Dissociation as a normal state of mind: when bad things happen, you’re just not used to it yet
This title suggests that we’re all dissociating like a bunch of raving lunatics. Of course this is a bit of an exaggeration in order to make a point, but that’s pretty much what the article is about. It explains how the trauma of everyday life and our cognitive limitations combine to pretty much force us into dissociating in a way that usually goes unrecognized. In other words, dissociation is more normal than we would like to believe and prevents us from fully digesting and coming to terms with the pain in our lives.
That’s why when you’re feeling bad about what’s happened, you’re just not used to it yet.
It’s still fresh, as if it hasn’t happened yet. You still expect people to turn up around every corner, even though they’re dead or gone.
You get flashes and images of bad things happening.
But all kinds of other images flash before your eyes too, making you feel a little crazy, because you just can’t digest it all.
Some say that this wierd state of mind is due to shock. Because shock allows people to deny reality in order to continue to act with some degree of normalcy. But I’m talking about this same state of mind when it keeps on happening, even when it keeps on happening long after the bad thing has happened.
It’s not that you’re denying the reality of the bad things that happen. You can even see the bad things happening while they’re actually happening, so it’s very real to you. But it’s also like a dream, because it seems unconnected to other stuff in the world.
It’s so real that you can even see it up close. So close and so real that you can count the pores on someone’s face just inches away from you. Yet, even while experiencing this small part of the experience, you can’t comprehend the whole of the experience. You can’t digest it all well enough to get used to it. And if you can’t get used to it, it keeps its power to keep hurting you. It still hasn’t lost its sting.
The therapies that help with this aren’t always enough to help us to get used to it completely. Desensitization techniques expose you to what makes you feel bad until it loses its sting. Until your bad feelings get tired out. Until you get so bored with the bad thing that’s happened that it isn’t so bad anymore.
While this and other therapies do help, they often don’t help enough for us to completely get used to the bad things that happen to us.
The reason is that we’re simply too stupid to completely digest the entire experience.
By stupid, I mean that we’re unable to pay attention to more than a few things at a time. This is well established in the memory literature. We can only pay attention to about seven things at a time. And a few of those slots get taken by keeping track of where we are in the world, keeping track of who we are, comparing new things with our memories of old things, and a few other housekeeping functions.
That leaves precious little left for paying attention to whatever else we’re taking in from the world. But we all know this already. In fact we’re very intimate with this stage on which we view the objects of our attention.
We think of this stage as our mind, the stage on which the contents of our consciousness keep dancing around.
These objects of our attention keep appearing on this stage, but they keep on disappearing too, because there’s only so much room up there on the stage, so that every time something new pops up onto the stage, well, then, something else has to get bumped off.
But we know this. We experience it all the time, and always have. There’s nothing in our lives that we’re more familiar with than with how few things we can keep in mind at the same time.
The particular choice of contents on that stage creates a perspective that can change dramatically when only one or two of the pieces are bumped off and replaced by other pieces. This dramatic change in perspective can make us feel almost like a different person from one hour to the next hour, or even from moment to moment.
Because we can only pay attention to so few things at once, we are doomed to take only snapshots of what is going on.
And a single snapshot can’t possibly take in the entire experience.
There’s lots of snapshots. Snapshots of the entire event from a bird’s eye point of view. And many snapshots of much more detailed slices of the experience. There are just too many snapshots to get them all on that stage together. There just isn’t enough room up there, unless we’ve only got a couple of snapshots to work with. That is, unless we are the kind of simple minded people who take only a couple of snapshots wherever we go. Which provides an oversimplified, superficial, uncomplicated experience of life without any depth, contradiction, or detail.
But many of us are overwhelmed with too many snapshots that we can’t get all connected to one another because we can only see them flashing at us a few at a time. This can be especially disconcerting and confusing when any of these snapshots contain trauma, or the power to sting and to hurt us. The problem with a traumatic snapshot is that we can’t stay focussed on it long enough for it to lose its sting because we keep getting ambushed by all kinds of other snapshots that keep bumping each other off the stage of our attentional capacity. Therefore, they remain fresh enough to carry their sting. They retain their power to hurt us, and to keep hurting us, again and yet again.
One of the reasons that these snapshots keep their sting is that there aren’t enough linkages between all of the snapshots of an entire experience. When there are hardly any linkages between one snapshot and some of the others, then it can be hard to get back to the earlier snapshot.
It’s like you forgot it. You can’t remember it. Because you can’t find your way back when there’s only one or two bridges to reach it and you’re not sure how to find your way to those bridges. It’s like a Mapquest list of directions but with a whole chunk missing.
This disconnection between snapshots, this dissociation between them, is a kind of amnesia. And when you have amnesia for one of the snapshots that hurt so much, you might even breathe a sigh of relief when it seems to have vanished.
And then you get ambushed by it when you least expect it, because something unexpected triggered a linkage to it.
It may seem that one solution to this problem is to create more linkages. You can create linkages by putting two snapshots together to see how they’re related to one another. And if you keep on doing that with different pairs of snapshots, then pretty soon you’ll be treating them as “chunks” of two snapshots, then “chunks” of three snapshots, then four, with each “chunk” becoming a snapshot in itself.
This “chunking” is the way we learn new things. It’s what we do when we rehearse things over and over until we know a whole lot of things by heart. It’s how we learn to drive a car. First you put the key into the ignition. Then you turn the key. Then you shift gears. At first, each of these steps takes all of your attention, until little by little, because you keep doing it over and over again, eventually you do it all automatically, as just a few big “chunks,” without having to give it much attention at all. In fact, you give it so little attention that you suddenly realize that you don’t know how you drove to where you are now because you’re attention has been on something else entirely. You’ve forgotten how you got there. You’ve lost your way. You’ve lost a chunk of your time. Amnesia again. Disconnection between snapshots. Dissociation.
