"SPACING OUT" -- DISSOCIATION

Multiple identities

Why isn't it an advantage?

Maybe it is.

The kids used to call it “spacing out.”  They would say, “I’m spacing on what an adverb is.”  Or “he’s a space cadet.”  And if I lost my line of thought, “You’re spacing out, Mrs. Scriver.”  Usually interpreted as a kind of loss of consciousness, it’s really more like an electrical brownout when something is sapping all the energy before it gets to the normal goal.  If we all knew about it, it must be more common than people think.  Maybe it's a matter of how intense it is.

Human society, just like other animal societies, often keeps order through peer pressure.  If someone is acting a little different or responding to causes other people can’t sense, they may be challenged or even punished.  They might be accused of deliberately making trouble.  Teachers who watch a set of students in a classroom see faces that might show daydreaming or might demonstrate a petit mal seizure.  Unsophisticated teachers will not know the difference and may react in damaging ways.  Likewise the other students. 

It’s possible that dissociation might be produced organically in the brain: malfunctioning electro-chemistry in synapses, molecules missing atoms or folded wrongly, outside chemistries interfering (drugs), rhythms garbled.  If the phenomenon is happens a lot and interferes, it probably ought to be investigated medically.  The intense hormonal changes of pregnancy or the drastic introduction of chemotherapy can induce “fog” to thinking or even throw the person into another interior reality.

If the “under mind” is wrestling with strong feelings or ideas or new information that needs to be resolved, it can put everything else on hold.  Onstage an actor knows this and when depicting something powerful will not move for a few seconds to show that everything is going to processing.  We recognize this.

Years ago I paid a counselor to talk me out of going into the ministry.  She failed.  (She also lost her marriage and became a torch singer.)  Sometimes when we were talking, she would ask what she had said and what it meant to me — because she said I suddenly looked as though she were speaking Chinese.  She taught me that it meant that I was “spacing” because she had said something I needed to process.  She taught me to try to recognize what had just happened and therefore to explicitly ask for time to process the feelings.  This works.  It appears that I pick up more information and emotion than I can keep up with, esp. in meaningful situations.  This was probably the most important thing she taught me.

Sometimes one can actually feel through the autonomic nervous system the emotion thrashing away in the breathing, heartbeat and other viscera.  Sometimes it is like entities wrestling with each other and sometimes, if the tip of a tentacle appears in the consciousness, one can seize it and pull it out for observation.  This can happen in therapy, in dreams, and in poetry.  Metaphors help.

"Would you marry me?"

My movie last night was “The Golden Door,” an Italian film about emigration to America at the turn of the 19th century.  (Excellent!)  The protagonist has been told that in America there are rivers of milk and he quite likes the idea.  We are shown what he imagines as if it were an actuality.  We are used to this in movies since so many show “flashbacks” and the like — a glimpse of another reality and then a return to the mainstream.  In fact, modern life in the “fast lane” is so tachistoscopic and mixed-context that we easily recognize it.  

In older movies, people are sometimes depicted as losing control and even contact with reality when something traumatic and intense happens.  The another character (usually a man) will slap the dissociating person (usually a woman) across the face and she will say, “Thanks, I needed that.”  This is not recommended.

Consciousness is honored and privileged so much that we lose the value of being attentive to feelings, so that part of the brain, even in the forebrain, is suppressed. But it’s as though the metaphorical “operating platform” is the site of a riot of concepts that cannot produce anything ready for consciousness.  At least not daily conventional consciousness.

The Five Dissociative Disorders

The SCID-D can identify whether a person is experiencing one of the five types of dissociative disorders. The first four are 

dissociative amnesia, 

dissociative fugue, 

depersonalization disorder and 

dissociative identity disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder). 

The fifth type of dissociative disorder, called dissociative disorder, not otherwise specified, occurs when a dissociative disorder is clearly present, but the symptoms do not meet the criteria for the previous four.

The five disorders can be distinguished from one another by the nature and duration of their stressors, as well as the type and severity of the symptoms. A brief review of each dissociative disorder is presented below.

Dissociative Amnesia

A defining characteristic of dissociative, amnesia is the inability to recall important personal information. This common dissociative disorder is regularly encountered in hospital emergency rooms and is usually caused by a single stressful event. Dissociative amnesia is often seen in the victims of single severe traumas such as an automobile accident (forgotten details might include one's actions immediately before an auto accident in which the person with the disorder was involved). The condition is often seen in wartime; witnessing a violent crime or encountering a natural disaster may also trigger dissociative amnesia.

