Dissociation in childhood trauma: my experience

The experience described is very close to the childhood trauma response in people I am close to and have talked extensively about. The following relates my understanding and experience of this kind of thing, but is by no means universal

The dissociation begins as a defensive mechanism for "not knowing" about the abuse, but over time, it can provide a black hole for putting away all kinds of stress and struggle, allowing some people to operate at incredibly high intellectual levels and go through immensely stressful situations with apparently incredible endurance. However, throughout this time, sometimes interacting with them, I would see they can have an almost robotic affect (I understand that this is when the dissociation is happening in real time). One thing that confused me was that if this happens in the transit to adulthood, it's hard to distinguish the dissociative affect from changes attributable to the process of growing up.

The catch is that all that badness is not gone, just sealed away, like a cyst. At some point, something causes it to crack open. This is the most painful and confusing time for everyone involved because the change the person undergoes can be rapid, dramatic, and unexpected.

The good news is that with time, patience, and most of all, therapy, there can be healing. For the abuse survivor, this is mainly finding ways to manage the trauma response, reconnect to their body and physical experience, and establish steady rhythms in life and in their relationships. That incredible endurance may be replaced with a normal, healthy drive to do things productively balanced with a desire for rest and downtime. Interactions with them can become warm and connecting in new ways.

As the person adjacent to and supporting this experience and recovery, here are my thoughts about what I learned:

• I needed my own therapist to help me understand my own feelings about the situation and deal with them on my own, not putting that burden on the person going through trauma recovery.
• I could not be the therapist for the person recovering from trauma. They need actual professional help, and it was not something I could provide even though I had an impulse to help.
• Learning about trauma response and what it is like to recover from trauma is helpful but I had to realize that my knowledge will always be an intellectual exercise to try to understand something that's happening viscerally for that person. The closest I think I have ever come to really understanding was when it was described to me this way:

You know how when you break something made of glass and you have to pick the broken pieces up carefully so you can carry them to the trash without cutting yourself? That's how it is uncovering bits of the trauma, but there's no trash can to throw them away in, the person just has to learn how to carefully hold them and try not to cut themselves. Now imagine that the glass was broken over shag carpeting, so that even after you've picked up the big pieces, smaller bits are constantly showing up unexpectedly, forever.

• It can be confusing for the abuse to show up all the sudden, but doubt about whether it happened only causes an obstruction in rebuilding relationships. I practiced a kind of radical acceptance that was coupled with an understanding that there was no way I was ever going to understand their experience, so there was no place for me to offer judgment, only support.
• Not everyone in the trauma victim's life will respond positively to the way they are changing, and that can cause incredible strife in those relationships. I have been in a place where I was uniquely positioned to help repair those relationships, but doing so had a great personal cost in my own well being.
• I want to emphasize that I only pursued reconciliation because there was a genuine desire to reconnect from both sides but a mismatch in expectation. That's entirely different from trying to keep someone in a relationship that's harming them or that people think they should pursue out of some sense of social propriety or familial duty. The latter should be recognized and avoided, even if it is painful.
• In the end, you can't force anyone to change their mind, so mediating that kind of thing is like being asked to manage people without being given authority over them, but turned up to eleven. Some of this work was worth the cost to me because those relationships were important to me, but even with that, eventually I had to draw a line and say, "I've done all I can do to help you understand each other. Now it is up to you to decide whether you can make the changes necessary and reconnect." I think removing myself as a crutch/go–between actually made space for people to move forward in their own. It ended positively for me, but could easily have gone the other way (e.g. the relationship crumbles), and I would have had to accept that as well.
• to summarize the last few points, if you embark on that kind of reconciliation journey, make sure it is not perpetuating a harmful relationship, try to recognize when you've done all you can and get out of the way, and finally, know that there may not be success at the end and that you will have to accept that.

If anyone is looking for more resources, a book that has been recommended to me in this space is The Body Keeps the Score.