"I find myself looking at the presence as if I were inside a grave or another world." Everything seems strange to me: I seem to be outside my body and my own sense; I am lost to personality, separate, unconsciously interrupted.
(Henry (1) Friedrich Amel, 1880)
It was a busy day until the clock seemed like it was not moving. I arranged your office and then went on a half-hour daily trip to your home in a nearby town. But this time something really strange happened, it was repeated from time to time, Every time you are asked, you found yourself in front of the house, as if it had happened suddenly. You already know that you were driving from work to home, but you do not remember what happened during driving or the places you passed and the cars you avoided. Before?
It's a common situation. You must have felt that the last half hour, for example, as if you were not, you do not remember what happened during that period or even what you did, even though you knew you were sitting there messing with books, it seemed like your mind was working In an autopilot way, it performs all the usual things while you're not here, just drenched in daydreams. It is a very short moment in which you lose the ability to recognize your surroundings. You are sitting in your house. The person sitting next to you is your father. But for a moment you talked to him. For a moment you did not take the time to think. So, that I suddenly wondered: Who this person? Where am I?
"De Jafo" inverse!
What happened in the two previous stories is that you have separated for a short time from the reality around you. This is called the separation / separation. Naturally, it does not last very long and people wake up from daydreams alone or only when someone draws their attention with a word or a call. But in some cases the person can not easily get out of it, affecting his or her life, work and relationships. Here, the person has a dissociative disorder.
In that case, you separate from your current actions, your usual thoughts, your sense of the surrounding world, your sense of perception, and your identity as well. You feel like a person named Omar, for example, has a set of traits and behaviors that he knows and practices With all the people, there are many different reasons for this condition, but all of them are linked, in one way or another, to a harsh childhood incident, such as gross neglect of parents, sexual exploitation, persecution, beatings or any other harsh incident. Trying your mind to break away from those cruel childish events, like an automatic Defense that keeps you away from the vicinity of that bad anniversary.
For example, in the case of a depersonalization / derealization disorder (3) you will feel that you are watching yourself from outside your body as if you were watching a movie, Or it will seem like you're floating up to see everything, including you, moving from that point of view. This type of disorder is also characterized by another phenomenon we know, but we are experiencing for short moments, which we talked about a little while ago, the so-called "Jamais vu" means to be in a familiar place with familiar faces but you lose your connection to the ocean like you You see it for the first time, unlike deja vu, and you see a whole new twist but feel familiar.
Forced flight
Dissociative amnesia (5) refers to the case in which a particular memory is separated, for example, a painful accident, or the three years surrounding the accident, as well as all the events and personalities surrounding, such as forgetting the house of your grandmother and the face of one Your uncles like you have never seen before, sometimes a person feels that he is not the person who knows him. In other words, you may forget the Facebook password that you memorize and then remember shortly afterwards, in the extreme case of this Symptoms There is a disorganized memory disorder.
At some stage you may have a complete loss of your personality. For example, in the case of dissociative fugue, memory loss develops into a complete loss of personality. Here the person is separated from his nature, his usual behavior, his body language, his practical experiences, and forgets Even his friends and work relationships are accompanied by a journey to a distant place where the person lives in a completely different character. One of the most famous is journalist Judy Roberts of the Tacoma News Tribune, who disappeared in 1985 to appear 12 years later in Alaska, De Williams ", another character with other relationships and a different life.
In all of the above situations, the person will be separated from the reality surrounding him just as you do in the case of your minor daydreaming, during which you normally practice your life, such as driving home, but your self-perception, for instance, Another person, while the first person remains in that state of daydreaming all the time, may extend from several days to many years.
Multiple personalities
The most severe, and most well known, case of paradoxical disorder is the disorder of multiple personality, but now it is not taken because it is mistakenly understood as a personality disorder while it is a dissociative disorder. This is called dissociative identity disorder (8) , In which one person has at least two separate characters, the number may increase but only two are more dominant, each temporarily controlling the body and mind of the casualty. Each person is in a loss of memory while the other acts, when the other person controls your body and your mind will appear It's like you've been out for hours or days, just like it happened As you drive home, you'll see a new phone or sweet piece in the fridge and you do not remember buying either.
This may be apparent to those around the casualty, but in that case you suddenly or gradually change from one situation to another, changing your way of thinking, thinking, and how you feel about the world around you, it seems like you are taking on someone's personality. In simplicity and in the palace when we suddenly feel like we are kissing one of them, he was a relative or a celebrity, but in the case of identity disorder, it is more cruel and catastrophic.
Different characters speak within the same human being in different ways, acting in different ways, thinking in different ways, each having a particular political or social opinion, and even opposite, as well as a different body language, and also vary in age, race, even sex, That a male may be one of his multiple personalities is a female, or be a character is a child at the age of ten, and these characters are often associated with the accident or trauma of childhood received by the patient.
Errors in understanding
Let us make it clear at this point that the films do not clearly reflect that situation. We will soon separate a special report to compare the identity disorder between reality and film. But in general, the new character is not always violent in the way "Dr. Jake vs. Mr. Hyde" Of course, appears as a conflict between good and evil, but in reality things are not always the same, and the additional characters do not continue to control for long periods, on the other hand is not related to the disorder, significantly, the existence of hallucinations or mania or other additions Hollywood known.
Also, one of the famous mistakes in understanding is to imagine that there is a complete separation (9) between personalities in the same person. It happens in a way that seems to be so, but let's deal with it as multiple cases of the same self, sometimes depressed, You are a little skeptical, through the perspective of each of these situations can express yourself, in the case of multiple personalities happen, but more harshly, and for longer periods of time, and a degree of separation from the memories of the previous situation.
In all cases, dissociation disorders, primarily multiple personalities, or identity disorder, do not exist as a single fixed state, but extend in a wide range between an ideal situation in which no symptoms, which is rare, are ideally placed on the other side, Symptoms, which are rare, and the doctor to determine the difference between cases and natural cases, but - Believe it or not - we are all separated, to varying degrees, from the reality around us, we go back a little in different worlds, and then come back again.