Dissociation and the Dissociative (Freeze-Based) Trauma Response #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter D post in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I want to talk about dissociation and the dissociative (freeze-based) trauma response.

Readers who’ve followed my blog for years or who’ve read my “About” page, know that I used to have a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID). Dissociation exists on a continuum from everyday daydreaming on to full-on, polyfragmented DID. I am somewhere in the middle.

First, what is dissociation? Dissociation is a disconnect between the usually integrated functions of identity, perception, thinking and memory. There are basically five different forms of dissociation:


  • Amnesia (memory problems), which can range from brief moments of “spacing out” to years of “lost time” in your personal life history. It can also be full-on lack of memory but also lack of emotional memory. I, for example, often experience the thing where I act as though I have no memory of doing or experiencing something, but do remember it at the back of my mind.

  • Depersonalization, which refers to the phenomenon of not feeling real. Parts of your body may feel numb without a medical explanation. It can also refer to the experience of “watching yourself”.

  • Derealization: the phenomenon of feeling like the world around you is unreal. I experience this on a regular basis, when it feels as though I’m interacting with the world through an invisible wall.

  • Identity confusion. This one has always baffled me and for a long time I thought this is actually normal. I mean, I have no clue who I am, but doesn’t everyone at my age? And even at nearly forty, I struggle to realize that no, in fact most people don’t experience this.

  • Identity alteration. This, at its most severe, refers to the experience of having “multiple personalities”. It can, however, also refer to distinct patterns of behavior, thinking and perception that “do not feel like you”, even if these distinct personality states do not have their own names, ages, etc.

Pete Walker refers to dissociation as the freeze-based trauma response. I’ve always struggled with this, because I rarely literally freeze. I, however, do often “space out”, watching myself from a distance. I also experience the existence of several distinct personality states. Now that I’m older, they are no longer as separate as they used to be when I was in my teens and twenties. However, the identity confusion is still very real, like I said. In fact, I believe it’s a lot worse now than it used to be when my “pieces” still were more separate.

Codependent (Fawn-Based) Trauma Responses #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter C post in the #AtoZChallenge. Last year during this challenge, I discussed codependency for my letter C post. Today, I want to talk about the same topic, but specifically as it relates to people who experienced complex trauma.

You are probably familiar with the fight or flight response when it comes to fear. However, there are several other ways people can respond to perceived threats. One of them is fawning. This has always been a confusing term for me, particularly because I’m a non-native speaker of English and there is no proper translation of this word in Dutch as far as I’m aware.

Fawning, if I’m correct, in the context of trauma means being overly compliant with the wishes of other people and being unable to protest. It’s similar to people-pleasing, for which I haven’t found a proper Dutch translation either by the way.

Pete Walker, the author through whom I know of the fawn-based trauma response, has an entire chapter on this topic in his book on complex PTSD. I just opened the book to the chapter on fawning and oh my did it hit hard! Walker starts out by explaining how he learned that he himself gravitates towards a fawn response when he apologized to a chair for bumping into it. I have done that too.

However, it’s harder for me when I find myself apologizing to people, because too often my apology gets seen as being insincere when I truly have a reason to apologize. That makes sense, especially because I can also show a fight-based response when triggered.

The thing for me is that I overadapt until I can no longer take it anymore and then I have an aggressive meltdown. This sometimes makes me doubt I actually fawn at all. It doesn’t help that my parents from a young age on ingrained the thought that I am selfish into my psyche. I can indeed be self-centered, but that’s not the same.

I am still unsure whether I am a primarily fawning trauma survivor rather than a fight type. However, reading Walker’s chapter makes me realize I’m probably closer to the fawn end of the fight-fawn continuum than many people, including myself, believe. I, after all, experience a deep-seated lack of understanding and even deeper lack of appreciation of myself. Walker calls this self-abandonment and self-abnegation. I wonder whether, because my most outwardly noticeable reaction when triggered is fight, I have been conditioned to see myself as primarily a fight-based type.

