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Those of us who suffered severe trauma and abuse particularly during our earliest infancy — so that our physiological development was forced to change in adaptation to the trauma — need to speak out and begin to think about our resulting difficulties in getting along during our lifetime in a world that really (fortunately in many ways) does not have a clue what living in a trauma-altered body is like.

We need to realize that dissociation is NOT a clearly understood phenomena.  There is no clear trail of understanding about dissociation laid out for us to follow by the experts in any field of research or practice.  I believe dissociational experiences need to be documented in any way that we can manage because it will only be in the future that survivor’s who were forced to build a body-brain that contains dissociational patterns will receive the help needed to understand how we are in the world — along with HOW we are in our body in the world affects WHO we are.

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If you have just landed at this post, please first read the post that immediately precedes this one.

Living requires that everyone continually process incoming information so that it can be responded to.  Through safe and secure earliest caregiver relationships we are supposed to build a body-nervous system-brain that can smoothly take in new information, match it up with related and relevant information we have gained during our past, and then be able to respond in the present (responding to the future is a different topic) in appropriate ways.

This process is supposed to be both ongoing and coherent.  That means it is supposed to make sense.  We are supposed to be able to make sense out of what happens to us.  We are supposed to come up with responses, reactions, and actions continually that make sense — make sense to US and make sense to those around us.

Early maltreatment of infants during their first year of life, during the period in which the body-nervous system-brain is undergoing its incredibly fast and complex building process, interferes with this process.  When primary caregivers confuse, hurt, terrify and terrorize, neglect and in other ways mistreat an infant, the information the infant receives cannot possibly be received by the infant in positive ways.

The only alternative a maltreated infant has is to physiologically adapt its development in response to horrific conditions that signify to its growing and rapidly developing body that the world is not safe, that the infant is vastly insecure, and that the infant is ALONE in the midst of all of this.  Dissociation is one of the natural consequences of being overwhelmed, traumatized, and of being fed not only too much information to handle (process, make sense of and respond to), but too much of the WRONG information about the self and the world the self has been born into.

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Now, to simply get to a nitty-gritty description so that I can document a dissociational episode I experienced yesterday.

The first phase of trying to document dissociation involves the reaction (I believe) of shame and embarrassment.  “What’s wrong with me?”  This stage also includes the sense that what happened made no sense at all and that there was no ‘reason’ for it.

We must be careful here.  I am NOT saying that shame and embarrassment TRIGGER the dissociational episode.  I am saying that these feelings are a very seductive temptation to fall into when we go back and try to document such an episode.

Humans are supposed to gradually build into their body-NS-brain from birth the ability to smoothly transition between experiences.  Traumatized infants cannot build this ability into their body because nothing about what they experience allows them too.  Being traumatized and frequently overwhelmed creates a different body-NS-brain because it has been fed, as I said above, too much of the wrong kind of information.

I see an image:  Picture someone saying to an infant, “Eventually in your life, when you are bigger and ready to handle it, life is going to give you a LOT to deal with.  Right now our job is to build you a body-NS-brain that will have good, healthy strong channels in it so that when this time comes, everything you need to get along in the world well is prepared and ready.  This way you will nearly always (overwhelming trauma can hit anyone down the road) be able to take in stride all that you encounter in your life.  You will be able to transition, or change smoothly with the changes as you move along through the rest of your life.”

Dissociation is a DIFFERENT way to handle transitions and changes.  As we document dissociation we do not need to judge it.  We need to pay attention the best that we can and describe it.

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So there I was yesterday, already hyper aware of my well overamped stress response system that had been overtaxed during the week by my efforts to take care of my friend’s job so that she would not worry as she heals from her illness.  Of course all kinds of other stressors went on all week, and the end result is that my entire self, living as it does in a trauma altered body, was on overload.

Standing in line at our small town’s local hardware store — did I notice the BLANK instant that would have let me know dissociation was going to take over the job of handling me in relation to the changes of the world?

Nope.  I did not.

But as always happens sooner or later, once dissociation has occurred and a DETOUR is in progress, something happens to make sure we know we are on a different track in our life from the one we were following prior to the dissociational experience.

What I find fascinating as I make the effort to document yesterday’s experience is that somehow I switched the identity of the person I was speaking to.

Within my own self I simply reorganized certain information within me and reoriented the entire scenario so that as the DETOUR was in progress everything made sense to me.

Did it make sense to the woman I was speaking to?  Of course not!  Did it make sense to me once she put the roadblock in the middle of my DETOUR route?  Not at the time, not even yet — but I respect who I am and how I am in the world as a severe early trauma survivor to try to look at this without criticism and judgment.

I don’t believe dissociation happens without the presence of both stress and a stressor.  Because at the same time I had a permanently turned on/activated stress response system (that I am coming to believe is the exact same thing as the insecure attachment disorder-system I also have that also cannot be turned off), I am ALWAYS experiencing stress (call it anxiety — but it is a very particular kind of anxiety).