Dissociative Fugue

Like dissociative amnesia, dissociative, fugue also is characterized by sudden onset resulting from a single severe traumatic event. Unlike dissociative amnesia, however, dissociative fugue may involve the creation of a new, either partial or complete, identity to replace the personal details that are lost in response to the trauma. A person with this disorder will remain alert and oriented, yet be unconnected to the former identity. Dissociative fugue may also be characterized by sudden, unplanned wandering from home or work. Typically, the condition consists of a single episode without recurrence, and recovery is often spontaneous and rapid.

Depersonalization Disorder
The distinguishing characteristic of depersonalization disorder is the feeling that one is going through the motions of life, or that one's body or self is disconnected or unreal. Mind or body may be perceived as unattached, seen from a distance, existing in a dream, or mechanical. Such experiences are persistent and recurrent, and lead to distress and dysfunction. Chronic depersonalization is commonly accompanied by "derealization," the feeling that features of the environment are illusory. It should be noted that characteristics attributed to depersonalization disorder must be independent of any kind of substance abuse. It should also be noted that depersonalization as an isolated symptom may appear within the context of a wide variety of major psychiatric disorders. For example, mild episodes of depersonalization in otherwise normally functioning individuals have been reported following alcohol use, sensory deprivation, mild social or emotional stress or sleep deprivation, and as a side effect to medications. However, severe depersonalization is considered to be present only if the sense of detachment associated with the disorder is recurrent and predominant.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously called Multiple Personality Disorder)

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) occurs in people with varied backgrounds, educational levels, and from all walks of life. DID is believed to follow severe trauma including persistent psychological, physical, or sexual abuse during one’s childhood. In this condition, distinct, coherent identities exist within one individual and are able to assume control of the person's behavior and thought (American Psychiatric Association, 1987). Unlike depictions in sensationalistic movies, most people with DID do not have dramatic shifts in personality and only persons very close to them are aware of mood swings.  In DID, the patient experiences amnesia for personal information, including some of the identities and activities of alternate personalities. Some people with DID experience subtle memory problems, and may only appear to have memory problems associated with attention deficit disorder. 

 DID is often difficult to detect without the use of specialized interviews and/or tests, due to: 

1) the hidden nature of the dissociative symptoms, and 

2) the coexistence of depression, anxiety, or substance abuse which may mask the dissociative symptoms, and 

3) feelings of disconnection that are often difficult to verbalize.

Because people with DID may experience depression, mood swings, anxiety, inattention, transient psychotic like states, and may self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, they are frequently diagnosed as having solely bipolar disorder, major depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety disorders, psychotic or substance abuse disorders. Studies indicate that previous diagnoses in these areas are common to people with DID. 

It is not uncommon for a decade or more to pass before a correct assessment of DID is made. Research with the Structured Clinical Interview for Dissociative Disorders has identified five distinct dissociative symptoms experienced in individuals who have DID (see section above, Five Dissociative Symptoms.) 

Though DID is the most severe of the dissociative disorders, this disorder  can respond well to specialized psychotherapy which focuses on understanding the dissociative symptoms and developing new constructive ways of coping with stress.  Medication can be used as an adjunct to psychotherapy, but is not the primary form of treatment.

Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified

Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS) is an inclusive category for classifying dissociative syndromes that do not meet the full criteria of any of the other dissociative disorders. A person diagnosed with Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS) typically displays characteristics very similar to some of the previously discussed dissociative disorders, but not severe enough to receive their diagnoses. DDNOS includes variants of Dissociative Identity Disorder in which personality "states" may take over consciousness and behavior but are not sufficiently distinct, and variants of Dissociative identity disorder in which there is no amnesia for personal information. 

Other forms of DDNOS include possession and trance states, Ganser's syndrome, derealization unaccompanied by depersonalization, dissociated states in people who have undergone intense coercive persuasion (e.g., brainwashing, kidnapping), and loss of consciousness not attributed to a medical condition.

Naive persons will often interpret consciousness changes as balkiness or not paying attention.  Therefore the first descriptions of syndromes or disorders are often pejorative.  People will shout, possibly strike, and exclude those who exhibit this behavior.  Or if it’s mild, they may deny it, refuse to admit it exists.

Ganser syndrome is a rare dissociative disorder previously classified as a factitious disorder. It is characterized by nonsensical or wrong answers to questions or doing things incorrectly, other dissociative symptoms such as fugue, amnesia or conversion disorder, often with visual pseudohallucinations and a decreased state of consciousness. It is also sometimes called nonsense syndrome, balderdash syndrome, syndrome of approximate answers, pseudodementia, hysterical pseudodementia or prison psychosis. This last name, prison psychosis, is sometimes used because the syndrome occurs most frequently in prison inmates, where it may represent an attempt to gain leniency from prison or court officials.

