Platinum Magazine, September 2005
John R. Cook, Ph.D.
Registered Psychologist

Ever have the experience of plugging in too many appliances at once (e.g., toaster, kettle, iron) and blowing a circuit in your house? Annoyed and scared you descend the darkened stairway to your basement hoping that replacing the blown fuse will be a simple operation. You discover the blown fuse in the fuse box, but much to your dismay, have no spare fuse with which to replace it. You wonder why we bother to have fuse boxes in the first place. The simple answer is that without this protection circuits can overheat, melting the insulation off wires, causing shorts and potential fires. Your house could burn down!

The human brain works in a similar fashion as the fuse box in your house. This is particularly true in response to upsetting and overwhelming experiences that occur during childhood. The equivalent of a fuse blowing in humans is dissociation. Dissociation is a disruption in the processing of information. Its primary purpose is to protect us from overload. It works by preventing us from bringing together in conscious awareness the totality of what is happening during a traumatic event or when we think about it afterward.

The result is a fragmented or disjointed experience with important parts missing such as knowledge of the events themselves, aspects of the sensory experience, and awareness of our feelings. The world around us may seem altered (as if in a fog or a dream) and/or we may even seem less recognizable to ourselves.

The severity of the dissociative response is often in proportion to the level of upset accompanying the event. An example at the mild end of the continuum is feeling sleepy when someone is telling a sad story. At the more severe end it is possible to feel as though you are outside of your body witnessing the event without feeling anything.

Although dissociation is a protective mechanism, it is not always welcome. For example, if we have been traumatized in childhood, relatively minor stressors may cause us to dissociate uncontrollably in adulthood. Thus, the human fuse can blow when we are scared late at night, during a stressful conversation, or even in the midst of sexual intimacy. At times like this, we may curse the day we first started using dissociation to protect ourselves.

It is disturbing to realize we are still being disadvantaged by an earlier traumatic event, but keep it in perspective. Imagine what could have happened if we weren't able to dissociate when we really needed it. Think about what can happen to a house without a fuse box. You could face potentially more serious and disabling mental illness, or even death.

Fortunately, there is treatment for unwanted dissociation. It consists of learning to recognize your symptoms of dissociation, identifying the triggers, and learning alternative, more efficient methods of stress management. Some of these methods include abdominal breathing, visualizing yourself in your "comfort place", and engaging in activities that you find grounding. This may be as simple as making a phone call to someone stable, going for a run or working out, or drinking a bowl of chicken soup. If you are interested in learning more, call 881-1206 to schedule a free 20 minute consultation with Dr. John Cook.