DID: A Sane Response
The Effects of Trauma
I’m not going to go into too much depth here (I’ll save that for a future post), but I wanted to talk about how trauma affects the entire being of a person: physical, emotional, and spiritual. We know that when people go through a car accident or other trauma, their body releases hormones and chemicals so that they are able to dissociate from the pain for a time, long enough to get to a safe place. It is normal to go into a state of shock. No one blames people for that. It is a natural response to a traumatic event and allows for survival.
The same is true emotionally. During trauma, people might have a flat affect, with no emotional response, until they are in a place of safety and the trauma is over. Spiritually as well, things are truncated, with a quick prayer being lifted up, often whittled down to one word, “Help!” There is no time to process these emotions or spiritual beliefs and actions. It is a time for survival. The processing can come later.
If however, a person never reconnects physically with the pain of a broken limb so that they avoid going to the hospital, this can cause prolonged problems for them. Their daily life would be severely impacted by that limb which would not function correctly, or may even be lost because of neglect.
The same is true emotionally. If people refuse to process the event into their narrative memory, it stays raw, unprocessed traumatic memory. In this case, people are still affected by the wounded emotions because they “pop out” in every day life when people are triggered by a similar situation, like a near traffic accident. The emotions and sensations remain as raw as the day of the trauma.
Spiritually, people can get stuck too and hindered in their everyday walk with the Lord because beliefs and unmet expectations that came from the traumas are not ever admitted or resolved.
My guess is that most people reading this are very familiar with what I am describing. This probably describes what you feel on a regular basis, or what you see in your spouse, or in people who are hurting and coming for help. Most of these traumas can be resolved by the methods commonly used in psychology or ministry: CBT, talk therapy, prayer warfare, theophostic prayer, sozo, and etc.. The problem is, you may have tried most of these methods and not found relief. Or, you have tried to help a client or someone in ministry with the methods you use all the time with success, but for some reason, though there might be a little relief, it does not last.
The Spectrum and Normalcy of Dissociation:
As mentioned above, it is a normal human response to trauma to dissociate away from the pain of it. The first line of defense after the initial traumatic event is over is to use some form of denial to try to manage the pain, fear, grief, rage, and more related to the event. Denial can look like focusing on blame in order to minimize the complexity of all the aspects of the traumatic event. It is normal to place all the blame on ourselves, or place all of the blame on someone else. It is also normal to minimize the impact of the event, trying to move on as though everything is “just fine.” In more extreme cases, or when things happened at a young age, there can even be complete denial that the event ever happened.
Part of the reason for this is the cognitive dissonance that a person has to wrestle with in order to come to terms with what happened to them. I think a good example of this is what you can find in the life stories of Holocaust survivors. I’ve read accounts where they say something to the effect of, “I was one child before I went to the concentration camps, a different child lived through the camps, and I am a different person now from either of those.”
As human beings, we have a difficult time reconciling inside our minds and hearts the “two worlds” that we find when we come face to face with trauma. One world is relatively safe, with a few difficult situations to face, but generally nothing too bad ever happens to us or those we love. In the “other world,” the one in which the trauma occurred, it is horribly not safe, and the “two worlds” don’t seem to go together. It feels like to admit the trauma then means that the world is not a safe place anymore, and maybe God isn’t safe either.
Our minds are wired to wrestle with the questions of:
How could this have happened to me?
Why did this happen to me?
How could I have done those horrible things?
Why did God allow these things to happen to me?
Why didn’t God stop me from doing those things?
Because these questions take time to wrestle through with God and others, because the traumatic event was so bad, and because we have to live our lives day by day and don’t always have time to process things, denial is a way to try to cope, at least for the time being. It seems like it is easier to dissociate away from the trauma and pretend everything is okay. Unfortunately, this is not a long term solution (like we talked about earlier), and it is intensified when it is not adults, but children who experience chronic trauma in their developmental years.
Development of DID – Survival by “Not Knowing”:
Children are ego-centric. The world they know is the world they know and it all seems to revolve around them and happen because of them. They lack the experience, context, emotional and spiritual knowledge to be able to effectively deal with traumatic events that come up in their lives. This is why they need their parents to help them to be able to safely process the traumatic things that happen to them so that there is less chance of residual negative effects once they are grown.
Many people have “inner child wounds”, things that have stayed with them since childhood and were never resolved. Who ever heard of a perfect childhood with perfect parents and friends? Because these wounds were never addressed in childhood, they begin to affect their every day lives as adults. This leads people to come for help to resolve these wounds.
For people who develop DID, this “inner child” resolution is not so simple.