__________

The examples given of Ganser Syndrome are not very enlightening.  “When asked how many legs a horse has, they will answer five, which shows that they understand the question and are close to the right answer.”  I don’t think that demonstrates anything of the kind.  It could be anything from neurological inaccuracy to a creative definition of “legs.”  Also, I would not discount the Alzheimer’s patients tendency to give teasing or deflecting answers to hide problems that are worrisome, undefined by the person suffering from them.

Emigration "The Golden Door"

In “The Golden Door,” officials try to test the Italian-speaking peasants to see if they are sane and competent.  They ask, “how many legs does a horse have?”  The confused peasants can’t figure out why anyone would ask such a thing when it’s perfectly obvious.  In the tangle of conflicting realities, injustice appears and fearful indignation on all sides.  

This is in miniature what many nations are facing with waves of immigration.  We face it in classrooms and court rooms daily because separate generations are as different as separate national origins.

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

Brian Kahn is a handsome, broad-shouldered lawyer married to a beautiful artist.  He runs an organization of inquiry and advocacy.  http://www.thelastlink.org/artemis/artemis.html.   He’s from California, but I try not to hold it against him.  (I’m in Montana, but too far north in the state for him to visit.  Anyway not in winter.)  He has a weekly public radio interview show, which is archived online. You can listen to it by streaming Yellowstone Public Radio or by going to the archive. Here's the link:  http://www.yellowstonepublicradio.org/programs/local/home_ground.html   

Last night’s program (Dec. 3) was about Montana kids defined as “crazy” when in fact it is their families who are insane if not in jail.  Brian interviewed two female clinical psych workers who constantly work to “wrap around” these families and get them operating again.  They say,  “We don’t push them away.  We pull them in close to talk to them, even if they kick us in the shins.  We want to know them.”  They try to avoid meds.

They presented a composite story of a young woman with all the “ten indicators” of psychosis and explained them.  (The list I found online has 11.  Same stuff.)  They do what is sometimes called “acting out.”  Often the kids will replicate what troubles them: assaults, forced sex, stealing, lying, fantasy, running away, destruction, drinking, drugs.

http://www.livescience.com/35938-mental-illness-children-warning-signs.html

• Feeling very sad or withdrawn for two or more weeks
• Seriously trying to harm or kill yourself, or making plans to do so
• Sudden overwhelming fear for no reason, sometimes with a racing heart or fast breathing
• Involved in multiple fights, using a weapon, or wanting badly to hurt others
• Severe, out- of-control behavior that can hurt yourself or others
• Not eating, throwing up or using laxatives to make yourself lose weight
• Intensive worries or fears that get in the way of daily activities
• Extreme difficulty in concentrating or staying still that puts you in physical danger or causes school failure
• Repeated use of drugs or alcohol
• Severe mood swings that cause problems in relationships
• Drastic changes in your behavior or personality

Sometimes I respond to Brian and he always acknowledges it.  This time I said:  “Our culture itself is abusive:  we require things that are not possible, we punish their failure with violence and confinement, we are all obsessed with sex defined as domination, and we wonder why marriages fail.  Money is the measure of all things.

“Who 'wraps around' a culture?  Religion?  Government?  Media?

“If Pope Francis can take it on, why can't we?   The planet may be turning.”

In response, Brian sent me a copy of  Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today's World (24 November 2013)  which has flipped the Catholic world on its ear with surprise and on its face with gratitude!   Pope Francis has captured the flag. 

I replied to Brian:

"Yes, I've been following Francis and the talk about him.  Because of having been a minister and because of being an alumni of the U of Chicago Divinity School, I'm on mailing lists that follow discussion of any and all new developments and the Pope has their full attention.

There are a few ways he needs to go even deeper, but he's certainly a powerful focus on the right issues."

The things I note below are crippling the Catholic (basically Roman) convictions.  They are far more important than who gets to be a priest (Just DO it -- you don’t have to be ordained -- and there are far more sexual orientations than male/female.)

1.  There are too many people.  We will HAVE to come to some kind of birth control.

2.  Institutions always put first their own self-perpetuation.  The only reason the Pope can talk like this is that the cardinals realize that without change the Catholics will die out -- already are except in the Southern Hemisphere. Denominations try to promote their specialness at the expense of others and by doing so, eventually devalue themselves --  indeed, the whole concept.

3.  Underneath all the dogma and talk and service to the least of these has to be an empowering connection to the nonverbal FELT sacredness of the world in all its sensory richness.  To put all the emphasis on something in "another world" where rewards are deferred until after death is a vulnerability.  To make a humongous humanoid the object of felt sacredness doesn't work for all of us.

