Dissociative disorder: hypnosis helps

Edwin Selij
October 30, 2018

Do you ever feel like something is happening but it's not happening to you? Like you're walking around in a movie? Or are you sometimes talked to by friends and family that in some circumstances it seems like you are no longer yourself or you just really can't remember what happened at a certain time? If so, you may be suffering from dissociative disorder. In this blog, I explore what that is and how hypnosis can help with treatment

Dissociative Disorder

If you suffer from a dissociative disorder, it means that at times you temporarily lose touch with who or what you are. You may experience moments when you have difficulties with your emotions, identity, behavior, memory, perception, and sense of self.

For some people, this is more distressing than for others. There are several types of dissociative disorders, and they can co-occur with other disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, ADHD, and/or trauma.

Generally, dissociative disorder goes away after a few weeks, especially if a traumatic event is the trigger for the disorder. But if it does stay longer, it is wise to seek treatment for it.

Symptoms of dissociative disorder

As mentioned, you can suffer from a variety of mental problems when you have dissociative disorder. You can recognize this by:

  • Feeling out of your body.
  • Memory loss.
  • Feeling disconnected from your environment.

Everyone has actually experienced dissociativity to a greater or lesser degree. This is the case, for example, when you are completely absorbed in a book or daydreaming.

Dissociation is also common in the event of an accident. Who hasn’t heard stories of people who “woke up” on their airbag but couldn’t remember anything about the accident or the moments leading up to it? This is your body and mind’s way of protecting you from events that are difficult to process. For example, if you are able to remember the car accident, it can cause severe fear of driving, which can affect your daily life to the point where you can no longer function properly.

In the more severe cases, it is also referred to as dissociative identity disorder. In this case, you may have or employ multiple identities in different situations. Each identity has its own behavior, memories and thoughts. For example, you may have a different favorite color from one moment to the next or a craving for different food than usual. The "change" of identity cannot be controlled and therefore also causes a lot of stress for people who suffer from this.

Either people around you see this, or you can notice this yourself and go to a doctor with it.

In these cases, you also have memory loss in everyday matters, your personal information can be difficult to remember and certain traumatic events.

Because of these multiple identities, you can get social problems, work problems and problems in other areas where you need to function.

The degree to which these identity changes cause problems is also different for everyone. After all, at the end of the day it does involve 1 and the same person, you cannot delete 1 identity, it is important to intertwine them again as 1 identity because they are 1 person. This is something you should not lose sight of.

Cause of dissociative disorder

There are multiple possible causes of dissociative disorder. As indicated in the symptoms section, a traumatic event, such as an accident or abuse can cause this disorder.

When it comes to the more severe disorder in which your identities can change or in which it feels as though you have multiple identities, the cause can often be traced back to childhood—for example, if you were abused or neglected as a child, and this occurred over an extended period of time.

The fact that this happens to people in particular who had an unsafe environment in childhood is explained by the fact that it is precisely during that time that your identity is formed. If at that time you can "pretend" that the abuse is not happening to you but to someone else, you can take this technique for dealing with stress into your adult life when it no longer works for you but against you.

Treatment of dissociative disorder

It is very important to find treatment for your dissociative disorder if it becomes chronic. In the case of dissociative identity disorder, 70% of patients in the U.S. attempt suicide. Since the US has a fairly similar society to ours, in the Netherlands this percentage can also be incredibly high.

In addition to these problems, you can develop other problems such as:

This is a point you don't want to get to, so always seek help if you're not feeling well.

In general, the treatment for a dissociative disorder consists of therapy. The goal is to reintegrate the identities and to overcome stress as a trigger for memory loss and feelings of disconnection or detachment, so that you can cope with stress in a healthy way, enabling you to better manage stressful situations.

Experts indicate that treatment should be phased into 3 stages. In the first phase, it is important for patients to learn how to stop behaving dangerously to themselves (in the case of self-mutilation, for example), how to regulate your emotions, how to be less impulsive and how to live more in the here and now.

In the second phase, you can look at identifying the identities and work with them to turn them back into 1 person. In the end they are both that one person, only it doesn't feel that way yet. In the second phase you will work on this feeling so that you are less likely to "change" or suffer from amnesia or the feeling of connection loss. In this phase you can also use more stress triggers to overcome those moments and make the transition from one identity to another smaller or at least remove the feeling that it is now "the other" who is happening to you. These exposure techniques still need to be handled with care at this stage.

In the third stage, treatment is often not so delineated and you as a therapist can look at the patient's needs or you as a patient can identify your own remaining needs to feel better.

Hypnosis and dissociative disorder

Straight hypnosis is recommended for treating dissociative disorder. This means that you are primarily engaging in hypnosis when you allow yourself to be hypnotized by a hypnosis expert, rather than engaging in self-hypnosis, as is common in most treatments where hypnosis is recommended.

So it can certainly be helpful that when using hypnosis in treatment it is performed by your psychologist or psychiatrist who is also knowledgeable about the rest of the treatment or at least in proper consultation with the treating physician if you want to hire an outside hypnosis expert.

Hypnosis can be used in the first and second stages. For regulating your emotions, impulsivity and living in the here and now, hypnosis can help with hypnotic suggestions, for example.

To do this, a hypnosis expert will first have a conversation with you. This conversation will explore what beliefs you have about stress or your disorder, for example. In response to those beliefs, you may be given suggestions. To do this, the hypnosis expert first helps you "get into hypnosis." Then he repeats the suggestions. During hypnosis, these are absorbed better than when you are not in hypnosis. These may include suggestions such as:

"When I'm insecure I can do something healthy instead of taking drugs."

"When I feel different I am still me."

"I have nice and not so nice sides, just like any other person," said Dr. K. K., who is also a hypnotist.

Another way to live in the here and now is through relaxation exercises. You can learn these during hypnosis, but also outside of it. A good way to ensure you maintain a sense of connection is to feel the soles of your feet on the ground during moments of stress. Simply checking that you have both feet firmly on the ground—which is always the case (thanks to gravity)—can go a long way.

In the second stage, hypnosis can also be important for confronting stressful situations that can cause feelings of alienation or even turning into the other person. Under hypnosis, you can use guided visualization to practice dealing with stressful situations. You then first make a list of stressful moments that can trigger a dissociative moment and make a top 10 from least triggering, to most triggering.

Then under hypnosis, you can use guided visualization to practice how to deal with the stress of those moments and any dissociative feelings, so that in real life you are less affected by them again.

Would you like to learn more about how hypnosis works and how you can use it to help yourself or others? Then come to an event or sign up for one of the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1289960

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/dissociative-disorder

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/dissociative-disorders/what-are-dissociative-disorders

http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-28153-001