[CN: We talk about patterns of neglect and injuries from not getting the help we deserved. The target audience are people who experienced torture and those who try to help them. It is painful to read when this has been your life experience. It might also trigger shame in those who tend to blame themselves for being injured. This is the second part of a small series that covers the topic of dehumanization and recovery from it. If this speaks to you and you are not a torture survivor or their therapist, please refrain from giving me feedback on it. The most disconnected feeling you can have about this is awe, so if you feel that, go examine yourself. The ‘advanced’ articles don’t come with special trigger warnings. You can assume that they are triggering if you are not in later phases of therapy.]
Complex trauma can sometimes come with a disconnection from other people that goes beyond feeling alienated or rejected. Torture, chronic neglect and the persistent experience that people see signs of abuse but they don’t help can lead to a dissociative blindness for neutral or positive people in our life. When we were young, nobody cared, nobody said anything and nobody did anything that made a difference in our world. We learned that we are on our own and there is no use in turning to someone else for support. We have to save ourselves and we can only rely on ourselves to get us through life. It is easier to live with that truth when we eliminate other people from our understanding of the world and life. They have nothing to do with us or we with them. The result looks like severe avoidant attachment and can easily be confused with narcissism by lay people.
Ways we dissociate other people
Depersonalization of others
Depersonalisation describes a dissociative process where the width of our perception of something is limited. Our awareness becomes narrow and most of the spectrum of experience is lost. When we experience depersonalization of others, life is lived like a computer game and other people are like characters on the screen. Some are just there to fill the picture and to make it look realistic. It does not cross our mind to even talk to them. Others play a defined role and can be approached for certain tasks and they come with pre-determined dialogue. The exchange with the supermarket cashier follows the same pattern as the one with the elf peddler from the video game. There is a set number of phrases they use and a set number of answers we give and the exchange was successful when we got the wares we need for our current quest. There is no more depth to be found in the video character. They are just there to sell us an item and if we click more often we don’t get any different dialogue out of them. To people who live with this view of others, it can feel comforting and satisfying to master a scene like that without a glitch. We said all the right things, did all the right actions and got the standard reactions. It went so smoothly. And that makes it a good interpersonal encounter. Repeated successes with smooth exchanges like that create positive feelings towards the other character. We start to feel a little bit closer to them when we know that we can rely on this exchange being a smooth one.
This might look ‘autistic’ to other people. But it might just be dissociative. We live life as if we are in single player because our view of other characters is so limited we are unaware that there is more to them. When we move through life, the width of who they are for us is limited to their role. We don’t expect anything more than the usual dialogue. We learned not to expect anything from people that goes beyond their professional role. There is no player with a whole life of their own behind the role and no possibility for them to act outside their role.
It is not rare to find this kind of depersonalisation in people who grew up in institutions like children’s homes where distant caretakers only did the most basic things to get large groups of children to survive without any warmth or empathy for them. Their caregivers made sure that they know that they are just acting in a well-defined role and that they are personally not available for relationships. Teachers, trainers, doctors and other adults in our life might have done just the same because that is, after all, how a professional acts. This has become the master pattern for all relationships: People are roles. There is nothing in it for us beyond that role. So we shouldn’t expect even the tiniest bit more from people. That way we protect ourselves from rejection and more pain. There just isn’t anything else they can do. They are narrow characters with a narrow set of actions and less than human in that way so we shouldn’t expect a human exchange, just a professional one. They can’t help it, that is just who they are.
When someone with this pattern of relating to others comes to therapy, they will expect to talk to a therapist (role) and not to a human being. They figure out patterns of interactions that get them to resolve problems but it never feels like they build any personal connection. Creating patterns of smooth exchanges is a way to keep someone like that from leaving therapy. It won’t be enough to change their view of people and give them the ability to see humanity beyond the role.
Derealization of others
Derealization is a dissociative process where we lose the sense of depth in our perception of things. They feel flat and unreal. Derealization of others makes it seem like other people are cardboard cut-outs that sometimes get moved to different places but there is nothing behind the flat surface. There is no life in them, we don’t expect them to feel anything or do anything. All that is inside of them is made of cardboard as well, so expecting any empathy is entirely ridiculous. Who would be so foolish. Sometimes we witness scenes of cardboard cut-outs telling stories about life, having families and fun together. They still don’t feel like something we could ever participate in because we don’t belong into a cardboard story like that and we don’t mix well with cardboard people, with our terrible needs and big emotions and our messy bleeding hearts.
We get this sense of other people when we regularly experience how bystanders stay passive in the face of our suffering. They don’t help, don’t express any compassion, don’t show any sign of being a fellow human who sees us in our misery. They could just as well be made of cardboard. While they were present, they also made sure not to make a difference in our life and not to engage in any way. Neglect plays a tremendous role in developing a cardboard view of the humans around us.
