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WordPress keeps a running list on my Admin page that shows me the kinds of search terms people are using that lands them on my blog.  Here’s one from yesterday:  “How to stop dissociation.”  Hey, now that’s quite the question?  Do I have any kind of answer at all?

For the most part, I think the truth is that neuroscientists (along with everyone else) is stumped by ‘dissociation’.  The word is thrown around like tumbleweeds in early fall high speed desert wind.  From my point of view, at every point where the brain can perform an action using circuits-regions-pathways-networks TOGETHER yet also perform an entirely different set of activities through a recombination of these areas or in solo operation, a risk for dissociation exists.

Add to this wide open field of possible dissociation factors the complex and sophisticated operation of our body as a whole, which uses all its known abilities to moderate and modulate stress and calmness levels through our many nervous system responses.  The truth of the matter is that those who suffer most from so-called ‘dissociation’ are probably the closest to being experts on the topic of any human on earth.

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My sister is graciously sending me a copy of the book, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.  There’s certainly nothing either new or original about the topic, but I hear the book contains very useful, practical, and do-able exercises for changing – basically – how our brain and nervous system processes information in the present moment.  I’ll bite.

Until I lay my eyeballs on the printed words in Tolle’s text, I don’t have a single clue how what he says is different than what’s in this book, for example:  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

But after I thought about it for a little while the day my sister told me of her recent experiences implementing some of Tolle’s techniques, I realized that the state of mind, or state of being that she described to me sounded extremely – and eerily – familiar to me.  I KNOW that state, in the deepest regions of my being.  If it is anything like what it sounds to me, it’s the state of what I named for myself of MAJOR DISSOCIATION.

How interesting is that?  The problem for me at this moment, not having yet read this book, is that I’m not at all sure I want to intentionally exercise myself to reenter that state.  Supposedly it relates to NOT thinking and NOT feeling.  Sound familiar?

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CAUTION becomes the word for the day for me in regard to anything that non-severe early infant-child trauma and abuse survivors seem to find useful in their own process of achieving increased well-being.  Because I had to develop a very different body-brain, I need to be very careful about which doors I open and leap blindly through.

My inner sense of warning about ‘messing around with’ anything that can alter my state of being in any way comes from the knowledge that there are black holes, abysses and pitfalls within the operation of my bio-chemical makeup that do not exist for a ‘normally built from infancy’ person.

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I just went to my bookshelf to search for something I read about six years ago on this topic and have never been able to find again.  I ‘accidentally’ found this, written by Dr. Jon G. Allen in his book, Traumatic Relationships and Serious Mental Disorders.  Because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in it, I immediately stuffed it back among its multi-colored-spine relatives.

But wait a moment!  Why did these words appear at this moment?  I give up.  I don’t know, but I suspect there is a perfectly good reason.  So, having reclaimed the page, here’s what I ‘accidentally’ read:

“Although we generally admire persistence and deplore giving up, Carver and Scheier argue that being unable to give up unattainable goals is a huge problem:  ‘the person experiences distress (because of an inability to make progress) and is unable to do anything about the distress (because of an inability to give up)….  This situation – commitment to unattainable goals – is a prescription for distress’ (p. 195).  Many clients struggle with this plight in treatment.  They courageously persist in treatment for years in the face of ongoing symptoms and relapses.  In the midst of relapses, they become profoundly demoralized, often feeling as if they no longer have the will to keep trying.  At these junctures, many become suicidal – the ultimate expression of disengagement and giving up.  Working on trauma is a prescription for slow progress toward goals, the guaranteed precipitant of negative affect.  If the client has adopted the completely understandable goal of cure, freedom from symptoms, and freedom from relapses, depression will ensue.

“Particularly in the midst of relapses, clients long for wholesale and dramatic change.  But we must help them go in the opposite direction.  To ensure success and positive emotion that builds confidence in treatment, we must orient clients toward a view of improvement based on small, gradual changes….  Gollwitzer (1999) proposed a two-step strategy for goal attainment that I introduce to clients in the context of self-regulation.  The first step is goal setting, an important challenge.  What are realistic treatment goals?  Over the long term, gradual improvement with ups and downs is realistic – but by no means guaranteed.  But we must focus on the short term, where clients can experience concrete progress.  Gollwitzer emphasized that goals must not only be achievable (within the person’s capacity) but also be specific rather than general (e.g., ‘Say, “No!” when I do not want to do something’ rather than ‘be more assertive’).  Goals should be proximal (near future) rather than distal (distant future).  The combination of specific and proximal goals allows the individual to identify clear feedback that promotes self-monitoring.  It is helpful to formulate learning goals (e.g., learning how to calm oneself or discovering capacities to distract oneself).  Approach goals are preferable to avoidance goals.  For example, rather than setting the goal of not feeling anxious, the client might adopt the goal of calming himself by listening to music at the initial signs of anxiety.  The client must also eliminate distractions and temptations in the environment.  Perhaps most difficult in light of clients’ ambivalence and depression, success requires high motivation to attain the goal and a strong sense of commitment to it.

“Gollwitzer made a convincing case that goal setting must be accompanied by implementation intentions, that is, specifying when, where, and how the goal will be implemented:  when situation x arises, I will perform response y.  This entails forming a clear idea of situation x in advance.  Situation x could be an emotional state in an environmental context.  For example, the client might formulate the implementation intention, when I am afraid and alone at home during the daytime, I am tempted to cut myself, I will take a walk abound the neighborhood.  Mentally rehearsing implementation intentions is helpful, and adhering reliably to plans ensures that intentions become habitual.”  (pages 316-317)

NOTE:  Mental rehearsal makes use of our mirror neuron system, essential for learning anything that involves actions taken by our body.

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Well, I can easily see how this passage from Allen’s book relates to “How to stop dissociation!”  From my personal perspective, stopping dissociation isn’t actually possible for those of us infant-child trauma survivors who actually have a nervous system-brain that was forced to build itself with major dissociation as one of one of our prime operating patterns.

I believe we can set the realistic goal of learning more about what conditions, situations and circumstances in our present-day life contribute to an all out pandemonium of dissociation.  But STOPPING dissociation as if it never built itself into our body-brain in the beginning is not going to be possible.  Finding ways to lessen the trouble that dissociation causes us NOW and lessening the opportunity for it to happen (be triggered) NOW is a possible goal.

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To give you an idea about how oblivious I truly believe the neuroscientific community is about dissociation, in the book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (Paperback – Oct. 22, 2001) – I so far have added 12 page numbers of references in the text to dissociation that are not mentioned in the index of this book  (only 2 references are actually in the index)!  If I can follow through on a ‘motivational intention’ to do so, I will add the information I have found in Siegel’s book into a future blog post.

This is another great book by this author:

Coping With Trauma: Hope Through Understanding by Jon G. Allen

In fact, what I am looking for is in this book – and I will include this information in my next post.

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