Category Archives for "Dissociation"

The Complex PTSD Freeze Response

You dissociate to protect the still functional parts of yourself.

When you disconnect, your energy becomes more present in the upper body and more disconnected from the lower body. It is usually the diaphragm that keeps a lid on the unresolved emotions that remain in the belly area. 

You dissociate to protect the still functional parts of yourself.

Alongside this disconnection, you will likely default to some form of substance or behavioral addiction to cope with your excessive stress.

Fragmentation & The Complex PTSD Freeze Response

This is a good thing in the sense that you do not feel constantly overwhelmed.

It is a not so good thing because this fragmentation causes secondary problems of addiction, short attention span, inability to focus and get things done, not being sensitive to the needs of your body, and often feeling somewhat depressed or numb.

It is a bit of a "damned if you do (reconnect = getting overwhelmed), damned if you don't (stay disconnected = not feeling alive)." 

It is a real dilemma!

To unwind and unfold trauma, you need to go carefully in and out of the emotional residue that is stored in the body.

Working Through The Complex PTSD Freeze Response

A trauma informed therapist can be a great help, but it is just really hard to find them!

And, working with a therapist who is NOT attuned to your needs and individual process can add insult to injury.

To help you gradually reconnect with the body and process emotional residue, I have created The Trauma Care Resources.

Included are somatic meditations that guide you step by step through the different parts of the body where emotion is held and how they relate to the different "mind" states of; disconnection/depression, excessive thinking, loss/grief/sadness, anger, anxiety, and the fight, flight, please-appease, and freeze responses.

These guided meditations put the emphasis on working on your containment and building resilience, without getting overwhelmed, so that you can safely process your emotional residue.

Check out exactly what you are getting and get started - RIGHT HERE

To your recovery,

 Roland

The flight response is much more hidden than the fight or please-appease response.

Some of the characteristics of a flight response might be that you tend to avoid confrontation or uncomfortable situations, which might further lead you into escapism and seclusion.

The Flight Response as Survival

Each response is based on optimizing your survival chances and preserving your sense of self; furthermore, each response—be it fight, flight, or please—is often adopted in childhood and honed through repeated experiences that were upsetting to you.

Hence, your particular survival response becomes hardwired.

Some of the characteristics of a flight survival response might be that you tend to avoid confrontation or uncomfortable situations, which might further lead you into escapism and seclusion.

A flight response can seem to be the least harmful response at first—when you were a child—but can grow into a serious handicap as an adult.

Invalidation, Escapism and Avoidance

When you are constantly avoiding situations, or escape whenever you are under pressure, you will fail to set boundaries with others, which results in an invalidation of your sense of self.

That lack of validation then needs to be constantly counteracted by spending a lot of time alone, in order to get back a sense of containment and sense of self; this leads to further isolation.

Anxiety might also be an outcome of this lack of boundaries when the escapism persists.

The Flight-Freeze Response and Neglect

The trouble doesn’t just stop there.

While I can see a lot of benefits to the flight response in terms of avoiding stupidity or by not engaging with someone who is having a self-righteous monologue and discourse, the flight response can also result in you being (or appearing to be) indifferent, apathetic, and neglectful.

It is likely that when you are repeatedly confronted with an overwhelming environment—both in the past and present—you will exhibit a mixture of the flight-freeze response. This will result in your not just avoiding confrontation, but again in potentially becoming indifferent, apathetic, and neglectful.

This is a serious concern!

Seeing the Flight Response for What It Is

Being constantly in flight mode as a parent will result in your not being able to be accountable for your responsibilities as a parent. The same might apply in a working environment or in maintaining a relationship.

This isn’t said to put you on a guilt trip. We are describing the difficulties and patterns of the flight or flight-freeze response and we need be aware first of how detrimental this response can become in the long run.

When you are willing to see this response for what it is and the harm that it does, without further going into guilt, shame, or blame with it, you can then start to work on it.

Balancing Out Your Survival Responses

You will always have one or the other of the survival responses more strongly present. If you tend to be a flight-type personality, you will have to start to see the dangers and pains that it causes.