It could take a book to adequately document just this one episode of dissociation that happened to me yesterday standing in line at the hardware store.  I believe, when I talk about honoring and respecting the dissociation severe early trauma survivors experience, that this fact is true for every single dissociational experience any survivor has.

Present with any single instance of dissociation is an entire lifetime of accumulated knowledge about what trauma is, what it feels like to endure it, what it takes to survive it, and about what the risks continue to be as we stay alive in a vulnerable body in what our body knows to be a dangerous, threatening and hostile world.

THAT IS A LOT OF INFORMATION!  All of that information is both vital and very near to us (because it is IN us) all of the time.  So-called ordinary-normal people do NOT carry this vast storehouse of trauma-related information.  Therefore, they are NOT at risk for becoming overwhelmed at any given time with a wealth of survival based information — which means they are not at risk for a dissociational episode that seems to come from ‘out of the blue’.

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If I were writing this in a book format I would start another chapter here.  Because I am writing this in a blog format, this post is simply going to get longer!

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I feel like I am inching my way out on a precarious branch that few before me have traveled so far out on.  As I described in my previous post, dissociation is always connected to our physiological adaptation in our body-NS-brain to terrible trauma that overwhelmed, and therefore confused, disorganized and disoriented us.  Those earliest traumatic experiences that built us always happened at the same time that chaos was present.  Within chaos — all possibilities exist simultaneously.

Our tiny growing body-self had to find a way to continue-on-being in the midst of these experiences.  At the same time we brought right along with us into our future life, one instant at a time, all of this UNRESOLVED trauma experience information.

Trauma remains alive in the body of all survivors until somebody somewhere somehow pays the right kind of attention to its message.

Why?

Just as trauma involves the experience of chaos where ‘all is possible’, at the same time it carries the parallel message that if the human race is going to survive and endure the information contained in the trauma has to be understood so that in the future the same kind of trauma can be first of all AVOIDED and if that doesn’t happen, then the same kind of trauma can be responded to when it happens in a new and better way.

Just as trauma=chaos=all is possible, any individual member of our species who experiences trauma is connected to the ALL — we each contain within us the genetic information that made us members of our great species in the first place.  And along with being a member of our species we are given an inescapable mandate:  What each of us experiences in our lives as individual representatives of our species belongs to the WHOLE.

If any single one of us continues to carry information within us about a trauma that was NOT resolved, that information is designed by nature and by evolution to be of critical importance to every single member of our entire species.

Problem?  We do not think this way.  But not thinking about something accurately does NOT make the faulty way of thinking accurate.

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So, again, there I am standing at the counter in the hardware store having a verbal exchange with the cashier.  I am interacting with a woman I will call Anna, though I do not actually remember her name.  I know her through associated experiences I have had in the past.

This woman’s brother is married to my neighbor in this trailer court where the house I live in is located.  I will call my neighbor Ruth.

Over 95% of the population of the border town I live in is of Mexican heritage.  (The town 8 miles away where the hardware store is located is probably 50%.)

Now, looking closely as I try to describe and document what happened to trigger what happened next I verify my own statement above.  All the trauma related information of my entire lifetime was present in that instant I stood in line — and dissociated.

How is that possible?  Again as I stated above, all of this information is present with EVERY early trauma survivor because our bodies changed in their development to make sure we remember.

Dissociation is a part of this trauma-related altered remembering ability that we survivors are blessed-cursed with.

Entering into the context of the hardware store exchange came all the information that I have about my being unable to attach to others in the world.  My insecure attachment disorder exists in nearly absolute contrast to what I see happening between family members, neighbors and friends in this area I live in.

These people are above all else supremely social from the time they are born.  They love one another and they show it — all of the time.  They are designed from birth to value one another in social interactions — Anna and Ruth being no exception.

I lost track of certain facts yesterday, things I consciously KNOW about the relationship of these two women.  I know about the connection by marriage that socially makes these two women very real sisters.  I know Ruth lives two trailers to the west of my house, just over the chain link fence of the neighbor that lives between us.

I know Ruth drives a little silver car.  I know Anna lives in another town 13 miles away and drives a large four wheel drive.  Both women work at this hardware store but seldom on the same shift, and on this day only Anna was working.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my attempt to document what happened.

Anna cheerfully made a light comment that she loves this time of year, that the night previous she enjoyed lighting her wood stove.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my WAY TOO MUCH RELATED INFORMATION.

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I must take a moment here to mention something that has happened to me in recent weeks — at least that I have certainly become aware of in recent weeks.

Never before in my life have I consciously noticed that I occasionally think in smells.  Over the past two months I have noticed that sometimes if I think ‘lilac’ I simultaneously literally SMELL lilac.  If I think vinegar, I smell it.  If I think sour milk, I smell it, etc.

How and why this is happening to me (and not all of the time – randomly — and I can not predict it and do not expect it when it DOES happen) I do not know.

But it happened yesterday.

