I worry it's going to effect Cloudy's growth, like with intrusive thoughts getting mixed up with hers
Zen
I cannot possibly disagree with this sentiment more. Disowning parts of yourself can and does lead to those parts of yourself no longer existing. Though as a caveat I would define your emotions as "not you" but rather stimuli from the body that you should accept, process, and understand, so take that however you will. But there is no part of your own identity itself that should be off-limits for scrutiny and alteration.
If I may play devil's advocate - sure, there may be certain parts of yourself that you may be better off without. However, accepting those parts first may be much more efficient than "disowning them"/pushing them away
Zen
I cannot possibly disagree with this sentiment more. Disowning parts of yourself can and does lead to those parts of yourself no longer existing. Though as a caveat I would define your emotions as "not you" but rather stimuli from the body that you should accept, process, and understand, so take that however you will. But there is no part of your own identity itself that should be off-limits for scrutiny and alteration.
I very much agree that if you have a hard emotion or memory, you should accept, process and understand it, that's all that therapy is about.
Disowning it is the opposite of accepting, processing and understanding it. It's more of "I don't want this to be part of me" rather than "this is not me" and I think the latter is not that harmful in minor cases.
Disowning results with not letting your brain to accept, process and understand, due to many reasons like embarrassment, shame or fear. Not letting your brain process one of your memories is not making that memory go away(edited)
I think that what you mean by disowning is detachment from emotion and memory, which helps with processing things more calmly. But you still accept it to be part of important processes happening in the brain, and that is not what I mean by disowning(edited)
I agree it's entirely a semantic difference betwixt our arguments. But to continue to try to illustrate my point because I'm secretly a masochist: I don't consider processing emotions in any way to be related to what is being discussed.
There is processing emotions healthily, and there is deciding what traits are part of your identity. The two are completely different skills in my mind, and ideally should absolutely not be done at the same time. What you're describing is emotional processing. What I am describing is identity manipulation.
Oh ok, I think I would agree with that if it's about identity. On therapy sometimes there are things that are resembling personality forcing that are helping the patient which involve changing identity traits.
I was looking at it more from the perspective of disowning parts of your life narrative with a person ending up not having a cohesive life narrative and weak sense of self(edited)
Unfastened Belts
Yes, but paradoxically, we have to disown part of ourselves (the part that is obsessed with circumstance) before it becomes possible to accept the parts of us we used to disown
I'm not sure about disowning, I think it's about detachment with the difference being what I explained above.
Interestingly inner family system therapy starts with detaching yourself from parts of you so you can work on them in similar way that Zen mentioned, but you don't disown those parts since it's an integrative approach to therapy
I disagree with it very strongly. There are no useless emotions. There might be emotions that are inconvenient to you or make you act irrationally or you feel them in inappropriate moments, but as Reguile mentioned emotions that are not useful would not even evolve.
I find it interesting that you mentioned both fear and anger as useless, while they are both mechanism of fight-flight-freeze reaction, which is one of basic survival mechanism
4:47 PM
Do you mean those emotions are useless in the modern world?
Anger is not useless, it's an important qualifier of information; but mostly not useful as a state to be in when interacting with literally anything.
Fear on the other hand is completely useless outside of niche survival situations and is actively more trouble than it's worth.
Ideally fear wouldn't happen in situations where there is no real threat. If someone has a strong fear reaction to minute threats, that's because of the experiences that taught the brain to have this kind of reaction, not because of fear. In the past, that fear might have been appropriate. But it's the situation to blame, not fear
Fight/Flight/Freeze reactions are actively detrimental apart from the adrenaline shot they give you, which actually don't require either. As someone who has been in combat situations fear and anger are distractions. Flight reactions are best moderated by reason rather than fear. And freezing is an active failure to compute a situation.
The freeze state is pre-flight or fight. It's "reactive immobility" in which you are still computing. Failure to leave the state is always a failure to compute a situation properly.
But don't get me wrong I agree that there are inappropriate levels of fear you can feel. That happens when you were conditioned by situations and those emotions you felt were not processed. They get triggered by anything that your brain associated with the situation that happened in the past
Zen
The freeze state is pre-flight or fight. It's "reactive immobility" in which you are still computing. Failure to leave the state is always a failure to compute a situation properly.
Freezing is fight-or-flight on hold, where you further prepare to protect yourself. It’s also called reactive immobility or attentive immobility. It involves similar physiological changes, but instead, you stay completely still and get ready for the next move.
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Dissociation is an adaptive response to threat and is a form of “freezing”. It is a strategy that is often used when the option of fighting or running (fleeing) is not an option. We shut down to draw less attention to ourselves
Freeze, and attempt to process danger. Fail, when the answer should be to run or fight.
5:02 PM
Think about that logically: Running is the only valid response in that situation, because obviously you are well out of your league physically and need to seek outside assistance. Freezing is not a valid response, it's passive towards the danger.
5:03 PM
Dissociation on the other hand, may be a valid response.
Dissociation is an adaptive response to threat and is a form of “freezing”. It is a strategy that is often used when the option of fighting or running (fleeing) is not an option. We shut down to draw less attention to ourselves.
5:06 PM
This
5:06 PM
Is not what the freeze response is. The freeze response is being filled with adrenaline and observing for further danger.
5:06 PM
It's a heightened state of awareness, not a dissociative one.
This is a false parallel that is being drawn. The instinct to fight/flight/flee have nothing to do with the mental gymnastics and repeated trauma that are required to even attain a dissociative state. I've experienced all three responses and I've never once dissociated during them. The dissosiation response may be a valid response to a situation but that doesn't mean it's part of that particular instinct.