Once you are willing to start to do that—and it is a process of growing your awareness of this response—you can then ask yourself which response you might not be acting on sufficiently.

As with the please-appease response, when you overdo the flight response, you will likely not be exhibiting or lacking a healthy fight response.

It is by pushing back, holding your ground, setting your boundaries, taking responsibility, voicing yourself that you can start to balance out your lopsided flight response and work towards more health and equilibrium.

Keywords: Fight flight.

Survival responses of fight, flight, please-appease, and finally freeze often come in combinations. Furthermore, some of these combinations will be more hardwired for you than others.

You might habitually default to a please-appease response first, when being triggered or put under stress, and when that isn’t effective you might default to anger to try to power through a particular confrontation or situation.

When neither pleasing nor fighting seem to be productive—and you remain overwhelmed—you might finally go into a shutdown state.

In this example you have a combination of please-fight and then freeze.

Fight, Flight, Please-Appease, & Freeze Examples

These combinations of survival responses are honed through repeated exposure to abuse or neglect.You might even have several combinations that work for you depending on different situations and the people involved.

Perhaps as a child with an overtly abusive parent you tried to please-appease first, then took flight if the abuse continued, and finally retreated in a shutdown-freeze response when the first two responses didn’t work for you.

These combinations of survival responses are honed through repeated exposure to abuse or neglect.You might even have several combinations that work for you depending on different situations and the people involved.

Hereunder is the very first chapter of this new eBook.

Chapter 1: Dissociation Out of Survival

Roland: I'm here with Art O’Malley, who is a doctor in child and adolescent psychiatry. He has studied various other psychotherapeutic models, including sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing.

Today, I wanted to see if we could talk about dissociation in general, and dissociation as a survival mechanism. In my approach, addressing dissociation is one of the pillars of resolving trauma, and there are various processes that are involved in dissociation. Basically, it's moving from embodiment through any kind of shock—either covering a period of time or a single incident—that we move into excessive thoughts, addictions, shutdown, and continuously overwhelming emotions. The dissociation that ensues happens on different levels and constitutes various fragmentations.

I've outlined these processes into a very simple structure which can be applied to any kind of trauma, be it severe or quite mild. With trauma, there's always a sense of feeling overwhelmed, a loss of control, and helplessness. That state of helplessness always relates to a particular core emotion, be it anger, sadness, or anxiety. From there, we dissociate further into what I call a coping emotion.

For example, you might lose somebody, somebody who is dear to you, so you have sadness as a core emotion. That sadness might be too overwhelming for you to hold, and so you fragment further through dissociation, and you might default to anger to deal with that overwhelming sadness. The sadness gets pushed away onto a deeper level and you stay more with the anger, which then expresses itself as feeling irritated or being very critical, being very judgmental, or self-righteous.

From there on, it dissociates even further into a substance or behavioral addiction like smoking or drinking, being obsessively occupied with work, or being glued to social media and technology. It could be anything, really; even yoga or going to the mountains could become addictive as a way of coping with excessive stress. I have met those people, who seem to do something very sporty and healthy, but they do it as a coping mechanism, and that fragmentation comes through at some point. I'm putting it very briefly now, as this is my way of looking at dissociation and trauma, but I'd like to go into it much more deeply with you.

Art: One of the ways I like to think about it is as a continuum. I give this analogy of if you're in the safari park and you come out and see a lion who maybe, say, is 200 yards away from you. Your body goes into alert state and everything is activated in terms of your body's response to that. You may gradually think, "I need to get back to the Range Rover to safety."

As that lion comes closer and let's say it's 100 yards, 100 meters away from you, your body becomes activated and very quickly goes into a decision: "Do I fight, do I flight, or do I freeze?" It's at this stage, when the lion comes closer, that in terms of a physiological response, the only way we can survive is to become very flaccid and to collapse and to become numb. That's very much the result of the activation of what we call the dorsal part of our vagus nerve, which is divided into both the ventral, which is the front of the body, and the dorsal part.

