiction in the first place; what we had been unwilling/unable to face originally, what drove us to drink,drug and into inumerable dysfunctions. Only now our problems were compounded by all the problems that addiction brings.
“The worst would pass in a few days. I’d feel good and I’d think, “I’ve got it down pat.” But then I’d look at my life and feel bad. That’s the real pain when you’re an addict. USING HURTS, BUT REALITY HURTS WORSE.”
when we are not dissociating, we look at our life and realise this is so very different than what we have envisioned. We do not have a birth family, We do not have in-laws, We do not have blood relatives, We do not have a life partner. We give up an immense amount of ourself to insure that we would have all these things, and when we stopped dissociating, We realise that not only did we have none of those people in our life, We are also missing major portions of ourself. It has taken us along time to realise two things:
1. How can you lose what you never had? I never did have those things, only a pretence.
And 2. We now have things that are far more important and valuable than those ever were in reality.
But. We are still addicted. We know we would not have survived if we had not had the skill of dissociation. It served us quite well. It saved our lives. Now we don’t want to rely on it; we don’t want to do it automatically we have identified three types of dissociation we struggle with:
1. The first way is the simple practice of spacing out or shutting off. we use this for two different purposes:
1. Avoidance when we are unwilling or unable to face things
2. A learned way to be able to switch. There are many times when we cannot access the parts that have the information and skills we need in a situation. Throughout time we have learned that a way to handle this was just to shut off completely inside, and sooner or later the information we needed would gradually seep to the surface or some other place in my mind where it would become accessible to me.
2. A second way we dissociate is to switch to other parts inside.It has taken us time to be able to tell when we am not ourself. we blend through most alter personalities, and it used to be easy to believe we are just being ‘us’. We’ve learned to be alert to various factors. One is what age we feel. Other ways we have found to know when I am not Child Within present are to feel what size the body seems, relative to other people or objects; Sometimes we look at a dog, and it feels as if the dog is shoulder height to me. Ooops. Not Child within present! Other ways are to recognise what the emotional tone is and what the values are, what sort of things are important to us. How do I want to spend my time? A numbing activity such as social media games? Oops. That is not a Child within choice for us. So who is out and why?
3. The third way we dissociate is one that may be difficult to grasp if we don’t use it. If we do, We will definitely know what we are talking about. We will tell us that some of us whom we have discussed this with have found this concept highly triggering.
We found ourself talking to our guides about a ‘construct’. They asked us what we mean by that term; at the time we had not a clue.
We have since learned that we create a construct when we are functioning through something that is not an alter. We are always looking for a perfect ‘formula’ that we could leave in place, and personally go away. Life was something to be endured, and got through as gracefully and safely as possible, while the real ‘us’ was tucked away somewhere inaccessible. When we are preparing to be in a situation which we may perceive as threatening, we automatically figure out
what qualities would be appropriate and useful for that event; find parts inside that have those qualities; put them together and create an ‘artificial’ persona to deal with the situation.
An example: One time a friend and I planned to go away for a weekend, share a motel room, and do numerous activities together. I was terrified. I was unused to being social; I was unused to spending long stretches of time with another person without being able to escape and dissociate. I was afraid she
would find me (fill in the blank here) unacceptable, stupid, weird, any number of things. My anxiety levels rose and rose. I found myself figuring out how ‘normal’ people would act in a situation like this, what kind of things would interest them, what kind of things they would talk about, what kind of
values they would have. I figured out what the situation demanded so that I could pass as human. I found myself focusing entirely on my friend and what she might want to do. It was far too terrifying to have any ‘me’ present at all. I was still around, somewhere, but definitely not in my body. That would have been far too terrifying. From some remote area, I worked the body, instructing it what to say and do. A construct is not ‘me’ or an alter; it is
lacking much depth of character, although there were always certain parameters set for what actions the character could do.
Fortunately, by then I was far enough along in healing that I realised what I was doing and started laughing at myself. This was a friend who knew about my background, who was safe, who was very accepting of who I was. I ended up just ‘winging’ it; yes, there were some anxious moments, but I spent a lot of
time just being ‘me’ and reacting spontaneously to whatever arose, and had a great time.
An example: One time a friend and I planned to go away for a weekend, share a motel room, and do numerous activities together. I was terrified. I was unused to being social; I was unused to spending long stretches of time with another person without being able to escape and dissociate. I was afraid she
would find me (fill in the blank here) unacceptable, stupid, weird, any number of things. My anxiety levels rose and rose. I found myself figuring out how ‘normal’ people would act in a situation like this, what kind of things would interest them, what kind of things they would talk about, what kind of
values they would have. I figured out what the situation demanded so that I could pass as human. I found myself focusing entirely on my friend and what she might want to do. It was far too terrifying to have any ‘me’ present at all. I was still around, somewhere, but definitely not in my body. That would have been far too terrifying. From some remote area, I worked the body, instructing it what to say and do. A construct is not ‘me’ or an alter; it is
lacking much depth of character, although there were always certain parameters set for what actions the character could do.
Fortunately, by then I was far enough along in healing that I realised what I was doing and started laughing at myself. This was a friend who knew about my background, who was safe, who was very accepting of who I was. I ended up just ‘winging’ it; yes, there were some anxious moments, but I spent a lot of
time just being ‘me’ and reacting spontaneously to whatever arose, and had a great time.
We do want to say that we do not believe all dissociation is from addiction. If a person is still around perpetrators, dissociation may still be necessary. But once dissociation is learned as the major means to handle difficult emotions, a person will continue to use it automatically from then on, and it greatly lessens the quality of life.
Having decided we wanted to do away with this addiction and the pain it causes us, We find specific strategies helpful, when we are not dissociating our decision to stop dissociating: We would like to share these with you.
We would like to start with a quote we found: “No one healing intervention will enable a person to manifest the full scope of his or her wholeness. To maximally heal it is important not to limit ourselves to a single modality but to incorporate several healing practices that encompass body, mind, and
spirit.”
We who have experienced ten stage recovery strongly believe it takes more than talk therapy to break through when there is severe trauma in the background. It takes physical actions, whatever form they may take. When we are faced with severe trauma, the fight or flight response gets activated. This shuts down the cortex; the part of our brain that can reason, plan and make sense of things. Pieces of the event, snapshot pictures, get recorded, but the meaning does not. They are memories that do not make sense. After the trauma, these unresolved emotions are frozen in the body. Think of what the physiological
responses are to any emotion and what it means for these responses to be stopped before completion and remain in the body. There is an ‘act hunger’ remaining – the body wants to move through and resolve these physiological processes. The body remembers even when the mind forgets. The body acts as
our unconscious mind. At the ten Stages we implement a full range of both play and safe drama therapies.
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