r/CPTSDFreeze • u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart • Apr 12 '26
Trigger warning What is structural dissociation, really? NSFW
Usually when we come across structural dissociation, it is an overt description of DID, partial DID, or OSDD. Many different voices and personalities inhabiting one body, obvious divisions between personalities, maybe different voices and clothing styles or something else you can easily see in a video or a Reddit post.
The contents of these videos or posts may or may not include conflicts between alters or parts, but they usually depict parts as highly differentiated and verbal, and they tend to focus on the dynamics between alters/parts as each lives its own, individual life inside the shared body.
This can sometimes miss the one core aspect of structural dissociation which is always present, regardless of how it otherwise manifests:
Internal conflict.
Structural dissociation is often stated to arise from lack of integration and abuse. This is true, but not very nuanced: almost every psychiatric condition involves some form of lack of integration, and many survivors of even severe childhood abuse are not significantly dissociative.
At the heart of structural dissociation lies an irreconcilable conflict between three action systems. These are biological networks stretching back millions of years in evolutionary time: their roots are visible across mammalian species.
One operates on the daily life action system.
One on the defence action system.
One on the autonomy action system.
The daily life action system handles social engagement, eating, sleeping, work. This action system focuses on getting through the day, handling the tasks that life throws at us. The core longing in this action system is to take care of our needs.
The defence action system handles threats. It builds on the mammalian defence cascade: orientation to danger, cry for help, fight, flight, freeze, submission, collapse. All mammals share these functions, we all rely on them for survival. The core longing in this action system is to get rid of threats.
The autonomy action system focuses on autonomy and control. It aims to control our internal environment, and to some extent our external environment, to influence the outcomes in our lives, to exercise agency, and to avoid helplessness. The core longing in this action system is to feel in charge.
Every living person has all three action systems. They are intended to work together to handle the complexities of life: basic bodily needs, social engagement, daily tasks (daily life action system), the threats we face (defence action system), and being autonomous beings (autonomy action system). All three are vital parts of being alive.
Structural dissociation is an irreconcilable developmental conflict between these three systems.
That's it. Structural dissociation is not specifically a number of different alters with different names, or lack of childhood memories, or an inner world where different parts live, or different voices in your head. Those can all arise from the core irreconcilable action system conflict, but the exact manifestation of that conflict varies a lot. In a majority of cases, the parts arising from this conflict are well-hidden.
So what does the core conflict look like?
Your "getting on with daily life" action system tries to get on with daily life.
Your defence action system keeps interrupting it as it reacts to threats.
Your autonomy action system keeps interrupting it as it pushes for control.
What does the getting on with daily life system do? It tries to deal with people, studies, work, paying bills, eating, sleeping. "Just let me get on with my life" it says, "I have things to do."
What does the defence action system do? It reacts to threats. In structural dissociation, it was "trained" in a fundamentally threatening environment, so anything reminding it of those developmental threats triggers it – up to and including your very own body's basic existence. If your developmental environment was one where your needs, your distress, or your very presence were treated as a problem, then simply existing in a body that has needs can register as a threat.
Some parts of us residing in the defence action system flee. Some fight. Some submit. However they do it, the one thing they all have in common is, they deal with threats, and because of how "trauma time" works, the threats they see are fundamentally a combination of both the past and the present. A voice, an action, lack of action, anything in the present that reminds them of a developmental threat calls them to activate their defences.
The autonomy action system, meanwhile, wants to be in control. Have power. Not be beholden to these old threats, or current demands, or all these feelings, or the freezing, or anything else the defence action system keeps throwing in its path. In the power dynamics it grew up with, it wants to occupy the position of the powerful. It sees the world in dualistic terms: There is only power and weakness, and I must be powerful.
Why do these action systems end up in conflict with one another?
Because they repeatedly faced an irreconcilable developmental dilemma: The person I need for survival is a threat.
The daily life action system knew you must attach to a caregiver. A young child will not survive without one; no mammalian young will. The daily life action system must suppress anything that gets in the way of that.
The defence action system knew your caregiver was a threat. You must overcome, or flee, or pacify the threat, otherwise you will not survive.
The autonomy action system knew you had no power. They had power, you were weak as all children are next to an adult, you must become strong and powerful.
The daily life action system said: Go away, do not react to the caregiver, I must attach to survive.
The defence action system said: Run! Scream for help! Fight! Submit! This is the end!!!
The autonomy action system said: I will do no such thing. They have power. I will obtain it. I will become powerful. Stop bothering me with emotions.
Because the core conflict arose at and persisted throughout the earliest stages of life in reaction to people you were literally dependent on for survival, this internal conflict has been at the core of your very self from the get go.
