Secrets Part 4
We’ve been talking about secrets… and I mentioned that our brains can hide things from us.
This is dark and complicated, but extremely important. (That was your trigger warning.)
Your survival brain has one job: to keep you safe.
And your survival brain is excellent at its one job.
It wants you to live.
No matter what horror you have been through - your survival brain wants you to live.
And the survival brain is incredibly creative in this process.
Sometimes, especially at very young ages, people do horrible things to us. This is extreme abuse… human trafficking is one example. And it’s probably the most well known.
Survival brain for these kids has to defend them from horrific abuse.
And survival brain wants to survive.
Survival brain looks at a child in a dangerous and very abusive situation and says, “I will protect you. I am going to send the you that makes ‘you’ away, because you can’t handle what is happening.”
This is survival brain being a bodyguard to logic brain. Logic brain holds us, our personality and makes us who we are. Survival brain wants to protect that.
And desperate measures are employed.
When a child cannot escape a situation like human trafficking or abuse on that level - survival brain sends logic brain away.
Survival brain may also create a ‘character’ or ‘personality’ that can handle what the child cannot, in order to survive the abuse. Some people who have been through this call this process splitting, or describe the character as an ‘alter.’
It’s still them. It’s just a different them that helped the child survive.
The professional psychologists characterize this as Dissociative Identity Disorder.
And here’s a video of a person with a system of ‘alter’s who helped them survive through trauma.
As a writer… I have characters, but I know they’re fictional. I love them dearly and I recognize that my characters have elements of me - but they aren’t me.
When a person has dissociative identity disorder they don’t separate the “characters.” They also aren’t “characters” they are actual persons. To make it clearer, they are actual persons in one body and when the overwhelm appears, they will dissociate and switch into another person who can handle whatever caused the overwhelm.
Share Chronic Writer by VintageInkSlinger
Thanks for reading Chronic Writer by VintageInkSlinger! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
