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Dissociation.  Without spending time digging around in my back stockpile of previous research I have done on the brain to detail this information, I will simply say that various regions of the brain are usually involved in every brain action in cooperation with each other.  Most regions are designed to be involved in multiple and differing kinds of actions and are not confined to do just a ‘one thing’.  Many of these variable patterns of connections and possible purposes for these regions introduce ‘places’ where dissociation can happen.

Now, I am going to mention a dissociated experience I had about a year ago that I wrote about on this blog.  But before I do so, I want to add that my current difficulties with dissociation happened after my chemotherapy disrupted my brain’s ability to make good use of all the ADULT LEARNED ways I had evidently come up with to diminish the ability my brain has had to dissociate from nearly the time I was born.  Dissociation was not only built into my earliest forming, growing and developing brain, in some profound ways IT BUILT IT.

I will bypass here all the various arguments presented about who dissociates and under what circumstances.  All I want to do is present this example of dissociation in slow motion:

I went out for my daily exercise and walked along the stretch of old rail bed that had its rails and ties recently removed as  part of the national ‘Rails to Trails’ project.  The rocky bed of black chips dumped there from the copper smelter many years ago is still there.

About a mile out there’s a bridge that takes the rail’s bed across a fairly deep desert wash.  Under that bridge lives a good size rattlesnake.  I had seen the snake out there in various spots around the bridge as it came up to warm itself on the sun-heated bed.  Now, what I am going to say next defies reason.

One day I was on my return from my usual turn-a-round spot, having marveled at the beauty of the landscape, the quiet serenity that spread itself around me across the high desert to the distant mountains in all directions .  Suddenly my eyes scanned something on the ground at the end of the rail bed.  My thoughts were, “Oh, my!  Look at that beautiful piece of paper.  How did it get there?  It looks like parchment, like oiled parchment, light weight, almost transparent, and what a beautiful pattern it has on it, and look at those beautiful colors.”

At the same time these thoughts were following one another in my mind my body was in motion without my conscious attention.  I had approached the spot and had my right arm extended with my hand only about two feet away from touching and picking up this ‘beautiful paper’ before my OTHER brain regions kicked in.  First my brain began to recognize that this was not paper, it was a snakeskin.  My brain then followed a series of thoughts about how intact the skin was, and when did the snake leave behind that skin, probably recently because it hadn’t blown away.  I was still reaching NOW for the skin before the next transition in my brain’s activity took place.  Fortunately I next watched that paper swell itself up, get fat and plump, gain dimension, and grow before my eyes into that good sized very live rattlesnake coiled to strike.

Just in time I froze.  Then I retracted my body every so slowly from the space surrounding the rattler.  But even then I did not have a stress response reaction.  I was completely calm, as if I was in another world.  I backed quietly and slowly to the opposite side of the rail bed and continued my walk home.  I have not taken a walk on that rail bed since, and don’t expect to.

Suddenly something CLICKED and I stopped just as my brain said, “Look.  See.  That is a coiled rattler.”

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I don’t believe that prior to my experience with how chemotherapy changed my brain that this kind of dissociational experience would have happened to me — as an adult.  I also believe that it was not the chemotherapy that ‘gave’ my brain the ability to dissociate its operations in this way.  It was the unimaginable trauma, terror and abuse of my infant-childhood that put these patterns into play.  As the circuitry, pathways, and region-to-region operation of my brain was built in the beginning the dissociation was built into me at the same time.

Had I not had to build a brain in the midst of such trauma from birth, dissociation would have been the exception rather than the rule — or it would not have built itself into my brain in the beginning.  Because there WAS enough trauma to build the dissociational information processing patterns into my brain, I needed to learn as I grew up to function in the world in spite of it.

Chemotherapy interrupted my memory of those learnings to the point that my brain’s operation NOW is far more similar to how it was actually created than I have ever known before as an adult.  I am very careful of what I do, where I go, and the situations I expose myself to now.  I live a very simple life, as simple as I can make it.  I no longer trust my brain to give me information in the order I need it, or trust what my possible reactions might be.

I cannot view my present condition as being anything less than a terrible loss of the potential life I COULD have been living if I had not been built in trauma the way that I was.  This topic of dissociation is important for me to keep close in my thoughts as I enter these next stages of my writing.  There is no possible way that my mother could have done what she did, lived the way she did, had the story of a life that she did without dissociational patterns being the entire undercurrent of how she was in the world.

As I work closely now on finding out both how my mother’s story became my story and how it did not, I need to be able to spot the dissociation in both of us.  At the same time, I have to fight my own dissociation every step of the way.  The process I am and will go through to write the story of my childhood is an important one — and will appear as topics within future blog posts.

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