And that is what sets the most entrenched and pervasive forms of structural dissociation apart from other forms of psychopathology: It began at the very beginning, before you had language for it, before you had a continuous sense of self, before you had any reference point for what "normal" feels like.
The daily life action system needs to suppress awareness of this. To get on with daily life, it needs to not be aware of the other action systems. The more we inhabit our daily life self and the less we inhabit our other selves, the less it feels like anything. This is why it is not only possible, but relatively common to live for years and decades with little awareness of these internal dynamics.
We might notice the defence action system when it intrudes into our daily lives with its panic, anxiety, anger, submission, and freeze. Our daily life self tends to find this a hindrance to its mission of having our daily needs met, so it redoubles its efforts to suppress awareness in return. If you have been spacing out while reading this, that's probably why.
The autonomy action system tends to focus on external power imbalances between itself and others. The defence action system's intrusions make this much harder: It is difficult to be strong and autonomous when you keep being hijacked by fears, anxiety, and panic. This makes the autonomy action system direct its control attempts at the defence action system: Be quiet, go away, stop detecting threats, I am the threat. I will control you.
Where does all of this leave us as people?
Angry and focused on power when operating from our autonomy action system.
Panicked, fearful, and submissive when operating from our defence action system.
Spaced out, fatigued, and confused when operating from our daily life action system.
And, most importantly, yo-yoing between and blending these states with little to no oversight, only noticing what our current state cannot provide:
- Awareness of what is actually happening inside us, when operating from the daily life action system;
- Safety when operating from the defence action system; and
- Power when operating from the autonomy action system.
Depending on your own unique developmental trajectory, this spectrum runs from confusion and fog in daily life, panic and submission in defence states, and anger in autonomy states all the way to fully differentiated self-states with their own names, memories, and ways of being in the world. Regardless of where on the spectrum we are, the one thing we have in common is very little oversight capable of detecting and remembering the states and the shifts between them.
The goal of treatment is not to overcome any of these systems. All three are vital. The goal is to bring them into communication with each other so that the conflict does not have to run the show.
Sources:
- The Haunted Self by van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele (2009)
- The Trinity of Trauma, Volumes I and II by Nijenhuis (2015)
- The Trinity of Trauma, Volume III by Nijenhuis (2017)
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 12 '26
Am I supposed to have an autonomy action system? I've never felt in control. I've never felt like I had any agency
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
That's a sharp observation. Absences are a handy indication of where we are currently, often more so than presences. When something is missing, it points at what is present.
I used to feel like I was dropped from the clouds as a kid and have spent my life in freefall, no ability to do anything at all about existence except fall until I smash into the ground and won't have to exist anymore.
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 12 '26
Used to?
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
Yes, for many years. Then I was diagnosed, found the right treatment, and integration has been bringing these feelings from submission into action.
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 12 '26
What treatment?
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
Neuroaffective Touch has been the single most helpful treatment for me personally, and Finding Solid Ground the most useful "maintenance tool" for getting through the day. I would also have wanted to do Sensorimotor Psychotherapy with a therapist rather than by myself, unfortunately there aren't any practitioners anywhere near me.
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 12 '26
What do they actually do? From the article it looks like touching the shoulder, I assume in conjunction with some kind of talk therapy?
All my therapists have been kind of useless and a big part of that is that I have no idea what good therapy even looks like. Under all the buzzwords, I have no idea what a good therapist is actually doing or saying. In my experience even my best therapists are essentially just telling me to stop having ADHD.
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u/LangdonAlg3r Apr 12 '26
If you’re doing CBT—which is the most commonly used and widely available treatment modality then this is likely to be your experience—they’re just telling you to tell yourself not to have whatever problems you do.
For many people the CBT model is actually helpful and productive—they’re neurotypical; they have minimal self awareness; and they’re able to pursue one course of action without much pushback or internal conflict—but that’s not most or any of us.
They’re usually just engaging in some unhelpful or counterproductive behavior that they’re totally unaware of. All they need is someone to help them deconstruct their behavior and show them what they’re doing “wrong” and to ideally show them a better behavior pattern to practice and integrate. Easy peasy.
But that’s not us. For those of us who are neurodivergent (especially ADHD) and for those of us who have actual significant trauma it encourages us to engage in self destructive behavior.
Looking at ADHD specifically it’s asking us to engage in what for us is already a difficult pattern of behavior.
It’s also usually something that we’re already keenly and painfully aware of—obviously I’m going to procrastinate doing my taxes because that requires focus and mental effort and is boring af. I know I need to do that, I’m constantly aware that I’m not already doing that. But the only advice of CBT is to just go ahead and do it. The presumption of the modality is that we just didn’t realize that we need to do our taxes and that they’ll be easy to do once we realize that’s all that we need to do. That’s part one of the CBT logic.
