Hello, everyone reading this article! Perhaps you’ve seen some of our other articles relating to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD.) If not, here is a basic explanation written by Maria.
Shattered Minds: A Basic explanation of Dissociative Identity Disorder and Related Disorders
Now that you understand how dissociation is mainly caused by the trauma that may be experienced by beings in the stages of early childhood through the rest of life, we can begin to explain how we developed this kind of a condition in the first place. If you aren’t in a stable state of mind at the time of your reading this, I’d highly recommend you do not read any further. I go into details of trauma in the rest of this article.
We were born an empath. In simple terms, this means we’ve always had the ability to feel the emotions of others as though they were our own. In more complex terms, a friend of ours once said, “It’s the ability to see people and things as they are, not as they want themselves to be seen.”
As one might imagine, this kind of ability is both a blessing and a curse, depending on how it is managed. As a child, we had no knowledge of things such as the ones we were experiencing being possible, let alone being the exact nature of our situation. When, for example, at the body age of 2, we bore witness to our parents arguments, not only were we overwhelmed and frightened with the voices of supposed comfort yelling back and forth, but also with the emotions thrown back and forth between the two. We felt what they did as though it was our burden to carry, and did not understand the reasoning behind what was happening. Unable to disown the pain that we had no idea wasn’t, in fact, ours, we instead deeply internalized it, and it was during the process of internalization that our dissociation saved our life.
Any trauma can cause a child to tell themselves, “This is not happening to me, but to someone else.”
This is what the consciousness that once was an unbroken whole told themselves when they took in things that weren’t theirs to take in. Any child under the age of five can disown any experience as having happened to themselves. In fact, any other age group can as well. So it was only natural that, faced with these strange emotions, unaware of their proper place in our lives, and additionally overloaded by our own fears and pain, we, as one, said, “This is not *I* who feels this, but another.” Our intention was not to cast the emotion back to its source, but to remove ourselves, then one self, from the situation. We cared not if the emotion was stored with another who had split themselves off from the wholeness that was who we were at the time. We did not know of such things happening. We only wanted escape, and we did find it, but at a high price.
As you might have gathered from Maria’s essay, it is only the self that divides in the case of overwhelming trauma, the self that becomes fragmented, and so the self that still remains trapped in another’s feelings. The part of the self that is left in the experience of overwhelming pain knows nothing more of empathy than the rest of the self does, and so may not be able to say, “This pain is not mine, but yours,” and if they could say this to begin with, there would most likely have never been a divide at all.
The part of the self that is divided from the rest of the self, and who more than likely knows nothing of empathy, still believes that what they feel, even if lacking context, is of themselves, and as such they will not make any effort to cast it away from their space. In our case, this situation, combined with parental battles of will and blindness on the body level, with a traumatic birth as a beginning into this world, set the stage for a fracturing of the mind, and, at some point none of us can clearly define, a fracturing of our soul. The cost of unmanaged empathy, for this existence, was that this kind of splitting took place. The resources I was given when the body was 1 and a half to two years old were only enough to stop whoever was in control of it at the time from feeling the emotions of others in a way that was obvious to themselves or to said others. I could not stop the subcontious internalization of the states of others, or the absorption of other people’s feelings, only stop those things from being felt at a conscious level, and at times, nothing I could do would stop things from coming to the surface despite my best efforts.
Thanks to intervention that started 4 months ago, we’ve realized our empathy for what it is, and we’ve begun working to get ourselves back to some sort of balance. The internalization of other people’s energies that caused other disabilities in some insiders other than blindness, or at the very least behavior consistent with some of these other disabilities, is slowly coming to an end as we learn other ways of dealing with the input that is forever a part of our lives. But the scars will likely last a lifetime, if not longer, and I am sure we will always be we in this life, both from the unmanaged impact of empathy and from the other situations in our early childhood that caused us to split in this way in the first place. We publish this article not as a letter of self-pity, but as a wornning to the world. Do not let your child suffer because they cannot tell their experiences apart from another’s. Even if they aren’t subjected to other trauma, overwhelm from empathy can be its own horer. In our next articles, we will talk about things you can do to help your child recover from internalized pain, both from themselves and from others, as well as ways of preventing overwhelm in the first place. We will also go back to basics, including our story of empathy in full, the good and the bad, and share prospectives on this subject from a blindness standpoint.
I hope this article has been informative to you and that you have a greater understanding of how dissociation and empathy come together. Love and light,
Cooperland.