So, then, it seems that this process of chunking doesn’t just reduce dissociation by connecting a bunch of details into a whole. It seems that all this connecting that’s going on can also lead to disconnection. To dissociation.
Which is a process that everyone experiences. We all do it. It’s the way we function. We just don’t usually think of this as dissociation. We only think of it as dissociation when it’s more extreme, like in amnesia, or flashbacks of war scenes or sex abuse or other trauma, or multiple personalities, or other exotic illnesses and disorders.
But it’s much more normal than we normally think. So maybe it might be more realistic for us to expect to that we will be doing a good amount of dissociating a lot of the time. Whether this dissociation bothers you enough to do whatever it takes to get help for it is more important than deciding if your dissociation is severe enough to figure out what the diagnosis is. It doesn’t much matter most of the time if we have an exotic mental disorder that is diagnosable. Most of us won’t bother going to all the trouble to do anything to change it. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. That’s the very reason this essay is being written. To point out a disconcerting process that is always right in front of our noses, always getting in our way, but something that we get so accustomed to that we don’t even notice how problematic it is in our processing of reality.
Another problem with this process of chunking is that the faster we do it, the more efficient we are at it. And greater efficiency means that we will use only the least amount of linkages necessary to create a new chunk of snapshots. You did this in learning your ABCs. You’ve learned the alphabet so efficiently that there aren’t enough linkages between all the letters for you to immediately know whether “k” comes before or after “o” without starting from the beginning and (A…B…C…D…E…F…G …) running through the entire alphabet to be sure of the answer to this question.
The way to learn exactly which letters go before and after each other letter is to go back and learn each little snapshot and put it next to each of the other snapshots, one by one, and, well, we just didn’t learn it that way, mainly because it wasn’t necessary and therefore wasn’t a very efficient way to learn it. So chunking all the snapshots of an experience into just a few big chunks will not by itself provide the opportunity for us to be exposed long enough to the traumatic snapshots for them to lose their sting. In fact, chunking prevents us from too much exposure to each piece of the puzzle, making it more likely that those traumatic pieces actually stay fresh enough to sting real hard.
But this does suggest that if we are serious about getting each snapshot to lose its sting that we can change our focus of attention, moving from a larger chunk to a smaller and more detailed chunk. Instead of getting into the car and just starting it up and peeling out of the driveway, we need to slow things down, to think about the fact that we first need to stick the key in the ignition, and then stop, slow down, and try to remember what we are supposed to do next. Instead of just going ahead and doing it all automatically without thinking about it.
But this is hard work. We don’t usually have the energy, time, and motivation to do all that it takes to expose ourselves for long enough to all of the detailed snapshots for them to finally become painless. But this is what exceptional people do. Like a conscientious therapy patient. Or a star athlete.
This is what a star tennis player does. He practices four basic moves, over and over again. That’s how he becomes great, by practicing the basics, not by playing a whole game, which is really what we all want to rush to get to. Actually, most things in life are the things we sort of rush to get to, so most of it is a hodgepodge of snapshots that are stuck together in some random and bizarre sort of way.
The limitations of our attention only allow for a messy little hodgepodge of snapshots. That’s why our viewpoint of things is usually missing some important pieces of the puzzle. Each of us has some sample of the entire jigsaw puzzle rather than all of the pieces because we simply can’t grasp them all at once. So all we have are a few of the puzzle pieces that we smush together because they don’t really fit together exactly the way they would if it were the complete puzzle.
That’s why people seem to have tunnel vision about most things when you really look closely at what they are saying. What they are really seeing is a kind of lopsided, bizarre viewpoint that is missing some essential, crucial ingredients. Yet, they try to act like they understand the world well enough. They act like they’re normal. They pretend that they have it all together. On the outside they appear normal. But on the inside, they have a lopsided and bizarre viewpoiint. And they don’t want people to realize how poor a grasp they really have at any given moment in time. Because it makes them feel so inadequate to fully realize this.
But it’s normal. Because that’s how we’re put together. Too stupid to grasp it all at once, too stupid to digest the entire enchilada. Only smart enough to grasp a distorted and bizarre perspective. Like the Bizarro World familiar to fans of Superman comics, another dimension of reality, like another planet, where all the familiar characters of your world are recognizable but are slightly distorted. Distorted just enough for everyone to look pretty bizarre. Hence, the Bizarro World.
It does help to account for why people who are seemingly sensible keep doing the stupidest things. Just turn on the news and watch all the normal people reporting on the world and see how crazy they really are when you listen carefully. How crazy all of us are. It helps to explain why people keep acting so crazy even while they keep pretending that they’re not, pretending that they’re normal and pretending that they really get it all. With only a few snapshots flashing before them at once, their grasp on reality is almost as shaky as the person who is in shock over the death of a loved one. Almost as precarious as the most mentally ill among us. They’re dissociating all over the place, but maybe not enough to be obvious about it.
So maybe we would be wise to get used to being kind of mixed up. Get used to having flashes of reality that bowl us over, and over, and over, again and yet again.
And maybe it’s not so unusual to keep feeling pain from those snapshots that keep ambushing us when we really shouldn’t expect anything different if we don’t put in all the time and energy that it would take for it to be any different.
It’s only natural that you’re not used to the pain in your life yet, even if it’s an old pain. That’s why you can expect that when bad things happen, you’re just not used to it yet. And it may take a while before you are used to it.
