Hey Fuckers, jumping in for one quick correction.

I’ll be honest. I recorded this, listened to it, and realized that my haphazardly thrown together final topic at the end is excluding something important. I’m not re-recording this thing, because I don’t have that kind of free time and I think it’s a good idea to show my mistakes. But I want to correct that before you get started.

In the final segment, after a bunch of psychological and evolutionary research, I talk about how I believe obligation can shape personality through stimuli, thought, and emotional repetition.

But… it’s not just obligation that causes these behaviors on repeat, obviously. That’s just where my head was at in that moment.

What else can have this same effect? Avoidance. And that’s an incredibly important one for Traumatized Motherfuckers.

So, on top of obligation and responsibility enslaving our personalities… Also consider what happens when you get so avoidant of triggers or other upsetting life details that you narrow down your life to a tiny, boiled down version of the same day on loop. Say, when you get agoraphobic or only visit certain “safe” locations at “safe” times. How do you think that solidifies a certain, portioned personality?

You’ll see what I mean.

Okay, that’s it. Just a quick note on the avoidance that makes and breaks so much of our trauma life playing a role.

Let’s git into it.

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I keep having the same question run through my head over and over again lately. “Why are you like this?”

Just kidding, that question has been playing on repeat for the past 30 years. Most often in my past, as I stared in the mirror through tear-blurry eyes and examined all the damage I’ve done to myself via unhealthy living and substance abuse.

The more specific and currently relevant question is, “Who are you, what are you, and why?”

… Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound more specific. Let me explain.

For instance. You guys hear me bitch constantly about how I pound at a keyboard all day until I can’t see straight, shove some food down my gullet, rinse (but not really, because who bothers showering during pandemic isolation?), and repeat. With it comes anxiety, agitation, and a degree of seriousness that makes me suck. Always late for an important date, my brain grumpily tells me.

Without exaggeration, this has been my life for the past several years – probably most intensively so in the past 8 months.

As I’ve been trying to calm my anxiety-jets on the manic accomplishment front, I’ve been thinking lately about my productivity and pushing lately – yes, those efforts have value. You guys tell me so, and I’ll always believe strangers over my own inklings. But, at the same time… how would I enjoy or appreciate the alternative option? If I was to stop working so hard, what else could I do every day? What else would I want to do? How would I act?

Like, if I wrapped up this project satisfactorily, having said all there is to say about trauma and helping other folks contend with their trauma-brained lives one day… then what? As I close up the computer, wipe my filthy peanut butter hands off on my pants, and look around at my physical surroundings… What? What do I do now? How do I celebrate? How would I “cut loose,” have fun, or just give myself a break from the writing rat race? How would I proceed with life? What else would I like to do with my time?

This is where my head really spins. Because the truth is, in this headspace, I don’t know.

I can’t tell you how many times in the past 10 years or so I literally have posed the question to myself, “What do you even like? How do you want to spend your days if you aren’t working?” under various contexts. Because, at some point, it got really difficult to know myself.

Sometimes, the question has emerged on an empty weekend that I don’t have plans to fill. Sometimes, with pressure from a significant other who insists that I plan the activities for once. Sometimes, when I’m trying to dial down my persistent typing efforts, but realize I actually don’t have a preferred backup plan for the tasks to stop flowing.

Every time, I’ve come back to the same answer.

I dunno. If I’m not working, I’ll just kind of zone out and eat, I guess. Make some art, ideally (but unrealistically). What else is there? This head doesn’t often raise queries like that, so I don’t have an answer ready and I’m not sure where to find one. Deep down inside, I guess.

And so begins several difficult hours as I attempt to reconnect with my historically reasonable, thinking brain and remember, or maybe imagine, other interests that I once had, or I thought about having, or I’d like to have. The answers don’t come up easily. In fact, when I ask myself these very basic questions about who I am, where I’m going, and what I even enjoy in this world… I usually start to get panicky.

As I recognize that I’ve been mindlessly marching forward day by day without taking a single breath to actually notice myself, I feel like a 7th grader who just got caught depantsing a peer in gym class. I catch myself red handed and demand insight. My brain rapidly admits that I don’t have answers about why I’m in this current state or what I thought was going to happen next. I don’t even remember getting to this place where my palms are sweaty and some pants are on the ground. I just saw that elastic waistband and felt compelled to take action – in the form of typing my heart out all day long, all month long, all year long. Now, in the wake of my thoughtless behavior, everyone is embarrassed, there’s an uncomfortable focus on dirty laundry, and no one knows how to proceed without making the situation worse.

What I’m saying with my trite workaholic storyline and sexually-harassing memories from public school PE is, lately I’ve been trying to answer one of my life’s greatest questions… for about the billionth time.

Who the fuck am I? And why do I compulsively forget?

Because looking back at my life so far, I’ve been a few disparagingly different humans at different times. All of which have been dictated by circumstance and obligation, more than a consistent consciousness. In the day to day, I seem to forget that I’m a whole, stand-alone human, at all.

And this is where today’s talk is headed. The battle of a traumatized brain versus a cohesive ego. Rapping about our tendency for fragmented views of self, claustrophobic thinking, and loss of identity that come riding along with C-PTSD. Why can’t we see ourselves as whole organisms? Why can’t we integrate all components of self into one? Why do I forget about myself so often? Why don’t we know who we are across time and space?