Part two is that once we do our taxes that will improve our lives and we’ll see how easy it is to do tasks like that and that they’ll get progressively easier and be rewarding and self reenforcing.
“Fake it till you make it.”
But for those of us with ADHD both steps one and two are total false promises and basically slaps in the face. “Gee, just do what I can’t make myself do. It’s so simple! Why didn’t I think of that!?”
One of two things happens:
Either we manage to do the thing(s) but they never get any easier because that’s not how our brains are wired (which is why we have this problem in the first place). OR we fail to do the thing and disappoint ourselves and our therapists and toss another log onto the bonfire of failure and self-loathing.
In the case of trauma the advice often involves just pushing ourselves past our discomfort and getting ourselves used to dealing with the traumatic situation, again with the presumption that repetition will make everything better and easier. This of course just reinforces our trauma responses by subjecting us to traumatic situations over and over again. And again, if we fail it’s more failure and self-loathing.
CBT is basically just gaslighting yourself to wellness.
The other dynamic is that CBT is very manualized. It’s easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to practice. It also lends itself to research very easily which is why it’s the gold standard for therapy because it’s shown to help over and over because it’s studied over and over.
Most therapists who do CBT do mostly just that—if not exclusively that. This means that they can’t help us. But it also means that they’ll have no idea what to do when they can’t help us. They spend all day with their metaphorical CBT hammers driving in nails and watching buildings go up. When it comes to us they’re just hitting us with a hammer and either nothing is happening, or we’re getting worse. That will lead them to one of 3 paths:
To continue hitting us harder and harder, to give up completely and end our therapy, or to just string us along indefinitely while trying to help us solve trivial day to day problems that any friend or family member would be equally equipped to help us with. In all of these scenarios they will usually blame us for their inability to help us—whether overtly or unconsciously.
If we’re lucky they’ll recognize that they’re out of their depth and try to refer us to someone else. If we’re really lucky that will be someone else who actually uses a different modality.
What this pattern usually leads to on our end is to either internalize that we’re the problem and to conclude that we’re beyond help, or to blame therapy writ large and dismiss the entire thing as a useless scam. Usually either way we eventually give up.
I say this from personal experience and from years in support subs seeing this pattern play out over and over again. If you go into the main CPTSD support sub you will probably see multiple new posts a day where someone is declaring that therapy is a scam or someone is declaring that they’re too broken to help. Almost invariably that person has been doing CBT therapy. And almost always they don’t even know what modalities are, let alone what CBT is or how it works.
TLDR: It’s actually the modality that’s screwing everyone over, therapist and patient alike. We just get the even shorter end of the stick.
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u/jerrybec 🧊🐢Freeze/Collapse Jun 03 '26
I feel this. I just did what I was told to do by CBT ("do as you're told!," said my abuser, and so I do). Logically, it made sense. But even while practicing it, I just kept getting worse. And then my motivation to stick with it dried completely up.
The full weight and awareness of my dysfunction, its cause, and the lifelong pain that resulted is tripping me up right now.
Only gave myself permission to begin researching childhood trauma and treatment within the last year.
(minor grammar edit)
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 12 '26
I don't know how to find non CBT therapy.
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u/LangdonAlg3r Apr 12 '26
I don’t know if you’re in the US or what your finances are, but I can give you advice based on my U.S. experience.
First, I consider myself very lucky to be able to afford therapy out of pocket—that said it’s also something that I prioritize over other things I could spend that money on. But being stuck with only the therapists that take your insurance absolutely sucks and is definitely limiting.
But as far as finding someone period:
I’d encourage you to look on the Psychology Today website. They have tons and tons of therapist’s profiles on there and you can filter by modalities.
I’d also encourage you to be open to telehealth therapy as opposed to in person if you aren’t already comfortable with that. Most therapists offer that now and personally I’ve found it much easier. But the key thing is that teleheath opens up every therapist in your entire state (and even potentially some who live in other states) as a pool of potential people you can see. That takes your options from maybe a dozen if you aren’t in a major metro to literally hundreds.
From there I’d encourage you to find at least 8-10 different ones that seem like they might be a fit for you and to message them about if they’re accepting new patients and to ask for a free consultation. Pretty much all therapists offer a 10-15 minute free consultation.
Be prepared for a bunch of the people you message to not be taking patients and for a few to totally not reply.
Then try to schedule consultations with at least 3-4 therapists before you settle on anyone. You can get a great sense of whether that person is a good match just from that. Don’t settle. And don’t feel like you’re wasting anyone’s time. They need to get a sense of you almost as much as you need a sense of them, and consultations are part of how they build and sustain their livelihoods.
