Beyn 1

Wesley Beyn
10/2/14
Mental Defense; Disassociation and Splitting Aren't All That Bad
People take in ridiculous amounts of information; some stored, some lost. The significant
memories that are processed, become our personalities and determine our behavior. Tragic events
can effect this outcome in a number of ways that lead to a fragmented, incomplete identity.
Viewing excerpts from Leslie Bell's Hard to Get and Martha Stout's When I Woke up Tuesday
Morning, It Was Friday, one can depict people who have dealt with sexual assault and
disassociation to the point where they need to seek help from these two psychanalyists. The
patients who have gone to seek help from Bell and Stout have their own views and narrations,
which were born from their own personal experiences. What people have seen, heard and
experienced are all factors in the way a person reacts to, in terms of a sane person, normal daily
occurances. Personal narrations play a major role in deciding how the world functions around a
person. Disassociation and personal narratives are defense mechanisms that allow traumitized
people an escape where they can function automatically, while evaluating an inner struggle.
Depending on the situation and level of emotionality the person is at the time of an event,
the brain filters memories in accordance to personal and social impact. In other words, the most
important, stand-out events will be recorded. Traumatic events are set in their own category.
These cases of extreme mental impact create a flood of external stimulation that is too much for
the brain to handle. When this occurs, memories turn into fragments of that specific event. Stout
refers to the brain as a fuse box where given the circumstance that a blizzard is occuring
outdoors, a person is given two choices (420). Either risking the chance of catching the house on

Beyn 2
fire by shorting the fuse box or bear the sub-zero temperatures of not doing anything. As Stout
mentions, like the outdated fuse box, the psychologically traumitized brain houses inscrutable
eccentricities that cause it to overreact- or more precisely, misreact- to the current realities of
life (Stout 421). The misreaction Stout iterated are the moments of disassociation which
randomly happen when faced with familiar stimulations that were present during the traumatic
event. At these moments, a person is faced with unrelenting fear and loneliness. They regress
into a state where they feel lost, helpless and unable to fend for themselves.
This state of disassociation comes without a warning and happens instantaneously,
sometimes the affected person is unaware that they have entered this state. People who have
entered this state tell of places that seem to be dream-like or a void that has no end. Take Stout's
patient, Lila, who describes her experience as
awful... everything around me gets very small, kind of unreal...It's my fly away self, I
call it. It feels like my spirit just kind of flies away, and everything else gets very
small - people, everything... Sometimes even my own body gets small and unreal. It's
awful. And when it happens, I can't stop it. I just can't stop it. (Stout 433).
What Lila is experiencing is something that has taken over her ability to distinguish what is
reality and what isn't. Viewing Lila's disassociation, it's almost as if her brain is telling her to
slow down, not worry over the little things and examine the big picture. Now, Lila views this as
terrifying and intimidating, but what she doesn't consider is that her brain is just trying to help
her forget any negative stimulants and future ones that may occur.
Furthermore, the identity she created from being disassociated has impacted her overall
outlook, throwing off her ability to judge other people unbiasedly; changing her identity. Lila

Beyn 3
was in a convenience store when she got into an argument with the cashier (433). She saw a
resemblance of her abusive step-father which triggered a disassociative event (433). Lila,
unconsciously, believes that all of her problems are linked to her past; never once thinking that
she could get over the fact. Her mind tells her to believe everything wrong with the world is her
father's fault, but most of the time it's just her own problems. The reoccuring episodes of
disassociation are a consequence of her own personal narration.
Another form of disassocitation is when a person fades out and creates holes in their
timeline. This example is given to us as Julia, one of Stout's patients. Julia was a functioning
member of society who seemed like any other normal, intelligent, hard working woman. What
many people fail to believe is that she disassociates herself unknowingly. This defense
mechanism is derived from the fact she was tortured as a child. She had used disassociation as a
means to escape from the abuse and torment her parents dealt to her. This safegaurd she
developed still haunts her in the present, exposing itself randomly. Julia announces that she
[loses] time. Hours, days. They're gone, and [she] [doesn't] know what [she's] done or where
[she's] been or anything else (Stout 431). Some of Julia's life is on autopilot, where she doesn't
remember any of her own actions, almost being hijacked by another version of yourself. But
because she had disassociated herself so much, she nearly lost all of her childhood memories.
Julia's brain determined that her childhood was more negative than beneficial to her and decided
to get rid of it. This loss has abled her to function intellectually passed childhood and focus more
on the future.
Leslie Bell introduces another defense mechanism which is connected to disassociation.
Ths psychoanalytical term splitting refers to the behavioral division of a person during a highly

Beyn 4
stressful situation. Quite symmetrical to being bipolar but able to command it on will. Frequently
occuring to women, they implore a front to make difficult, often times sexual, situations seem
easily distinguishable in terms of yes and no. They refer to a simplistic desire that controls this
new personality, from being in control to wanting a non-responsible relationship. Splitting occurs
in women who have been exposed to trauma in the past. Generally, they use it to get over their
confrontation such as Alicia, a patient of Bell's, who wanted to convey, to others and to herself,
the degree to which she had gotten over her family's impact on her (Bell 39). Splitting may
further lead to wanting two seperate desires, that may be contradictory to one another. Since the
desire to be socially accepted is high among young women, the rate and frequency of splitting
increases dramatically. This defense mechanism allows women to not be directly exposed to a
dangerous situtation that involves sexual assault. For Alicia, her inner struggle was her abusive
and non-supportive family with which she has trouble getting closure with.
Splitting and disassociation are both rooted within personal narratives. No matter how
much people like to deny their true intentions, they always are intertwined with what people
believe they want. It just becomes this mess of an identity that people can't make sense of. Both
Stout and Bell have used observation and psychological techniques to discover the core of their
patients' problems. How these patient's split and disassociate themselves explain their desires and
what they are running from. How patients interpret their episode or event in which either defense
mechanism takes place, are the personal narrations that define who they are. The inner struggle
represents the past where these patients need to obtain closure and resolve, otherwise these
defense mechanisms run wild causing more harm than good to a person's identity. Just because
Bell and Stout talk about personal narration forming one's own identity, they both are forgetting

Beyn 5
that because of other people, a person has an identity.

Beyn 6
Works Cited
Bell, Leslie. "Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom."
2013. The New Humanities Reader. Fifth ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, n.d.
25-46. Print.
Stout, Martha. "When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday." 2013. The New Humanities
Reader. Fifth ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, n.d. 420-439. Print.