But.

Before we start, let me be clear with a disclaimer here… This is a big topic. Fragmented self goes hand in hand with Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, which is more or less the highly renovated terminology for Multiple Personality Disorder these days. Because, no, Eve didn’t really act like that… but at the same time, we still don’t have a firm grip on the psychology of split personalities in one body, as far as I can tell. The whole thing is confusing. I’m reluctant to proclaim too much comprehension. And I don’t want to push anyone away by prematurely describing DID incorrectly.

Also, all of this is – apparently – very triggering, I’m finding as I start approaching these dissociative topics. So, today, I’m just dipping a toe to introduce the big-hitters by starting where my thought pattern also started – considering my tiny, pre-portioned assessments of myself and tendency to get trapped in one boiled-down version of my vast, dynamic personality that excludes 90% of the full picture.

This area of dissociation discussion is not going to be a one-hit wonder for this podcast.

I’m confused about how my life relates to the controversial diagnosis of DID at the moment. At this point, I consider my musings to be more relevant to the concept of fragmented self, which is defined as lacking a continual understanding or perspective of ones’ self over time. Focusing, instead, on the fractionalized parts of the person, which masquerade as whole identities. Yep, sounds right.

I’m also going to admit that I wrote this post before I read Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors by Janina Fisher, so calm on down if you’re waiting to hear from her. It’s coming later, don’t worry.

Today, let’s begin to touch on the dissociative topic, because there’s too much to say.

We’re going to talk about losing yourself to early abusers, losing your human brain to your lizard system, and losing your identity in the weeds of daily life. The ways that I’m understanding how fragmented self perceptions develop and the impact of them on this Motherfucker, in particular.

Some part of my personality will come back to talk more about DID another time. For now, let’s splinter our identities and get pigeonholed by the shards.

The forest through the trees

So, first things first… In the discussion of self-fragmentation, I think I immediately have to acknowledge our traumatized penchant for getting caught up in the details contained in a 2”x2” area while forgetting the entire wall-spanning mural we’re painting.

If your brain works anything like mine, and I bet it does, you tend to involuntarily focus on tiny problems at hand while you just “forget” important, broad details of your life, for lack of a better explanation.

If existence is a long journey through dangerous plains, across raging rivers, and over breathtaking mountains… well, I spend a majority of it hunched over on all fours in a thorny patch, examining the pricks that tear my flesh apart and yank threads out of my clothing, while I crawl painstakingly from one shit puddle to the next. Maybe if I looked up, I would actually see the trees, waves, and vast snowy peaks as they’re passing me by. I would enjoy the sights that my peers rave about on their Instagram feeds as they “#followtheirbliss” or whatever the bafflefuck people are saying these days. But here I am, preoccupied and pissy about the nearly-invisible obstacles that trip me up, missing the entire trek and wondering what everyone else is so fucking excited about.

I think this adequately summarizes my life.

I’ve realized for at least a decade now (as evidenced in my journals) that I struggle to pull my head out of the deep, dank crannies of my own ass to be aware and attentive to the larger trends in my life.

This omissive pattern includes failing to acknowledge external events, such as giving any heed to the professional and academic strides I’ve made, where I live, quality of relationships, and successes in overall “adult” capacities. Instead, I’m far more skilled at noticing minor annoyances, setbacks, and mishaps, feelings of inadequacy and injustice, pangs of jealousy, insecurity, and panic contained in the minute details of my daily life. Then, running through them on repeat until it’s bedtime. Then, for about five more hours.

My brain is so skilled at exclusionary thinking and maintaining a negative affect that I could probably win the lottery today and find myself full-on disgruntled by the morning, just thinking about how inconvenient it is that I need to travel downtown to collect my illogically massive check. That means I have to put on clean pants. Traffic will suck at that time of day. I better not get a massive paper cut from my unnecessarily large cardboard bank note.

You might say that I’m a miserable bitch with a severe void of gratitude and generalized wherewithal. You wouldn’t be wrong. I hear you loud and clear.

But, as we’ve discussed before, I’m pretty sure this method of operation is because my brain was carefully trained to notice the dangers in my childhood home. I’m keenly tuned into the potential threats, ominous signs, and possible evidence of my own shortcomings in life. I don’t let any of them go easily, because they’re critical indications of what’s to come. So I get stuck with these gloomy thoughts raging day in and day out, thanks to those pesky overactive survival drives and failed stimuli filtering systems.

As a result, when it comes to life circumstances, I always get caught in the weeds. The underbrush is full of dangers, big and small. My brain is happy to analyze said risks on a neverending loop of ambiguity anxiety. And, as a side effect, I get down, disgruntled, and fearful of my own rapidly approaching doom before I ever have the sense to… I don’t know… take a breath, look above the pokey terrain, and realize there are better times headed my way. Seems way too close to “look on the bright side!” Sounds impossible.

However, my inability to form a complete picture of reality goes even deeper. All the way into my own personality.