This can look narcissistic, but true narcissists know about the depth of other people and use that to play their games with them. They simply don’t care if they hurt others. This specific lack of depth perception of others doesn’t realize there is any depth to begin with and any feelings to get hurt. It stays unaware of the possibility of relationship with others because there is no awareness of anything to relate to.
When someone with this pattern comes to therapy it seems like they are doing all the work themselves. They talk and turn in circles until they come up with something that works for them but they are unable to receive input or new ideas from the therapist. They make therapists feel useless and helpless because no matter what they try, it cannot be received. The patient will look at attempts for interventions but they are unable to connect with them or make use of them and then they turn back to their own version of a solution. There is progress, but the therapist also feels like they have nothing to do with it.
Partial amnesia of others
Finally, there is a dissociative process where we develop a not-knowing of elements of an experience or the entire experience. When our mind encounters certain content it just … glosses over it. Nothing to see here. So we move on and don’t notice that there was something that could have drawn our attention in the first place. When we dissociate others like that, we stop noticing them when we start to struggle with life. We develop a blindness for those around us who are neutral or even positive. Our world is narrowed down to us and the thing or person that hurts us and nothing else around us exists anymore. We don’t ask for help because we are entirely unaware that there are people in the world. We don’t expect any intervention because nobody else exists anymore.
This awareness of oneself, the pain, the abuser and nothing else is a key element of torture. I believe that the relational pattern is what we get when attachment figures were bystanders of severe abuse and they gave permission for it to happen and watched in silence to make sure it happened according to plan. As a child in this situation, we have no choice but to un-see them in the scene. Our brain creates a not-knowing of their presence during the traumatic events because it would be impossible to know that they approved of it. Our brain learned to gloss over people who should have been rescuers and helpers, to make sure we don’t expect any of that. There is nobody there who could be approached, there is nobody present who could do anything, there is nobody there who should speak on our behalf, it is all just us and the abusers and nobody else. We make the idea of help go away so we can endure the fact that we are not getting any help. We might even manage normal life exchanges with other people well but as soon as we experience suffering, all the people around us vanish from our awareness.
Someone like that might not come to therapy because they stay unaware that other people could be part of a solution. If they go to therapy, they might have phases where they don’t seem to hear the words of the therapist and instead be caught in their own inner experience or scene. When a therapist reaches out to offer a helping hand it is not recognized and gets ignored because it is not realized. There are other reasons for that, but they might not look at the therapist directly, their eyes wander and… gloss over the person who is sitting there. Therapists can feel invisible and like they are constantly being shut out. They are being treated like a ghost and not a real person. When they try to figure out what we are expecting from them they come up with nothing. We don’t expect anything. From whom.
Dehumanization breeds dehumanization
What we are dealing with are the effects of dehumanization. This is not a weird little attachment problem. It is a persistent change in how we function in relation to others that is based on experiencing dehumanization. Different things happened to different people but we were all treated like less than human and less than deserving of human dignity and humane treatment. I believe that the role of dehumanization in neglect is grossly underestimated. Neglect stripped us of everything we needed as little humans and the lack of interpersonal warmth shut down life itself and its capacity for relationship in us. If something equivalent to that was done to adults we would recognize it as torture but in children we just call it neglect. In some complex trauma situations we collect layers and layers of different kinds of abuse that all support the sense of dehumanization.
Humans have been the source of our seemingly endless suffering until we couldn’t bear them anymore. Finally, we dissociate and lose our ability to recognize others as human beings with humanity. And when we meet new people, they feel so hurt by that. How dare we assume that they are flat and lifeless. Why can’t we just trust them to be good people. It hurts so much not to be recognized as someone who has feelings too. The feeling of powerlessness can drive therapists into discouragement because we don’t notice their help, can’t make use of their efforts and there is no way to reach us. They obviously don’t count as a helpful person in our world. It is incredibly easy to get blamed for dehumanizing others in the way we don’t-see or don’t-know them as complete and complex human beings. Guess where that comes from. Yes, from never being seen or known as complete and complex human beings. There is no use in blaming us for being hurt in our humanness. There is even less use in diagnosing it as something or another. The reason why it is there is trauma and dehumanization and giving it a label does not help to understand it better than calling it dissociation and dehumanization does. Not even the label of avoidant attachment will make a difference if we miss the underlying pattern of dissociation.
What do we do with this?
I am not a therapist. Maybe there is therapy out there that has wonderful solutions for this. I will simply outline what I experience as helpful or not helpful.
