Dissociation as a Mirror

The chiropractor said something very affirming to me last week. I asked her if she treated many patients with dissociative disorders, or if treating me seemed weird. She looked at me for a moment and said, “It doesn’t seem weird to me at all. In a sense, all of humanity is dissociative. We see ourselves as separate people with separate lives, and even when we connect with someone else we still cling to our separateness. Really, though, there is only One, we are all really only One.” I was taken aback, and pleased, and enlightened. I believe that there really is only One as well, and that One includes people, animals, plants, the Earth, the Universe, and so on. I forget this, a lot, but I do believe it. The statement took all the freakiness I sometimes feel about my disorder out of the equation. My condition seemed suddenly to be a mirror of a bigger condition, and not some absurd and wacked condition way out there, but rather a byproduct of evil like the human condition of separateness from each other and the Earth is a byproduct of evil. (By the way, evil, I believe, is always a perversion of Creation. Evil is not creative or original. The whole Universe is only good creation, but evil can pervert that goodness and that’s all it is.)

So dissociation mirrors the human condition. In a way, I feel like that this gives me the opportunity to learn in a very personal way HOW to connect and how to APPRECIATE connection in a way other people may not be able to. It makes me think of how I became grateful for being an alcoholic. In working the 12-step program I learned so much about myself and was able to move beyond so much of my past that I actually appreciated the fact that the disease of alcoholism precipitated the changes. Other people, ‘normies’ as we AA members call them, sometimes have a harder time initiating change in their lives because there isn’t the loaded gun of alcoholism pointed at their heads demanding they do so or die. Disease can be motivating.

Dissociation, then, can be an opportunity in my life. Instead of focusing on it as a disabling mental illness, which I believe it is, I can focus on it as the precipitating factor in my life that leads me to learn to connect with myself which will open the door to learning how to connect with others and the Earth in a more intimate and personal way than I otherwise would.

Book information: http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/