Last week, I talked about dissociation in the traumatized adopted child and how to help a traumatized adopted child to stop dissociating. This week, I am going to focus on dissociative disorders.

According to Martha Stout’s book, The Myth of Sanity, dissociation occurs on a continuum. On the far left is normal dissociation that everyone experiences, such as “losing yourself” in a good movie and “forgetting” that you are sitting in a crowded theater. In the middle of the dissociation continuum is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). On the far right is dissociative identity disorder (DID), which used to be called multiple personality disorder. (I have written extensively on my personal blog about DID).

Dissociative disorders fall on the dissociation continuum between PTSD in the middle and DID on the extreme right, which makes them more severe than PTSD but not as severe as DID. If you are parenting a traumatized adopted child who experienced severe trauma and has PTSD, it is possible that your child is also struggling with a dissociative disorder.

Dissociative disorders are difficult to define because they are actually defined by what they are not. They are not PTSD because they are more severe. They are not DID because the person does meet the DSM-IV guidelines for DID, which are outlined here. There are a wide range of dissociative disorders that fall into this range, and there is also a wide variety in how they manifest. The DSM-IV has been criticized for its inadequacy in defining dissociative disorders.

For example, I know a couple of child abuse survivors who split into colors. Their anger is red, sadness is blue, etc. When they look into the brown, they lose time because the brown holds the memories of the most severe abuse.

I know others who have personality fragments but not separate alter parts, which excludes them from being diagnosed as DID. A personality fragment is a one-dimensional part (versus a three-dimensional part in DID) that holds only one memory or one emotion. That part feels separate to the traumatized adopted child, like the abuse happened to “someone else” rather than to the child.

On Trauma Thursday, I will talk about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Hopefully, understanding both DID and PTSD will help the definition of dissociative disorders become more clear.

Related Topic:

• How to Explain Dissociative Disorder--Not Otherwise Specified (DD-NOS)
• Highway Hypnosis

Photo credit: JulieC