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As soon as Anna mentioned her wood stove three things happened simultaneously.  (1) I remembered that I sometimes think in smells, (2) I remembered actually smelling very real woodsmoke wafting through my back yard this week, and (3) I was overwhelmed with the connection made inside of me to everything I have EVER known about wood smoke and wood stoves.  With an Alaskan homesteading childhood and a long time spent living in the cold winters of northern Minnesota my memories of these experiences are vast.  Because I was built the way that I was, trauma is connected to many of these wood smoke memories.

Strange trigger.

I am not sure that I would have reacted the way that I did yesterday if I had not already been near my complete stress overload point from all the other things that are happening to me (none of which would overstress a ‘normal-ordinary’ person).

So, yesterday suddenly out of nowhere I dissociated in such a way that I lost track of the real time information about who Anna and Ruth are, where they live, etc.  Suddenly I was talking to Anna AS IF SHE WAS RUTH.  In my trauma-stressed-altered reality suddenly Anna lived in the trailer as my neighbor and Ruth disappeared as a person from my reality.

The conversation included me telling Anna that I have tree branches in my yard from the trees I have trimmed, and that she could have them for her stove.  At the same time I could ‘see’ Anna coming down the driveway to get them.  Discussion turned to stray dogs because I was purchasing T-posts so that I can try to build a fence along the east side of my yard that the stray dogs cannot penetrate.  Anna told me about her fence that keeps her dog in her yard.  I responded, “I didn’t know you have a dog over there!”

Abrupt crash – detour ended.  Anna:  “I don’t live there in the trailer, Ruth does!”

Me?  Embarrassed and shaken, confused at my own self, “What HAPPENED, Linda?”

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Even though we are most certainly operating within the cultural norms of our society to take dissociational experiences personally — after all, word of my ‘faux pas’ is no doubt going to spread like wildfire around this small, closely knit neighborhood I live in — my documentary’s point is that dissociation happens to us as individual people because trauma has ALWAYS been bigger than we are as separate people.

We did not survive, evolve and endure as a social species by being alone as separate individuals.  We endured as a group.  When trauma-related memory information overwhelms us — FOR WHATEVER SEEMINGLY INSIGNIFICANT REASON IN THE PRESENT MOMENT — at the instant that it does, at the instant we become overwhelmed and dissociate as a consequence, we are being humbled as an individual self.

At the instant something around us connects with something within us that triggers dissociation, NATURE itself — along with the human specie’s mandate to carry trauma information until someone somewhere at some time can solve the riddle so THAT won’t happen within our species again — takes over and overrides in real time our ability to be a cognizant person with free will and free choice.

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So, yes, patterns of dissociation can wreck absolute havoc with a survivor’s ongoing experience of being an individual person ‘equal to all others’.

Severe infant-child abuse survivors ARE DIFFERENT.  We carry information about terrible things that CAN and DO happen within the reality of our species.

Nobody listens.  Nobody learns a damn thing.  Nobody cares.  The trauma information gets carried forward because NATURE is NOT going to let a species member forget what ALL species members need to know.

A traumatized, maltreated, abused, neglected infant is not given any other choice but to endure the best that it can.  This endurance includes trauma altered changes to its physiological development.  From that time forward ALL early trauma survivors are not given a choice about whether or not to carry the torch that blazes with signals that this kind of trauma DOES exist in the world.

When we experience dissociation we are experiencing what it is like to carry this torch.  What was it yesterday in that conversation that caught my trauma survivor attention?  The detailed specifics no longer mattered about who the actual individual was who lit a wood fire to stay warm.  What mattered was the ability to stay warm to survive in the cold.

The detailed specifics no longer mattered about whose dog lived where.  What mattered is that dogs that are not cared for adequately by owners cause all kinds of problems and are threatening.

The detailed specifics of who these women were as individuals ceased to matter, as well.  What mattered is that they are connected and closely attached to one another and share each others lives.  Their reality is fundamentally in contrast to my own where I live alone, am alone — because I pay this price for being formed as an isolated and severely abused and traumatized tiny human being.

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Severe early trauma survivors are at risk of dissociating ALL OF THE TIME.  It is nearly a superhuman task for us to anticipate what is going to trigger the overwhelming reactions to trauma that were built into our body.

What really matters to me is that I am prevented in real time within my society from approaching my neighbor and her ‘sister’ to tell her what happened to me yesterday, and what has happened to me all of my life as a direct physiological consequence of having been born as a beautiful, whole tiny baby to a vicious psychotic mean, dangerous mad woman who was supposed to be my mother.

I cannot tell them that even my mother was a torch carrier for trauma-related information.  I cannot tell them that really awful things happened to my mother when she was tiny and that she passed trauma on down to me.

So I say all of this here and now, knowing that whatever backlash that is likely to surround me — silently and invisibly — as a result of yesterday’s social fiasco will be detectable to me.  I still have the same basic choice I have always had as a trauma survivor:  survive or don’t.

That my species does not care about the information about trauma that my body has stored and carries is NOT my problem — really.  My job is to carry this torch — and carry it I do, no matter what awkward and puzzling ways this torch sheds its information.  What matters to me is that I figure this all out the best that I can.

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