About Adoptee Rage

poor outcomes for a child's future.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Adopted Child's Dissociation Related to Developmental Trauma


The Psychology of Childhood Developmental Trauma In Adopted Children's Dissociation

Relation to trauma and abuse

Dissociation has been described as one of a constellation of symptoms experienced by some victims of multiple forms of childhood trauma, including physical, psychological and sexual abuse This is supported by studies which suggest that dissociation is correlated with a history of trauma. Dissociation appears to have a high specificity and a low sensitivity to having a self-reported history of trauma, which means that dissociation is much more common among those who are traumatized, yet at the same time there are many persons who have suffered from trauma but who do not show dissociative symptoms.
Adult dissociation when combined with a history of childhood abuse and otherwise interpersonal violence-related (PTSD) has been shown to contribute to disturbances in parenting behavior, such as exposure of young children to violent media. Such behavior may contribute to cycles of familial violence and trauma.
Child abuse, especially chronic abuse starting at early ages, has been related to high levels of dissociative symptoms in a clinical sample, including amnesia for abuse memories. A non-clinical sample of adult women linked increased levels of dissociation to sexual abuse by a significantly older person prior to age 15, and dissociation has also been correlated with a history of childhood physical and sexual abuse. When sexual abuse is examined, the levels of dissociation were found to increase along with the severity of the abuse.

Apathy (also called perfunctoriness) is a lack of feeling, emotion, interest, or concern. Apathy is a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation and/or passion. An apathetic individual has an absence of interest in or concern about emotional, social, spiritual, philosophical and/or physical life and the world.


First sense: inability to connect

A fictional description of the experience of emotional detachment in the first sense was given by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dolloway. In that novel the multifaceted sufferings of a war veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, with post-traumatic-stress disorder (as this condition was later named) including dissociation, are elaborated in detail. One clinician has called some passages from the novel "classic" portrayals of the symptoms.

Second sense: decision to not connect emotionally

Emotional detachment in the second sense above is a decision to avoid engaging emotional connections, rather than an inability or difficulty in doing so, typically for personal, social, or other reasons. In this sense it can allow people to maintain boundaries, psychic integrity and avoid undesired impact by or upon others, related to emotional demands. As such it is a deliberate mental attitude which avoids engaging the emotions of others.
This detachment does not necessarily mean avoiding empathy; rather it allows the person space needed to rationally choose whether or not to be overwhelmed or manipulated by such feelings. Examples where this is used in a positive sense might include emotional boundary management, where a person avoids emotional levels of engagement related to people who are in some way emotionally overly demanding, such as difficult co-workers or relatives, or is adopted to aid the person in helping others such as a person who trains himself to ignore the "pleading" food requests of a dieting spouse, or indifference by parents towards a child's begging.
Emotional detachment also allows acts of extreme cruelty, such as torture and abuse, supported by the decision to not connect empathically with the person concerned. Social ostracism such as shunning and parental alienation, are other examples where decisions to shut out a person creates a psychological trauma for the shunned party. As a result, the decision as to whether emotional detachment in any given set of circumstances is considered to be a positive or negative mental attitude is a subjective one, and therefore a decision on which different people may not agree.

Emotional detachment, in psychology, can mean two different things. In the first meaning, it refers to an "inability to connect" with others emotionally, as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as "emotional numbing" or disassociation, depersonalization or in its chronic form depersonalization disorder. In the second sense, it is a decision to avoid engaging emotional connections, rather than an inability or difficulty in doing so, typically for personal, social, or other reasons. In this sense it can allow people to maintain boundaries, psychic integrity and avoid undesired impact by or upon others, related to emotional demands.



Though degrees of depersonalization and derealization can happen to anyone who is subject to temporary anxiety/stress, chronic depersonalization is more related to individuals who have experienced a severe trauma or prolonged stress/anxiety. Depersonalization-derealization is the single most important symptom in the spectrum of dissociative disorders, including dissociative identity disorder (DD-NOS). It is also a prominent symptom in some other non-dissociative disorders, such as anxiety disorders, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar identity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, migraine and sleep deprivation, and it can be a symptom of some types of neurological seizure. It can be considered desirable, such as in the use of recreational drugs..
In social psychology, and in particular self catagorization theory, the term depersonalization has a different meaning and refers to "the stereotypical perception of the self as an example of some defining social category".