The Myth of Sanity Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus The Myth of Sanity

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Zusammenfassung von The Myth of Sanity

Name: The Myth of Sanity
Rating: 4.5 (62 reviews)
Author: Martha Stout

Martha Stout

Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

4.5 (62 Bewertungen)

22 Min.

Themen

Mental Health Trauma & Healing

Inhaltsübersicht

The Myth of Sanity
in 7 Kernaussagen verstehen

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Kernaussage 1 von 7

What’s in it for me? Explore the psychological phenomenon of dissociation.

Have you ever been driving home from work and felt your mind drift far away – so far that you couldn’t really remember how you even got home? Or have you ever been so engrossed in a movie that you felt as if you were right there alongside the characters instead of sitting on your couch?

If either of these descriptions sound familiar, you’ve experienced a minor instance of dissociation. Dissociation is usually a mechanism our brains use to help us cope with emotionally overwhelming situations and traumas. But it comes with a catch: it’s easy for us to get used to dissociating, with our brains constantly “checking out” and avoiding emotionally challenging situations.

If we want to begin to live more honestly and fully in the present, we must confront the phenomenon of dissociation and understand why it develops in the first place.

A quick warning before we begin: these blinks contain discussions of child abuse, trauma, and suicide.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why it’s difficult to express traumatic memories through language;
how dissociation can be responsible for out of body experiences; and
how it’s possible to die from hopelessness.

Dissociation functions as a survival mechanism, but it can be a double-edged sword.

Picture this. It’s a calm, clear evening, and you’re in your car heading home after finishing a tough workout at the gym. You’re about to drive through a green light at a busy intersection when you see it: someone has run the red light and is going to slam directly into the right side of your car.

You understand what’s going to happen before it actually does, and suddenly, it feels like you’re no longer the person at the steering wheel. In fact, it seems as if you aren’t inside your own body at all – like you’re watching the accident happen rather than participating in it.

The term for what you’re experiencing in this situation is dissociation, and it’s a common and normal reaction to traumatic and highly stressful situations. When we dissociate, our brains allow us to “disconnect” emotionally from a situation so that we can act calmly and coolly rather than panic.

The key message here is: Dissociation functions as a survival mechanism, but it can be a double-edged sword.

Dissociation is undeniably useful during traumatic events. However, it tends to have lasting impacts that are anything but useful after the events are over. In a situation where you’ve dissociated, your brain has potentially drawn a connection between something traumatic and something that might seem completely benign to everyone else. And that means you could be tossed into a state of dissociation at completely unexpected moments.

To illustrate this, consider an imaginary woman named Beverly, who’s reading a newspaper while waiting for a train to arrive. She’s so engrossed in the paper that the arriving train’s loud signal causes Beverly to jump in her seat. Suddenly, her heart is pounding, she feels the desire to run, and she even notices an unexplained scent of chlorine.

She doesn’t know it, but Beverly’s brain has emotionally thrust her into a moment in her childhood, when she watched her younger sister jump out into the street and be hit by an oncoming vehicle after walking home from the town swimming pool.

As a result of Beverly’s dissociative reaction, she might feel inexplicably tired, paranoid, or afraid for the rest of the day. But that’s just a minor dissociative reaction. People who experience more extreme traumas will also experience much more extreme dissociative reactions, as we’ll learn in the next blink.

Trauma disrupts the brain’s memory-storing processes and causes dissociative reactions.

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.

Dissociative states can cause a person to lose time or have out-of-body experiences.

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.

Children are much more vulnerable to trauma than adults.

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.

Dissociative identity disorder usually develops as a survival mechanism for an abused child.

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.

Dissociative identity disorder can cause drastic behavioral switches.

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.

To overcome dissociative states, we need to take responsibility and confront past traumas directly.

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.

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Worum geht es in The Myth of Sanity?

The Myth of Sanity (2001) dispels the idea that only “crazy” people experience dissociative states – periods of time in which we might forget where we are, lose track of time, or even have out-of-body experiences. Though we might not all have endured the overt instances of abuse that often lead to dissociative disorders, we are nevertheless shaped by traumas both big and small throughout our lives. By understanding why dissociation happens and how we can overcome it, we can all begin to live more fully in the present.

Bestes Zitat aus The Myth of Sanity

For no conspicuous reason, we depart from ourselves… and these unrecognized absences play havoc with our lives and our loves.

—Martha Stout

Wer The Myth of Sanity lesen sollte

Fans of psychology and the inner workings of the human mind
People who have dissociative disorders or know someone who has one
Trauma survivors

Über den Autor

Martha Stout is a clinical psychologist and former faculty member of the Harvard Medical School, Wellesley College, The New School for Social Research, and the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. Her 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door won Best Book in Psychology in the Books for a Better Life Awards. Stout currently practices privately in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Psychology

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