For DID to develop, children experience chronic abuse between the ages of conception to 6 or 7 years old. This abuse can be neglect, sexual, physical, emotional, or any mix of these. It could be at the hands of one person or many people, family members, or any number of people who are in their lives growing up.
One of the factors playing into the development of DID in these children (besides the chronic abuse) is that they cannot find any help or hope externally. Many of these children tried to tell an adult and were not believed or were even condemned for making such an “accusation.” In other cases, there was never a chance to try to tell anyone because their parents and their parents’ friends were all involved in the abuses.
In any case, children are left without recourse in terms of escaping the horrors of the abuses happening in their lives. There are no people outside of themselves to whom they can turn to find safety, comfort, or at least hope for escape. People cannot live without hope, so when there is no hope of escape coming from outside of themselves in other people, children escape into their minds instead.
Children who are able to dissociate at this level are usually creative and intelligent. There is overwhelming cognitive dissonance from the traumatic world they live in. They cannot handle the disparity of living in one world where they need to believe they have moms and dads who love them, function at school, have friends, and grow up to have careers and families, and also live in what seems to be another world where they are neglected or abused on a regular basis, often by their parents, relatives, or friends of the family.
In order to survive, have hope, and not go crazy, these children learn to compartmentalize the various roles that they need to play in their lives. That way, the trauma gets “dispersed” amongst the various compartmentalized “parts” of the person so that the core, the essence, the heart of the person is protected until he or she has grown up and it is time to face the reality of the past.
Although the core splitting and many other parts of people with DID are formed between birth and 6 or 7 years old, once people are able to dissociate in that manner, they can continue to spontaneously (and unknowingly) create parts to help them deal with new abuses, abusers, or stressors in their lives such as starting a new job, getting married, or having children.
Phenomenology of DID
The phenomenology (the way people perceive the world) of people with DID can be put into broad categories which can help others who are not DID to see the rationality of the survival method, though it happens spontaneously in the midst of the trauma:
People have parts where they believe they have never experienced abuses.
The parts who are active in every day life often have no recollection of the abuses at all and think their childhoods were ideal. They might have an uneasy feeling that something is wrong with them, especially as time goes on and they don’t know why they feel so anxious, depressed, suicidal, have eating disorders, are emotionally volatile, and more. This is what usually leads them to seek counseling or ministry.
The parts who hold the anger at the abusers and may also have abused others. The original splitting that happens is here where there is anger at the injustice of the abuse which is compartmentalized and split off of the original little girl or boy who was being abused. This is where the defiant, “Not me!” cry of the heart is made. The children cannot reconcile in their minds that the abuses are happening and resolve to be tough so that no one will ever touch them again. They don’t realize because of the amnesiac walls that are there from dissociation that they are still being abused. The terror, pain, and other consequences of the abuses are just held in other parts of their psyche.
People also have parts where they hold aspects of the traumas in their lives.
Some parts may hold the visual aspects of the trauma, some the sounds, some the pain, some the emotions, etc. This can be the case for every type of abuses that they suffer, thus dispersing the pain of each one across many part. These parts are usually “stuck in time” where they present as younger than the physical age of people, and usually very young, under the age of 6 years old.
Finally, people have parts where they know about the traumas in their lives which happened to “the others” but do not believe it happened to them.
These are usually the parts “in the middle”, the “protectors” of sorts, whose job it is to keep the DID system in place so that the “not know” strategy of survival can continue.
Healing from DID - Integration Process
All of these parts in a DID system are protecting the essence of the person who God originally breathed into existence at conception. All of these parts split off from this original essence of the person. The work of healing from DID involves conflict resolution, repentance, and growth in the Lord so that people are more and more willing to connect with that original essence again. They have lived a life of “not knowing” what happened to them. The healing work requires trusting in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ in ways they never have before.
Doug Riggs, the pastor who counseled me, said that if people are only coming to get help with DID because they want to feel better, they aren’t going to make it all the way through. Things are going to get more chaotic and more painful as the DID system breaks down and the integration process begins. The real reason to integrate is to be able to willingly present themselves wholly to God. God wants us to love Him with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength. People with DID cannot do that. Their hearts are divided. The choice to heal means offering their whole hearts to God by faith, even though they don’t feel like they can do that because of the dissociation, and trust the Lord to lead them through the process, whatever it takes and no matter the cost. Because Jesus Christ is so worthy, no cost is too much. He is worth it.
If you would like to read or listen to Doug Riggs, click here.
If you would like to contact us to see if we can help: survivors, click here and pastors/leaders, click here.