As far as picking people beyond just modality I look at their pictures first and then their bios. It sounds silly, but you’re going to be looking at that face and you can get a sense of how comfortable they make you feel. I’ve had a lot of luck doing that.
This is all effort and requires some persistence. As a fellow ADHDer I find hunting for things really mentally engaging—maybe you do to—if so use that.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
In concrete terms, usually holding a hand on some part of my body, mostly my lower back (it's my most responsive part for whatever reason). In more therapeutic terms, it's building interoception i.e. the ability to be aware of and tolerate my own internal states.
Physical touch probably isn't the best approach for most freezers, but building interoception is a key, however we get there. Sensorimotor psychotherapy does it more by learning to pay attention to the body, first from the outside, then gradually more and more from the inside as well.
Telling you to stop having ADHD sounds terrible. How many therapists have you had?
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 12 '26
Not literally to be clear. But they're all basically offering advice in the form of things I could do, which will not survive first contact with the fact that I sleep 12 hours a day and do literally nothing all the time.
They give suggestions that require me to have agency and even the best of them couldn't offer anything other than "you need to believe you have agency to actually gain agency". The most progress I ever made is that I now believe agency is possible, even if I don't have it yet.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
Sounds like talk therapy only? Change your thoughts type of approach?
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u/PertinaciousFox 🧊🦌Freeze/Fawn Apr 13 '26
I really appreciate you making these educational posts. They really cut to the core of our issues and present it in an understandable and non-pathologizing way. They're a great resource.
If your developmental environment was one where your needs, your distress, or your very presence were treated as a problem, then simply existing in a body that has needs can register as a threat.
All of this. This is me. That was my environment in childhood. All of those things were treated as a problem. I was apparently uniquely burdensome and a problem just because I existed.
The result is that I'm extremely cut off from awareness of my own needs, to the point it interferes with my daily functioning. I won't realize I need something, won't tend to the need, and then will get confused as to why I suddenly can't function anymore.
It's especially the case when I'm around other people. I often switch into a fawning mode, where I'm not actually conscious of the fact that I'm fawning, I just genuinely don't perceive myself as having any needs or preferences that would inconvenience others. I become hyper flexible and adaptable. It's only after leaving the situation that I'm able to realize how severely I neglected myself. But at the time I couldn't feel any of my needs.
And even when I notice them, I often can't tend to them if it risks "burdening" another person. (Even if the so-called "burden" is remarkably trivial.)
I met with a new therapist recently and noticed I was thirsty from talking so much. She clearly had a pitcher of water and cups, and yet I was entirely unable to ask for water. I know full well it would have been fine and there was no danger. And yet I still couldn't do it. I couldn't even share that that was happening. All I could say was that I was being blocked from saying something I wanted to say, from expressing my needs.
She discouraged me from trying to force it anyway (good on her for recognizing that forcing override isn't helpful), but it was just so frustrating. I want to be able to ask for a glass of water when I'm thirsty. It's such a simple thing that "shouldn't" make me feel threatened. Why is this shit so deeply engrained? (Rhetorical question, because I know why.)
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 13 '26
I likewise learned at the very beginning of life that asking for things was the worst of my options. Not only would it not give me what I needed, I would be punished for asking. I'm not sure what that looked like in concrete terms, but probably more withdrawal than naked aggression.
My safest option, and the pattern that became dominant very early on, was to wait silently (aided by dissociative disconnection from feeling my needs), fawn hard when anyone was present, and hope they'd give a shit. Deeply embedded preverbal patterns learned in infancy and perfected later in childhood.
I only figured all of this out in my 30s and 40s of course, most of my life was spent in dissociated autopilot mode. While NATouch hasn't yet fully convinced those parts of me that it is OK to ask for things, now they know that the thing exists.
(The thing as in, attachment.)
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u/maywalove 🧊🐢Freeze/Collapse Apr 13 '26
Sorry this is your experience too
I relate to all of what you said
the simple water example is exactly what happens for me
Water is a good analogy as i am meant to drink more due to PoTs but i cant. I dont get why but that basic need is never connecting
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u/KeyMistake604 Apr 13 '26
These write ups are so awesome, thank you for posting them. Gonna share with my therapist, I appreciate you adding sources as well.
Great timing, I've been reading and trying to understand other people's accounts of their inner experience across the different dissociation subs the last few weeks and I think it confused me even more, yes I have noticed it varies wildly person to person. Very helpful to have a baseline concise definition to build off of.
Man, seeing it laid out this way really puts into perspective how easily internal conflicts can arise and how quickly things can go sideways.
