3:42pm July 1, 2014

Actually, wait, I thought of something very generalized to say about stuff that was upsetting me last night.

amorpha-system:

(Written last night.  Posted this afternoon. -S)

So our system didn’t form by dissociation. But that doesn’t mean we’ve never dissociated in response to upsetting events, as a way of dealing with them. In fact, I think when you’re plural, dissociation as a coping mechanism can work very similarly and manifest in similar ways whether your system was created by trauma or not.

I also don’t really buy the idea that spacing out on the highway is a form of dissociation. We always perceived it as… setting your brain to autopilot in a way that de-prioritizes things ending up in long-term memory. Because there really is no good reason for most people to prioritize memories of driving on I-5 in California’s Central Valley for six hours. Having your brain deprioritize memories or awareness of repetitive or unnecessary stuff is not the same as disconnecting from awareness in various ways because something bad is happening. Everything we’ve personally experienced that we would qualify as dissociation was in response to something upsetting or traumatic that was happening.

So if you don’t normally dissociate much under non-traumatic circumstances… and you go into communities where everyone or almost everyone claims they can’t hurt others because they’re so oppressed themselves… and you find yourself dissociating in ways that you don’t dissociate unless something bad is happening, ranging from total emotional detachment to depersonalization in situations that should have upset you, to blocking out memories of upsetting things you read, to finding yourself keeping unusually rigid barriers between system members in order to prevent intrusive upsetting thoughts or emotions from spilling over to people who take these things harder… well, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Something bad is going on.

And when people gaslight you about it, saying they can’t do anything to you because they’re so oppressed, or mock you for “tears” or “oversensitivity” when you experience things that are well known reactions to upsetting situations for people with a history of being traumatized… something bad is definitely going on. (Or they claim that all they do is “educational tough love.” “Educational tough love” can bite my shiny metal ass. Many of the facts presented to us on Tumblr as “YOU DON’T KNOW THIS” are stuff we’ve known since high school, since we figured out something was deeply wrong in the world and resolved to study the roots of it, partly because it would help show us why our voices were being marginalized, silenced, and not taken seriously, and how it was bound up with other types of oppression. And the stuff we learned from did not deliver the information wrapped up in verbal abuse, humiliation, or screaming tantrums.)

And when people still won’t admit that any kind of problem is present… that’s even more fucked up. When the presence of malicious hate-filled people in a community is causing you to dissociate with increasing frequency, when nothing else overtly upsetting has happened, and people deny that any such malice exists… I hope it doesn’t sound too much like the stuff we hated in oldschool MPD/DID communities if I say “No, we’re fucking dissociating because of it (and I really wish I could get off the front)— we’re a canary in a coal mine for this kind of shit, if we say it’s there, IT’S THERE.”

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