Psychoeducation · Trauma reactions
As if what happened is in a separate box
It may feel easier to carry on when painful experiences stay separate from daily life.
You didn't have to face everything at once. Getting through the day mattered, too.
What is it?
Painful memories, feelings, and everyday tasks may seem to stay in separate parts of your life. Someone may manage daily routines, then feel the weight of what happened at another time.
How can it happen?
When facing everything at once feels too much, some feelings may stay in the background while you deal with what needs doing. That doesn't make the experience unimportant.
Supportive words
Maybe I could only take in what I could manage at the time.
I don't have to understand everything at once to take what happened seriously.
What it does not mean
Putting what happened to one side for a while doesn't mean denying it. You didn't have to think about it every moment.
What it might feel like
“During the day I lived as though it had never happened.”
Background and sources
Feeling as if events are in a separate box can have different explanations. On its own, it doesn't establish a particular dissociative process.
These sources relate to the topic. The explanation is independently edited educational content, not a clinically tested intervention.
- Holmes et al. (2005) · Are there two qualitatively distinct forms of dissociation? A review and some clinical implications
- Kleim, Wallott & Ehlers (2008) · Are Trauma Memories Disjointed from other Autobiographical Memories in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder? An Experimental Investigation
- Bedard-Gilligan and Zoellner (2012) · Dissociation and memory fragmentation in post-traumatic stress disorder: an evaluation of the dissociative encoding hypothesis