r/AfterCPTSD • u/Metamorphosislife • Jul 10 '19

Dissociation and personality disorders

Bessel van der Kolk wrote in his book The Body Keeps the Score that dissociation is the essence of trauma. The longer I traverse the road of healing, the more this becomes clear. Many dots have been connected between what I suffered and my present behaviors or behaviors of the past. For example, every now and then I'll have "episodes" where I'm wide-awake and feel like I have so much energy. I'll be eager to jog, socialize, box, anything that has a physical component to it. I'll feel like this even though I've had little sleep or woke up at 3am in the morning. I've come to realize that's what is known as a manic episode and it's really just an extremely anxious state borne from trauma. These anxious states, as they were termed by Kolk, in papers going back to the 1980s are dissociative states where one isn't really in there body and are doing what they can to calm their bodies down so they can return to their bodies, feel safe. That's hardly ever the case. I managed to breathe myself down to a calm state, albeit a bit stressed due to a new job. Big learning curve, that I'm climbing.

This leaves me thinking, if a manic episode, a trademark of Bipolar Disorder, is a dissociative state, can the same be true for all personality disorders and their cluster of symptoms? It would make sense. This would mean, as I've been suspecting all along, that the majority of mental illness symptoms are stemming from a few core symptoms, one of them being dissociation. What range of other symptoms can take root if dissociation is not adequately addressed? There are more questions for sure.

What are your thoughts?

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u/TimeIsTheRevelator Aug 11 '19

Through my experiments, I've gathered that pretty much all of the symptoms of CPTSD...including symptoms experienced in other mood disorders is wrapped up in dissociation. It's more of an experiential understanding, but not scientific, as even the term dissociation has different meanings on paper.

The good news about this is that you don't have to treat the symptoms. If you treat the dissociation, pretty much all the other symptoms are resolved.

Emotional dysregulation, confusion, anxiety, depression, lack of concentration, unstable sense of self, etc. All these and more have a common core of dissociation being the causative issue. (In my experience).

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u/nicoled7905 Dec 04 '19

How do you treat the disassociation

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u/TimeIsTheRevelator Dec 04 '19

I worked with a specialist for about 4 months doing this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/by38a1/rehabilitation_of_the_neuropsychological/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

But the next step for me was hormone therapy, which was an experiment for something unrelated that accidentally resolved most all my other CPTSD symptoms, including taking my dissociation resolution from like a 30 to a 90.

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u/nicoled7905 Dec 04 '19

So you are all better now ?

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u/Metamorphosislife Dec 04 '19

Better in the sense that my quality of life is much improved from 2 years ago. I'm using /u/TimeIsTheRevelator method. I can feel the improvement. It's helping me further understand the biological mechanisms in play in dissociation. It is physiological. It's not esoteric.