It’s a good idea to see our dissociation process as a flow, one wounds type often develops into another wound type as the wounded person explores and proves to themselves that their wound defines them.
A wound, although it can be a cognitive distortion, which is an internal incongruence or lie, which can maintained without too much challenge to the individual concerned. However, most wounds result in dissociation, and each dissociation, has a flow, if it is left untreated. Thus, it can be seen that this flow is how the dissociation embeds into self, and what for one person, might simply be a highly treatable thinking error, becomes a personal drama that significantly impacts their life, and can highly difficult to treat, due to the complexity created by layer upon layer of internal lies of justification and externalisation of blame.
For example, my first dissociation, when I lost my inner child, was due to my self blame, for rejecting my mother. This was my guilty stage for that dissociation. First, I rejected my mother, and I blamed myself for that. I then tried to cover up my guilt, so I blamed it on my mother, then I changed that internal dialogue twice, until I was blaming someone else entirely, in my childhood mind, I saw myself being taken away by an entire family, and this represented that traumatic decision I had originally made.
This meant my inner child was locked in three towers, the three towers of the mother, since my mother is the divine female, which in this case is a triple goddess, there is one tower for each of them, three different internal sets of myths that needed to be unfolded to reveal my inner child. Three journeys, each leading their way to reunifying with the inner child.
The barrier, simply the lies I told myself to cover up my guilt. And in the wrapping of those lies, that fear, that horror of the unknown, increased, as I made up that lie to forget the lie of my initial misinterpretation of my mother’s, and I’s interactions. So, my internal myth, went from guilt, to abandonment, which developed further into a trust wound. I tested my mother, and others around me and proved to myself I could not be trusted, meaning I would project my lack of trust into all relationships, in general.
Then, this lack of trust reinforces our belief that we are broken, and not worth bothering with, should be dead, and so we end up neglecting ourselves, and those around us, to death. Unless, just before that death, we can hit some kind of rock bottom that allows you to revisit this stack of lies you have built for yourself, and either build a new one (because it’s still too fearful to contemplate facing our “demons”). Or, our choosing to do something different, includes facing at least one of those demons. In which case, we will come a little bit closer to wholeness and self-truth
So, multiple dissociations embed at different times, meaning you can have any or all of these issues at any one time.
I think also, that each dissociative layer, can leave its own triggers. Only, those triggers, because of this masking of one issue with another, actually mean the easier to deal with source trigger seems even more frightening. So, just like I tended to find, you’d go in with bated breath, thinking this will be terrible, and you come out 20 mins later, thinking “Was that all it was?”