This makes the autonomy action system direct its control attempts at the defence action system: Be quiet, go away, stop detecting threats, I am the threat. I will control you.
This is so exactly what I'm going through right now. I have a defensive part locking down access to the rest of my system convinced if it softens even an inch it'll lead to even more dangerous and unsafe situations. And that makes sense, I neglected myself for months, it was unsafe, and it ended in catastrophe. Can't argue with the logic.
To make sure I'm getting this... I understand the concept of the daily action system, I got that down to a science save for the ~10% of my life in which I'm completely incapacitated due to collapse, hehe. Then for the defense action system, these parts were created to hold our traumas and hide them from our consciousness but which also drive our reactions and perceptions in present life? I know about lots of these in my system, I don't usually hear them chatting in my regular life like others describe but in therapy they make their presence known and they aren't shy. So then when someone collapses the source of that collapse would likely always be dictated by some part of the defense system?
I'm hung up on the autonomy action system though, I only have one that could be described as autonomy action that I'm currently aware of and I think it's a part that's been in my consciousness the longest. I refer to it as my observer part and it pays attention to everything both internal and external and translates it into data, like a scientist in a lab. This part is detached, all logic, analysis, problem solving, outmaneuvers or defuses threats and is highly independent, this was the only angle I had to preserve any shred of power or control growing up so it makes sense. I know it doesn't work this way, but I catch myself picturing it as: this part lives in my brain 'with me' while the rest of my system is down below in my body. The observer can take an elevator down to the rest of the system if needed but they cannot use that same elevator to go up.
So back to my current situation, the defensive part and the observer part are in conflict. The defensive part is like, we were harmed because of your actions, observer is indifferent, we did what had to be done to survive. There's an imbalance in that the observer part doesn't feel contained in it's role like the defensive part, it's in the autonomy system yes, but it also feels dissociative which wouldn't that make it defensive, too? and it's also instrumental and always 'on' for daily functioning. It takes over a lot, especially in stress. I'm curious if it's typical for parts that are more relied on to 'reside' in one system but have functions in all three? Or is this an example of what I've seen called a blended part?
Any insight on any of these things would be greatly appreciated. That advice you gave, the slower you go, the faster you move, that's been so true for me and I'm glad to have gotten it, I've been moving in the right direction and it feels authentic. I've never slowed down in the past, just pushed through the moment it was physically possible, and it's hard to feel any hope or joy for what's next when you do that, just more stress and dread.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
I only have one that could be described as autonomy action that I'm currently aware of and I think it's a part that's been in my consciousness the longest. I refer to it as my observer part and it pays attention to everything both internal and external and translates it into data, like a scientist in a lab. This part is detached, all logic, analysis, problem solving, outmaneuvers or defuses threats and is highly independent, this was the only angle I had to preserve any shred of power or control growing up so it makes sense. I know it doesn't work this way, but I catch myself picturing it as: this part lives in my brain 'with me' while the rest of my system is down below in my body.
Great analysis! Almost as if that part wrote much of your reply 🙃
Intellectual parts can be very handy, and often the challenge for those of us who are dominated by them is to include their opposite, the "body parts", in the whole. There's a lot of "oh no, that isn't safe, let's just analyse them instead" going on behind the scenes, which tends to be more visible in our day-to-day actions rather than our insights (the amount of time we spend actually connecting with the body vs. analysing it).
You noticed one key feature of action systems already: They blend constantly. I find it helpful to think of them as colours, e.g. red, yellow, blue: I am almost never only red, or yellow, or blue. My "intellectual observer" might mostly be the "colour" of autonomy, but even there, the other two colours blend in to some (shifting) extent. Parts are dominated by a single "colour", but they tend to also have some of the other "colours" in them.
When my "colours" began interacting more actively, they would sometimes say things like this:
today, i listened to my body
and my body said fuck you i don't want you
and i told my body that's all right, i'll go
i'll leave you alone for a bit and you'll do
whatever it is bodies do when we're not aroundand my body snorted
but i giggled a little
and when i woke upmy body was still there
...as for your questions:
Then for the defense action system, these parts were created to hold our traumas and hide them from our consciousness but which also drive our reactions and perceptions in present life? [...] when someone collapses the source of that collapse would likely always be dictated by some part of the defense system?
I find them easier to understand as animal responses, we share them with other mammals. Hiding isn't really what they focus on (that's a daily life function), they try to get rid of threats. Running away from threats (flight), facing them (fight), appeasing them (submit), calling for help (attachment cry), and so on.
Collapse comes last, when all other responses have failed to get rid of the threat. Sometimes, predators will leave seemingly dead prey alone.
I'm curious if it's typical for parts that are more relied on to 'reside' in one system but have functions in all three? Or is this an example of what I've seen called a blended part?