When that gets activated in order to survive and the lion is right up next to you, if you were to fight back or attack the predator at that stage, you could literally be torn apart; but if you're flaccid, and if you give in and play dead and literally dissociate, you might survive.

Sometimes, the only way that you can play dead is to physically and emotionally leave your body, if you like, so that you're no longer attached to it, and that may actually keep you alive. The difficulty for many people is in reclaiming the integrity of their state, their emotional or mental state. It can be something that's very difficult to cope with because they've never actually got away from the idea that they're still under attack, and they're still reliving this event.

Roland: Let me intercept you there and see if we can get deeper into that. You mentioned the fight, flight, and then the freeze response. It's almost like you're saying that the fight and flight response is, first, what gets your adrenaline going; there's danger, there's a response to danger by your physiological responses, and then when there's no completion of your fight-flight activation, because of the continuing danger, you default to freeze as an alternative in order to survive.

Do you feel that the way to work on that is to go back into that experience in a similar fashion? That first you have to be with the freeze response, and perhaps make links to what event or what period in your life it relates to, and from there on, once you hold that freeze response, the disconnection or dissociation, that you might feel your fight-flight response, which might be translated as extreme anxiety or hurt vulnerability.

How would you see that?

Art: That's a really good question because I sometimes see there's another type of freeze that I didn't mention. It's the freeze of the shock of the sudden potential danger where you're activated, but you're frozen at the same time. There's that hyper-aroused type of freeze as well as the frozen-shutdown type of freeze. The fight or flight can intermingle with those states. They're almost like two sides of the same coin.

I would say if you’re in the freeze state, you need to be activated a little bit to reach what most people would call their window of tolerance and in a state where you can think and feel at the same time, being careful not to tip into that fight or flight response or hyper-aroused response. When you're dealing with somebody who's processing, they can't do a lot of processing in either of those two states, which are both dissociations from the true self, really, and the true integrity of how they're processing.

I would see it as a juggling act and as a balancing act of recognizing which state they're in, and giving them the tools to get into and open up that window of tolerance because in a lot of these patients with this chronic experience of attack, they have not got the experience of having a very wide-open window, so they flip from the frozen state to the hyper-aroused state very, very quickly.

Roland: It's interesting that you mentioned that both are present and they're both part of a dissociation process or the fight or flight on one side, and then the freeze response on the other side. What I noticed is that people who have gone through trauma seem to be fluctuating between those two.

They're either too frozen and it expresses itself as depression, numbness, amnesia, chronic pain, or other physical and psychological symptoms that go with that. Then they go through periods where they're hypervigilant, they're hyperactive, racing thoughts, racing heart, all of these things together.

They go in between those two extremes and, exactly as you said, they're missing that level of tolerance, the resilience to actually integrate, going continuously back and forth from one extreme into the other. I would say the gluing between that seems to always be some form of judgment either towards themselves or towards others, which are the excessive thoughts.

I heard somebody else calling them "inhibitory responses," which is quite interesting as well to call them that. Anyway, this glue, the inhibitory or intermediary responses seem to be some form of blame, shame, guilt, self-reproach, embarrassment, comparison, pride, self-righteousness, and comparison.

Those are the glue that makes those responses of dissociation go from one extreme to the other. Now, one final thing I want to add before I give it over to you, is that the lack of a level of tolerance or resilience seems to be the prime contributor that keeps trauma in place; or, when there is enough resilience and tolerance, is what will help people actually move through trauma.
What also needs to be considered is how people go into a traumatic experience; the intensity and the duration of trauma, and then, lastly, the support they receive after the trauma.

Either you are able to move through a traumatic experience or period because you have enough support afterwards and the duration was somewhat contained and you went into it with a sane mindset, or the opposite. You're already being burdened by childhood experiences and you experienced an overall lack of support. The traumatic state has become chronic. It goes on and on and repeats itself through different experiences into adulthood.

I know we started talking about dissociation, so there are a lot of different elements here that we are bringing into the conversation.

