Dissociation can occur any time in our life and there is two kinds of dissociation, childhood and adulthood. Child dissociation is different from adult dissociation. Child dissociation occurs when the child is actually experiencing some sort of trauma, like abuse. Adult dissociation happens in situations like stress or family related issues. Another difference is that child dissociation does not last very long (usually a hour), but adult dissociation lasts for a longer period of time. Dissociation occurs when something so painful is happening that the mind leaves the body to go elsewhere. In Martha Stout’s essay “When I Woke up On Tuesday, It Was Friday,” she defines dissociation as the mind leaving the body and transporting our awareness to a place so far away, it feels like the person is watching from outside their body. In her essay, she tells her audience about the dangers of dissociation, such as blackout, unable to relate to others, a sense of not knowing who one is, and the sense of lost time. She also includes some of her patient’s stories and experiences with dissociation, how they struggle for sanity and how she helps them see a new meaning of life. She tells her audience that often when patients or people dissociate they have lack of self-control and self-awareness. Dissociation can happen to anybody in a dire situation, for instance a child getting abused or some other traumatic event. Martha Stout has her audience/reader rethink about dissociation particularly the harmful side of it. She has help me see that although dissociation is helpful, it could lead to suicide thought, accidents, loss of identity and sanity.
Dissociation is harmful in many ways. It could cause the individual to have blackout, to have multiple...
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...individuals to lose sense of time, to lose sense of whom one is, to emotionally detach, and to prolong disengagement from the world. Dissociation can cause people to feel like they are a passenger in their body rather than the driver. In other words, they truly believe they have no choice. Society needs to help and accept these people for whom they are and not look upon them as some sort of maniac. My perspective, at one point in time, was that dissociating was good, because it was a way to let people numb pain and get away. After reading Stout’s essay, I know now that there are many disadvantages to dissociating that people need to be made aware of before they harm anybody.
Works Cited
Stout, Martha. “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday,” in The Myth of Sanity:
Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. 15-43
Across Five April's by Irene Hunt is about how the civil war tears apart a family during the hard times of the civil war. There were 239 pages it this story. The book follows the life of Jethro Creighton, a young farm boy in rural Illinois as he grows from a protected and provided for nine year old, to a educated and respectable young adult during the chaos of the civil war.
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In “High Holy Days” by Jane Shore the idea of innocent youth awakening from a slumber for the first time is conveyed at a rate of infinite constancy from beginning to end. At the poem opens the tone of the speaker is childish and picayune. Throughout the eloquent stanzas filled with reminisces of the speaker, the tone becomes passionate and valiant. The writer, Jane Shore, awakens the speaker to her reality as a Jewish woman living in a world that does not condone her religion.
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According to Barlow, Durand & Stewart (2012), Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is one of several dissociative disorders in which a person experiences involve detachment or depersonalization. They go on to explain that people with DID ha...
Chloa Wellman was born in Grand Rapids, MI in 1890, and on February 4th, 1910 she despite that, “some superstitious people think it unlucky to start anything on a Friday,” decided to start writing a diary. Grand Rapids at this time still in the peak of it’s furniture boom and benefiting from a healthy economic atmosphere. I am interested in analysing this source in particular, because Chloa Wellman is my paternal great-grandmother and I too have been a 19 year-old young women living in Grand Rapids. In the dairy, Chloa records her daily life: events she attended, the health of friends and family, shows she enjoyed, and men who admired her. The nature of that the dairy as more of a simple record does not seems to have an overarching, driving argument, however it provides insight into the daily live and prominent concerns of a young woman at the turn of the century.
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Dissociative identity disorder, a condition that has plagued and altered the minds of those who were diagnosed for many years, represents the condition in which an individual displays multiple personalities that overpower his or her behavior around others and even alone. Such personalities or identities can have staggering differences between them even being characterized by a disparate gender, race, or age. One of the sides of them can even be animal-like and display feral qualities. Also, the disorder severs the connection between the victim’s sense of identity, emotions, actions, and even memories from their own consciousness. The cause for this is known to be a very traumatic experience that the person had gone through previously and fails to cope with it, thus they dissociate themselves from the memory in order to keep their mental state in one piece. All these results from the disorder do not begin to tell of the rest of the horrors that gnaw away at the affected human.
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What is Dissociative Identity Disorder? A proper explanation of DID necessitates a dissection of the name itself. Dissociation is “a mental process, which produces a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity.”1 In other words, there is a disruption in the way in which these usually integrated functions communicate. Daydreaming, highway hypnosis, or “getting lost” in a book or movie are all examples of very mild dissociation.
The opportunity presented allowed me to contact all three, David Gleaves who then pointed me in the direction of ‘The Dissociative Initiative’ – an Adelaide-based website run by Sarah K Reece which provided, pamphlets, posters and support material focusing on dissociation and multiplicity. This worked in my favour due to the broadened scope of information I was then able to access, assisting in the discovery of support services around South Australia. The outcome was that I had three primary resources – each respondent that I corresponded with offering different outlooks on the question that all came to the same conclusion: the disorder causes dissociation and can be defined as the ‘presence of multiple
In the early 1960s, Herbert Spiegel recognized dissociation as a defensive process. He saw the defensive nature of dissociation as a “fragmentation process that serves to defend against anxiety and fear”. He also recognized the relationship between dissociation and repression. This was known as the dissociation-association continuum. The continuum was used to describe the degree of dissociation (History of Dissociative Identity Disorder).