The Myth of Sanity summary

Trauma doesn’t just create lasting emotional scars – it also has a dramatic effect on the brain itself, particularly when it comes to hormones and areas of the brain related to memory.

So, let's take a look at how memories get formed under normal circumstances. First, your five senses send information to the amygdala, the emotional processing center of your brain. Then, after “assessing” the emotional significance of the information it receives, the amygdala passes its assessment on to the hippocampus, which sorts the information according to its emotional importance and integrates it with other memories.

Julia had a dissociative disorder with several adverse effects. One was that she frequently entered states of fugue, or “flight.” In fugue, a person’s mind is able to carry out intellectually-driven functions like waking up, going to work, and even having conversations – yet the part of the brain that experiences emotions and remembers events isn’t functioning properly.

It was during these periods of fugue that Julia felt as if she “lost time.” On one occasion, she woke up on what she thought was a Tuesday but was informed by a coworker that it was actually Friday. Strangely, no one had noticed her acting any differently on the days in between, when she wasn’t mentally present.

Child abuse is disturbingly present in the world. In America, for instance, almost 5 percent of all children are reported as victims of abuse. And conservative estimates suggest that 38 percent of all American girls and 16 percent of American boys experience sexual abuse before the age of 18.

Aside from direct abuse, many children also frequently witness secondhand violence, like muggings and shootings, especially in urban environments. And on a more global scale, tragedy is ever-present – disasters affected three billion people in just the years between 1967 and 1991.

Much of what causes dissociative identity disorder, or DID for short, is unknown. What psychologists do know is that the disorder almost invariably occurs in chronically abused children as a survival mechanism.

In situations of hopelessness, the body often “gives up” and dies – it simply cannot withstand protracted extreme stress. As far back as 1957, psychologist C.P. Richter demonstrated that mice placed in situations of hopelessness, where no fight or flight response was possible, often died of heart failure.

How well do you think you understand your closest friends and family members? Could you come up with a list of personality traits to describe them and be reasonably sure they were accurate?

You might be thinking, “Yes, of course I could!” But you’d probably be wrong. That’s because most people aren’t just objective, casual observers of other people – instead, they often mentally distort facts or events such that their image of a person remains consistent over time.

All of us experience dissociative states at one time or another, whether they’re as simple as spacing out and daydreaming on the commute to work or as dramatic as lapsing into an entirely different persona. No matter where you fall on the spectrum, is there any way to overcome these dissociative states?

The remarkable recoveries of some of the author’s patients give us a hopeful answer to that question. Both Garrett and Julia, two of the patients we discussed previously, stared their most painful memories in the face – and didn’t back down.