Art: I wonder, do you agree that one of the core emotions that maybe has been repressed is this anger or rage that can be either frozen or trapped in the body? I find if you can activate their connection to those feelings, then some of the more subtle emotions can be felt and registered. One thing that I noticed recently with some of these responses to reactivating this trauma; I'm always very interested in how the body stores the information and where the body is registering that tension.

This person told me that she felt it on either side of her lower abdomen, and it just coincided, in my view, with where the adrenal glands are situated above the kidneys. We know that with depression, and we know that under stress, the adrenal glands will become hyperactive; they will increase in size, they will produce all of this adrenaline. Literally, that physiological state of activation has a massive impact, both on your physical health and your emotional and mental health.

You can reverse that by tuning into it and helping that inflammation, that enlargement to decrease. It helps us, I think, to integrate these responses and realize how they're driven very much by the endocrine system, the immune system, circulatory system in ways that we don't fully understand or control at the time.
Therefore, in the therapeutic process, you can educate and reverse those processes in a safe way.

Roland: This makes it interesting in that both of us have a body-oriented approach and that we take on board the body's responses to stress and trauma; and that tracking the sensations, the emotions, and the thought processes actually sets in motion physiological changes, and potentially rewires the brain and nervous system.

Art: I do too.

Roland: There are certainly limitations—regarding recovery—and I think it is important to have healthy expectations. That said, I have seen people who have been severely traumatized and they have recovered 50%, or 60%, or 70%. That is a major leap of improvement in lifestyle and life quality.

Art: I think, in the way that I work and in the way that you work as well, my goal is always that they leave each session feeling unburdened, feeling the symptoms of their trauma less intensely, and almost like they have a weight lifted off their shoulders that has been literally pressing down on them, holding them back. In a session that I usually do, which are ideally an hour and a half to even two hours long, there's time to rewire those networks and then to allow the information to percolate at a thinking level into the thinking part of the brain.

It's almost like when the trauma happens, the reptilian brain, the primitive structures of our spinal cord decide that in order to survive, our heart, our lungs, our guts, they need to get the most blood supply because they're going to be crucial to our survival as a species. The head, if you like, is considered redundant. In a sense, I'm just thinking as we're talking that the head at the moment of the trauma dissociates from the rest of the body because the reaction time of the cortex is about half a second, 500 milliseconds, where the body will be responding within 30 to 40 milliseconds.

That knowledge, and intrinsically your neural system, gives the head less of a role to play in the immediate response to survival. Though, I find that one of the goals of my therapeutic process is to connect with where that information has been stored on a physiological level in the body and then to titrate it and activate it so we reverse that process, so we can give patients the sense that they're no longer in danger and it's safe to reperfuse their brain. Then at the end of the session, I say, "Well, what have you learned? What meaning, if you like, does the experience hold for you now?"

They're able to contemplate in a way that they wouldn't have been able to do before because the networks are now being perfused, the synapses are connecting in a way that wasn't possible, or wasn't visible, or wasn't even advisable at the time of the trauma happening.

Roland: There's also what I have coined the "please response."

Art: Yes, that's interesting.

Roland: Some call it the "fawn response". We pretend to get approval, to get acceptance, to get some sense of self, even if it is through externalization. I think pleasing is especially present when we talk about developmental issues, or traumatic environments that persisted for years, and that response goes alongside the fight-flight-freeze responses.

I work with a lot of people who have symptoms of complex trauma, and they have various traumatic patterns that relate to different people; so, if they relate to their dad who might have been the abusive person, they have a different set of reactions, of survival, with their mother, who might have been the neglectful person.

With one parent you're either more fight-freeze and the other parent, you might be more flight and please. So, with the fight response it relates more to being angry, getting upset, being irritated, while a please might be more being submissive, allowing too much and having your vulnerability and your boundaries crossed.

It becomes more complex through different traumatic experiences, different situations, and people. You have various survival patterns that are built in different parts of the brain, like, "With this person, I need to react in this way to survive and with that person, I need to react in that way." It takes up a lot of energy to have various sets of survival patterns related to different people, and they can activate and get triggered so unconsciously.