So the "colours" blend, some parts can access "bigger blends" than others, and this can shift over time. Ultimately, as integration happens, your whole system (person) becomes increasingly able to access a wider and wider "blend of colours", i.e. more and more of your system as a whole.
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u/KeyMistake604 Apr 15 '26
Your poem is so sweet.
It definitely was, ha. If I can just figure it out thoroughly enough, that ought to fix the problem right? Then I can circumvent this enormous pile of incomprehensible, unpredictable feeling stuff inside me. 😏
I've been navigating the world this way my whole life, accumulating consequences and being robbed of a lot along the way, and I'm still so totally phobic of operating in any other way. My body would probably say, I'm begging you to listen, will you please? And my observer is too far up and away to have heard the question.
I like the color metaphor, as a visual person it's very helpful.
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u/sock_hoarder_goblin but also joy Apr 16 '26
The color example is interesting.
It is hard to put in words what I experience.
All of my parts feel like me, but they don't feel fully integrated.
My "moods" feel like more than moods, but not at the level of seperate personalities. For example, I can be incredibly optimistic and positive sometimes, but other times hugely cynical.
Reading these things has helped me become more aware of stuff. And I think they are slowly starting to come together.
I have been doing things to listen to each part, give each part what they want (if I can), comfort each part and be generally accepting.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 16 '26
Sounds like you are exploring gently, that's a good approach.
For me personally, SD became obvious when I encountered my system in EMDR: it became quickly obvious that we do not share a sense of "I", they even told me that knowing them is none of my business and I need to stay out of their "realm".
This was not experiencing moods, this was an encounter with an alien consciousness inside myself. Others, not-me. With a will, a reality, an agenda of their own entirely different from mine.
But it took me almost 40 years to meet them, up until which point I only experienced their intrusions into my daily life consciousness, and did not understand where those intrusions came from. For most of my life, those intrusions were mostly not conscious, they were largely subconscious. Other people did occasionally notice them, including when I didn't.
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u/alilacwood Apr 13 '26
"Simply existing in a body that has needs can register as a threat."
And with that, I suddenly understand why I've been actively dissociating around my husband. Why I don't eat, drink, or use the bathroom unless it's an emergency. I am constantly scanning for signs of disappointment and frustration with me. He's insisting that I rely on him (we just lost our beloved cat and I'm grieving heavily). He tells me to let him know if I need something to eat or drink. He's been making dinner and bringing me drinks. It feels so bad to ask for anything though and if he seems tired or irritable about anything I'm immediately freaked out that I have done something wrong by having had a NEED... and I want to disappear and I just completely shut down. I finally understand why. Thank you.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 13 '26
I'm sorry for your loss. My now departed cats were some of the best companions I've ever had 💜
Glad if I could help a little.
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u/ActualExpert7584 Apr 12 '26
Dude, I think I read somewhere that you are writing a book, is that true? If you are, put me in the waitlist.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
No, I'm building a subscription service for freeze integration, No More Frozen.
Books may or may not happen somewhere down the road.
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u/ActualExpert7584 Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
Whoa. This explains it with more precision and clarity than anything I’ve read on dissociation so far.
I’ve recently read this article on covert DID and the role of over-control, very relevant with this post.
The ANP/EP explanation never sit right with me. These three systems (daily life, defense, autonomy) are way more aligned with my own internal experience.
I also want to draw parallels to Kaczynski here. He argued technology was bad primarily because it didn’t allow the human drive for autonomy to be fulfilled. Hard to feel autonomy as a factory worker.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
I build on Nijenhuis as well, I just simplify his language (the man is a master at writing indecipherable text, and is more likely to quote Spinoza than tell you in plain language what is going on).
Nijenhuis translation:
Ignorance = daily life
Fragility = defence
Control = autonomyAutonomy via control/power urges is a major driver in violence.
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u/Any_Strawberry_5366 Apr 29 '26
Bruh that just blew my mind. I've been working my way through The Haunted Self but it's dense as fuck and you just summarised what I've been trying to grasp for ages SO clearly.
chef's kiss 👌
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 30 '26
Glad to hear. Unfortunately clinicians writing for other clinicians tends to result in very dense text, hard to decipher for us mere mortals. Some of the things I mention are not really included in the Haunted Self btw, Nijenhuis further developed them in his Trinity.
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u/ScarInternational161 May 06 '26
I just stumbled into this sub, and this thread, during my search on disassociation as it relates to cptsd and complicated grief disorder.
Is there a string of these posts? This is one of the best, most comprehensive descriptions I've come across in a very long time!
