Structural Dissociation, DID & Time Distortion : Ego-State Parts, IFS

Deef

Structural Dissociation, DID, Relational Dissociation - Part 1 - 11/21/20

1h19m

Part 2 - Inner Persecutors, Introjects, Superego vs Ego 12/5/20

1h30m

Gallery view version

Summaries for Sat: Background video clips & Terminology for Saturday’s zoom:

Structural Dissociation

Dissociation types

Trauma Triggers Ext & Int

http://traumadissociation.com/alters

DID Research webpage https://did-research.org/

But, here’s some of my take on how the Panksepp’s 7 emotional systems of SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY, LUST, and CARE seem to work together.

First of all, I think PANIC is better labeled as GRIEF, he even describes it as separation anxiety, and the emergent emotions he associates with it are: separation distress, sadness, guilt/shame, shyness, and embarrassment.

When the brain is more integrated and feels safe in the environment, the 3 emotions of SEEKING, PLAY, and CARE are able to be fully active and functional.

But with PTSD those 3 circuits are limited or disengaged, with the nervous system directing attention towards instinctual & survival systems.

The Fight, Flight, or Freeze instinctual responses can match with the RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC/GRIEF systems… LUST fits in as a pleasure/hoarding/greed type escapism emotion that also links with sexual desire.

My take is that ANP are typically identified with RAGE or FEAR emotional circuitry…

RAGE based ANP would be variations of control, manipulation, perfection, defense, aggression, blame (self or other), keeping active/busy, etc.

FEAR based ANP would be variations of avoidance, conflict averse, people pleasing, rescuing others, prevention, anxiety, over thinking, isolation, etc.

I suppose ANP could also be associated with other emotions, like LUST where a person’s focus is all around jealousy, greed, hoarding, and earthly sensation and pleasures. But I don’t see that as a very common primary personality.. or possibly PANIC/GRIEF with someone who’s lost in depression with some sort of identity wrapped around helpless victim, but that might be more a merging of FEAR with PANIC/GRIEF flavor..

A theory as to why it might be hard to access CARE, PLAY, or SEEKING (I see this more as childlike curiosity and sense of adventure) circuits. It’s simply because survival instincts are triggered. Until there is a sense of safety, security, predictability, order, and calm. The limbic/neo-mammalian/sympathetic(nervous system) fight/flight brain is still activated, along with the even more primal reptilian/parasympathetic(nervous system) freeze/dissociative brain.

As for EP’s and Panksepp’s emotions, I’m not as sure how they might fit in… I think EP’s might be more of symptom of implicit memories that didn’t get processed and resolved into explicit memories. Implicit memories are like fear conditioning, cellular memory, procedural memory, muscle memory, memories still stored in the body that aren’t fully integrated at the level of conscious thought and memory.

When memories don’t get properly integrated into conscious memory because the trauma or dissociation response takes over. I’m guessing that these memories tend to clump together around similar emotional suffering or inner children personas.

Some of my recent past EPs (Emotional Parts) were around overwhelm/overload, fear of rejection, social exclusion, right to have my own opinion… earlier EPs that seemed to have less of a personality were around raw hopelessness, fear of living, raw confusion and uncertainty, detachment/isolation.

As I integrated more of my EPs or unresolved emotional suffering, often there was a feeling of lightness, a feeling of deep understanding or an insight high. I often also had feelings that seemed to give me more access to the PLAY, CARE, and SEEKING circuits, childlike wonder, laughter, fearless play, sense of adventure, or higher sense of natural curiosity.

Ironically, the more I understand about the healing and integration process, the more it seems to point towards the PANIC/GRIEF emotional network (ie. the Parasympathetic nervous system, the reptile brain, freeze/dissociation response). This system seems to be the source of what short-circuits the higher brain functions, and fractures conscious memory integration. It’s a very primitive network that was probably quite effective for survival on it’s own, but can get in the way with surviving in a much more complex, social, and interconnected modern world. But this system also has positive benefits of restorative, rest & rebuild, reflective, retreat, recover, conscious awareness, meditative states, deep peace, calm, etc.