Even to become aware of those patterns that we have, that as a patient, you have, can take a lot of time. A therapist, of course, helps you with speeding up that process, the cognitive understanding. As you mentioned, a therapist and patient, they're actually working through those processes, of renegotiating, what I call boundaries and vulnerability. Going from the dissociation into the activation and then going into finding that point of resilience where you can contain and not be moving into extremes all the time, and bring some resolution, physiologically, mentally and emotionally.
All of that goes together, of course, as you know.

Art: I was interested in your work online with patients who have dissociation. You are able to tune into them and cut off a potential dissociative response by being aware of their states of mind as you're dealing with them and just distracting them or turning to mundane topics.

Roland: Changing the topic for a while, yes. I often use that; it's a nice technique to shift the attention onto something more mundane, especially when your client starts to get too focused on the internal pain. Like, "Okay. What kind of books are you reading or what's going on your life or what's next after the session, what are you up to? How is your house looking, does it need repairs or what do you need to do today?"

Just little things, simple things that take their minds off from the freeze response, when they stay too long in there. I think you need to do that as a therapist, and it takes practice to come to that point that you can just shift the attention naturally, easily, and move it into a different energy.

As a therapist, the first time is like, "What do I do with this?" because it has that stagnant energy, and at first you can get pulled into that freeze response, especially if you haven't worked on your own things sufficiently enough. I think through experience, you know how to first recognize it and then to shift the energy and gently move out of there.

Art: One thing I'd like to share with you when we have the time is, it builds on the work that I wrote about in the book that came out a few years ago, where I had a picture of the rapids, a picture of a castle, and then a picture of a sort of frozen lake. I've since had that developed as a three-dimensional model, just quite a small little box that's a wooden box and in the center is a cardboard model of this castle with a number of windows down at the bottom.

There's a picture, a three-dimensional model of the rapids for the person who has racing thoughts, affective instability, their personality is fragmented into parts, they're impulsive, distressed, and suicidal. Then on the opposite side of the castle, the frozen lake represents this freeze reaction where they're oblivious, and they're emotionally numb. As I said, they can be two parts of the same coin, but the castle has an open roof, if you like, where they can feel safe and contained and can, through imagination and guided visualization, get a safe space where they can contain the emotions that they had.

One patient was able to actually, without me saying anything, draw a picture of a door and of herself holding a key, which gave her the ability to escape from the emotions to a path where there would be therapists who she knew to interact with and relate to, and her partner as well, which was a bit of a breakthrough and what we described as a light-bulb moment for processing these emotions that had been repressed and held on to for a long time.

Roland: Excellent. I think it would be good for today to end it here and use our follow-up meeting to go into the next part on trauma and dissociation.

Keywords: Negative body Image.

Overcoming addiction keeps addiction in place. The more effort you put into trying to overcome addiction—without awareness of the underlying emotional causes of addiction—the more energy you feed the very addiction you are trying to overcome.

When you feel repeatedly overwhelmed, desire, wanting, craving and finally addiction are all ways of attempting to deal with those feelings.

Through the search for satisfaction and release, you attempt to mitigate your emotional stress. Addiction is thus dissociative; something you do in order to survive. It is a coping strategy, never the core issue in and of itself.

Addiction, Eating Disorder and a Negative Body Image

Almost anything can become an addiction. Most of the time, you either gravitate to a behavioral addiction or a substance addiction.

An eating disorder is one form of addiction.

Overcoming addiction keeps addiction in place. The more effort you put into trying to overcome addiction—without awareness of the underlying emotional causes of addiction—the more energy you feed the very addiction you are trying to overcome.

There are many facets to understanding PTSD and dissociation. Today, I want to go deeper into what happens when belief and judgment take over and become props which you use to avoid your underlying pain.

Beliefs vary greatly, and can be acted out towards others through blame and judgment, or turned inward on oneself through self-reproach and guilt.

Beliefs and Attempting to Understand Their Role in PTSD

Beliefs easily get channeled into expectation, which is then projected onto something or someone. What further complicates this is that you accept your belief as reality.

