Dissociations of the Good Kind

Our life narratives are ongoing stories. These stories are often told differently depending on initial and later emotions, the kind of reframing utilized in managing any harms and benefits over the life span, and if we were fortunately dispositioned to begin with when using traits (see Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; McAdams, 2006; Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999 for more).

All individuals undergo a myriad of experiences. When organizing the episodes of our life, everything may not always go together. As found in a well-edited story, the patches on the quilt of our life keep on changing in shape and area. This re-organization is intended to provide a sense of coherence and comprehensibility to make life easier.

One psychological mechanism that falls across the constructive and corrosive coping dimension is dissociation. You'll attract an expression of vigilance in therapists at the mention of this term due to its association with some unsettling disorders. However, at closer probing, you'll see how commonly dissociation is found in people, particularly if your life experiences are varied and chaotically ordered, when life phases don't complement each other, or if you may have simply witnessed an accumulation of different life roles. People who have married several times, for example, know dissociation through and throughout but they'll deny knowing this if confronted. In this blog, I'll describe three of many functional forms of dissociation which help us manage our life stories. Just as a safety note, dissociation is a detachment from selectively distinct experiences which if unaddressed in extreme conditions can be harmful. Now read ahead with an open mind.

Possible dissociation in bi-cultural Individuals: When individuals move to a new cultural context, the ideal scenario is blending seamlessly; acculturation is anticipated (see Zhang & Tsai, 2006). Typically, some central norms and rules of new conduct are observed and are made part of the person's new civil sensibility. Depending on the culturally relevant contextual reminders, thinking shifts (Wang, 2008). However, in order to function well, it is not uncommon for bicultural individuals (meaning, people influenced by two main cultures) to respond to any personal or contextual challenges mainly using one cultural template depending on the type of problem. This switching of frames is not perceived as a limitation when experienced but more as a necessity because in the absence of the full cultural knowledge of the newer culture, lessons from the previous culture are used to prolong life. Surprisingly, this works wonders particularly when dealing with problems marked by no single known solution, such as in daily psychosocial adjustments, navigating through group dynamics, maintaining positive emotions in the absence of much control, and so forth.

'Survivor-to-Protector' dissociation: There was a time when I used to naively think victims and survivors of any kind look a particular way, similar to my wrong assumptions about people with mental disorders. I thought I could tell them apart from a distance by their distraught appearance. After visiting a psychological health services lounge and volunteering as a peer-advocate at Sexual Assault Services for a year as an undergraduate, I knew better. More elaborate conversations with people who have seen a difficult life, a common pattern is emergence of a later formed protector-self or what I call a 'warrior self' who takes care of the survived victim. Life events can at times destroy the previous identity beyond repair, so much so that the person may have to either borrow a previous separate and untouched identity (e.g., a phase from childhood) or give birth to a new one based on new life priorities. This kind of dissociation surely doesn't mean the full forgetting of events. However, there is definitely a change in situatedness in narrating the story of your life. In such psychological adjustment, you become the person who knew the survivor and now knows how to behave as a protector of a similar person or when challenged similarly again.

Life-role based dissociation: People may use life lessons and life stage development itself as a form of leaving any damaged identities from the past, similar to shedding off old skin as found in many animals. This may mean dissociation before or after major life events such as marriage, becoming a parent, when changing cultures, or shifting across drastically different professions, etc. Later events, however, can bring back a sudden recollection of experiences that may mimic something you may have forgotten about conveniently to protect yourself.

Some may argue this to be a revised form of recall and not dissociation entirely. However, many people also know from experience how some of these more functional forms of dissociation can generate the psychological space for better emotions when a constant consideration of impossible to change events and explanations is damaging to the mind.

References

Carstensen, L. L., & Mikels, J. A. (2005). At the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition: Aging and the Positivity Effect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 117-121.

McAdams, D. P. (2006). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by. Oxford University Press.

Pennebaker, J. W., & Seagal, J. D. (1999). Forming a story: the health benefits of narrative. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55(10), 1243–1254.

Wang, Q. (2008). Being American, being Asian: The bicultural self and autobiographical memory in Asian Americans. Cognition, 107(2), 743-751.

Zhang, Y. L., & Tsai, J. L. (2014). The assessment of acculturation, enculturation, and culture in Asian-American samples. In Guide to psychological assessment with Asians (pp. 75-101). Springer New York.