So the eventual part of the re-integration and healing process seems to use the PANIC/GRIEF circuits, to give an ‘end of story’ to all those unprocessed memories. With empathy, compassion, and some sort of external support, that can allow courage with a sense of safety to consciously venture into the PANIC/GRIEF network, to help guide it, learn from it, and allow it to integrate unresolved griefs into conscious memory, and genuinely put the past into the past.
https://www.myptsd.com/threads/structural-dissociation.50555/page-17#post-819064

I’ve proposed that one aspect of dissociation and unresolved trauma or loss is that the movement from implicit memory to explicit is blocked. When this blockage occurs, implicit memory in its pure, un-integrated state has the important characteristic of not being labeled as coming from some time in the past. So when a person with disorganized attachment and unresolved trauma or loss is trying to respond to questions about those experiences, the raw implicit memories are retrieved and the individual is flooded with sensations, emotions, images, or behavioral impulses that feel as if they are happening now. There is no sense that these are images or feelings from the past. That is what unresolved trauma or loss can create, and it feels intrusive, confusing, and even terrifying.
– page 127 “Brainstorm” Dr. Dan Siegel
https://www.myptsd.com/threads/structural-dissociation.50555/post-819936

Just discovered some nice visuals of someone else working on combining Panksepp’s 7 core instinctive emotions with other research (gamification)

from this blog post Aug 2017 https://memetechnology.org/2017/08/06/affect-and-affordancies-my-final-model/

expanded to include 2 more layers

(1) So, now we have a model of the core emotions, as described by Pankspepp and Bevin,
(2) overlaid with emotions attributed to gamers in the work of Lazarro.
(3) To that I have below added a third layer. They are affective triggers, drawn from Lazarro and Sylvester’s recommendations for game mechanics, or affordancies, and that trigger emotion in gamers, and Hamari{i, 2014 #148} et al’s motivation mechanics from their study of gamification.

Deef

Not sure if I’ll have enough time to visit, explore and sort thru all the various materials out there. Looking at CPTSD or codependence through the lens of DID might be a very powerful framing for some members.

In Structural Dissociation/DID/OSDD theory, sometime around 6-8 years old, personality starts forming into a solid integrated self, while children with developmental traumas, disorders or genetic issues. Their brain splits off, breaks off, or fragments into emotional parts and for some Alter personalities.

https://lioncuddles.tumblr.com/post/167879450476/were-so-excited-to-show-you-the-little-lesson

I like these visuals too.. earlier visuals tend to present normal as a sorta one dimensional part that is sorta gray, a more integrated person would be more like a rainbow of all emotions and capacities. While CPTSD and more extreme forms of personality splitting would have EP (Emotional Parts) fragmented in the psyche.

https://myselfandmyselves.tumblr.com/post/169402823643/cambriancrew-myselfandmyselves

and a 3rd visual, showing external stress/trauma can create a new EP (inner Emotional Part) or memory fragment in the psyche.

blog link https://clever-and-unique-name.tumblr.com/post/189763970544/there-is-no-logical-or-natural-limit-to-how

another blog with good visuals but these examples might be too specific
https://hello-world-from-system.tumblr.com/
————————————
This motion induced blindness might be a fun test to see how the group responds. Supposedly the people who very easily go blind to the objects in the outer edges are more prone to dissociation. Another theory is that they’re more left hemisphere dominant. I couldn’t get the edges to disappear in most videos, except for one with black background, more evidence that I can’t turn off my right hemisphere processing like most people.

here’s a webpage where you can customize the yellow dots and speed:
https://michaelbach.de/ot/mot-mib/index.html

Deef

Another excerpt from Jan 2014 post under my alias Valentino describing trauma & heart break

… With the trauma path, it’s slightly reversed, the ‘Dark Night’ comes first. There often is little preparation, training, community or support. It’s literally being thrown to the wolves. Maybe many common PTSD symptoms are simply because the experience is so shocking, intense, and fast. Then in this overwhelmed state, we’re left alone to try to figure out our way through and out. BUT while this path can be so much more difficult, maybe it might offer a much richer wide open heart at the end.
Trauma has a way of totally breaking open the heart, tenderizing it to a point of infinite softness and openness, but it’s also an infinitely courageous heart that can endure more raw emotional energy than any normal human being can. We notice that the bigger heart feels pain and suffering more intensely, but that same bigger heart can also feel bliss, joy, freedom, peace, and love just as intensely and so more than our pre-trauma hearts.

https://www.myptsd.com/threads/where-do-you-find-a-sense-of-belonging.39123/post-640412

Deef

I wonder if I can can combine 6 core emotions into Structural Dissociations ANP (Apparently Normal Parts) and EP (Emotional Parts) framework.

