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Delayed Emotional Responses
Feeling Emotion After the Fact
Children growing up in dysfunctional homes learn a magic trick; they learn to delay their emotional responses until they have privacy, or they dissociate away their emotions.
This article will focus on delayed reactions to emotional responses and how this affects people with dissociative identity disorder.
Childhood Trauma and Dissociative Identity Disorder
Childhood trauma is made up of events experienced by children that make them feel fearful and is commonly dangerous, violent, or life-threatening. Some examples of physical or sexual abuse, neglect, or experiencing a major medical problem that is fear-filled for the child.
Childhood trauma doesn’t always involve something happening to the child, as watching a loved one die, for instance, is exceptionally traumatic for kids.
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is caused by repeated extreme childhood abuse (trauma). This cause is especially true if the child has no adults to turn to for comfort and thus feels trapped and alone in their pain.
Childhood trauma is also a leading cause of delayed emotional response, as seen with the disorder’s dissociative properties. The child feels endangered, has nowhere to go…
