When the trauma is so great that the brain 'disconnects' to survive

• When we reach the '' flow '' the connection between ourselves and what we are doing is so strong that the environment goes to the background
• This natural mechanism can become a way to help us overcome stressful or difficult situations.

Dissociating means disconnecting the mind from the body , reducing the reflective capacity for a moment and heading somewhere where the imagination takes us. It is a daily experience. Being distracted, away from reality, oblivious to what is going on for a moment is not only not negative , but it favors a few moments of rest for the thinking mind, as long as this trip to Babia is a short break and your return Be done voluntarily.

The most positive experience of these dissociations is the so-called 'flow' experience, to flow, where the connection between ourselves and what we are doing is so strong that the environment passes to the background and time slips without realizing it. Do you remember any occasion when you were so enthralled in your homework or in the conversation that after an hour you thought only five minutes had passed?

Our brain has two functioning systems, according to psychologist Daniel Kahneman. A slow , rational one that serves to reflect and that follows the marked brain paths, but that requires a lot of energy to function. The other system is that of fast , emotional, thoughtless, highly automated thinking , full of quick shortcuts - the so-called heuristics - that lead us to make decisions without too much premeditation (it is also the seat of creativity or intuition).

According to Kahneman, the slow system is effective but lazy, so, many times, the fast system takes the reins and leads us to dream, look for new ideas, go to Matrix or just think about shrews.

SURVIVAL MATTER

This momentary disconnection ceases to be a mechanism of creation or rest when it is excessive, distances us too much from reality or ends up becoming something involuntary. The psychologist Cordelia Fire says that " the brain does not seek the truth but survive ." Therefore, sometimes, the natural mechanism of dissociation can become a way to help us overcome stressful or difficult situations, although it can lead to more or less serious pathological conditions.

When there are concerns we all know types of people who focus on work and leave their feelings aside. They are even able to feverishly increase their performance and present themselves to the world as impregnable individuals to whom no problem takes them out of their duty.

Trance, shamanism or the skills of mediums are other accepted dissociative forms and even favored in certain environments.

The addict's thinking is also dissociative. On the one hand, the thinking mind knows that smoking or drinking are harmful behaviors, but there is another "mind" that works without control that directs you without brake to the cigarette or alcohol.

Sometimes, difficulties in memory and connection with oneself result in states of "dissociative escape" in which a person does not know how he has arrived at a place and cannot remember anything related to his trip or why he is there.

There are situations such as depersonalization-derealization where we feel strange in our own body , as if we function as a zombie or as if the things around us are not real and an invisible wall separates us from others. These may appear due to anxiety, drugs or trauma. If they are short-lived, we probably won't give them much importance, but if they persist over time, they require psychological / psychiatric treatment.

IDENTITY DISORDER

The most serious cases of pathological disconnection occur in the so-called Dissociative Identity Disorder. Maybe Jenny Haynes's name doesn't tell her anything, but her traumatic experience will surely sound like she jumped into the media a few days ago.

Jenny was tortured and raped from four to eleven years old by her father who has been sentenced by a Sydney court to 45 years in jail.

In her struggle to survive an extreme trauma where the person who has to provide security, support and affection becomes a source of indescribable terror, this woman who is now 49 years old, developed 2,500 personalities . It was the only way his brain could withstand that physical and emotional pain .

During the trial, Symphony, the personality that represents a four-year-old girl describes the dissociative mechanism: "What I did was rescue everything that I thought was valuable to me, everything important and charming and I hid it from Dad for when he was abusing me if he was not abusing a thinking human being. " It was precisely those identities that helped Jenny not feel that she was the one who received that monstrous treatment from her father.

Dysfunctional dissociation is a disconnection of the mind-body that breaks with the feeling of unity, with the feeling of being a person, of having an integrated self, where psychic and somatic life work in unison.

As Philip Bromberg, a professor at the University of New York points out, the function of pathological dissociation is to act as an early warning system that activates before the traumatic event arrives. The brain, by severely limiting the participation of cognitive reflexive judgment, leaves the limbic system more or less free to use itself as a "dedicated line" that functions as what Van der Kolk (1995) calls a smoke detector.

What differentiates the pathological dissociation from the adaptive is that the latter is under voluntary control and also promotes integration while the former increasingly moves away from the possibility of showing the human being that I truly am.

How to intervene

Drop down

By virtue of neuronal plasticity, fortunately we have options to have successful treatments in the fight against dissociative problems. In fact, there is evidence of neuroimaging modifications after successful psychoanalytic treatments. Schore proposes that this produces changes in the mechanisms of unconscious affective regulation that can compensate for the functional problems described.

Therapy can reorganize aspects of brain functioning so that the patient can recognize somatic affective signals in his body by interpreting them as personal experiences and maintaining control over them. The 'mindfulnes' also activates the experience of the here and now helping us to be more aware and be more connected with our senses and our experiences.

Being able to develop through the breath or focus on something a high awareness in the present moment helps us to live the way with a connection to which we are not accustomed.

ISABEL SERRANO-ROSA is director and psychologist of EnPositivoSí.

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