Posted by littleone on June 13, 2006, at 21:39:30
In reply to This is so heavy for me, I feel so overwhelmed :(, posted by happyflower on June 13, 2006, at 19:43:07
Hi happyflower,
This is what I understand about splitting and dissociation.
The term "splitting" is used in a few different ways. One is a defense someone can employ where they "split" someone else into all good or all bad. For example if a child is sexually abused by her father each night, the child can actually "split" the father into the bad and nasty nighttime father and the sweet and caring day time father. The child cannot bring the two images of the father together into one for various reasons.
"Splitting" is also a term used in relation to your own ego (ie your own self) and I guess a lot of the time it is because we don't want to accept a part of ourselves. For example, rage and even anger has always terrified me and because of this I refuse to acknowledge my anger. The anger doesn't disappear. In my case a part of my ego (my self) has split off to hold and own that anger. Note that this is not DID (the old multiple personality disorder), it is more like an ego state disorder.
Dissociation is different from splitting. Think of dissociation as being a continuum, a big long line. At one end you might have common daydreaming, getting lost in a book, getting lost in your thoughts as you're driving, etc. At the other end you have Dissociative Identity Disorder. And there are a heap of different levels in between. For example, you have PTSD numbing in there, there's dissociative amnesia, fuges, the dissociative thing where you get foggy or don't feel like you're part of reality (forgot the name of it), there's DDNOS. All sorts of things. There's also the ego state disorders that some of us talk about.
So you've got this big long dissociation line and everyone falls somewhere on there. It's just a matter of where. Most people are right down at the bottom end of it with the daydreaming and whatnot. Some of us aren't. But just because you're not sitting at the bottom end, it doesn't mean you have DID. There are lots of places to sit in between the two ends.
poster:littleone
thread:656012
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060604/msgs/656661.html