Original article: Dr Sara Llorens, translated with AI.Read the original in Spanish
What Is Traumatic Paralysis (Psychic Sideration)? Part 2
Psychic sideration and dissociation after trauma: what happens in perpetrator and victim, and why the worse the trauma, the less victims are believed.
In part one we talked about psychic sideration (a sudden “freezing” of the mind) and the dissociation that sometimes follows when we live through traumatic situations. Well, there were a few interesting points we didn’t get to. In this second article I want to focus on dissociation, both in the perpetrator and in the victim, and especially in the victim.
What about the perpetrator? How can someone be capable of such acts? How can anyone do something like that to another human being? How do they live with it? Among the functions attributed to so-called mirror neurons is helping us empathise with other people’s emotions (although their exact role in human empathy is still debated). Some authors suggest that, at the moment the perpetrator attacks, he too undergoes an emotional dissociation that blocks this empathic response. This makes it much easier and more comfortable for him to carry on with what he’s doing, since he barely empathises and doesn’t feel his victim’s suffering. It has been described as a common phenomenon in situations of extreme violence: the perpetrator disconnects emotionally from the victim.
The victim’s dissociation, on the other hand, can last long after the moment of trauma. What’s more, if circumstances keep the victim in continuous contact with the perpetrator, the dissociation lasts longer, and from the outside they seem to be “fine” when in fact the opposite is true, even though the victim isn’t aware of it herself (which makes it less likely that she’ll ask for help). You could say that the greater the danger the victim faces in daily life, the more intense and lasting the dissociation, because it’s her way of protecting herself. A mask that’s invisible even to the person wearing it.
All of this makes it less likely that she’ll receive help, because the people around her worry less. Why? The victim is disconnected from her emotions, so she doesn’t show any. When we’re faced with someone who shows no emotion, our empathic response is much weaker and we find it hard to empathise with that person. If we don’t empathise, we don’t know what they feel, which makes it harder to see that this person needs help.
So the general idea would be:
The more traumatic the situation, the greater the dissociation (during and afterwards), and therefore the less credibility the victim is given.
As I said in part one, training in this knowledge is essential for any professional who may play a role in a process of this kind (psychologists, psychiatrists, police officers, judges, lawyers, juries… and, of course, the victims’ families and loved ones), because this is how these situations can be dealt with fairly and how the process of helping the victim can truly begin. Therapy in these cases takes a long time and, as I’ve mentioned in other articles on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), its goal is for the person to integrate the trauma and store it in their memory as a memory, without reliving it with the same pain every day.