Out of touch exiled emotional parts are Awe & Shame… Conservative/Right tend to play in disgust & anger (walls, structure), while Liberal/Left tend to stay in disgust & Grief (sympathy/pity), which matches colors of Republican party Red (Anger) and Democratic party Blue (grief).

Normal people would have their maladaptive coping modes are their false self or ANP, or public self; navigating through society somewhat functionally.

Inner child shadow material would be EP, while ANP is false self typically combo of super-ego or internalized parent with acting out exiled inner child (EP) that controls the attention.

Narcissist false self would be internalized demanding parent, with externalized angry child
Codependent false self would be internalized punitive parent (excessive inner critic & guilt driven) with externalized vulnerable/lonely sad child (people pleasing rescuing slave)
Other combinations would be a fragile npd would have more externalized vulnerable child… while a counter-dependent would have more externalized angry child thru perfectionism/workaholism.

Deef

My ambitious plan to build a bridge between Grannon & Vaknin excerpts but frame them within Structural Dissociation terms.

“Codependency is

a state of being broken boundaried (Dissociative state)
highly emotionally dysregulated (uncontained chaotic EP memory fragment)
having a neurotic trauma-based response to stress and challenges (ANP with Fawning strategy)
especially to emotional vulnerability and intimacy (fixated on attachment trauma)

DID is from extreme dissociative response to trauma that leads to containment through internalized separate alters ANPs & EPs.
What if Codependence and NPD is also trauma and dissociation but the containment is through externalized ‘shared fantasy’, which requires constant maintenance and manipulation of others to keep the fantasy up?

Richard Grannon describing the ‘externalized’ others focused fixation of NPD and CoDep dichotomous roles (ANP/EP false self)

Deef

Bonus personal example where I integrated one of my ‘Inner Rebel’ EPs into my system.

The initial interaction was on a discussion forum thread on ptsdforums now known as myptsd.com with with Solara (now listed as Deleted Member 1860) who used BPD gaslighting or trolling tactics, to personally attack me and trigger some EPs in my system.

That discussion thread is available here, my user name there is Valentino - https://www.myptsd.com/threads/i-need-an-outside-perspective.39802/post-647103

Here’s excerpts from private message conversation, writing out and discussing my insights and experience with Ms Spock.

From Feb 2014

I think I have FINALLY figured it out for myself, but no idea how well it will work for others..

REBELLION! Defending my right to have and trust my own FEELINGs…

My secondary woundings by narcissist and borderlines actually got me to lose trust in my sense of reality and my own feelings, I lost trust in my own gut and instincts. WHY? Because both narcissists and borderlines blasted me with DISTORTION campaigns, and I ended up believing them.

Being an Aspie I’m already naturally prone to be confused with trusting my instincts and emotions. Things often come out wrong or misunderstood. So growing up I learned ways to translate and filter myself, and read the situation. I came across socially awkward but I was okay and comfortable with that.

Post PTSD I had to relearn and develop a whole new social interaction blueprint, in this case I ended up being overly cautious, that strategy was adequate, but failed with defending me against the secondary wounding.

1 - overly cautious means I was projecting weakness, fear and lack of confidence. And to a predator type personality of a borderline or narcissist, they instantly sense weakness and instantly see me as easy prey..
2 - Being overly cautious means I’m projecting a subtle anxiety/fear energy, which borderline/narcissists also don’t like feeling
3 - Being overly cautious means that I would focus on conserving MY own ENERGY, and would disregard or not pay attention to all the constant needs for irrational attention by a borderline/narcissist. Essentially thumbing my nose to their incessant need for ‘narcissistic supply’ (look at me, attention).

