Our receptiveness to the world can be blunted; in a world where news is live streamed to all our devices, we see suffering around the world 24-7, and there is ample. Fortunately there are initiatives to share more positive news as well, and you can find lots of heart-warming stories of human kindness and generosity.
That is, if you are open to it. For many of us, we need to associate in order to empathize. We may find the suffering of a dog or cat unbearable, but that of a cow or chicken a necessary result of nourishment needs. You may associate with the suffering of someone who looks the same as us, but less so with someone of different skin colour or religion. We are shocked by a flood in our country killing 20, but agnostic to one in a faraway country killing 2000.
So far, this is normal human behaviour, like it or not. But there is something else going on; I recall a case in my home country where a woman was raped in broad daylight in a park. People walked past and heard her cry for help. No one responded. Every day, we encounter people who struggle; an auntie walking home from the market, and she can barely carry her body weight due to hip issues, let alone her groceries. An uncle who struggles eating because he doesn’t have enough teeth. And in many large cities; lots of homeless people, in the cold.
If we take all of their suffering to heart, we would not be able to function properly; carrying the weight of the world will weigh you down into depression and inertia. But clearly the societal support system these days has changed. Most countries would have a significant part of the population live in smaller communities and there would be little migration between them. That meant most would know most in the community, and if someone fell on hardship, people would know them personally and help. It would not be uncommon for a family to take them in on the farm and let them work as a farm hand.
These days societies have individualized and thereby fragmented. We migrate more, travel more, contacts are more fleeting, we may still have long-time friends, but many people come and go in our life. Often we are the only constant factor in our own life. There have been replacements to the societal support network through NGO’s and other formal support organizations, but this doesn’t offer a one on one replacement.
In this fragmented society I observe one phenomenon more and more; dissociation. Dissociation is a break in how the mind handles information. Roughly described, our senses typically pick up information, match this against our reference “library” of memories and experiences, we perceive the information against what we know, and an emotional response follows.
As mentioned above, we naturally experience some form of dissociation from what is not close to us. If we have a dog, we associate with the suffering of dogs, less so with other animals. If our skin colour is brown, we associate more with brown coloured people. However, dissociation can be a protective mechanism. As a result of traumatic experiences we may actively break the link between receiving information and having an emotional response to it.
This emotional dissociation may be perceived as a complete loss of empathy. We start calling our sense of humour sarcasm and feel that it is justified to poke fun at just about anything. The process of dissociation can go further than emotional; especially when we experienced physical trauma, we may physically dissociate. We no longer feel connected to our own body. We no longer suffer from pain (on the contrary, pain may become a familiar friend), we are always braced for impact (which causes more pain as a result of muscle tension and the stress this causes) and may even see our motoric skills impact (we are no longer able to move our body naturally, and frankly become the worst dancers in the world).
Both the emotional and physical dissociation can feel liberating. We feel like we are sitting on top of a mountain, looking down at the world. The noise in our heads is silenced. Negative emotions and pain seem to hardly arise. Pretty awesome right? Wished you were there with me?
Well,…. you can’t. Everyone sits on their own mountain top. And that gets rather lonely. You can’t establish close relationships when dissociation occurs. How can others connect with you when even you have disconnected from your self? Romantic relationships will be transactional at best. Parent-child relationships will fail to set the right example; you have given up on your emotions, so how can you foster healthy management of emotions with your child?
So what is the way out of the dead end street? Plugging back into emotions. Slowly and with guidance. Learning that emotions are safe, and can be processed. Learning to build up mental resilience to doing so. This means creating space in your head to digest emotions, one situation at a time. It means associating present day situations with past experiences: eg. when your child openly talks to you about their emotions, realize that you never experienced that with your parents and allow grief to arise alongside seeing the beauty of your child being able to express their emotions so freely. This way, you can slowly chip away at that mountain of unprocessed emotions.
Especially when the early childhood process of learning how to process emotions, was disrupted, this can be very a scary process deep rooted healing that needs some professional guidance. Fortunately, much more is known these days about trauma informed care and support is more readily available.
If this article resonates with you, do start exploring you own mind, and see if you can discover pathways in the jungle from dissociation to resilience. And leave your thoughts in the comment section for a start.
Original Article Posted on LinkedIn HERE.