Like an idiot child who can’t figure out how to let my eyes blur the details to reveal the image in those colorful hidden picture books (which I definitely never could) I also fail to look past all the tiny dots and see myself as one whole, unified, person. It’s easy for me to focus on the small blemishes, the bright spots, and the glaring vacancies, one at a time. It’s not natural for me to see the larger organism operating beneath, within, and throughout all of them.

Will I beat the shit out of myself for making a tiny mistake after a year of perfect performance? Oh yeah. Can I ruminate over my perceived shortcomings for days on end after a social failure? Mhmm. Am I still battling off guilt trips and shame spirals from times that I fucked up two decades ago? Youknowitstrue.

This selective focus is one big part of the way I wind up “losing myself” for months and years at a time. One of my most prevalent trauma patterns is selling myself short via forgetting who I actually am as a human being… or that I am a human being, in the first place. My brain is very reductive when it considers itself across the board.

Yes, I easily get preoccupied with the negatives that my inner critic never wants me to forget, as in telling myself that I’m a lonely loser who is too big of a disaster to be loved so fervently that I forget about the people who do love me. But it works in another direction; I can also become obsessed with the characteristics that are actually working for me. This explains all the times I’ve, say, become a studious and hypervigilant professional at the cost of my real personality. I divert all energy to the skills that other people praise, as in my non-stop drive to find some stability and acceptance steers the ship, while actively forgetting that I have my own needs, interests, and experiences in life, too.

Basically, good or bad, I’m skilled at focusing on one or two pieces of myself, relying on those components as an automatic daily operating system, turning my back to the rest of my being, and then wondering why I don’t feel like I’m living authentically or in my best interest. Or hell, why I don’t even know who this person is entirely.

Is this sometimes necessary to power through difficult days? Sure. We all have had the experience of compartmentalizing our shitty feelings and broad desires for the sake of finishing a project or scrambling through a final exam. But over time, when you’re only expressing or seeing a few parts of your personality and abilities, you will notice the tension building.

For me, this adult hypervigilance sending myself out to sea thing is really common. It’s been an ongoing issue my entire life. My attempts at living “responsibly” (read: over-responsibly and under the influence of fear) routinely cause a ton of sneaky strain and internal thrashing that is experienced as anxiety and dissatisfaction. Not to mention the imposter syndrome whisperings that come along with it, when you’re only showing up as who you think you should be.

I’ll notice that I’m doing it again when my inner condition starts to slip. I will have the sense that something is off-kilter. I will feel damped, muted, and discontent. But I won’t necessarily realize that my lifestyle and over-reliance on said neuro-pathways have been at the expense of letting the other 98% of my brain have a turn or make any changes to improve the situation.

When I inevitably figure out that I’ve done this to myself again, which usually happens 3-6 months into the self-abandonment, it’s like a whole new personal crisis to deal with.

“You forgot who you are again and worked yourself into a stupor, asshole. Time to go back to the drawing board – reintroduce yourself to the class like it’s the first day in 9th grade and try not to be embarrassed when you stutter.”

And, oh man, is that confusing. Sitting down, looking at the life you’ve created and how uninvolved “you” actually were, wondering where time went and what shapeshifter was inhabiting your meat suit while all of these events took place… It’s enough to make you panic. It feels like looking back on a hallucination. It definitely makes me wonder if I’m a sane person, because I sure don’t remember choosing to play dress up every day.

How can a year go by, the events were dizzyingly exhausting, and, yet, it feels like a dream, at best? Where was my head when I accomplished A, B, and C, but forgot about all my hobbies, loved ones, and personal goals? Hell, most of the time I forgot to shower and change my clothes – how’d you block out the smells? Who else can feel so accountable and tormented moment by moment while also being so disconnected from the broader view that they essentially browned out every day like a functional alcoholic?

The questions I have for myself are never ending.

But the two heaviest inquiries that I come back to over and over again after I realize I lost myself once more, are as follows: What do you even like? And, who the fuck are you?

I suppose the likely follow up would be, “How did you get this way?”

Early abuse creates dichotomous personalities

So much of my life has been spent dealing with the question and subsequent self-judgement, “Why does everything that seems so easy for other people feel so hard for me?”

The older I get, the more I realize that the answer is super simple. When you grow up in an unhealthy environment, you adapt to survive in an unhealthy environment. Down the road, you only have unhealthy skills and unhealthy expectations, both of which run counter to healthy ideals that you’re putting on a pedestal.

“Why do I struggle to have a single, cohesive, all-encompassing view of myself?” Because I grew up with diverse influences that shaped my brain – the adaptations I had to enact to survive in my dysfunctional childhood home and the skills I had to demonstrate when I ventured out of it. Then, separate from the two identities was my real, inherent, personality that came factory-stocked.

When we were growing up, we had quite a set of challenges on our little hands. Social shaping and survival coping that we never even had a chance to understand as tiny, impressionable, inexperienced human animals. We never had an opportunity to learn how our families were different from others.

No one ever pulled us aside with a quick disclaimer: “Hey, these people aren’t right, take what you see, hear, and get throttled with a grain of salt. It’s alright to just be yourself. You’ll be out of here soon enough.”

Yeah, fucking right. I’m willing to bet that none of us had that conversation in our young lifetimes. Instead, we were taught that we weren’t right. Our personalities were inherently upsetting. We needed to adapt, fast, if we wanted acceptance and safety. There’s no other choice.

