Short Answer
Aka: “I’m not reading all of that, give me the gist”
When there’s enough trauma in early childhood, a complete identity can fail to form. This causes multiple identities, that may have different personalities, memories, and senses of self from each other, all inhabiting the same body.
Long Answer
What is it?
Dissociation is when ones awareness is disconnected from their environment. Think tunnel vision, fogginess, even just “zoning out”. It’s common. It’s usually caused by immediate stress, a survival mechanism. If you’ve ever had trouble remembering a stressful experience after the fact, like your brain is “blocking it out”, you’ve experienced dissociation. It’s not necessarily good, but it’s normal.
When you get to an extreme form of dissociation, you start to see the weird stuff. This is what we call a “complex dissociative disorder”. We got diagnosed with one of those disorders a year ago1 .
“Alters”, or “parts”, is the most sensationalized symptom. This is what you think of when you think of “multiple personality disorder”– the term’s no longer used, but it’s certainly evocative. Multiple identities, one body, with some level of awareness of each other.
This is what we are referring to when we say “us”.
Also significant, and somewhat connected to the former, are the memory gaps and amnesia. This can range from frequent forgetting of recent events, to confusion around dates/times/reasonings behind actions, to large memory gaps in a person’s past.
That might sound a little vague. It can look like someone greeting you on the street, with absolutely no inkling you’d ever met them. It can look like waking up on a different part of campus with no memory of how you got there, or why. Or missing chunks of memory that span years.
Why Does It Happen?
Kids can dissociate too, and kids are masters at learning new things. When a kid’s environment makes frequent dissociation necessary (usually an abusive situation), they get good at it. Really good. So good, in fact, they can compartmentalize at a level most people can’t, breaking up the bad experiences into more survivable chunks.
Unfortunately, the brains2 of very young kids aren’t fully put together yet. They’re still fusing. And when they dissociate too much, when they compartmentalize everything, their brains don’t fuse at all. The pieces, each “holding” different things, split off and grow separately.
Now, instead of one, continuous identity (which most people develop by age 5), we have a child with several identities. These are the “alters”, or “parts”, we discussed earlier.
Not only that, we have a child who has become a master of dissociation– who can do it for any scenario, at any time, more severely than most. Sometimes– because it’s become a habit– they do it when there’s no danger at all. This allows for further splitting, as well as the chronic memory gaps that make dissociative disorders so distinct and hard to pin down.
We’re not going to go into detail as to our “why”. It’s not a secret, just would be kind of weird to talk about in a university assignment. You might glean some of it from our art, though.
- Kind of– technically, we got diagnosed four months ago. There was a lot of testing involved, but our therapist knew. ↩︎
- Metaphorically, of course– not the physical brain matter. “Brain”, here, means the entirety of the conscious/unconscious mind. A more accurate term would be “psyche”, but that sounds a bit too mystical for my liking. ↩︎