Notable parts from the informative videos:
Our personalities are not born integrated, they’re not born whole, we develop our personalities over time. For a child, it’s very easy to, without secure attachment and with traumatic injury, and emotional injury, not to be able to pull their personality together into a whole.
A child can, perhaps, not have dissociative amnesia from what happened but actually can remember quite clearly and tell you the story, but in the most matter-of-fact way. And that is where it gets unclear, I think for clinicians and CPS workers, maybe this child is over this, or maybe this child is reporting a story that didn’t happen to them, but in fact, for dissociative people, those are the very experiences of non-realisation, that is the hallmark of disassociation. It didn’t happen to me, or it happened to me, and it doesn’t really matter. There’s no feeling to it.There’s no sense of personal ownership. And that’s what non-realisation is all about.
Non-realisation helps people, because then they’re able to go on with their life. If you’re constantly in a traumatic state, of re-living, and emotional upheaval about what happened, you can’t function in daily life. So, non-realisation of the trauma, whether it’s amnesia, complete amnesia, or whether it’s some form of mental distance, like ‘ I know it happened and it doesn’t matter’, or ‘it seems like it didn’t happen to me, it’s more like a dream’, all of those things help you function normally in daily life.
If you say to a three year-old, “Gee, i’m going to pick you up at 6:00,” they may ask every hour, “Is it 6:00 yet?” because they really don’t understand what 6:00 is or what tomorrow is. If you ground them in kind of concrete information like, “I’m going to pick you up when it’s time to have dinner, when it starts to get dark,” then they’re better grounded. Now, think about the traumatised child. and what they might be able to remember, with the orientation of present time. The child, for example, whose parent is physically abusive to them or sexually abuse them, and says “If you tell anyone, I’ll come back and get you,” that child may be waiting for that parent to come back in every present moment, and, therefore, that child not only has been traumatised by the event, but by the fact that they don’t have some of the cognitive capacities that adults or even older children, school age children, have.