Transcription
People with severe dissociation are often misunderstood. They're often misperceived as liars. Dissociation involves memory lapses and lost time. And this is a terrifying experience and people try to compensate for it, to reframe it, to ignore it, to deny it, to repress it. No one copes well with dissociation.
Dissociation is a thief that takes bits and pieces of your life away. And so people try to bridge these gaps and by doing so they appear to be facious and deceitful and dissimulating and deceptive. Frequently these people appear to be lying but they're actually not prevaricating. It is just that because of their extreme dissociation, these people have learned to not forget. They hoard memories. These people never discard even the tiniest details. They document their lives meticulously. They memorize dates and numerous trivia and data as handles. Some things to hang on to in their whole ridden minds.
Dissociation engenders compulsive memorizing. Ironically, dissociation forces the individual to revisit time and again recalled snippets and snitches and snatches of a life ill-lived. Then try to put them together within a coherent and cohesive narrative. And then there are holes in this narrative. They're gaps and the individual invents a story. And so these pieces of fiction which glue the narrative together which generate a simulacrum of continuity, they appear to be lies, deliberate, premeditative and premeditated and manipulative machiavellian lies, but they're not.
Dissociative people have uh often contradictory memories about the same object, the same event, the same person at the same time. A dissociative person can regard the same woman, for example, as both irresistible and impulsive and repulsive. So a person with dissociation can hold simultaneously mutually exclusive memories and appraisals, evaluations of other people. And so as I said, a man with dissociation, a heterosexual man with dissociation can regard a woman as both irresistibly attractive and undeniably repulsive. Repellent, the same building as prestigious, cryptic, the same person as someone who makes him feel good or feel bad. And all these coexist within a space which is compensatory. There's an attempt to compensate for the dissociation by, as I said, hoarding all these memories, never letting go, never updating, never revising, never recreating the narrative to accommodate new data and new information and such.
Gaping discrepancies make dissociative people appear inconsistent and deceitful. But we are not talking about lying. This is not lying. This is not deception. It is simply an archaeological memory multi-layered. These people maintain access to all the conflicting layers and strata at once. They access all the memories regardless of the time stamp at once. But why would these people have radically differing viewpoints about the same person, the same event, the same object? Why would they have memories that contradict each other that are mutually exclusive when it comes to the same target of memory, the same object of memory? Precisely because of the way that these people struggle to maintain their unruly memory and to cling to it desperately. These people never delete a memory because they cherish their memories like so much treasure. These people cherish their memories like treasures because they have so few of them which are genuine and authentic and undisturbed and unperturbed.
When there is a troubling gap and their memory fails them, patients or clients or people with dissociation confabulate. They invent a plausible probable narrative or a scenario that must or may have happened and then they come to believe in it and regard it as fact and they try to convince other people that their confabulation, this concocted plug that is intended to somehow bridge the memory gap is real, has always been real, has always been factual. And when they encounter a challenge or a disagreement, they react with aggression and they acquire a reputation for lying, for mendacity, for deceitfulness which is utterly unjustified. It is just a futile attempt to reestablish continuity in a disjointed broken life. An identity that could never coalesce because the underlying memories were severely hampered and obstructed and shattered and fragmented.
So these people never get rid of a memory. They never replace one memory with another. They never modify a memory. They simply append the memory to another memory. Even if the two memories are diametrically opposed, even if the two memories contradict each other, even when the two memories refer to the same person, same event, same object and they can't sit well together because they are totally opposite. Even then the two memories are retained and recalled and accessed simultaneously.
So people with dissociation are highly ambivalent. They hate and love at the same time. They find you attractive and repulsive simultaneously. They detest aesthetically an object or a piece of architecture even as they admire it. They have conflicting contradictory streams of consciousness and cognitions.
Dissociation is typical in borderline personality disorder and may be the reason, the cause of idealization devaluation approach avoidance. These cycles of behavior, these cycles of attitude, these cycles of motivation, these cycles of interpersonal intense relationships. These cycles may emanate from the very fact that the borderline is dissociative. The narcissist is dissociative and they're unable to discard antiquated out-of-date memories in favor of more updated ones. And so they're always ambivalent about other people, about their own lives, about events, about objects, about values, about beliefs. They're always ambivalent. They always simultaneously um hate and love, approach, avoid, seek and crave, reject, and fear.
Borderlines and narcissists, but borderlines more so are labile. The changes in their internal states, self states, in their cognitions, their emotions, in their moods are so abrupt and violent that they disrupt any personal continuity and a sense of coherent identity. And this discontinuity also makes borderlines and narcissists appear to be factious liars. But they're not. This discontinuity, this identity diffusion or identity disturbance is real. These people are not pretending to be someone else. They are someone else from time to time. It's very, very reminiscent of dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder which of course are based on dissociation.
Borderline and narcissists are just struggling with their fragmented memories and excruciating liability, with the volatility, with the contradictions inherent in their state of mind, with their inability to create cohesive internally consistent narratives that sit well with reality and of course with their impaired reality testing. Dissociation is at the heart of all these phenomena and a crucial part of the ideology of narcissistic and borderline personality disorders.