Relating outside the pattern
As a patient, I expect exchanges in therapy to go a certain way. That creates safety. It is especially helpful to have a frame of a small ritual to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, be it the same phrase that is used for a greeting or a hand shake. Within this frame that creates safety at the beginning and end, it can help to sprinkle in unexpected exchanges. Sometimes it is therapeutic when therapists share small anecdotes from their life, simply because it adds dimension to them and shows that they have a life outside their role. There is a fine line here. Therapists cannot just abandon their role and they shouldn’t. There are ways to show that they are living people with their own inner life and outside life and their own way of relating to others. Therapy rooms can sometimes be a bit clinical when really, they would benefit from becoming weirdly human. I would suggest some well dosed self-expression and personal weirdness of therapists in therapy to normalize that people are no sterile NPCs. We are in multi-player now and others do weird personal things just because they can. Therapists can reduce their own dehumanization by being offensively human with us. It might be interesting to see how much of that is needed for us to even notice it. That doesn’t mean that boundaries should be crossed or that all stable exchanges should be eliminated. We will simply be stuck acting within scripts unless there is something that disturbs our idea of how we can relate to others.
Asking outside the pattern
Therapy can sometimes turn into a routine of questions and answers, especially when there is a structured approach like CBT that follows certain steps. We as patients are incredibly good at figuring out these steps, walking ourselves through them, preparing the answers and then going through the pre-determined dialogue during the session. CBT is ideal for narrow ‘elf peddler’ exchanges that lack the whole spectrum of experience. Unexpected questions are good. Changing the focus can be good and adding elements from outside our narrow focus can be good.
I like systemic therapy as an approach because it asks questions differently. Even when we know our therapists favorite questions, they are still so closely connected to the situation that the answers are harder to prepare. Circular questions stay unpredictable because we never know what perspective we are asked to take. Being less fixed on our own perspective helps to find more depth in those of others. We don’t lack empathy, we just lost awareness that others exist. So taking new perspectives helps to rediscover the depth of the human experience in others and unexpected questions help us not to slip into a mindless pattern in our interactions.
Acting outside the pattern
Actions speak louder than words. A therapist can tell us that they have been thinking about our therapy but it will not enter our awareness like an action would. We learn that someone has a mind (instead of having a cardboard brain) and that they keep us inside that mind when they do things that shows us that this must have happened. When they listen carefully, they learn things that we are interested in or how we function and then come up with small gestures to show us that they remember it. My therapist knows that I like to read scientific articles for fun and has started giving me copies about topics that could be interesting for our shared therapeutic process. That is not exactly how her role is defined, it slightly reaches beyond that, but it also creates a point of connection, a scientific paper, that can then be used to relate back to her and open a conversation. While I might not be able to notice her as a person, I am suddenly confronted with a paper that meets my need that points back to her/the presence of another active person in the room. Something similar can happen when someone hands us a glass of water. An item enters our awareness and possibly meets a need and it draws our attention to the presence of a person in the room. Therapists who wait for us to ask or who wait for a positive response when they ask, might miss an opportunity to do something for us that happens outside the script and therefore disturbs the dissociation. I can’t believe that I am saying this but yes, unless it violates some expressed boundaries, therapists should probably sometimes do very small kind things for us without asking first and do it in such a casual way that it almost seems unintentional. It is not meant to be an Intervention, just a random act of kindness between human beings. And then they should expect to help us with our confusion when we notice them as a person who cares. Noticing kindness can feel so big it can be hard to tolerate but it is possible to co-regulate us through that. An item that is entering our perception is an effective way to turn our awareness towards the giver of the item.
By breaking up the expected patterns we can sometimes create attention for a wider spectrum of experience and depth. We draw the attention away from its usual focus and present new information to process. When we put the humanity back into our interventions instead of only following scripts we hold space for humanity. We need more integrative actions for re-connection but this is a good start to initiate them. It serves the same purpose as offering strong stimulation to those who dissociate, disrupting the state and encouraging re-orientation.
Non-verbal approaches
Relational disconnection is where non-verbal and creative approaches can shine. Interactive movement, dance, art, music etc creates a dialogue through our senses. We make a sound and someone responds with their own sound and we hear that someone heard. Simple imitation is enough. It creates a loop that includes the other person by first including the sensory input they contributed. When I draw something and someone adds themselves into the picture, I can see a representation of them before I notice that they are actually in the room with me. Once imitation was noticed, adding personal variations can show us that the other person is different from us and makes their own choices that we can respond to. There are a million small ways to create exchanges like that without it having to be a full session of art therapy.