As youngins learning about the world, we had to contend with all-knowing, ultra-powerful beings known as our families, and trust that their word was god. Like them or not, feel safe with them or not, we had to obey by their direction and fall in line with their every whim for the sake of surviving. It’s part of this mammalian experience we share with furry things high and low – better pay attention to mom, or you’re going to fucking starve to death.

Even when our families were violent, unfair, cruel, or dismissive forces in our lives, we recognized that we couldn’t defy authority without dire consequences. This means, as kiddos we learned a very special set of skills that maybe didn’t align with our innate wants, needs, or strengths. Just turn off your personality, forget about your own drivers, and be the person you need to be to get through this. Each one of us came out uniquely equipped for a particular brand of abuse or neglect, finely tuned in the ways that we see the world, comfort ourselves, and appease to comfort others.

Coming from chaotic, unpredictable, and aggressive households, we had to learn how to come out on the other side of a family upset – the fight/flight/freeze/and fawn skills that kept us from pissing off our parents into the red zone or being bludgeoned into nothingness. That’s enough of a challenge, in and of itself. But then, we secondly had to learn how to continue living with and relying on these terrifying figures.

I.e. We don’t have the power to escape the dangerous situation we’re in and never look back; someone needs to feed and clothe us. The foster care system is not a welcome alternative.

There’s a theory that this has the unfortunate effect of forcing a young brain to “split” its cognitions about people and circumstances. We can’t reasonably concede that these humans who hurt us so badly are also the humans who need to love us with at least 18 years’ worth of financial and personal sacrifice.

The narratives don’t align, the information doesn’t make sense when we try to piece it together, and more importantly, the emotions are oppositional. How we feel about the person in a time of upset – when we’re receiving survival signals from our brain-body chemical factory – is too disparate from our biological programming for the story to add up.

How can the brain mesh these two vastly different views of one single person? Especially at that young age, with survival depending on them, it can’t. Certain events and characteristics have to be blocked out of immediate memory in order to draw that birthday card for mom. So, we become skilled at picking and choosing which memories, emotions, and cognitions we’ll entertain about her at any given point.

Mom can be really unpredictable, irrational, and cruel, but I know she cares because she always makes sure I’m fed. Dad can get out of control when he drinks, but I know he loves me because he still takes me to games with him. No one listened to me when I told them about so-and-so being inappropriate, but it’s only because they’re so worried about giving the whole family a better life. They’re not so bad.

We make excuses for our caregivers, we block out their dangerous behaviors, and we only recognize the risky aspects of their personalities when they’re about to slap us in the face – metaphorically or literally.

At the same time, we learn to cautiously select who we’ll be, in response, as the moment-by-moment circumstances change.

We come to find out that being sweet, subservient, and silent works best in this scenario – so, just quiet those pieces of yourself that wanted to be extroverted and bold to stay under the radar. We realize that asking for help or expressing a need will result in punishment and shaming – so, it’s probably best to expect nothing from no one and distantly stand on our own two feet. We understand now that our perspective, wants, and thoughts are grounds for mockery and anger – so, it’s best not to express a single thing.

As if it’s not enough to have your personality squashed for the purpose of avoiding abuse by others, this developmental defense mechanism in social learning only gets more confusing as we continue to grow.

We learn maladaptive coping skills to tip-toe on eggshells for our families… and then, we leave the house and find out that there’s a whole new set of rules to abide by for the sake of the rest of the world.

Like a herd animal, we don’t want to be seen as the weak, sickly member of the pack. So, we must hide our wounds. When we’re among our peers in the context of school and socializing, we do everything we can to fit in with a different collection of appropriate behaviors. We adapt to the steep learning curve – probably trailing a few years behind our similarly-aged associates, which only causes further internal strife when we face those social challenges and rejections. We find a niche and we stick to it.

This can, of course, teach you to develop a whole other set of survival skills that don’t necessarily particularly match your inner sense of self. Now you’re the unwanted loser at the lunch table. The kid wearing hand-me-downs who just wants to hide in the corner. Or the studious accomplisher who can at least earn praise from your teachers, if no one else. Surrounded by household outsiders, maybe staying silent still works well for you. Maybe you find that being loud and extroverted earns you the positive attention that you lack in your home. Maybe being seductive and impulsive will get you the acceptance and praise that you’re lacking.

The results will differ based on your situation. But the point is, you learn to be a different human in different scenarios due to the adaptive drive to pacify and receive acceptance from others. And none of those traits have to match the personality you naturally came equipped with.

To summarize my pointed stuttering… Early in life, you can’t recognize what’s abusive versus what’s healthy. You form opposing views of your family members that allow your basic survival needs to be fulfilled. You subsequently form opposing views of yourself to explain their actions. You have no understanding of the ways your brain is being shaped by your social life. You only know what behaviors keep you breathing in the immediate term, and you learn to mold yourself into the characters that are best received by various authoritative influences. Then, you get into the “real world” and find out that a completely different self is necessary to fit in with those healthy turds who parade around with their well-balanced and enjoyable lives. So, again, you highlight the important qualities and let the other pieces of your personality fall by the wayside in the name of socializing with the tribe. Great.

