Self Erasure and Dissociation aren't the same.

[massaki]

For the longest time, up until, just a few minutes ago, I thought of disassociation as the same as self-erasure. After watching Stefan's video "The deadly superstition of human rights", I now think differently.  Stefan talks about dissociation  from all the known horrors of the world , like child abuse, that we know are going on, to make ourselves not be disabled by it.  I always thought Dissociation and Self-Erasure were the same, but they are not. They are both used to protect us ,but one holds more destructive effects than the other one. I think the main thing for self-erasure is how we are destroyed when we use it.  Dissociation is used to protect us ,but does not have the destructive effects of self-erasure. I think it's ok and a good thing to dissociate to a certain point to survive. I before used to completely reject it, because i thought it was a form of self-erasure and it was harmful to me. I now will use it more actively in my life. 

 

Do you guys have any thoughts on this? 

Any Criticisms ? 

[Quadrewple]

For the longest time, up until, just a few minutes ago, I thought of disassociation as the same as self-erasure. After watching Stefan's video "The deadly superstition of human rights", I now think differently.  Stefan talks about dissociation  from all the known horrors of the world , like child abuse, that we know are going on, to make ourselves not be disabled by it.  I always thought Dissociation and Self-Erasure were the same, but they are not. They are both used to protect us ,but one holds more destructive effects than the other one. I think the main thing for self-erasure is how we are destroyed when we use it.  Dissociation is used to protect us ,but does not have the destructive effects of self-erasure.

 

From the wiki page on dissociation:  dissociation describes a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience.

 

It seems to me that self-erasure would just be severe dissociation.  To me whether or not dissociation is harmful to the person engaging in it all depends on the situation.  If you've abused or neglected someone else and dissociate yourself emotionally when they bring it up, you're in a sense pretending that they don't have feelings and engaging in behavior which if they mirrored would end the conflict (in the short term) and help you avoid a nasty, inconvenient truth about yourself.  However if someone is trying to manipulate you, it's obviously a good thing to be able to dissociate yourself from their feelings of neediness and shame and not allow their emotions to cloud the truth of the situation.

 

Theoretically, in a perfect world, dissociation would make no sense because you wouldn't have manipulative people around and you wouldn't be engaged in any unpleasant activities (like doing work you hated).

[Three]

Yeah, to use an analogy. Disassociation is like choosing the laughing gas to make the pain of the dentists operation more tolerable. But, maybe that analogy doesn't work, because usually when we disassociate we are only being tortured, whereas a dentist is inflicting pain on us to help.And we usually don't have a choice, our body just happily supplies us with a way to tolerate pain whether we like it or not. No shame in that!