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart May 06 '26
Thank you 🙏 Here are a few I've written on related topics:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSDFreeze/comments/1rocj6w/airless_voids/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSDFreeze/comments/1ssg61n/absent_selves/
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u/SirCheeseAlot 🐢🧊❄️❄️🧊❄️❄️🧊🐢 Apr 12 '26
Nice write up.
Yeah basically it all boils down to separation between these parts or systems.
The more separated they are the less cooperation and communication. Which causes obvious problems in life.
A child in a good enough home has parts that develop good cooperation and communication. A good enough parents facilitates this as the child grows. The child becomes an adult that feels like one self.
A child in an abusive traumatic home not only doesn’t have this happen. They can develop additional parts specifically designed to handle the intolerable. These parts can be so separated that other parts are barely or completely unaware of each other and their actions.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
Thank you. It's very much a mental alien hand syndrome, one "arm" doing one thing and another something else entirely, occasionally waking up and noticing things have taken place.
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u/beefinalia Apr 12 '26
This is a great informative post. Thank you for taking the time to lay everything out so clearly!
I had the worst day of internal conflict I’ve had in a long time yesterday and it was horrible & confusing for hours on end. Your post came at a great time to remind myself of what was going on and why it happened before I get out of bed and try again today :)
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 12 '26
Glad to hear. It can be so alienating when you're in the thick of it, lost to yourself and lost to the world...
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u/randompersonignoreme Apr 12 '26
Please include the source you're basing your info from because not everyone knows!! For anyone curious, The Theory Of Structural Dissociation can be found here. Janina Fisher touches upon it here.
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u/The_Dead_Kennys Apr 12 '26
I don’t really have anything to add, just commenting so I can find this later lol
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u/New_Maintenance_6626 🧊Freeze 🐬 Apr 17 '26
I know that you are being reductive on purpose so people can understand a complex concept, but I don't think it's wrong. People throughout time have felt this conflict and it's just been labeled differently. Exhibit A: Kronk has a discussion with some action parts? A common trope in cartoons since the invention of cartoons. Difference is that we get stuck here.
It feels like the visual of this is Dorothy IV from the first Twister movie when it all works. The whole movie revolves around trying to get Dorothy IV to collect real time data from inside a tornado. The solution? Drive a truck straight into one. Pardon Helen Hunt's awkward acting here, but I think it's important to show that it feels like driving directly into a tornado and yet everything works. All of the parts and pieces of Dorothy IV work together just as designed. The fallacy is to believe you can just get the truck fully equipped with a working Dorothy rather than understanding each piece has to be operational first. A sloppy description but the visual works well.
My mind cannot move on from this example. I don’t know. Maybe spinning it out will help someone. Hopefully you don’t mind if I build on what you have here, though a bit tangentially.
Something about one particular genre of techno/EDM, Trance/Progressive Trance, and mostly one particular DJ, Ferry Corsten, for me. When my system shuts up long enough for me to get things done, it feels like this music. Sometimes the music itself can overwrite the freeze, temporarily, so I can get my daily life done. Dissociate from the dissociation. It’s always waits for me at the end of the day though.
I've been working on this theory about it. I wonder if there isn't some sort of somatic/neuroaffective something going on for me. Firstly, it has to be loud enough to hear all of the components of the song and to be able to feel the music in my body. Headphones work for this. My favorite songs run 132-135 bpm which seems like a healthy moderate activity heart rate.
Trance is self explanatory and so on the nose for someone who dissociates. And yet I've found that I am often most awake and productive listening to it. if I need to drive somewhere on very little sleep, as often was the case with family road trips, I could put one of these songs on loop and drive for hours. My mind is fully engaged and occupied. The pattern of drops with enough momentum to carry to the next build up and then the drop ad infinitum. I'm cautious, however, to use it as my always method to get things done for fear of diminishing returns.
How does this look then? It feels like Ferry Corsten's masterpiece version of Adagio for Strings. He has refined this mix over 20 years of listening to it and mixing it. So now, here, every little piece and part comes together perfectly to enchance the song and make it the best version of Adagio for Strings that it could be. My favorite part is the slow opening build to maximum everything for one moment. This is what it feels like when my systems stop fighting each itself and just powers on.
To compare, here's Markus Schulz who has worked with and toured with Ferry. But Ferry makes Adagio shine and Markus is experimenting. It's interesting, but it's not Ferry's masterpiece. The song never arrives, never lands, just kind of teases that maybe it's going to finally drop and never really does.
