The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 66 of 254
Dissociation as a coping mechanism
According to Smith, and many other DID experts, the vast majority of cases begin with severe childhood abuse. Dissociation is essentially a coping mechanism for tolerating the intolerable. In a strange way it is entirely rational. If you have the thought ‘this can’t be happening to me’, the logical corollary of this is ‘this is happening to someone else’. If you think ‘I can’t bear this’, then conjure up somebody else to cope with it for you. Most of us are familiar with less extreme versions of strategies like this. The introvert who hates social functions may create an outgoing persona, a pretence that can just be kept up long enough to get through the horrors of a hosting a dinner party. Someone who has to do an unpleasant job can see putting on their work clothes – or taking them off – as representing a line between the real self and a role that has to be taken on. In most such cases, the roles we take on are clearly understood as roles. There is no radical dissociation between the ‘real self’ and the temporary facade. What makes DID qualitatively different is that the separation goes right to the bottom of the conscious self. A ‘memory barrier’ is erected between the alters, so that the memories, thoughts and actions of the alters become entirely separated from each other. So in the paradigmatic case, the victim of the abuse becomes an alter whose experiences and painful memories are not shared with the other alter or alters.