All of these survival-driven fluctuations in recognition, reaction, and strategic omission have a temporary benefit of keeping us socially safe (relatively speaking), but they have a long-term downstream effect that can leave a Motherfucker lost and reeling.

When your brain has learned how to parse fragments of information about ourselves as a necessary survival adaptation for so long, it doesn’t let go of that tendency so easily. We fail to successfully re-integrate our personalities even after we’ve escaped the dangers of our family homes. And, of course, we’ll never escape society.

We never learn how to embody our original, unmarred personalities. We easily slip back and forth between the reductive versions of ourselves that we’ve learned to create to fly under the radar. Most of the time, we probably don’t even understand that this is something we’ve gone through or a choice we’re making every day. It’s just cruise control by the time you’re an adult.

And I think that this is part of how you wind up with a crisis every time you pause to consider, “Who the fuck am I, though?” Fucker, it depends on who’s expecting what of you, self-included. Also, whether or not your lizard brain is flexing its scales.

Impulses and survival systems take over

You know where this is headed. I’ve already mentioned it today. I’ve sure as shit talked about it in the past… 20 episodes or so? You tally it up, let me know what the total is.

That’s right, we’re back to discussing our undercover survival system – the parts of our brains that help us respond in times of dire danger. You know my spiel at this point. You have two operating systems in your head. One is the higher level human brain with logical thinking power that pulls together information into cohesive narratives and constitutes what we generally consider your “personality.” The other system administrator is the reflexive response program that was handed down from the first existing organisms, early primates, and your great-great-great-great grandparents to the millionth power.

This evolutionarily-designed component is, by all means, necessary. Something has to keep you alive long enough to procreate, or else you serve no purpose on this planet. Biologically speaking. But our survival brains can also be shitheads. Why? Because, as stated, they aren’t really “us.”

When we detect danger, we divert our energy to our brain stem and associates. We start running automatic processes to keep ourselves safe, as determined by a minimum of tens of thousands of years of evolutionary adaptation. We go into that fight/flight/freeze/ or fawn mode that everyone is always talking about. We stop shuttling resources to our more impressive prefrontal cortex region, where our special reasoning abilities reside. We turn off our personality banks and roll with the basic instructions left behind by billions of animals who came before us.

And this is another theory about personality dissociation.

You know, I already talked about this process as a means for regular dissociation. When you’re engaging in behaviors that you honestly did not mean to enact – such as binge eating, cutting, purging, or any other deleterious coping behavior – it can be shocking to come back into your body and realize what you’ve done. What’s happening in those blackout moments? I theorized that your human brain went fishing under pressure, while your survival system drove you to participate in activities you thoroughly wanted to avoid. I stated then, as I’m stating now – it’s not really “you” calling the shots, from a neurological understanding. It’s more akin to a very temporary personality dissolution.

So I guess it’s not surprising that researchers propose longer term identity dissociation can develop under similar circumstances.

To back things up, when you’re just a kiddo learning to deal with the aggressive dysfunction of others, you quickly figure out how to choose the best survival scenario from the aforementioned F selection. Fight? Flight? Freeze? Or Fawn? What’s going to result in the least amount of household upset? What will keep you from being beaten? What will pacify your abuser or keep you from becoming their target?

Over time, these reflexive system responses become stronger and stronger, as your brain recognizes the antecedent stimuli, the potential consequences headed your way, and the historical path of least resistance to avoid the unwanted punishment. (Yep, I just ABA’d you again.) The pathway from stimulation to behavioral survival response is strengthened each time it is utilized. Your brain switches from humanistic thinking to lizard instincts more rapidly after every experience. The survival mechanism that saves your ass becomes a rapid-fire reaction. You learn to divert your brain energy to the basic functioning block at the first sign of danger. And, boy howdy, how our brains start to interpret everything as a danger.

I give you this repeated rundown of how stimulation leads to stress hormones leads to survival mechanisms to say… as children we learned how to put a hold on our real personalities so we could adopt the reactions that kept us safe. You might not have been a natural fighter, but you learned that aggression was the only way to stave off sibling violence. You learned to flee when mom was in that particular mood. You opted for freezing in tight spaces so dad wouldn’t take his bad day out on you. You could avoid the wrath of grandpa if you fawned like his doting servant.

Each time, you sell out your real personality for the sake of safety. Each time, your head gets more skilled at flipping that switch. Each time, you were, for all intents and purposes, learning to dissociate.

Ten or twenty years later, guess what? You’re still clocking in at an expert level when it comes to detecting something scary and sending your electrons down the survival trail. Your brain is still going to respond in the ways it deemed most effective as a kid. And the result? A new personality solidifies. One that isn’t really “you.” It isn’t really your ancestors. It’s a conglomerate of evolutionary responses, traces of your traits, adaptations to your circumstances, and the influences of your family of origin.

So, where is this brain dissociation and unfamiliar personality coming from? Your own head, high on keeping you alive.

To drive this point home once more – let me repeat that we have trigger-happy “oh shit” systems. Our limbic systems are hyper aware of everything happening around us. They tend to interpret inappropriate stimuli as danger signals. And that’s why it’s so easy for us to be thrown into survival states.