If we work with a sand tray, that is an invitation to add an item for our therapist to the collection and to work on the scenes before us in an interactive way. They move their own item without letting us decide what they have to do next. Let the T co-tell a story, try something new in the sand tray or relate to certain parts in their own way. While these interactions are not acting against expressed boundaries the therapist still acts independently from us and the story our mind is telling and that is what makes us realize that this is a multi-player. Someone does things independently because they have their own mind and motivation. Non-verbal approaches break through our usual patterns of processing by first creating a shared focus, then adding an interaction and exchange that we don’t fully control and finally by pointing back to the person who is with us. All this can happen in a playful way to make it easier and more light-hearted. It turns the relationship into something that is external and therefore easier to grasp. Again, this feels weird to say, but in these severely dissociated ways of relating, being less attuned to our internal story occasionally and creating a rupture in it can be helpful if there is also an intentional closeness in the interaction. It is where therapy is more of an art than a science. Non-verbal elements help to establish a tangible connection even when we get confused. Confusion is part of the goal here to encourage re-orientation.
The mirror of ourselves
We already talked about the process of being seen for who we are and being realized as ourselves as a key element of healing the effects of dehumanization. In a way, mixing up the therapy routine will do something similar. It takes the element of standardized practice and routines in treating patients out of the interactions and makes them more personal and more real. Standardized approaches show signs of dehumanization because they treat everyone exactly the same when people are not exactly the same and need something that is adapted to them. The effect of personal treatment is a better sense of being a person.
Chances are, we already have a rich inner life. Even when there are parts who are numb and not-knowing, there is a lot inside of us that is very much alive in all its complexity. We just need a safe space where we are allowed to be that way. It opens up when therapists create this space by looking at us and understanding us as human beings.
Through that, we become enabled to turn this around and see other people and realize them in their complexity and depth. It starts with feeling human ourselves and with knowing and feeling the depth of what humanity means. Eventually, we will look at others and realize that they are humans too, so they cannot be that different from us. They are not cardboard cut-outs. If they are as human as we are, they have complex feelings and complex reasons for doing things. When we ask ourselves ‘Why do I do this thing?’ and we get a complex network of selfish and selfless reasons for our behavior, we can look at others and realize that they do things for the same reasons. Some are nobel and some are not but the main point is not if they are good people, it is that they are people. When we think of all the hidden things in our life that nobody notices and that nobody would know if we didn’t decide to share them, we can look at others and notice how much of an inner and outside life they must have that we know nothing about because we never talk and therefore they never share. We learn to recognize the humanity of others in the mirror of our own humanity. They are not that different. If we are complex, they are complex. The most effective way to counter our tendency for dehumanization through dissociation is to heal our own wounds of dehumanization that normalized seeing people as less than human. To overcome the dissociation from people we first overcome the dissociation from our own humanness and aliveness and depth. As someone who feels like a human being we can recognize human beings. This completes our ‘rehumanization’ process and it is an important part of it. Recognizing the humanity in others dispels the last effects of dehumanization in us. It is a sign of healing.
There are reports of torture survivors who looked at humanity and its capacity for evil, and counting themselves as part of that human species caused too much disgust to reconcile with it. Améry famously said that there is no way to find a home in this world again. He described his lasting disconnection from humanity and eventually ended his own life. Human beings are strange creatures. They create holocausts and watch others being tortured without helping. They can also be absurdly selfless and give their lives for others. They invented chocolate and medicine. Some spend their whole life trying to help torture survivors and they don’t get rich doing it because they invest their earnings in charities for their patients. When we examine ourselves we find the depth of hell and the gates to heaven all in one place. So much capacity for unimaginable things, good and bad, smart and absurd. We lose our life when we focus on only the darkest things humans are capable of. Why do we help people? That exact capacity can be found in others. We can reconcile with humanity when we look in the mirror of ourselves and understand the depth of complexity in all of us. Other people aren’t black or white, they are both and neither, just like we are. If we find grace for ourselves, we might eventually find grace for the human existence.
Trauma healing
Recovery looks like something. Trauma healing is not just a process of losing the fear of our past. The effects of complex trauma require complex healing and some of that is healing in the way we relate to other people. These deep and dissociative patterns require integration that re-connects us to the depth in others. When deep calls unto deep, as the Bible puts it, we find life. No amount of memory processing will recover this connection but the therapeutic relationship might. Being safely held in the mind of someone else can grow our capacity to hold others that way, in all their complexity. In the mirror of our own experience we can learn a new level of respect for the depth in others. The life in us is no different than the life in them. And that creates a connection that not even trauma can fully eliminate. We get separated from it for a while but the dissociation doesn’t have to last.
This article is based on personal experience mixed with other survivor accounts and papers about dissociation but none of it so specifically that I would call it a source. If you are interested in the topic you can look into writings by Améry or Scarry about torture and the impact of DR/DP on relationships.