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Dissociative mechanisms
These are the psychogenic means by which I learned to induce my amnesia and form and maintain Abyss. They were once the only way I could survive, but now, they've become a really bad idea.
There are a variety of ways I keep parts of myself divided from me and feeling like other people so that I don't have to engage with them. All of them are traps. Some require more care than others to avoid.
| Dissociative mechanism | Trigger | Characteristic thought pattern | Why does this result in compartmentalization? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disavowal | Shame | “I'm disgusting and irredeemable.” | The self who judges can no longer accept being the self they judge. |
| Escape | Fear | “I need to not here right now. I need to be anywhere but here in this body in this time and place.” | The self who flees can no longer bear to be in the place of the self they leave behind. |
| Analysis | Confusion | “What's going on with me? Maybe I can figure it out if I try.” | The self who analyzes must be less confused than the self they analyze. |
| Surrender | Exhaustion | “I'm broken. I can't be fixed. I can't go on.” | A self must live on, which is now beyond the capability of the self who lived before. |
| Fictionalization | Incredulity | “There's no way that happened. That's just not possible. I must be misremembering. I must be making it up.” | One self is unable to bring themself to believe what another remembers. |
| Glorification | Grief | “Oh, poor me, woe is me, I'm so persecuted and wronged and tragic, I'm such a victim, everyone should feel sorry for me.” | The self who grieves puts the self who suffers on a narcissistic pedestal. |
| Blame | Anger | “It's your fault I'm like this, not mine.” | The self who blames refuses to take accountability for the self at fault. Functionally similar to disavowal, but the emotion is different. |
All of these are ways of “stepping outside myself to think.” Whether it's “hating myself,” or “figuring myself out,” or “putting myself on a pedestal,” or “expressing myself,” the essential problem that keeps happening over and over and over again is that I keep stepping outside myself, creating a self who stepped outside and leaving behind a self who was stepped out of.
You might notice, by the very act of writing this wiki, I'm engaging several of these at once, and that's probably not healthy either. Trust me, I'm hardly oblivious to this. So, then, why do I do it? Wish I knew.
It can be very difficult to tell the difference between dissociative mechanisms and internal communication. It's crucial to my healing process to be aware of the latter and keep track of it, but trying too hard to do so runs a high risk of invoking the prior.