Birth: The Effects of a Complicated Start in Life #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter B post in the #AtoZChallenge. I’m doing this challenge on healing past hurts. Today, I want to go far into my past: I want to talk about the effects of a complicated birth.

As regular readers know, I was born prematurely and spent the first three months of my life in hospital. Of course, I have no conscious memories of this time, but that doesn’t mean my complicated start in life didn’t have an impact. There is evidence that many people who were born prematurely or otherwise had a difficult start to life, experience attachment problems into adulthood. Now of course I didn’t have the most positive childhood either and there is no way of knowing whether I would still have attachment issues had my parents been well-attuned to me. Of course, this is also a difficult question, since my parents experienced their own trauma having me prematurely.

The thing remains though, a child who was born prematurely, spends time in a clinical setting that they should’ve spent literally inside their mother’s body. There are attempts to lessen the burden this has on children (and parents). For example, kangarooing, in which a baby experiences skin-to-skin contact with their parents, is encouraged as soon as it is possible. However, for preemies and other NICU graduates who are now adults, this may not have been the case. Many older NICU graduates hardly saw or heard their parents for the first few weeks to months of their life. My parents, thankfully, lived in the same city I was in the neonatal unit in, so they were able to visit often.

One thing that haunts me though, and I’ve mentioned this several times, is the effect my being medically complex from birth on left on my parents’ attachment to me. Like I said, whether I would’ve experienced attachment issues had my parents not mistreated me as a child, is a difficult question because one of the reasons they treated me so poorly is their difficulty coping with my being disabled. My father quite literally asked the doctor whether it’d make sense to keep me alive after I’d had a brain bleed a few weeks after birth.

It’s telling, in my opinion, that when you look up “birth trauma” online, what comes up most frequently is not the effects a child’s own start in life could’ve had on them, but the effects of complicated childbirth on parents. And like I said, one goes hand-in-hand with the other.

Autonomy: Learning That I Can Do Things and That My Opinions Matter #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today is April 1 so this means the #AtoZChallenge is starting. I haven’t prepared any posts in advance, but since I am going to write on healing past hurts, the concept of autonomy spoke to me for my letter A post. Autonomy is the ability to be self-reliant and independent, both physically and emotionally. It starts to develop in toddlerhood.

As I learned about emotional development as it relates to developmental disability (I discussed this in 2023), I realized in many ways I’m not there yet. I struggle with even basic decisions like what clothes I want to wear.

When I was 30, I was told I have dependent personality disorder. This disorder is characterized by passivity and the inability to make decisions independently, as well as a pervasive need to be taken care of. It is often related to lack of encouragement of autonomy in childhood.

I don’t have many memories of my early childhood, but I do know I wasn’t given a lot of autonomy when I was older. It’s not that my parents didn’t try, but as soon as I got frustrated, they gave up. They genuinely believed they were giving me autonomy and that I was just too stubborn to want to be independent. For this reason, they claimed and to this day still claim it’s my choice to be in the care system.

My psychologist back in 2016, the one who diagnosed me with dependent personality disorder, sided with them. She said I did have the assertiveness to stand up for myself, but wasn’t doing things I was (thought to be) capable of. That’s not what dependent personality disorder is though: lack of confidence in one’s own physical capabilities is but one criterion out of eight. And please note: it’s specified that the reason someone isn’t doing something, is in fact lack of confidence, not lack of skill or motivation. In other words, unwillingness to do things independently that you can do, is not dependent personality disorder, but care misuse.

And for clarity’s sake: I am not and never was misusing care. However, that’s exactly what my psychologist thought I was and according to which presumption she treated me by kicking me out of the mental hospital with virtually no support. She once again didn’t encourage me to develop autonomy. Refusing to help someone who clearly asks for help, contrary to the current idea in mental health services, may be politically useful, but it is not autonomy-supportive.

I am only now, now that I’m nearly forty, learning that I in fact was conditioned by both my parents and the psychiatric hospital to disregard my own opinions. Yes, being able to do things independently, is one aspect of autonomy, but so is the ability to make your own choices. One can hardly exist without the other.