For me, dissociation is a way that the brain finds to remain "human" and keep its capacity to experience "positive" emotions and feelings.
In the case of a PTSD, the person will have a dissociation which "puts aside" what he has experienced inhuman (the brain failing to integrate it into his autobiographical memory) to manage to continue living despite what he or she went through.
And in the case of a dissociation of the Complex PTSD or DID type, the person will develop "dissociative parts" each having a safeguard function, a way of acting linked to the traumas experienced to ensure that the child then l adulthood can continue to hope, seek help, laugh, love, learn despite the omnipresence of violence in their daily lives.
For me, another term should be created, coined for the "dissociation" that perhaps plays out in psychopathy and perpetrators.
I see dissociation as a mechanism to keep your humanity. His own humanity and the ability to perceive humanity in others. While in the case of the perpetrators it is a "dissociation" which cuts itself off from humanity with a cut from its own "negative" feelings which are transformed into pleasures of destroying the other and a cut towards humanity. on the other hand, they don't put themselves in their victim's shoes and don't care how they feel.
In one case for me, dissociation is present for the purpose of safeguarding, protection and survival, in the other, dissociation is destructive, a story of crushing and power.
If the pros or other disassociated people have an opinion on this, I would be interested in discussing ....
Ps: when I speak of perpetrators of violence, I obviously do not put the minor victims who reproduce what is done to them to call for help nor the victims who are forced by their torturers to harm others victims. I'm talking about adults who without constraints or threats attack other people.
All this is only my own reflection and my own feelings regarding what I live internally as a DID and how I analyze my interior experience. I am not a professional and my questioning therefore does not have the value of certainty or proof. It's just a questioning.
With this publication, I would just like to highlight the fact that every day, I fight to heal, to stop the cycle of violence in my family and in my daily life. My choice of functioning, my life path is different from that of the aggressors. And it is very painful to me that professionals and society in general do not use a different term between the dissociation of perpetrators and mine. I would just like to stress this fact. I choose every day to heal myself, for years, I try not to reproduce what was done to me, not to shut myself off from others, to be able to have healthy sex with my boyfriend, to be a mother "good enough", to create bonds of friendship. .. and I find it unfair that this fight which I am leading, which is a difficult and painful choice which requires considerable energy, a force of perseverance and immense courage, is not differentiated from that of my attackers ....
Names matter, and I find it unfair that my DID, my dissociation, everything I put in place to survive, to be able to love, to be able to put myself in other people's shoes, to feel ... let all of this be put under the term "catch all" dissociation or DID. I don't function like my attackers! I am not them! And I think this should be taken into account!
My courage and my will to get out of it, the operating choices I make should be put forward.
How as a victim can I ask society for justice for what my attackers have done to me if this same society does not distinguish between my functioning, my actions and theirs in the terms used to qualify our brains, our functioning ?
Another important point:
The majority of rape victims according to studies are women or girls. So logically if it was a question of dissociation in order to take action then women or girls should represent the majority of the aggressor proportion ... so it's good that something else comes into play, isn't it? It could be "patriarchy" or "rape culture" but if you relate it to diagnostic criteria of a psychiatric disorder, there is indeed a parameter which differs, something in the dissociation which is different between the aggressors and us. ..
Psychologists or psychiatrists trained to work with a person with DID also speak of "aggressor imitating or hostile parts" present within the dissociative system.
In their way of doing things, when they intervene in therapy, they tend to scold, lecture and forbid their actions to these dissociative parties.
Here's what I feel in it when they intervene this way:
-Small parties who "rejoice" because those parties who "persecuted" them and scared them are criticized.
-shame and the feeling of being bad and of having acted badly and that reactivates the memory of rest in the mind (a kind of exorcism session that I was given) and what the guru m 'said at the time, it reinforces his words.
-shame because this vision reinforces the impression that I have to fight against an angry little girl in me, I feel ridiculous and I feel anger towards myself and shame. It reinforces my fear of showing my small or angry parts all these ways of being that were forbidden to me in the sect.
- anger with the impression that I have something in me that is bad, that I have bad actions to stop and we are angry and that also arouses internal suspicion, can I have confidence in myself? Do I have parts that I should be wary of? And it loops my worry and my suspicion during my amnesias in my present. Do any parties want to sabotage me? Maybe they did something wrong during my amnesia ... Maybe I'm like my tormentors ...
-and it reactivates my small parts which understand that the guru by raping me, with his sperm left mini him in me, I have my aggressor in me. It disgusts, it makes me feel dirty. It reactivates my depressive parts who think that we will never be able to escape him since he managed to get into our heads when we fought so hard for this not to be the case ... suddenly it comes back to say that creating all these parts was useless, it did not save me ... and it reactivates parts who believed that he could know everything, see everything ... it reinforces the belief that 'he is all powerful, may god obey him, that he knows everything ... and parts are distressed because they continue to believe that the guru knows everything and they are afraid ...
-and this reactivates our conflicts in general ... how to let them come and participate if their coming generates so many negative and unbearable emotions? How to be tolerant and attentive to the why of their actions when it arouses in me shame, guilt, anger, despair, and feelings of being dirty and bad ...?
I realize that I "criticize" and question and that I do not provide a solution ... I do not have one. I don't know how to get them to cooperate and dialogue. But that's how I feel about this way of doing things and I feel that it doesn't help me. After perhaps this is an "obligatory passage". Maybe I really have "hostile and mimic aggressor" parts and I need to confront them like this?
But it bothers me. I don't like to see my brain functioning as negative. I want to see it as something wonderfully resourceful and positive to survive the worst. I need to see it that way to accept that I am at peace with myself, stop blaming myself for what I have experienced and come together instead of continuing to dissociate ourselves. There have been so many conflicts in me that I don't want to heal myself by generating conflicts myself for it. I don't find that logical.
It remains to find how to get them to trust me and trust those around me. And I don't have an answer.
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