Abstract
Dissociation during trauma (peritraumatic dissociation) lacks an adequate definition. Using data obtained from interviews with 36 posttraumatic individuals conducted according to the phenomenological approach, this paper seeks to improve our understanding of this phenomenon. In particular, it suggesting a trade off model depicting the balance between the sense of agency (the sense of control over the body) and the sense of ownership (the sense that this is my body): a reciprocal relationship appears to exist between these two, and in order to enable control of the body during trauma the sense of ownership must decrease. When the relationship between the sense of agency and sense of ownership changes disproportionately to the constraints of the traumatic event, the dissociative mechanism becomes dysfunctional. By contrast, when the relations alter in accordance with the surrounding conditions, the dissociative mechanism functions properly.
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Notes
I have chosen to define “dissociation” in this manner because the term is extremely difficult to define without reference to trauma. Dissociative symptoms such as amnesia and non-dissociative phenomena such as daydreaming, absorption, spaciness, and altered sense of time are often mixed together (Bryant 2007). Moreover, as van der Velden and Wittmann (2008) maintain, altered states of consciousness (ASC) and dissociation are in reality often not fully distinguished. van der Hart et al. (2004) argue that “there is pervasive misunderstanding of the nature of dissociation” (2004, p. 906). Indeed, a review of scientific literature reveals that the use of the term “dissociation” has become all-encompassing, describing a wide and unwieldy range of phenomena that include perceptual alterations, memory impairment, emotional numbing or detachment, reduced awareness of one’s surroundings, limited encoding of events, a distorted perception of reality (for example derealization), time distortion, seeing events as dream-like, a fragmented self, perceiving the self from a third person perspective, dissociative amnesia, and flashbacks (Bryant 2007; Foa and Hearst-Ikeda 1996). As Holmes et al. (2005) note, we use the term “dissociation” in a highly confusing way that leaves room for scientific inaccuracy and/or problems in treatment. Clearly a definition of dissociation is elusive and since the topic of this article is not dissociation, but rather dissociation during trauma, this partial definition seems satisfactory for the purposes of this paper.
It is important to understand that one of the central problems regarding the term dissociation is the fact that it is used to describe both the mechanisms (dissociative mechanism) and the experience. In this article I will attempt to distinguish between the experience itself and the mechanism.
Based on the “life events checklist”, we know that seven of the participants experienced more than one traumatic event.
Interestingly, all of these examples of the ability to function during trauma were provided by individuals upon whom the lives of others were dependent during the event. It seems that responsibility for others can shield the individual from losing the sense of agency.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank OneFamily for the foundation’s cooperation with this study and all the interviewees for agreeing to participate. I would like also to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments.
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Ataria, Y. Dissociation during trauma: the ownership-agency tradeoff model. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 1037–1053 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9392-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9392-9