Why do we feel like we’re living with multiple personalities in one body? Because… we sort of are. We were taught that it was our best bet. And now, after so many years of careful practice, we react in a variety of situations that aren’t necessarily correlated to our early experiences, but strike a similar chord in our over-sensitive stimulation sorting centers. Better safe than sorry. Stop being you – revert to whatever got you this far in life. Try to remember it later? Oh, wait, you can’t… because your recorder box wasn’t enlisted.

It all makes sense when biology starts talking. Does this explain a lot to you? Because it beautifully describes everything I currently understand about dissociation and identity disorders, again, which is admittedly very little.

If you couldn’t guess, I think this is the easiest model for comprehending fragmented self and DID. It’s simple. It’s elegant. It makes sense out of the senseless. Lizard brain versus human brain for the win, like usual. Accept this, and save yourself a bit of a spiral down memory lane compared to the other options I’m laying out.

That being said? I’ve got one more theory for you. Also biology-based. Also on-topic with something I talked about recently. Let’s get into the conversation about intentional and implicit memory for a sec.

Old memories double down “split” identities

Remember my super recent episode about how our brains process, store, and retrieve information differently under the influence of PTSD?

If not, well that’s fucking ironic.

Let’s just say, traumatized brains aren’t skilled in processing, integrating, or organizing data. This gives us that characteristic “dizzy,” agitated, and overwhelmed feeling that drives us to happily stare at walls. Too many remnants of information floating around to see straight.

It also explains a lot of our intrusive thinking patterns. We struggle with voluntary memory retrieval, but we’re really good at involuntary recollections. Are we talking about flashbacks? Yep! But also our inner critics’ inability to let you forget that horrific event from 15 years ago.

One of the interesting things about our memory systems is how strongly we tend to ruminate on traumatic events, which I separately discussed recently. Our brains really want to figure out this unfathomable event, so they obsess. The conditions before, during, and after the happening become common themes of thought. Furthermore, we love to put ourselves on blast for the ways we’ve caused the trauma as a way to make reason out of the unreasonable. We naturally pull our inner critic systems into the mix, so the shitty comparisons of self can have some time in the spotlight. And we figure out ways to throw ourselves under the bus for every unwanted event.

Now what happens?

We get more ruminatory – in a meta way. We compulsively think about who we once were, before the unwanted experience. How we acted during the event. And beat the crap out of ourselves for the ways we act now, following the situation and subsequent physiological changes.

It’s another rational-minded brain trick – we love to try to process our traumatic experiences with a self-critical eye. “What could I have done differently,” is a common PTSD rumination, because we want to have a straight-forward monologue about the baffling event. Blaming ourselves is still preferable to having no explanation. As I’ve said, rumination effectively predicts PTSD symptom development – especially when it includes our own self-assessment. And we can’t seem to turn off that self-appraising hate-fest once it starts.

The result? Uhhh… can we just say, “a clusterfuck of panicking about all the ways we’re colossal disappointments and utter despair over losing track of our perceived ‘old selves’ because we can’t accurately recall everything we’ve experienced and we’d rather have a self-hating explanation than none at all?” Yeah, that ties it up.

In this way, we don’t exactly imagine a separate personality or identity split… but I’ll say that we focus far too hard on the changes that have taken place inside ourselves during difficult times; in doing so, we actually convince ourselves that they’re meaningful and cement the changes. Fake it until you make it, gone wrong.

If you convince your brain that the events are real, they will become real. The harder you hate on yourself for reacting with aggression without feeling as though you have the power to respond differently, the more likely you are to react that way in the future. The more you consider how lazy, disgusting, and demotivated you are now, the more likely you are to continue acting in that vein tomorrow. The more intensively you consider the personality shifts that were necessary to keep yourself on two feet, the more you believe they are “you.” And you lose sight of your real self in the process.

Is the mechanism underlying this process any different than the aforementioned biological survival swap or learned personality embodiment? Nope, not really. It’s sort of both models, strung together.

This memory lapsing, rumination-inspired scheme just requires validation from our obsessive and negatively self-evaluative think boxes that we once were X and now appear to be Y. Under the conditions of A and B we acted like what we identify as “ourselves.” When C and D showed up, we have no idea what happened to our favorite characteristics, but this new dude fucking sucks.

Now, sit around in isolation, shame, and depression, tossing those thoughts around for a few years. How do you feel about your past life? Like you’ve had multiple personalities, many that you probably hate? One of which was your “true self,” who was lost years and years ago? One or five of which constitute your new, unwanted view of self that make your stomach turn?

This is to say, we’re taking an evolutionary model and throwing some psychology into the mix. You learn to adapt in necessary ways to fleeting or pervasive circumstances. If you’re telling yourself you ARE this adapted person, you will become this person. If you mourn the person you no longer see in the mirror, you won’t emanate them tomorrow. If you berate yourself for failing to be as good as you once were, you won’t take steps towards being that person again. And all the while, you’ll be sending distress signals to your survival brain that push you further and further away from your logical and true “you” brain as you panic and pummel yourself.

Where did this “traumatized personality” come from? Just remnants of your past, intrusive memories, self-punishment, and stubborn adherence to the shitty ideas you put in your own head, built on evolutionary neuro-physiology that you never asked for.

Something to chew on.

