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You keep talking about “dissociation”. What on earth do you mean? And “unresolved trauma”. So what? Trauma is part of life. We all have trauma. Whatever. You’ve just got to suck it up, deal with it as best you can and get on with it.
… Right?
Maybe you’re acquainted with a gearbox, or an engine? Maybe there is someone in your life who has worked with these things and you caught baffling, intricate glimpses here and there? If so, this picture might help you to understand the answers to these two questions: “What is dissociation?” And “What is the big deal about trauma?”
My dad is a mechanic. He specializes in repairing huge truck gearboxes. And what’s more; he puts a guarantee on them. They have to be good as new when he’s done with them. He’s got to work perfectly. Time and time again I saw his organized, competent hands, opening up the casing of the gearbox, taking out the main shaft with all its gears. I watched him take it all apart, wash each part with care, getting rid of all the grease and oil.
He would pack them out, neatly organized on a cloth, and then he would hold up a gear, run his finger over a battered segment and say, “See, Ruth.
This is the 6th gear. See, it was damaged here? Feel it.” And I would run my finger over the smallish segments with little chips missing. “This is why it kept jumping out of sixth when the truck was driving”, he would continue explaining.
Or another time when I went to visit him at the workshop and he held up a main shaft, broken clean off! “What kind of action caused so much damage!” I wondered, mildly shocked at the broken metal. The gears were totally wrecked. Yet he repaired it. One part at a time. Reassembled it and handed the gearbox back to its owner with a guarantee. Working perfectly again. What amazing workmanship!
Now back to our questions: we’re not talking about an engine, or a gearbox. We’re trying to catch a glimpse of our souls – that inner essence of who we are that we never can see, but that many of us wonder and theorize about.
There are answers to be found, though. We get them from the very Creator Himself. The One who made us and who understands our inner workings more perfectly than any expert workman ever can. He told us all we need to know in His Word. Let us look at just one Bible passage for now:
Psalm 139:13-15,
“For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in the secret place,
And skilfully woven together in the lowest parts of the earth.”
Hierdie Psalm se opskrif is, “God’s perfect knowledge of man” in die NKJV van die Bybel, en watter wonderbaarlike hoeveelheid inligting bevat dit nie.
Verse fifteen is talking about our physical body (my frame) and “the secret place” and “lowest parts of the earth” are euphemisms for the womb. Looking at the structure of our tissue magnified under a microscope, we find that our tissue literally is “woven together”!
And then, back to verse 13: “You formed our inward parts” This refers not to organs, which are part of our physical bodies. No, it refers to something much more profoundly important: our souls! That mysterious inner part of us that is not observable in any laboratory. Where we can only grope around and try to understand what goes wrong and how to get it fixed, hoping we’re somehow helping and not getting it all wrong.
Let’s go back to the gearbox of a big truck now: see all those intricate gears and parts? Every nut and bolt, even the gaskets that seal everything up? Our souls can be compared to that, but so much more complex and intricate that only God can ever fully understand how these “inward parts” function and fit together.
And what is trauma? Trauma is damage. Like that sixth gear with the little chips of metal broken off. We can ignore it and just “get on with it” so to speak. But every time we have to use sixth gear, it will grind and slip and not function well. It will instead, break more and more. This trauma might be as common as your parents who got divorced, or your dad who loved your brother more than he loved you. And you will find, when you want to engage with your own husband, or wife, your own kids, that you have issues. You’re struggling. It is just not going as well as you had expected, because well: the part of you that does that job is damaged and can’t work as it should.
What then is “dissociation”? In short: it is when one of those inward parts has broken loose and is completely out of place, not able to function as it should at all! How does this happen? When we experience trauma during early childhood, as we all inevitably do in this fallen world we live in, and we don’t have the emotional maturity and capacity to handle what is happening to us, we dissociate it.
This means that we cut that traumatic experience off and store it in a part of us, which bears that information for us, so that we don’t have to keep dealing with the unacceptably negative emotions caused by the trauma. We can then, “get on with it” but those unresolved emotions caused by the trauma are still there, and whenever that part of us is called upon to play its part in the normal course of our lives, various degrees of havoc unfold:
We may be totally unreasonable, immature, emotionally triggered, illogical, compulsive, in short: not functioning as we should in those situations at all. And it happens over and over again. We can’t seem to break out of it. Nothing helps.
When we take God’s hand, through His Spirit, and walk our own pathway to healing: going back to every traumatic incident and actually feeling and processing it with His help, He miraculously repairs us completely and puts us back together perfectly! It is possible to process trauma properly, to get to point of total healing and to live well – victoriously – as a Christian and as a person. I truly testify to this, as I live, and it is Jesus who does it!