Trauma and Dissociation:

How trauma and dissociation are related: Professionals working in the area of abuse and trauma are quite familiar with dissociative processes. Clients/ Patients commonly share in the context of treatment the phenomenon of separating their thoughts and emotions from the trauma that they were experiencing and/or had experienced in the past. This separation (dissociation) of one’s thoughts, emotions and even body sensations are commonly seen in traumatic disorders such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In addition, patients who are diagnosed with a dissociative disorder are often discovered to have trauma in their background. The apparent co-existence of trauma and dissociation have led many therapists to note that ‘you can’t have trauma without dissociation and that you can’t have dissociation without trauma’. There are always exceptions to this noted co-existence of trauma and dissociation, but nevertheless the phenomenon is quite commonly reported to therapists. There has even been discussion within the diagnostic community of possibly having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) listed as a dissociative disorder and thus removed from the DSM-IV category of Anxiety Disorders. (©George F. Rhoades, Jr., Ph.D. November 1, 1998, P.O. Box 1164, Pearl City, HI. 96782).

Dissociation:

The mystics (self-realised spiritualists) advise vippayutta (dissociation), wherein painful reality is transformed into a bad dream, as being the most effective means to deal with all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides and the such-like. Just as a traumatised victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, the sages and seers, the gurus and god-men/ goddess-women, the masters and messiahs, the saviours and saints, have desperately done precisely this thing (during what is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’). Mystics have been transmogrifying the real world ‘reality’ into an unreal ‘Greater Reality’ via the epiphenomenal imaginative/intuitive facility born of the psyche (which is formed by the instinctual passions genetically endowed by blind nature for survival purposes) for millennia.

Such dissociation is a psychotic sickness culturally institutionalised into a head-in-the-sand escapist ‘solution’ to all the ills of humankind ... hence the divine perpetuation of all the misery and mayhem across the millennia through a belief in maya and/or samsara and/or karma or some-such metaphysical fantasy being the cause of such aberrant behaviour. Mysticism is nothing more and nothing less than a frantic coping-mechanism, institutionalised into a cultural metaphysics over thousands and thousands of years ... especially if accompanied by dissociative states such as ‘derealisation’ or ‘alternate personality disorder’ and others. It is also known as ‘disassociation’, or ‘disassociative identity disorder’ and dissociative reactions are attempts to escape from excessive trauma tension and anxiety by separating off parts of personality function from the rest of cognition as an attempt to isolate something that arouses anxiety and gain distance from it.

For example, in normal everyday life, mild and temporary dissociation, sometimes difficult to distinguish from repression and isolation, is a relatively common and normative device used to escape from severe emotional tension and anxiety. Temporary episodes of transient estrangement and derealisation are often experienced by normal persons when they first feel the initial impact of bad news, for instance. Everything suddenly looks strange and different; things seem unnatural and distant; events can be indistinct and vaporous; often the person feels that they themselves are unreal and everything takes on a dream-like quality. Normal dissociation becomes abnormal when the once mild or transient expedient becomes too intense, lasts too long, or escapes from a person’s control ... and leads to a separation from the surroundings which seriously disturbs object relations. In object estrangement the once familiar world of ordinary objects – the world of people, things and events – seems to have undergone a disturbing and often indescribable change.

• [Richard]: ‘... ‘disassociation’, or ‘disassociative identity disorder’ are dissociative reactions or attempts to escape from excessive trauma tension and anxiety by separating off parts of personality function from the rest of cognition as an attempt to isolate something that arouses anxiety and gain distance from it. For example, in everyday life, mild and temporary dissociation, sometimes hard to distinguish from repression and isolation, is a relatively common and normal device used to escape from severe emotional tension and anxiety. Temporary episodes of transient estrangement, depersonalisation and derealisation are often experienced by normal persons when they first feel the initial impact of bad news, for instance. Everything suddenly looks strange and different; things seem unnatural and distant; events can be indistinct and vaporous; often the person feels that they themselves are unreal and everything takes on a dream-like quality’. (Richard, List B, No. 14g, 10 December 2000).

Vippayutta:

A state known as ‘vippayutta’ (dissociation) or complete object-estrangement. Viz.:

• [Mr. Gotama the Sakyan]: ‘There is that dimension where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; (...) neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis; neither passing away nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support. This, just this, is the end of dukkha. (Udana 8.1; PTS: viii.1; Nibbana Sutta).

In short it is a totally away-from-the-world non-experienceable realm in that it has nothing to do with the physical whatsoever: ‘neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind’ (no physical world); ‘neither this world nor the next world’ (no more rebirth); ‘neither earth, nor moon, nor sun’ (no solar system).

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