Freeze is when the brain is not sure if it should fight or flight and is waiting to see how the situation develops, dissociate is when there is no way out(edited)
Indeed, but to bring it back to the original point: Freezing in the context of fear has literally no value. If you're caught during a freeze-state it means you've not yet reached a conclusion when even picking the wrong conclusion is likely to produce a better result. If we had no fight/flight/freeze response at all, we'd be better off.
It's an interesting question to consider whether or not fear is required for dissociation though in the context of trauma, though.(edited)
5:17 PM
Would trauma even be particularly possible without fear? The responses of PTSD are tied up a lot within the same emotions. Panic. The same feeling of aversive distress, but often without a clear cause that's known to anyone but the sufferer.
5:17 PM
And of course, sometimes not even then.
5:17 PM
But the emotion is the same, the physical sensation of it.
In ordinary speech, and even among physicians and psychotherapists, the word “trauma” is used to denote an extremely wide variety of events. In everyday medical practice a diagnosis of PTSD as a synonym for stress reactions of any kind is as common as it is incorrect. The term “trauma” for the diagnosis of PTSD, however, is strictly defined in psychiatric classification systems. It includes only exceptional, life-threatening or potentially life-threatening external events and those associated with serious injury, which are capable of causing a psychological shock in practically any individual to a greater or lesser extent.
The psychological consequences of less serious, non-life-threatening stresses such as a divorce, job loss, bullying, or bitter feelings about these are to be considered adjustment disorders, even if individual symptoms typical of PTSD occur.
To (probably reductively) deconstruct what PTSD does, it makes you re-experience negative things vividly and avoid reminders of it. The brain does this by reinforcing these behaviours with aversive emotions on the base level, of which fear is the most powerful and prominent. But I wonder if it's possible to experience disgust-based PTSD or something to that effect? Or even just pain-based? In the absence of fear would your mind fill the gap with pain? Re-experiencing physical events and it actually causing pain is definitely a part of PTSD.(edited)
5:34 PM
There's also the classic guilt, of course.
5:35 PM
One of my favourite aversive emotions. /s
5:35 PM
Though I'd still say all of those have more value than fear, because fear is just so... not well tuned.
5:36 PM
Anywho I'm actually supposed to be studying something else right now, rather than studying PTSD. So I'm going to go do that!
Entering uncontrolled dissociative states isn't a instinctual thing scared brains do. Period. The Flight/Freeze/Fight instinct is just that; instinctual, uncontrolled, and universal to all healthy humans. At no point in that core instinct do you experience dissociation unless you've got some sort of conditioned behaviour laying overtop that.
Even if that is your experience of fear it doesn't mean that's how the instinct is supposed to function. That's like saying a particular word causes dissociative effects because someone who has been hypnotized and given speech-based triggers for the state says they always experience dissosiation alongside that word. Ultimately the two things do not relate.
12:27 AM
Gaining a dissociative disorder via trauma, it's important to remember, cannot happen at all through one traumatic event. They require repeated trauma and conditioning. You don't dissociate the first time you experience trauma. It happens with sustained badness, unlike regular ol' PTSD.
12:28 AM
Though with conditioning you may or may not block out memories.
I mean, I've only ever seen freeze reference dissociation in part of the discussion, but granted the four F's refers to multiple things: trauma responses, motivational behaviors in mammals, and threat response.
You don't dissociate the first time you experience trauma. It happens with sustained badness, unlike regular ol' PTSD.
I don't feel like that is accurate because basically everyone dissociates to some degree and I myself have experienced reflexive dissociation to certain situations and do not even have PTSD.
12:36 AM
Also, BPD is at least in fair part driven by genetics and usually includes dissociation amongst it's symptoms.
I've dissociated during mourning or times of panic, which I've heard is normal. Some people might "go numb" and go through the motions after some shocking news. It feels like nothing is real, like any day you'll just wake up and go back to how things were before, but until then you just can't feel anything.
I consider that dissociation, and it's so common that it's a piece of advice to mourners - don't feel bad if you don't cry or don't feel anything after someone passes, it's natural.
12:42 AM
When a brain encounters something it can't comprehend, it needs to defend itself somehow. Dissociation is one of those responses. Putting distance between you and the situation you're experiencing to temporarily separate you from it can be incredibly theraputic. That numbness can help you get through an otherwise emotionally overwhelming situation.
12:44 AM
However, I don't think extended and intense disassociation is normal or healthy, and can be a sign of underlying trauma. Disassociation that affects functioning can absolutely be a sign of childhood abuse.
I have full on dissociated to the point where we walked around and talked to people somehow despite vision being blacked out. And I do not as far as I know have any type of repeated severe trauma. But I don't have a dissociative disorder either. But that doesn't mean I haven't dissociated in especially stressful situations from which I couldn't or felt I couldn't , escape.
12:45 AM
It's just not being triggered by mundane enough things to be on the level of disorder.
Also, here's a source discussing the link between childhood trauma and disassociation: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00223989909599730
Although there is a strong link for pathological disassociation, there was no correlation found between childhood trauma and non-pathological disassociation (things such as daydreaming, the 'numbness' phase of mourning, ect.)
12:48 AM
I do not currently have the information needed to state the exact difference between pathological and non-pathological disassociation, but I'd be happy to research. Either way, sorry for butting in! I'll scoot
i think we might want to get on the same page. what does it mean to dissociate, and what is full dissociation?
12:51 AM
because on one hand, almost everyone daydreams and gets lost in their head for hours making up stories and alternate universes and whatnot. that is classified as a very mild dissasociation.
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