So, I ended up breaking tons of vital rules that borderlines and codependents (programmed by borderline’s distortion fields) constantly promote and reinforce through peer pressure, subtle shaming, and outright vicious public shaming. This becomes the norm in a rescuer/enabler type support community or in a therapist/patient relationship.

It just creates an addiction to co-dependence. Which is essentially promoting, YOU CAN NOT and WILL NOT EXPRESS or FEEL your own feelings unfiltered. You might DIE if you trust your feelings and instincts, feeling suicide thoughts might create suicide!!! (cast shame, fear, and doubt, masked in rescuer language and surface feelings).

Solara’s shaming co-depedence enforcement/training method was to attack me for having Aspie feelings and thinking. Valentino, you are wrong, you are broken! let me help you! You trusted your feelings and instincts! That is BAD! You should not trust it, it is wrong, it is hurtful, it is damaging to others! Instead, don’t trust and express your feelings. CONSIDER other people’s feelings (neurotypicals)! Other people’s feelings are more important!!! (meant more as Borderline’s feelings are #1 important, I need narcissistic supply!!) Your feelings and instincts don’t matter! Drop that Aspie label, drop generalizations, simply DO NOT think for yourself, LET ME THINK FOR YOU, LISTEN TO my DISTORTION CAMPAIGN of REALITY!!! it might not be totally true, but it’s actually BETTER than reality!! why be honest? Living a lie is ultimately better! that’s the way to avoid toxic shame!!!

So essentially, the lesson I finally figured out and could be one of the last pieces of the ptsd recovery puzzle for me:

I have a right to have feelings and express them. I have a right to be selfish. I deserve to be here.

Therefore I can now trust my feelings more and doubt them less. I can now seek friends and social interactions to help objectively test & develop my sense of reality, instead of constantly getting my sense of reality distorted, devalued and attacked by borderline/narcissists. I don’t need to live in their manipulated mental isolation.

Yayy!!! I feel free!! Rebels are free! Yes it’s scary being all out there exposed in open territory, but it’s so exciting and free!! My feelings matter and they can now help me, and I don’t have to waste effort and energy limiting them with variations of shame!!

What do you do for self soothing?

I do deep conscious breathing. It’s almost natural and automatic too. I’m also mindful of my physical sensations, muscle tension, blood pumping through my veins, feeling on my skin, etc. That’s also easier for me as an over sensitive Aspie and a primary FEELER bias.

If need more, I have food, drink, zoning out with game, internet, music, tv, movie.

Or I can go more physical. I have lots of self-massage spikey balls of all shapes and sizes. I can go for a walk or a jog. I can take a hot shower, or epsom bath salt soak.. I can use tuning forks and singing bowls to focus my hearing on sacred vibrations.

I also meditate daily in full lotus posture for an hour a day. allowing my mind time to reflect, process and settle.

Also how much real estate are we going to give to Solara in our heads?

one last piece of real estate.. Solara’s aspie glasses vs PTSD glasses analogy is SOOOO telling about her way of thinking. She simply took off her PTSD glasses and got instant and magical healing!! that’s essentially just outright REJECTION of any and all responsibility for having PTSD, any and all symptoms, and any active healing or recovery. It is now all about faking the outward appearance and feelings of someone who does not have PTSD.

This strategy will drive her totally nutz!!! disowning the PTSD glasses, means she’s forever stuck in it!! It’s just like Hashi’s inner contradiction of openly rejecting and resenting the world and God and other people, but she also still wants the rest of the world to accommodate, honor her, and give her a sense of belonging.

Borderline and co-dependents rationalize a strategy of attacking the rules of life, and trying to change them! They’re going to always be utterly frustrated because God is not going to change his rules. But they can be successful in lobbying a small minority of people to believe their distorted rules for short periods of time.

Rejection only works temporarily and is very limited, and likely attracting rejection back. What you resist persists.

——- Thanks again for being a genuinely sympathetic ear!! that really helps the integration process! it’s so hard to do alone, especially when your sense of reality is constantly distorted.

Deef

Peregrin a discipline is what we need to set up in order to foster the inner critic.

