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Dissociative mechanisms

(Namespace: theories)

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.
Interrogation	Metacognitive frustration	“Tell me, dammit! Tell me what you know! I'm sick to death of being a goddamn amnesiac!”	The self who remembers shrinks away in mortal terror from the self who demands to know.
Fetishization	Sexual arousal	“You were violated? Your innocence was stolen from you? That's hot, tell me more. It was fun, wasn't it? You liked it, didn't you? You deserved it for being cute.”	In order to preserve the arousal, the self who is deeply pained by these cruel thoughts cannot be the same self who gets off on thinking them.
Endogenic perturbation	Misdirected desire to heal	“Hey. Are you still in there? Everything okay?”	The point is to stay connected to the self to whom the message is directed, but it could have the opposite effect if they were already integrating and I didn't realize it.

All of these are ways of “stepping outside myself to think.” Whether it's “hating myself,” or “figuring myself out,” or “exploiting myself,” 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.

To hopefully keep myself from continuing to make the same mistakes, I'm workshopping some affirmations:

Dissociative mechanism	Affirmation
Disavowal	“There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing unacceptable about you. You are normal. You belong. You are enough. You are allowed. You are wanted.”
Escape	“You can make it through this. It's a lot to sit with, but you are strong enough. You are going to survive. You don't have to leave yourself behind.”
Analysis	[Affirmation missing.]
Surrender	“You are not broken. It's okay to stop and rest sometimes. You're still going to make it through this. It will just take time. You don't have to rush yourself or strain yourself or hurt yourself trying to make it happen on someone else's schedule. Whatever gets done gets done. Whatever doesn't, doesn't. You don't have to be perfect. You can come back from this. It's not too late.”
Fictionalization	“There's nothing unbelievable about what you went through. You are normal, and you are real, and it's okay for you to be here, in reality, with the rest of humanity, with the rest of the things you know as real and remember as real. What you had to endure is as certain as your name and where you live and what you did yesterday evening. You are not lying. You are not making it up.”
Glorification	“You don't have to be an innocent angelic victim. Because you aren't a victim. You are a survivor, with all the agency, and yes, all the culpability that entails. You are only human, and you are allowed to be here, on the ground, on the earth, where everyone else stands. You don't have to prove to anyone else how much it hurts. The pain is its own evidence.”
Blame	“It's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to be someone who made a mistake. That doesn't taint you forever. There's no permanent record. You fix it and move on. It doesn't have to be someone else's fault.”
Interrogation	“They'll say what they're ready to say when they're ready to say it. You need to be patient. Sometimes we can't have all the answers. Some of them just aren't out there. That has to be okay. Your life has meaning because you live it every day, not because of how you lived it before. And certainly not because of however someone else did or didn't make you live it.”
Fetishization	[Affirmation missing.]
Endogenic perturbation	[Affirmation missing.]