However, usually such reactions are temporary and brief and the person is functioning at a normal level at other times.ĭissociative symptoms are commonly related to hypnotisability or the potential to experience hypnosis. This can cause people to act in an extreme way to a seemingly harmless situation and to question whether they are losing their mind. ![]() Such responses can be triggered by reminders of earlier traumatic situations, even when individuals are not consciously aware that such memories are being triggered. “fight”, “flight”, “freeze” and “submit” responses). Such reactions typically seem to make little sense or to be very strange, but they may relate to survival mechanisms shared by humans and other animals in response to extreme threat (i.e. Individuals suffering from dissociative disorders may be very confused or perplexed about aspects of their behaviour such as why they might suddenly act in aggressive ways, why they might suddenly feel panicky and extremely threatened until they leave a particular situation, why they might feel helplessly immobile when they feel threatened or why they might have offered little resistance when others have treated them in an abusive way. Dissociative symptoms sometimes relate to an attempt to block out painful emotions associated with overwhelming or traumatic events. However, it is possible for such symptoms to emerge in later years, but most commonly after severe traumatic experience. Causes of Dissociative Symptomsĭissociative symptoms commonly result from repeated trauma, abuse and/or neglect in early childhood years. Otherwise they may assume that everyone has such reactions as extended blank spells or no memory for some significant past events (dissociative amnesia) or having difficulty recognizing oneself in a mirror or looking at oneself from a distance as though looking at another person (depersonalization). Many highly capable individuals from many walks of life also have dissociative conditions which they may be experts in disguising. ![]() Approximately 15 per cent of psychiatric outpatients would have some form of dissociative condition. ![]() For example, approximately 4 percent of psychiatric hospital in-patients would suffer from a severe dissociative condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder (whereby the person may feel or act as though they have a number of quite distinct and separate personalities). Sometimes individuals may indeed have such difficulties, but sometimes these diagnoses may result from health professionals not understanding the potential alternative of a dissociative disorder to help account (at least in part) for a person’s difficulties.ĭissociative symptoms can range considerably in their severity. ![]() People with dissociative conditions are often diagnosed with many other conditions including depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, somatic conditions (including fibromyalgia) and borderline personality disorder. Indeed, dissociative symptoms are probably the least understood symptoms by mental health professionals despite there having being much research on such reactions spanning over 100 years. They may also sense that health professionals whom they see will not understand or believe them. Otherwise they may assume that everyone reacts in a similar fashion. Often people do not report these symptoms because they may fear how others might respond. These symptoms include persistent daydreaming, forgetfulness and amnesia for recent events, feelings as though one’s body does not belong to oneself, feelings as though things (perhaps even the world itself) are not real, and a sense of acting so differently on occasion that it seems as though they were another person. Some of the most distressing symptoms that clients report include dissociative symptoms.
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