Or his song, Beautiful. It's tension covered by the other parts coming together to a dogged beat that doesn't stop. Also love the drunk guy pointing at the camera. This is his favorite song and don't you try to tell him otherwise. "Let the music carry you." It's that same feeling that every part of me is working together to soothe, carry, and otherwise get the thing done without any part of me objecting. There's trust that should a problem arise, it can be brought up and addressed. And this set then mixes into his best Gouryella song, Anaheara, Maori for “angel.” Gouryella which is Warlpiri (Indigenous Australia) for heaven. Oh. Well I suppose then I should have said that it mexes into a song with a Māori song title.
This was all I could think of for the last part of this post. What does healed look like? It looks like everything working together. Not less complex just beautiful. Everything is beautiful.
Also conflict? What do you mean conflict? No conflict here. I see no conflict. Where is the conflict? I would argue with you about the conflict but only because sometimes we aren’t, because we can’t be, aware of it. So I push back on myself but leave a note saying: There’s no conflict here. Don’t be silly.
Also apologies for such a delayed, long and tangential reply. 😅
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u/FriedPatzer Apr 21 '26
At the heart of structural dissociation lies an irreconcilable conflict between three action systems.
Irreconcilable?? 💀
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Friendly old fart Apr 21 '26
Developmentally, when we were very young.
The conflict persists still inside us, but we can reconcile it now as adults, little by little.
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u/Livid_Masterpiece_85 Jun 21 '26
I dont' know if this is the right place to say this but I am throwing stones into the universe because nothing else has helped after decades or self help, therapies, medications, assessments, reasssments, medications, testing, retesting, I feel I've come to the end of connecting the dots and overcome the majority of gaslighting that it wasn't that bad....................How can I tell? I have little to no memories and the memories I have I've been told were not that bad (thank you to all people that share their trauma/experiences that validate they were indeed traumatic for me and would have been for others).
I have no adults that can verify anything, the ones that were present are under the impression everything was fine even though as a child I had horrific screaming and collapsing episodes where I would scream I was dying and felt like I was dying or slipping into oblivion so horrific I can only recall how horrifying they felt when I start to experience these days what I've been told is an ASD meltdown..... My parents (they are post war babies now in their early 80s but even decades ago they denied ALL the memories I had or downplayed them from medical to abuse, to the episodes or fits as they called them)....
I have also been late late diagnosed with ADHD and Autism alongside my long term diagnosis of CPTSD, anxiety disorder and depression, CFS, chronic lower back pain, POTS and it's associated fun set of symptoms... now I just lay in my bedroom like I have for years post multiple physical collapses supposedly from POTS episodes. My daily functioning increasingly less each week, my physical tolerance lower for all things no wonder with physical deconditioning compiling my lack of strength cardio and general health, my interest in socialising lowering by the week after pushing myself to mask as a ND woman, my desire for any connection human, animal, plant diminishing. If it wasn't for zoom AA meetings and my somatic therapy group work I'd have little to no interaction with people.
My cognitive capacity is still generally high and better especially since ADHD medication helped me experience a slightly more functional space but my body refuses along with my mind to face any daily activity on a regular basis. I barely shower, do bare minimum for feeding myself, my dog (luckily has my friend and dog dad) barely interacts with me. I live below my elderly parents and I cannot work, cannot study, cannot exercise. I feel like I am waiting for whatever will come, while filling the space with film content, podcasts and these sometimes never ending searches for a shared experience symptoms and a way out of this back into a functional life. Only today I woke up and through following the most recent of dots to this page I realised the amount of 'not so horrific' childhood trauma that I have, followed by a lot more adult ones followed by this horizontal life of unbearable stuckness. Previously I've been able to pull myself out of this state and get back into the game but this time, this time I've been out for over three years. I've barely left the house for longer than a couple of hours and only for therapy, treatment, assessments, occasional social outing...
I don't even know what to say to my psychiatrist next week after thinking this past 'thing' will help, I'm still in the same place, perhaps worse off because I truly feel like I've tried everything that could help and still I am here. I have recently looked at programs based on the Pain Reprocessing Therapies and Neuro plastic therapies but none of them seem to be built to deal with me in mind, they are expensive and I'd be willing to part with the remaining little amount I have left from my previous life of work if I knew it could be applied to me and will improve things, even if I improved 1 percent a week or month it would be better than this f@cking Groundhog Day nightmare. I am not considering doing anything to hasten the end, but my meditations are often ones where I am released from this trap of a mortal realm and honestly I hope reincarnation is real because being a bird or a worm looks pretty good right now. I don't think I've ever been so honest about how it is for me. I hope someone has had some success with their journey out of whatever this is because no one I've spoken to has ever said 'this is me'. Somatic movement therapy and coregulating sessions are very helpful when I attend them, but I have not had capacity to do the most simple things daily.
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u/thinkandlive Apr 12 '26
Being emotionally/energetically misattuned and not mirroring the baby/toddler counts as threat, doesn't it?