Why Do I Feel Like Different Versions of Myself in Different Situations? – Part 3
By Regina Kerrigan, LCPC, NCC
This is the third part of a 3-part series in which I discuss the topic of noticing different versions of yourself. As I covered in Parts 1 and 2, it’s quite normal to make minor adjustments and self-edits to your behaviors and demeanor depending on who’s around you. For Part 3, I’ll cover structural dissociation more specifically.
Can you think back to the last time you were hanging out with a good friend? Think about how you felt, and how you interacted with your friend, and how you viewed yourself in that context. Now compare all that to the last job interview you had. Definitely different, right? This is just one example of a normal shift in demeanor, emotions, and mindset depending on the context. Most people experience this to a certain degree, and as a normal, healthy mechanism, it’s one of the things that helps us prosper in the world.
Sometimes, though, we feel less in control of the shifts we make, and the triggers that lead us to shift are less obvious than a job interview (which is clearly a potentially stressful situation for most people). Sometimes the trigger can be something as subtle as a certain look or side-eye from an acquaintance, walking into a room where the vibe feels off, or a song that plays on the radio. What all of these things may have in common for someone with repeated trauma during childhood (AKA complex trauma) is that they are potential reminders—conscious or subconscious—of times in the past when physical or emotional safety was not guaranteed. Whether it came in the form of emotional neglect, overt abuse, or attachment injury, a lack of dependable emotional or physical safety in childhood often leads kids to develop a means of coping known as structural dissociation, which they carry with them throughout their adult lives.
Structural Dissociation
Let’s start with a basic understanding of dissociation. First named in the late 1800s by Pierre Janet, a pioneer in the Western world’s understanding of traumatic memory, dissociation can generally be described as a state of being that is not fully in sync with either the body, or part or all of the mind. Dissociation as a concept is infamously vague within the psychology field, and there is no consensus on a singular definition.
An extreme, textbook example of dissociation would include a person who has survived a catastrophic event or personal tragedy but does not remember parts of the actual event. Another form of dissociating involves not amnesia but rather numbness or disconnection from the emotions associated with a traumatic time period. From the outside, this often looks like a person reporting what happened to them but feeling and showing little emotion while doing so. You can imagine how from a survival standpoint, dissociation is a feature that has helped survivors continue going on throughout human history.
Structural dissociation—more precisely, the Theory of Structural Dissociation of the Personality (TSDP) (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele; The Haunted Self, 2006)—builds on Janet’s work and describes how trauma can divide the personality into subsystems (e.g., Aparently Normal Part/Emotional Part). It’s a framework to understand dissociation, not a diagnosis in itself. In structural dissociation, a part of the personality, usually the part that holds the painful feelings related to trauma, separates from the rest of the personality. Among clinicians who work closely with dissociative clients, this is widely understood to be an adaptive survival strategy—a way the mind copes with overwhelming threat so daily life can continue. If a person continues to experience repeated traumatic events, particularly during childhood, more parts of the personality separate in order to keep the emotional pain out of awareness for the functional part of the personality as much as possible. This is one way that people who experience unspeakable traumas can go on to live seemingly normal lives from an outsider’s point of view.
What’s Going On – On the Inside
On the inside, structural dissociation feels different for different people. There is no one-size-fits-all description that captures the essence of being structurally dissociated, which has undoubtedly contributed to the vague definition and even disagreement on how common it is. To give you an idea, in specialty clinical settings, Other Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD) is often the most common dissociative disorder, which means that a large chunk of people who have a dissociative disorder diagnosis do not neatly fit into a specific disorder diagnostically.
Many clinicians use the TSDP “levels” shorthand: primary dissociation (often seen in PTSD), secondary dissociation (common in complex trauma presentations such as C-PTSD and OSDD), and tertiary dissociation (Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID). This is a heuristic—real people don’t always fit neatly. Very generally speaking, we tend to think of it in this way: The higher on the dissociative spectrum you fall, the more separated the parts of your personality have become. For a DID diagnosis to be given, the person must also have recurrent gaps in recall for everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events—beyond ordinary forgetting.
The most common language used for the separated parts of the personality is simply “parts.” Some people describe the experience of structural dissociation as a sense of feeling connected to different parts of themselves at different times, but still feeling like themselves. Some may describe it as actually hearing voices from different parts of themselves, which should not be confused with psychosis or with an internal monologue. Still others will describe their experience as feeling compartmentalized internally with subtle signals from different parts that reflect the parts’ differing belief systems about the self or about the world. Personally I think there could be as many descriptions of it as there are people with the diagnosis, and this has been supported anecdotally by various well-respected therapists who have structural dissociation.
Takeaways
If you can take one thing away from this blog post, I hope it’s this: structural dissociation is gradually becoming more understood for what it is—an incredible tool for survival that undoubtedly gets a lot of people through really tough experiences and still able to function and carry on with life. People with structural dissociation often just need support in familiarizing themselves with their parts in order to begin successful trauma-specific therapy work.
You might be wondering what the treatment goal is for people who have more defined parts of their personality. This is solely up to the person! Treatment is typically phase-oriented (1. safety/stabilization; 2. trauma processing; and 3. integration/rehabilitation). Generally speaking, if I can help a client come to an understanding about the parts of themselves and help them get to a place of a more harmonized way of relating to themselves and their parts, that in and of itself can be a transformative process. Ultimately, we want to help the parts process the traumas they’ve been through so that they can feel assured that the old threats are over and in the past.
If you are wondering about your own experience and whether or not you fall on the dissociative spectrum, I’d love to talk to you during a free consultation to see if we’d be a good fit. Reach out here or schedule a consultation here.
Take care! - Gina
Sources
· Brand, B. L., et al. (2012). International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 13(2), 115-187.
https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2012.629493
· Van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Steele, K. (2006). The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. New York: W. W. Norton.
(Overview article) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10950423/
· Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Van der Hart, O. (2011). The Structural Dissociation of the Personality Theory. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12(4), 412-425.
https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2011.570592
· Spitzer, C., Barnow, S., Freyberger, H. J., & Grabe, H. J. (2006). Recent developments in the theory of dissociation. World Psychiatry, 5(2), 82-86.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1525127/
· Chien, W.-T., & Fung, H.-W. (2022). The challenges in diagnosis and treatment of dissociative disorders. Alpha Psychiatry, 23(2), 45-46.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9597071/
· American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR).
(Summary of DID criteria) https://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
· Hunter, E. C. M., et al. (2021). Prevalence of depersonalization/derealization disorder in the general population. Psychological Medicine, 51(6), 949-959.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000650
· Moskowitz, A., & Corstens, D. (2008). Auditory hallucinations: psychotic symptom or dissociative experience? Schizophrenia Bulletin, 34(6), 1124-1131.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2632481/
· Brand, B. L., et al. (2009). Trauma-related dissociation and the development of psychotic symptoms. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 1(1), 62-70.
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015224
Additional Reading:
https://www.instituteforcreativemindfulness.com/about-dr-jamie-marich/