This is the mammal that survived the dinosaurs.  That's a radio transmitter on it's neck.

Brian Kahn has clearly been thinking about evolution, but he is still seeing "survival of the fittest" in terms of power and domination.  He has forgotten the lesson of the mammal, which in its teeny furry long-nosed prey form ran between the toes of the dinosaurs and proved therefore more FIT for a new world.

At the same time that I’m talking to Brian via email, I’m talking to Helen Macdonald in Cambridge, England.   http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/people/macdonald.html  She is a professor there, a woman who flies hawks, and one of the finest writers I’ve ever read, believe me.  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Helen+Macdonald&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AHelen+Macdonald

I was going back and forth with her on Twitter where she had posted the dismaying news that peregrine falcon populations in the north are being killed by unseasonable rain, which soaks the chicks and makes them hypothermic.  This is climate change diminishing habitat.  So I asked for examples of climate change expanding habitat, because climate change is habitat change writ large.
  

Then, since when I went out to feed the feral cats there was a V of traveling geese flying low over town, I proposed a little continuum:  the birds go from one habitat to another by going north/south;  the little mammals (pikas, marmots) adapt by going to higher or lower altitudes; the poor trees cannot migrate as individuals, but perhaps as one edge of forest contracts, another expands; and humans simply change the world to suit us at the expense of all the other habitats.  (Water is the most unmanageable factor in habitats as we notice with increasing desertification and rising seas.)  

Helen notes that an expanding hawk habitat is that of the city where the hawks live on the skyscrapers and eat park pigeons.  Then she says how she loves the cry of the wild geese,  so I posted this for her:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9VrgRIgOK0 .  She didn’t know it.   Too young.  Not a big hit in her circles.  But it’s key to mine since the day it was on the radio in 1950.  (I was eleven years old.) A great cure for depression, a clear clamor for moving on.  A vital use of the Internet to time travel.

Brian is operating out of a different paradigm than I am.  He believes in organizations, rule structures, exceptional and inspired individuals, rational argument.  He replies:   “SEEMS TO ME PART OF THIS IS GETTING LOST IN THE WEEDS OF PERSONAL VIEWS WHILE IN FRONT OF YOU IS A NEW, CLEAR, GLOBAL VOICE FOR ESSENTIAL -- AND I MEAN ESSENTIAL -- ECONOMIC SANITY.”  

It’s my challenge of what is “fitness” that is too weedy and personal for him.  His personal idea of success is opposite to mine, which is to have the freedom to be poor and write all day -- NO meetings!!  More of a bird-watcher approach.  I propose that what is endangered in one place is the “fittest” in another.  It may be that “psychotic” and delinquent kids who have been annealed in a family fire will be the ones who are tough and devious enough to create a culture that protects the hawk in the arctic as well as the child in the streets.   

The habitat of the human being is impalpable and ineffable and unpredictable.  It is here.  It is a song sung long ago but preserved in human hearts and technology.

Brian says:

I'm amazed you found that 10+-year old site.  It was created for a film and is obsolete, including the contact info.

In my view,  you have not accurately summarized what I believe in.  I don't remember if you've read my book, REAL COMMON SENSE -- it says what I believe. 

SALVATION AS PARTICIPATION

I’m a little nervous.  I’ve signed up for a Great Falls HIV-AIDS Outreach workshop next week.  I haven’t been an activist for years -- maybe decades.  If anyone says “committee,” I’ll bolt.  It’s not that I fantasize I might catch HIV.  What do you think these workshops are like???  Hep C is a much greater danger in a public group and there’s a lot of it around here, but not much HIV -- so far as anyone knows.  Our local attention is rather on immature young men who abuse their girl friends’ infants and toddlers, occasionally killing them.  The stats show few cases of HIV in Montana, but there a few sequestered populations that probably don’t show up in the data.  One is Malmstrom Air Force Base, one is the reservation populations (Indian Health Service) and another is probably post-prison felons.  

Otherwise most of the HIV cases are around the universities -- not just students but also the fellow travelers who hang around campuses, esp. IV drug peddlers.  Of course, University of Montana has attracted attention for cases of rape, including urban athlete recruits from the rough parts of eastern cities.  These days even nice ranch girls have defined anal and oral sex as somehow “not sex.”  Low income women dependent on men (maybe only emotionally) will accept bad treatment of all kinds esp. when both are drunk.  These days HIV is not homosexual -- it’s human.  The pattern is the same as tuberculosis or polio: under-lain by poverty, poor nutrition, housing shortage, mixed populations, lack of education or skills.