For example, you want your spouse, sibling, or parent to be more attentive to you, but they aren’t. The expectation is that they should be. This belief is based on a notion of what is idealized, socially or otherwise, but the reality is often horribly different.

Beliefs easily get channeled into expectation, which is then projected onto something or someone. What further complicates this is that you accept your belief as reality.

This simple example easily gets complex when you consider and understand the dynamics of trauma and PTSD.

Dissecting Beliefs and Projection Further

The “should” or “shouldn’t,” whether projected towards oneself or towards others, is going to cause conflict. Judging oneself or others is a movement of dissociation and takes you away from what is.

When you have gone through neglect or abuse and are dealing with PTSD or CPTSD, there is a part of you that is hurting. That part of you looks for resolution by projecting towards an opposite. When you have experienced a lack of bonding, or lack of feeling appreciated and valued, you will seek for resolution by expecting to be appreciated and valued by your close friends, your partner, or your parents. This expectation is most often unconscious.

Your need for feeling valued and the belief that those close to you should fulfill that need continues to be based on a lack or perceived lack that you experienced in childhood; furthermore, feeling valued and appreciated can become something that you constantly demand from those close to you.

The Subtleties of Understanding PTSD Projection

Bear with me: it makes sense that you want to be valued and appreciated by those around you. I don’t question that. It is the “too much” that is the issue; your attempts to understanding PTSD and Dissociation overcompensate for the “lack of” or “too little” love that you received. It is that part that we are addressing here, because it is that which causes your patterns to reenact.

Once you realize that you are projecting your needs—through demands, expectations, and beliefs—and begin to understand how they relate to your hurt of not having those needs met as a child, that can help you to curb your acting out of that need.

Such realization and understanding also give you an entrance into meeting the pain of that lack of love and validation.

When you can change the direction of that movement which by default flows outward through projection, and can bring it inward to meet your initial hurt, you are on your pathway of healing.

Understanding the subtleties of PTSD is complex.

How do you find yourself being too demanding or having expectations of others that are too high? Leave your comments below.

Keywords: Dissociative Amnesia.

You dissociate in order to survive. Dissociation isn’t a static state you move into when you come out of a fight and flight activated state; rather, it is a gradual process in which, with each step, you dissociate further into a state of disconnection.

Each time you further disconnect from yourself through dissociation, you leave behind a part of your awareness. As a consequence, a sense of forgetfulness or amnesia sets in. This PTSD dissociative amnesia can manifest in your not being able to feel certain emotions clearly anymore, or not remembering what happened to you.

You dissociate in order to survive. Dissociation isn’t a static state you move into when you come out of a fight and flight activated state; rather, it is a gradual process in which, with each step, you dissociate further into a state of disconnection.

The Ins and Outs of PTSD Dissociative Amnesia

It isn’t that your memory is lost to you; it is more that your focus has shifted to something that you feel you are more capable of dealing with.

Dissociation is a safety mechanism which helps you to survive when fight, flight, or pleasing aren’t possible anymore. Dissociation is set in motion to ensure your survival through physiological immobilization and psychological disconnection.

When animals come out of a freeze or dissociation response, they shake out the stress that has accumulated in their nervous system.

Unfortunately, with us humans, to undo a freeze/dissociation response is often a bit more complicated.

PTSD, Dissociation and the Freeze Response

The reason that it is more difficult for us humans likely is because abuse, neglect, or an abusive environment may have continued for an extended period and hence the possibility to discharge traumatic stress wasn’t available.

Dissociation is a safety mechanism which helps you to survive when fight, flight, or pleasing aren’t possible anymore.

Secondly, our ability to think and reason can perpetuate a dissociative state indefinitely.

Thinking brings in judgment towards ourselves or towards others, and thus the traumatic energy gets channeled into guilt, blame, self-reproach, shame, embarrassment, comparison, self-pity, jealousy, pride, fault finding, self-righteousness, regret, or distrust.

Thinking excessively prevents you from connecting to the body-- and this forms part of dissociation. When you are overwhelmed by emotion, you disconnect from the body. Your energy moves upward into the chest resulting in shallow breathing, and into the head, which results in excessive thinking.

