Trauma In Childhood

Avoidance has been largely related to the onset of DID. For instance, Dorahy et al. (2014) explains how clinicians, researchers, and victims naturally attempt to avoid recognising great trauma by minimising its severity or denying its occurrence. Accordingly, children who experience severe trauma first hand have been understood to mentally escape this trauma by dissociating their identity and retreating to psychological safety within a new identity (Gartner, 2015; MacIntosh, 2012; Maiese, 2016). Furthermore, this not only has a reinforcing effect – reducing pain via mentally escaping from the trauma (Savoy et al., 2012), but many people with DID are also conditioned to not tell other people about the trauma they endure, further pressuring them into avoiding aspects of their identities by escaping to alternative identities (Dorahy et al., 2014). Additionally, a further explanation by Huntjens et al. (2016) and ISSTD (2011) note how the traumatic experiences themselves are substantially difficult for children to integrate into their identity. Thus, a child’s psychological avoidance of the trauma itself results in an incoherent identity from which multiple identities can more easily form (Huntjens et al., 2016; ISSTD, 2011). …show more content…
Taken together, the avoidance of severe trauma during early years of childhood not only reduces one’s ability to form a single, coherent identity, but compels the development of alternative identities as a means of psychological escape from the trauma they may