That’s not what I did…. I did use discipline, but not to reprogram inner critic….

Instead I flipped the persecutor energy into a protector part… I called it awakening and reconnecting my ‘inner rebel’

Deef
Bonus personal example where I integrated one of my ‘Inner Rebel’ EPs into my system.
…
So essentially, the lesson I finally figured out and could be one of the last pieces of the ptsd recovery puzzle for me:

I have a right to have feelings and express them. I have a right to be selfish. I deserve to be here.

Therefore I can now trust my feelings more and doubt them less. I can now seek friends and social interactions to help objectively test & develop my sense of reality, instead of constantly getting my sense of reality distorted, devalued and attacked by borderline/narcissists. I don’t need to live in their manipulated mental isolation.

Yayy!!! I feel free!! Rebels are free! Yes it’s scary being all out there exposed in open territory, but it’s so exciting and free!! My feelings matter and they can now help me, and
I don’t have to waste effort and energy limiting them with variations of shame!!

https://www.visceralgravitas.com/d/22/14

The approach of taming and pacifying your inner critic, I’d argue risks being a bit short sighted and just reinforcing the codependent false self. Too much focus on an enemy, now it’s just the inner critic (internalized oppressor)… But winning this battle does you limited good for your next external aggressor…. Then people would just say… set stronger boundaries and just leave…. that’s a losers strategy…. you’re by default just leaving the ring, ceding territory, giving up…

Deef

4 Dimensions of unintegrated traumatic memories

possible material for part 2 of Structural Dissocation

Dr. Ruth Lanius’ 4D-Model with 4 dimensions of traumatic memories: Time, Thought, Body, and Emotion.

Building from past empirical and theoretical research Frewen and Lanius (2014) have proposed a four-dimensional model (4D-Model) that differentiates states of posttraumatic distress based on whether they intrinsically represent trauma-related altered states of consciousness (TRASC; i.e., dissociation symptoms), or states of normal-waking consciousness (NWC), the latter referring to states of distress, that while clinically significant, are not intrinsically dissociative in nature. The model is an extension of the phenomenological framework developed by Thompson and Zahavi (2007), which outlined the qualitative properties of human subjectivity or conscious experience. Thompson and Zahavi’s model has four dimensions, which are:

temporality (sense of time and memory)

narrative (the story-like quality of thought)

embodiment (the sense of having, and consciously belonging to a body)

affect (the experience of emotions).

The 4D-Model simplifies this structure by characterizing the four dimensions of consciousness as:
1) time, 2) thought, 3) body, and 4) emotion, respectively (Frewen & Lanius, 2014).

— source: Honors thesis by student of Dr Frewen: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=psychd_uht

Bessel van der Kolk uses a brain stress model with descriptive labels of Smoke Detector (amygdala) affect, Watchtower (frontal lobes) narrative, Cook (thalamus) embodiment and Timekeeper (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: DLPFC) temporality.

This section describes the interaction of ‘cook’ with low road ‘smoke detector’ and high road (slower) ‘watchtower’:

Danger is a normal part of life, and the brain is in charge of detecting it and organizing our response. Sensory information about the outside world arrives through our eyes, nose, ears, and skin. These sensations converge in the thalamus, an area inside the limbic system that acts as the “cook” within the brain. The thalamus stirs all the input from our perceptions into a fully blended autobiographical soup, an integrated, coherent experience of “this is what is happening to me.” The sensations are then passed on in two directions—down to the amygdala, two small almond-shaped structures that lie deeper in the limbic, unconscious brain, and up to the frontal lobes, where they reach our conscious awareness. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls the pathway to the amygdala “the low road,” which is extremely fast, and that to the frontal cortex the “high road,” which takes several milliseconds longer in the midst of an overwhelmingly threatening experience. However, processing by the thalamus can break down. Sights, sounds, smells, and touch are encoded as isolated, dissociated fragments, and normal memory processing disintegrates. Time freezes, so that the present danger feels like it will last forever.