Bringing it back around to workaholism

I guess I should now explicitly state how these personality fragmentation theories all tie into my original complaint, “I don’t know who I am without work.”

Why do you think I wound up this way? Why is my dominant personality so closely tied to performance, production, and accomplishment? Why do I forget that I have a capacity for other perspectives, behaviors, and even thoughts?

Because in my childhood home, my safe place was being silent, studious, and creative. My mom was happy if I was quietly reading, drawing, crafting, or caring for the animals out of sight. My dad and brothers generally left me alone if they didn’t see or hear me. No one put me through the ringer if they thought my time was being used in ways that they approved of, or if I was just out of the way. The only time I earned praise was by producing intelligent output for my mother.

In school, this was also my MO. The other kids didn’t like me. If I talked too much, I weirded the teachers out. I learned to shut up, sit down, and do work. I was naturally astute and capable, and this earned me recognition from my authority figures. My niche was being one of the “gifted kids” and otherwise flying below the radar as much as possible.

As I got older, this largely persisted. Although I finally learned how to do hair and makeup in a way that earned me some social currency, I excelled in various jobs due to my efficiency and dedication. I actually had to work more intensively at times to retain my niche because I figured out how to be attractive, which runs counter to most people’s perceptions of a hard worker. But, oh, Fucker, I did it. Even my incredibly rough around the edges Russian boss hated me at first, until I fought for my position for a year and finally became his right hand man.

In my life, I’ve always been the trusted employee. The person you could throw 50 tasks at, and somehow receive 100 completed by the end of the day. In my academic world, I’ve pushed myself to perfectionism in every class I’ve ever taken. If I’m not exceeding expectations, I’m failing. I don’t even know how to see things differently.

So, why do I get so caught in the spikey weeds of accomplishment that I forget to care for any other part of myself? Because this one characteristic – being productive – is what’s gotten me anywhere in life. My survival was always dependent on becoming a character – the diehard worker. If I wanted to evade punishment, harassment, and starvation, I needed to be a busy bee. I needed to prove my worth through permanent product output. I needed to shut off the other aspects of myself that ran counter to this tiny portion of my identity and go all-in.

To this day… clearly I do the same thing. No fault to you guys, but I don’t feel like I’m worthy of being part-time employed, going to school, and collecting donations from listeners unless I’m continually outpouring as much useful content as possible. How dare I even think about taking a day off, taking a bath, seeing friends, painting some shit, going on an adventure, redesigning my clothes, reading a non-trauma article, making my space comfortable, setting up one of my many fish tanks, playing guitar, knitting, sewing, finding new music, or even just zoning out in front of the fucking television… to name a few of my forgotten interests… when I have people to prove myself to?

And this is how I get trapped on an autopilot program, dictated by my first 20-something years, on repeat. Why I routinely look around and realize that I haven’t chosen this life or this personality, and both are ridiculously reductive if I actually engaged with my entire being, instead of 2% of it. The exact way that I can have mini crises when I perpetually feel unfulfilled, but can’t remember what I used to enjoy when I was really me in order to change the pattern.

A tiny, fragmented portion of my personality was split off in a time when I didn’t even know what “being myself” meant. And, to this day, I still struggle to define and embody the entire person who was left behind.

And where does DID come into all of this? Well, it’s when you realize that there are several tiny, adaptation-based versions of yourself all fighting for a shot at making themselves known, depending on the situation and circumstances, that shit really starts to get complicated. But more of that in another episode or eight.

One more theory

So, one more thing that I have to mention. Sure, I already gave you several complicated potential theories for how personality fragmentation takes place based on research. But then, I had a far simpler explanation jump into my brain. So simple that it has to be shared as a nice night cap to these far more difficult ideas.

To put it simply, what if, when you’re only doing the same things over and over again, you’re only running the same personality program over and over again.

Remember all my complaining in the “Using ABA for trauma management” episodes? How I got sucked into a post that made me mentally and physically uncomfortable and couldn’t shake the feeling? How work became my life, but I doubted my work, so I started hating myself?

You know how I broke that pattern and got any insight from it? Motherfuckers, I just did something different one day. As in, instead of continuing to stare at the same article for another 5 hours, I left the house, drove around, and took a walk. And what the fuck happened? My brain almost immediately dropped all of the cycling narratives that had been plaguing me for a week, I felt a lot better, and I felt a lot more like myself. Like, my full self. Like, I wanted to listen to music and laugh and learn new things. Like, my past struggle over this writing project was hilarious. Like, it never seemed as if it should have been a big deal at all.

I was feeling so extremely down on myself, overly-serious, and self-conscious because I had only been using one side of my personality. The academic, focused, obsessive part. I had been pigeon-holed into a perspective that only doubled down on my negative self-views, and completely lost the piece that usually balances me out with more awareness about how silly this whole thing is. How I definitely should not be taken seriously. How I’m just an artsy punker who wound up learning about science at some point, and now attempts to fill shoes that are ten sizes too big.

And that’s when I realized something so impactful and so goddamn common sense that it made me yell a lot and punch my steering wheel.

If you’re living the same day on repeat. Doing the same tasks over and over again. Filling your head with the same stimulation from the outside. Thereby, filling your head with the same stimulation from the inside, because your thoughts and environmental cues are so intricately linked… what’s going to happen?

