Adoptive Parenting, Child Parenting - Abused Adopted Child: What Causes Dissociation?

09/21/07

Abused Adopted Child: What Causes Dissociation?

Posted by : Faith Allen in Adoptive Parenting Blog at 05:17 am , 389 words, 107 views
Categories: Dissociative Disorders

I have read numerous books to try to understand how and why dissociation happens in the first place. I have come to appreciate what an amazing gift that dissociation is to the abused adopted child. Without dissociation, an abused adopted child would have a much more difficult time surviving the trauma.

The brain stores all of our memories, and it has an elaborate filing system to enable us to retrieve our memories. For example, when I take a boat ride as an adult, that memory is "filed away" with other memories of riding on a boat as a child. The brain's "filing system" logically connects one memory to the next. A child with a "normal" childhood builds one experience on top of another, creating a "normal" memory pattern in the brain.

When a child is traumatized, there is nothing to connect with the trauma. The child's mind is "blown," and he has no prior experience to connect back the terrifying event that is now happening. So, instead of filing the memory away in a logical manner, the memory is thrown into the subconscious, where it is not connected to anything. This is why many abuse survivors have no conscious memory of the abuse. When the abuse survivor is ready to heal, these memories return in the form of flashbacks.

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Dissociation is an effective survival tool for a person enduring trauma. Dissociation enables the child to "check out" while the abuse is happening. A part of the child's soul disconnects with the experience, so the child has the illusion of being spared some of the abuse. This is why abuse survivors often recover memories from an out-of-body perspective: Those are memories that were stored in a dissociated state.

Because dissociation is a highly adaptive way to survive abuse, it only becomes a problem when the child is removed from the abusive environment. The child continues to "check out" in his head when he is triggered by anything in his environment that reminds him of the abuse. The child must consciously choose to give up this coping tool as he heals.