When I taught on the rez over the past decades, I had to take a tuberculosis anti-body test because the “bug” moves as aerosol and most schools have closed ventilation systems that recycle rather than pulling in outside air.  For a while I got false positives.  When I was ward clerk at a nearby nursing home, the lead nurse was sweating out an eye-splash she’d gotten while working in an OR elsewhere.  There was no known HIV on the premises, but many stories about Hep C.  (The nurse was spared HIV.)  The first AIDS death of someone I knew was a fellow UU minister, a handsome young man whose father was a denominational leader and whose male partner was an MD.  

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I leap from the particular to the universal.  Therefore, what I see in this virus is a call to theology -- one of the many needles and shuttles that connect us with threads.  This web has powered my shift from an understanding of salvation as personal and individual eternal life in some other place (as I was taught in Presbyterian sunday school), to awareness of eternal life as a fabulous shifting code pattern in which we participate through the phenomenon of consciousness -- our ability to reflect and enjoy.  This is Eastern and Native American thought, which are contexts that were spared the Roman Empire as well as the Abramic paternalistic worldview.  It’s not “New Age.”   It’s scientific.  It’s the cosmology of those who are aware of the evidence.  

Like every other threat to existing prosperity, HIV-AIDS is virulently attacked by the representatives of the status quo -- which use as disguises the imported dogma of the Mediterranean, filtered through battles for dominance in Europe, and temporarily successful domination of the Americas.  These forces (call them right wing or ultra-conservative) are really about owning and controlling.  They are propelled by fear.

A key concept of participation-based wholistic life rather than preservation-based personal life is that there is no birth and no death -- one’s consciousness is simply received and then surrendered.  Use the body as you will, while you may, to traverse the web as you encounter it.  This is so different that it has penetrated [sic] many people on this planet without those who are preoccupied with getting-and-spending even perceiving it.  But children can see and feel this universal sense of the world.  

Yesterday on www.hereandnow.org  Matt Damon’s mom, who is an expert on child development, discussed the impact of so much “dark” violence in our media, esp. since her son is pretty deep into it.  http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/02/21/video-games-guns The question is in part why ordinary nice suburban kids are so attracted to these sexualized, monstrous, terrifying images.  If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have to ban them. Since nice suburban moms with good incomes are discussing the issues, they miss the most obvious fact:  many (maybe most if you include the Third World) kids right-here-right-now are LIVING what’s in those video games.  They don’t see murder on TV -- they ARE murdered.  This is one of the reasons kids have so much contempt for adults; that adults turn away.

Even the nice ordinary suburban kids know this -- odds are some of those kids are sitting in the same classrooms, undetected and unaddressed by adults.  Anyway, the state of the world on the news, the ragged “canners” pushing shopping carts, the urban myths that circulate even in the countryside, are mostly denied and ignored by adults.  If games are a way of working through kid issues, then video games quite likely address the moral and spiritual puzzles that adults fail to address in reality.  I still dream images of torture from WWII when I wasn’t even old enough to attend school yet.  (Bulldozers push high piles of the naked bodies, bones barely covered by flesh.)  No adult ever discussed them. They are the bulldozers behind my questing, which isn’t about God-dogma at all.  It’s existential.  And mercifully, the adults who WILL address such Evil are often located in the better seminaries.

So this workshop in Great Falls is being addressed by a man on the boundary, Greg Smith:  young, good-looking, and dynamic.  Because he is a partnered gay, he cannot be a priest.  I’d like to see the world from his eyes for at least a few hours.  I’d also like to see what he knows about the Underworld where big tough outsider tribal felons hang around in bars the college guys love to cruise to show how initiated they are.  What I know is mostly second hand, but mighty vivid.  (If I’d investigated first hand, I’d be dead now.)  Being a "virtuous" old lady, impoverished and celibate, is like being a priest without a church.  

Of course, I don’t SAY that, because many people are terrified of religious people, having had relatives who were “seized” and put into prisons of one sort or another.  Christianity can be predatory.  The irony is that a physical prison -- when it reaches critical mass -- can force a spiritual rebirth.  Not always.  And some fake it.  

The media doesn’t really get all this stuff, partly because reporters tend to be young, underpaid, ambitious kids controlled by old guys with an eye that is interlocked with readership and advertising.  News is defined by profit.  The educated are too busy sitting in seminars arguing over regulations.  The priests are burying young people.  (But only their bodies.)  Some realize that life is “for reals,” not a video game.  But it’s going on and going on -- through us.  To feel that is an astonishment and a joy.