Understanding Dissociation

Much of our lives are details of events: little snapshots in time which often become a part of what can only be defined as a museum of memory. In my understanding, these details can be as random as it gets, picked out from what can only be described as a giant mass of experience. Some of us remember things we don’t wish to, forget what we wish we had not. Childhood, in itself, is as chaotic as what remains of it: there is trauma, there is glee, there are all shades of everything. In such a degree, we can only conclude our identities are constantly shaped by your ability to remember and our ability to forget: and it is this which guides us.

This understanding maybe too textbook-y and skewed, but the idea remains to centralise on the notion of trauma, and the way it relates to memory formation. To go into some instances, one can talk about childhood trafficking, a social issue closely connected to childhood abuse and violence. Or, say, living in a broken home, or being a victim of assault, or even something as simple as being under a lot of stress. The kind of trauma derivative of undergoing such an experience leaves one not just scarred, but has an effect on their coping abilities. This coping can either be active, passive, or something which can be defined as a combination of the two: dissociative.

Dissociation can be described as ability, a disorder, or an experience. What it encompasses is a wide range of experiences, which can range from a separation of the traumatic event from one’s memory and severe amnesia, to losing sight of the self and one’s identity.

In its mildest form, dissociation is a detachment from events, from one’s surroundings, from people or friends due to the stress received. At its worst, dissociation can become a severe mental disorder and lead one to a state of non-identity, or where the self seems to have separated into two, with one lying dormant and the other performing.

Dissociation is largely a reaction to trauma, but also one that grounds itself in the imagination. However, it is not the disorder which we seek to highlight, but how dissociation figures in small degrees in our lives: a state where we might disremember events, feign detachment from friends and family, and become obsessed with our notions of self due to the largely detached nature of all our social media communications.

Our virtual world is also a texting world – and in this role, it is also a world of theatricality and performance. The landscape of texting allows us not only opportunities to create completely different selves, but also to develop a detachment from those whose identities we limit to the text and emoticons we perhaps see on our mobile screens. The actuality of the experiential, the realness of feeling, becomes a thing of artifice. Within this artifice, develops dissociation.

Dissociation as a phenomenon makes little appearances within our behavioural patterns – it can either be toning down on the toxic parts of the relationship to keep it going, to misremembering events which might’ve been humiliating or embarrassing to the self to lower the damage to one’s esteem.

This is a fact well-known: each time you look back on something, you remember some detail or the other differently until perhaps the entirety of it changes. In this sense, dissociation can be a life skill. It can be a coping mechanism. It can, in short, be the tool of keeping yourself going.

However, in extreme forms, our abilities to detach ourselves emotionally from things which are disruptive to us can lead us to places which are disruptive to our lives. Most people with extreme dissociation talk about two selves: the unemotional takes over in all social experiences, while the emotional tends to lie dormant inside. If not this, then amnesia of identity is talked about – wherein there is no sense of identity, only a distant dream of once having been a person. No one quite releases the effects of this: how the lack of an identity can rob you of yourself, of your own person, of your individuality. No one quite knows about this disorder, much less talk about it. And, as expected, no one quite knows how to cure it either. In such a state, discourse becomes key and the instrument of “change,” however vague our approach to change may be.

Smriti Verma