Since most clinicians learned little about childhood trauma and its aftereffects in their training, many are struggling to build their knowledge base and clinical skills to effectively treat survivors and their families. Understanding dissociation and its relationship to trauma is basic to understanding the posttraumatic and dissociative disorders. It is a complex neuropsychological process. Dissociation exists along a continuum from normal everyday experiences to disorders that interfere with everyday functioning. Researchers and clinicians believe that dissociation is a common, naturally occurring defense against childhood trauma.
Children tend to dissociate more readily than adults.
Dissociation may become a defensive pattern that persists into adulthood and can result in a full-fledged dissociative disorder. The essential feature of dissociative disorders is a disturbance or alteration in the normally integrative functions of identity, memory, or consciousness. Dissociative Amnesia with acute loss of memory may result from wartime trauma, a severe accident, or rape. Dissociative Fugue is indicated by not only loss of memory, but also travel to a new location and the assumption of a new identity. All of the disorders are trauma-based, and symptoms result from the habitual dissociation of traumatic memories.