When I Woke Up Tuesday It Was Friday Es
Rachel VanDemark
September 11, 2014
Expository Writing 101:ND Paper #1
The Sanity Behind Insanity
In the face on impending danger, the human brain resorts to primitive instinct to seek salvation. Instincts that drive humans to run from fires, fight off attackers, and hide from their worst nightmares. When those nightmares live deep inside their own minds rather than outside the body, the only way to escape them is through dissociation. Dissociation, the process of disconnecting one’s conscious awareness from his or her physical being to achieve a state of being “away” from reality, provides average humans with a relief from the brutalities of everyday life and victims and witnesses of serious traumas a way to avoid their memories. Popular belief dictates that excessive dissociation indicates insanity, while contrarily, it indicates an individual with heavier than average reliance on this intrinsic reflex. Rather than serving as an indication of insanity, dissociation functions as an innate, biological defense mechanism against memories of trauma to protect against the recurrences and recollections of the original traumatic event.
To begin, the limits of understanding the extent of shared sensory perception between humans contribute greatly to the idea that dissociation is not an abnormal phenomenon. One cannot accurately self-evaluate his or her perceptions and decipher whether they may classify oneself as “normal” due to the restrictions set by the fact that humans possess an inability to completely comprehend another’s perceptions. Resultantly, formulating a definite, all-encompassing line between the extremes of sanity and insanity cannot be achieved. For example, even the most basic sensory perceptions may differ immensely between individuals. Two people may classify a certain stimulus under the same label; yet perceive it in a completely different manner. During a session with Stout, dissociation patient Julia states, “‘two people can agree that
September 11, 2014
Expository Writing 101:ND Paper #1
The Sanity Behind Insanity
In the face on impending danger, the human brain resorts to primitive instinct to seek salvation. Instincts that drive humans to run from fires, fight off attackers, and hide from their worst nightmares. When those nightmares live deep inside their own minds rather than outside the body, the only way to escape them is through dissociation. Dissociation, the process of disconnecting one’s conscious awareness from his or her physical being to achieve a state of being “away” from reality, provides average humans with a relief from the brutalities of everyday life and victims and witnesses of serious traumas a way to avoid their memories. Popular belief dictates that excessive dissociation indicates insanity, while contrarily, it indicates an individual with heavier than average reliance on this intrinsic reflex. Rather than serving as an indication of insanity, dissociation functions as an innate, biological defense mechanism against memories of trauma to protect against the recurrences and recollections of the original traumatic event.
To begin, the limits of understanding the extent of shared sensory perception between humans contribute greatly to the idea that dissociation is not an abnormal phenomenon. One cannot accurately self-evaluate his or her perceptions and decipher whether they may classify oneself as “normal” due to the restrictions set by the fact that humans possess an inability to completely comprehend another’s perceptions. Resultantly, formulating a definite, all-encompassing line between the extremes of sanity and insanity cannot be achieved. For example, even the most basic sensory perceptions may differ immensely between individuals. Two people may classify a certain stimulus under the same label; yet perceive it in a completely different manner. During a session with Stout, dissociation patient Julia states, “‘two people can agree that