The same stimuli drum up the same thoughts. The same thought patterns come with the same emotions. The two put together are going to create all of your actions. And thoughts, moods, and behaviors put together are functionally going to constitute your… personality.

Why do you feel like you get “stuck” with fragmented pieces of your own personality? Maybe because you’re only completing tasks and absorbing your environment in an extremely limited way. Maybe you’re causing your head to run the same program on repeat every day. Maybe it excludes 90% of the “real you” because you need to amplify the 10% that meets external expectations. Maybe you’re living by obligations that whittle down the full, glorious spectrum of your true, complex, dichotomous personality.

Uh, I was.

And thinking back further, I have to wonder how much this same effect has impacted me historically.

For instance, when I remember my old life in Atlanta and my old job at the brewery while I lived there, I largely think of my commute to work. The sights and sounds that predictably came with every drive. Immediately, I start to have cognitive, emotional, and recollective flashbacks of all the changes that took place in my inner world as they were sneakily connected to my outer stimuli.

If I’m still vividly having these internal changes now, fully removed from the actual situation… how do you think my inner landscape was being affected every single day as I drove to and from work? Clearly, I had a lot of thoughts and feelings programmed into the scenery that surrounded me. I think it would be unwise to discount the effect of driving the same route every day, sparking the same thoughts every day, resulting in the same emotions and behaviors every day.

Similarly, I always have the best new thoughts when I’m on a trip or venturing somewhere unexplored. Why? Probably because I’m not being held back by the loudest thoughts in my head, which are being created by everything in my daily environment, which is generally stressful. New sights, new thoughts, new feelings, new behaviors.

Just saying. If you feel like you lost a good portion of your personality a while back, maybe you just need to change things up, so you can access quieter pieces of yourself that aren’t brought to attention 5 days a week by the demands of staying alive.

Surround yourself with new stimulation, think new ideas, make new connections, remind yourself of how complex you really are. Unfortunately, we’re often too avoidant to open ourselves to new experiences. And I think this is another way that our narrow, trauma-determined lives cause narrow, trauma-determined appraisals of ourselves.

This is also why it’s now mandatory for me to get out of the house every single day. So I stop seeing the same walls, computer screen, and reminders of ongoing challenges. So I stop ruminating over cyclical problems.

So I stop forgetting that, bitch, you’re more than a typewriter. You’re you. There are a billion things you want to do, besides all the work you need to do… but you have to shake off the automatic, obligatory behaviors that – yes, are required to live – but also make you forget the breadth and depth of yourself.

And what if your fractionalized personality really is that simple?

Wrap it

Okay, like I said, this is a big topic. I could probably research and write about it for the next year. But hell, here’s a place to get started without overwhelming your lost personality too much.

The last thing I want to mention is just a quick sentence from a very informative and relatable research review postulate from Ozturk and Sar. I’ll probably be reading straight from this report in the very near future.

The introductory sentence goes as follows: “There is a general consensus that a self can be understood through five aspects: agency, an identity, a life trajectory, a history, and a perspective.”

Taking that simple view of identity… I already feel like my self-dissociation is perfectly explained. Agency, identity, life trajectory, history, and perspective, combined, created your interpretation of identity? Well fuck me sideways, I don’t have a single chance.

When am I ever firing on all five of those cylinders? I would say, roughly never. I lack the perspective to do it regularly. Maybe I can approach it every few months, when I pull my head out of my work colon, deeply question where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m going. And then… subsequently freak out, because I forgot that I was supposed to study for that quiz. That’s when my brain shuts down and I’m likely to retreat, unless I force the thought to continue via journalling.

So, when can you really have this view? When you’re practicing your trauma narration therapy, turdbat. Like I’ve often encouraged, writing helps. Otherwise, your head just wants to run away from the unpleasant stimulation. Patching together your distant past with your more recent past, and filling in the ways they’ve impacted your present? It’s powerful. Forcing your brain to see everything, all at once, really helps. I have done it often. It’s one of the best ways for building up my self-esteem and motivation. Not to mention, inspiration to be someone other than an academic robot.

But staying in that special, shiny place where I see my life and myself clearly? It’s not so simple when your risk-assessment brain would rather look for reasons to be thrown into survival mode via daily events.

Now throw in a penchant for distracting yourself with tiny details and a sense of never having enough time in the day. How’s that for a challenge?

Like I said in the very beginning – my perception doesn’t go much farther than the speedbumps right in front of me. My head gets confused and congested with the itty bitty details of life. My head isn’t tuned into whatever station is displaying a sweeping summary of my experience so far. I see the thorny bushes all around me, I figure out how to navigate them best in the moment, and that’s the person I become, in response.

What is my identity? I have no idea. I’m basically always too busy stressing out, remembering the days before I was so disappointing, and surviving to give it very much thought. But I’m actively working on it.

In the meantime, I just act like whoever my lizard-human brain operating system tells me to be and forget that I was ever a whole person in my own right, before life circumstances and memory games made me forget. Oof.

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Öztürk E, Sar V (2016) The Trauma-Self and Its Resistances in Psychotherapy. J Psychol Clin Psychiatry 6(6): 00386. DOI: 10.15406/jpcpy.2016.06.00386