Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all, I am asking my child's (10yo) holiday and breakfast club to keep a behavioural log but I need a brief explanation of both dissociation and shut downs so they know which one they are documenting correctly. However I am at a complete loss on how to word it in non complex term for them. Is anyone able to possibly help.ThanksOne very stressed mum.
Being Withdrawn isn't Disassociation, and that's important. But whenever I listen to or read about clinical Disassociation, it's rarely if never in childhood. Most individuals don't recall their entire childhood, it would be too much for the brain. Traumatic moments are hard to forget while a comfortable life just breezes by and no one seems to recall much. Memory loss can happen when one is tired or has a sort of brain fog and difficulty focusing, even when it's diet related. So, it's far more rare memory loss is due to disassociation. Even highway hypnosis is normal.
But also, Disassociation is a condition that happens from long-term Repression, which is when Defence Mechanisms work against the self rather than for, and these are supposed to help the Typical mind mature. What was found nearly a century ago by Jung and Lacan is that Autistics don't create defence mechanisms and therefore, mature much slower than their peers.
In fact, clinical Disassociation is not natural Right-Brain Objective Thinking, which can sound much the Exact Same when someone tries to express the ability 'step aside from the self'. In Jung's Volume VI, he explains in better detail that Introverts have a more natural ability with a type of Objective Abstraction: sensing the external world or an object and presupposing it as alive and active and then withdrawing from it, as a mechanism of Adaption:
"The man with the abstracting attitude finds himself in a frighteningly [492] animated world that seeks to overpower and smother him... For the abstracting type, the world is filled with potent and dangerous objects that inspire him with fear and a consciousness of his own impotence; he withdraws from any too intimate contact with the world, in order to weave those thoughts and formulas with which he hopes to gain the upper hand." This is the fundamental experience of the introvert, a perfectly natural state for not quite half the population.
Now, Disassociation is said to produce split personalities in extreme cases. But today, we're throwing around very serious terms like cosplay and candy. While 'thriller' movies are made about kids who've ended up in this state for whatever reason, it's so incredibly rare, most of us should only ever expect to encounter it on Netflix.
Shutting down is a stress response and often confused with feeling depressed, and feeling depressed (blue, lethargic, deflated and sad) - is a state of rebalancing - coming down off of a high emotion or natural when dealing with sad things, and often confused with clinical depression, which used to only be associated with the body preparing to give up the ghost. So, a state welcome in later years, instead of our Survival Mode kicking and fighting to stay alive, one could actually give the ol' Grim Reaper a nice hug on site. ;)
There's little reason we should be stressing children beyond a threshold they can handle, and not helping them thrive. Most things are just not that important. Shutting down can be an appropriate response for a situation we've not been helped to learn how to navigate, where we feel trapped (for whatever reason), or if too much is happening all at once beyond our control. Any healthy grown human who's learned to recognise a thing triggering this, would remove themselves from the situation and detox or address the issue and change it. But kids just don't have these skills, the knowledge, the emotional and psychological maturity.
Thank you, this is actually perfect. I have had so many of them approach me saying she has disassociate at collection time. When in actual fact she has disregulated and then shut down. I have no idea where the disassociation has come from but they seem to be running with it.
I have asked them to document what happens before, durin and after, how long it lasts and what they are doing to help her.
I even tell them if it gets to the point that they are truly struggling come and get me as i work in the nursery that it is based out of and it is all the same company.
If it's usually at collexion time, she sounds exhausted!
This casual use of a very serious term is a tiny bit reckless. While yes, language can be somewhat 'organic', we have to be careful someone is not incriminated because of our misuse. Psychiatry holds a type of authority which is often not considered and social media has turned serious crimes into dramatic adjectives ('rape-y' for ex.), but loose lips still sink ships. ;)