This section describes how the timekeeper collapses under trauma:

Two brain systems are relevant for the mental processing of trauma: those dealing with emotional intensity and context. Emotional intensity is defined by the smoke alarm, the amygdala, and its counterweight, the watchtower, the medial prefrontal cortex. The context and meaning of an experience are determined by the system that includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the hippocampus. The DLPFC is located to the side in the front brain, while the MPFC is in the center. The structures along the midline of the brain are devoted to your inner experience of yourself, those on the side are more concerned with your relationship with your surroundings

The DLPFC tells us how our present experience relates to the past and how it may affect the future—you can think of it as the timekeeper of the brain. Knowing that whatever is happening is finite and will sooner or later come to an end makes most experiences tolerable. The opposite is also true—situations become intolerable if they feel interminable. Most of us know from sad personal experience that terrible grief is typically accompanied by the sense that this wretched state will last forever, and that we will never get over our loss. Trauma is the ultimate experience of “this will last forever.”

Stan’s scan reveals why people can recover from trauma only when the brain structures that were knocked out during the original experience—which is why the event registered in the brain as trauma in the first place—are fully online. Visiting the past in therapy should be done while people are, biologically speaking, firmly rooted in the present and feeling as calm, safe, and grounded as possible. …

Being anchored in the present while revisiting the trauma opens the possibility of deeply knowing that the terrible events belong to the past. For that to happen, the brain’s watchtower, cook, and timekeeper need to be online. Therapy won’t work as long as people keep being pulled back into the past.

– The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk

So when memories don’t get processed and stored properly with all the ingredients of 4D (time, thought, body sensation, emotion), because of a failure of watchtower, cook and timekeeper all being functionally online. These incomplete memories end up getting clumped together and stored in areas of the body. (ie. pain in the neck, lower back pain, heavy shoulder burdens, tension in thighs, etc.)

But these incomplete memories also want an end of story, seeking to be completed and integrated into long term memory. So they lie relatively dormant, sorta ‘waiting in line’, waiting for an opportunity to latch onto any new stimulus which has similar emotional frequency and suffering pain. And then when that opportunity comes, they flood the nervous system, piggy-backing on top of the recent trigger, often creating an over-reaction and emotional flashbacks.

excerpts from page 4 on, in my google doc:
Common Q&A, Traumatic Memories, Emotional Literacy http://bit.ly/2lgslHb

Deef

Good follow-up video, and also pre-meeting prep for Structural Dissociation Pt2:

5/16/20 Befriending the Super-Ego (Ideals, Morality, Inner Critic, Character, Dignity) 1hr27m

Or more specifically for Structural Dissociation. I would argue that for Codependents & Narcissists, they have undeveloped Reality Principle or healthy/mature ego function. There is preference for shared fantasy, which points towards reality principle is OFF line, not hooked up, inactive, non-functional.

Narcissists externalizing their super-ego, moralizing judgment against others, while being driven by incessant inner needs of the Id, pleasure principle.
Codependents externalize the ID, meeting needs of others before their own (people pleasers), but are driven by toxified SuperEgo, morality principle, often with an utopian like fantasy, where it’s the codependents job to rescue the world and bring about a utopia on earth.

But there can be variations and it can flip flop in expressions. The bigger core issue is that a healthy Ego that manages reality principle (map of reality updater, reality checker) is missing.

Grannon describes it as missing a big chunk of software 43s

NYE

I found this video which does a good job of demonstrating why it’s so hard to “rewire” our neural pathways once they are burned into our psyches:

Deef

Superego & inner critic might need to be revisited again, the problem might be much bigger in scope and scale.

Started a new thread with a different spin on it

Deef

The quest for social place

Yearning for True Belonging vs fear of social exile/lack, abandonment terror, pursuing exclusive status/power

Our Innate Tribal nature - Initiation paths to adult member & elder are missing

Masses stuck @ teenage level ‘ID’ pleasure principle core focus (very needy: binge desire & avoid pain)

Initiation to adult level, (social place/recognition) secondary pride, ID to altruism high (personal sacrifice, with desire for other’s development)

Initiated to elder level, seasoned life experience and emerged from own shadow journey, ID now includes mentoring and holding space for collective wisdom & access to ancestral portals (rituals, energetic transmissions, traditional shame/priest roles)

full post and thread at https://www.visceralgravitas.com/d/43/1