Dissociation and Coming Back into the Body

Coming back into the body and meeting the frozen high energy charge in the nervous system is where your potential for healing lies.

There are a variety of difficulties regarding coming back into the body, and this mostly is because your survival is invested in the dissociated state.

To come back to the body will ring all of your alarm bells, as you will have to meet the pain, the fight, flight, and please response and their associated emotional states of anger, anxiety, despair, hopelessness, helplessness, dishonored vulnerability, and overwhelming grief.

You have to go extremely carefully into working with and reversing dissociation. You will have to negotiate that space between connection and dissociation.

Working through trauma can often feel like navigating a minefield.

Negotiating Dissociation to Heal PTSD, CPTSD, and Complex Trauma

First of all, negotiating dissociation has to start by your becoming aware of the dissociated state and by being able to differentiate between the necessity of it in the past for survival, and how it is working against you right now and impacting your health.

When that awareness is present, and there is a willingness to work on it, regardless of the resistances that will surface, only then can any progress realistically be made.

What reversing and negotiating dissociation entails is for you to start feeling below the level of dissociation into the sensations and emotions that made you dissociate.

You will need to allow a temporary giving up of control to enable you to move through the dissociated state. This is where the hard part comes in as doing so will make you feel vulnerable and possibly overwhelmed.

Working Through Dissociation

You must, therefore, carefully move into the feelings that are beneath or within the dissociated state. When you get too activated, you need to be able to manage that activation. And, you do this by not going any further into exploring the activation and its accompanying emotions.

It is through the “holding” of your emotional activation that you create more resilience. Slowly on, you will start to contain the whole of your wound and process the emotional residue within.

Reversing and negotiating dissociation is a process. You will find that you will have to move back and forth between connecting and disconnecting repeatedly until you can feel more of yourself and can successfully manage your boundaries. Up to that point, your trauma-informed therapist is providing that management of what you can contain and hold, and when to temporarily break off the process and disconnect from what you have been working on.

How is dissociation for you? Leave your comments below.

I am sure you might have experienced this at some point in your life: something happens to you, and only later do you have an emotional response to what just happened. You have a delayed emotional response.

When it happens occasionally, it is not such a big deal. When you have gone through trauma, however, delayed emotional responses can become more frequent, and this can be upsetting and disturbing.

The Nature of a Delayed Emotional Response and Delayed-Onset of PTSD

A delayed emotional response is part of the “freeze” response of the nervous system. A full-on “freeze” response is when you go numb and play dead until the danger has passed. It is an extreme form of dissociation that is biologically hardwired in your system for the sake of survival.

There are many degrees of dissociation below the full-fledged “freeze” response.

The delayed emotional response is one of them.

Post-Traumatic Stress and Dissociation

When you have too much emotional input all at once and you are not able to process what is going on and respond at the moment, your mind “zooms” out and waits until your energy is more available or until you are in a safer place.

When this happens frequently, you might feel that you have gaps in your memory, which is a typical dissociative symptom.

The Window of Tolerance and How the Brain Becomes Conditioned

A delayed emotional response can become habitual and can start to occur without an apparent stressor, though often something has caused a trigger before your mind disconnects.

You disconnect when you feel overwhelmed, and feeling overwhelmed can become a conditioned response.

When you feel emotionally overwhelmed, which is what happens when you are traumatized, your capacity to deal with further stressors becomes limited. Your window of tolerance or emotional resilience has decreased because your energy is still occupied in struggling with the emotional residue of your trauma.

A delayed emotional response is part of the “freeze” response of the nervous system. A full-on “freeze” response is when you go numb and play dead until the danger has passed. 

You become prone to feeling overwhelmed and thus dissociate, go numb, or have a delayed emotional response for the future; this will continue until you deal with the emotional residue related to your past.

The Delayed Emotional Response and Healing PTSD

Becoming aware of how you dissociate and to which degree you dissociate is a first step in working towards healing.

If you are or have been doing counseling or therapy, you might have become aware of the delayed response within the therapy process, and this can be a good thing. It gives you a measure of to what extent you dissociate, and as you progress in the therapy process, you will start to notice that the gap between what is occurring and your emotional response begins to close.

