Tuning out is dissociation’s less extreme cousin, part of the same family of escapist adaptations. It is invoked by the organism when the circumstances are stressful and there is no other recourse for relief, when one can neither change the situation nor escape it. Such was the imperative in my own infancy. Such, too, was the situation for my three sensitive children—a trait they may well have inherited, as discussed in the last chapter—in an emotionally chaotic home characterized, amid plenty of love, by parental anxiety, depression, and conflict. This adaptation then becomes wired into the
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