When your resilience and trust grow, and you can gradually allow yourself to feel emotion in the moment, healing will become a present reality.

Do you have a delayed emotional response and how does that show up for you? Leave your comments here below.

Emotion, concerning Complex PTSD dissociation, is layered. We default to those we feel the safest with or those that didn't have any direct repercussion from our environment.

If there have been different people involved that contributed to separate traumas, it will make it more complicated, because the positions of what is one's core emotion and what is one's coping emotion could be interchangeable. For instance, with Complex PTSD and the dissociation that follows.

Core Emotions and Complex PTSD Dissociation

A core emotion is an emotion most closely related to what made you feel overwhelmed and helpless.

Emotion, concerning trauma, is layered. We default to those we feel the safest with or those that didn't have any direct repercussion from our environment.

Concerning incidental traumas, the core emotion is more accessible to identify. A car accident, surgery, or attack that contributed to Post-Traumatic Stress often has a fear of getting injured or losing one’s life as a core emotion. With a sudden loss, the core emotion would be grief and sadness.

With child neglect and abuse, it gets messier because there will be various layers of trauma in place. These mechanisms of core and coping emotion still apply, but there will be more than one present, and hence we talk about Complex PTSD dissociation.

Child Neglect and Abuse and the Layers of Complex PTSD Dissociation

With child neglect and abuse, on a very primary level, there is a lack of healthy attachment bonding.

It is this lack of bonding that gives rise in later life to loneliness, depression, self-doubt, issues around self-esteem, self-hatred, negative self-image, problems with sexuality, relationship attachment difficulties, and possibly addiction.

At the root of it is this lack of love, bonding, validation and acceptance and one’s core overwhelming emotion related to that is sorrow and grief (sadness). It might be conscious or not, but it is there.

It often doesn’t stay with neglect only when addressing childhood trauma. Traumatic periods continued with verbal, physical, or sexual abuse. At those times of abuse, as a child, you most likely weren’t in a position to fight back and show your anger as it would be met by more abuse or neglect.

So we get a secondary trauma of abuse where one’s core emotion is anger on top of the pain of neglect and its profound grief and sadness.

From here on it could potentially keep spiraling into further complexity. As an adult you might get involved, due to one’s emotional and nervous system patterning, in a relationship with a narcissist, have severe medical or addiction issues, and so on and so forth. Each incident might further compound a particular trauma pattern that is already in place or creates a new set of trauma patterning.

Why You Create Coping Emotions and How They are Part of a Complex PTSD Dissociation Response

The above reasoning is examples of how things can flow in life but there are many other variations possible. These are meant to sketch an idea while looking at complex trauma that there often will be several core emotions related to different traumas in place.

The difficulties, unfortunately, don’t just stop there. Core emotions are one thing. As mentioned in the very beginning we develop coping emotions that we default to when core emotions are too overwhelming, and they often are.

Coping emotions are emotions that feel safer to be with or express, and they channel the energy of the core emotion though they are fueled by the core emotion.

Over time the core emotions will become unconscious, and you’ll be focused on the coping emotion and attempting to overcome them.

For example; suppressed anger that relates to abuse in early life gets diverted into anxiety. Anxiety is the coping or default emotion here, and anger is its core emotion. Primary grief and sadness--due to neglect--might be channeled into anger or anxiety in order to cope. How you cope will depend on your circumstances and your particular character.

The Interplay of Complex PTSD Dissociation, Core Emotions, and Coping Emotions

You see how incredibly tangled all of this can become.

There will be central themes in your life though that are repeating themselves over and over again.

From what I have seen, even regarding complex trauma, there are often no more than two or three sets of core and coping emotion. So that’s the good news.

Once those themes are identified, it gives you handles on constructively working through Complex PTSD dissociation. Furthermore, this means that you aren’t just dealing with the addiction patterns or the coping emotions only.

Can you identify a core emotion and a coping emotion as a pattern that you tend to repeat? Leave your comment below.