“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
— Muriel Rukeyser.
A narrative is a story told by a narrator to the equally obvious reader. We are both the narrators and readers of our own personal life story, though given the existence of automatic negative thoughts or “ANTs,” this is often done automatically and largely subliminally.
“Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers.”
— Owen Flanagan, Duke University.
Narrators such as ourselves tell their stories through one of three general perspectives or points of view, each expressed by the use of specific personal pronouns. These points of view reflect the nature of the narrator’s relationship with the story.
The first person (1p) narrator identifies with a character in the story and tells the story to the reader through the perspective of that character. This is accomplished through the use of the singular pronouns I, me, my, we, us, our(s). We are each our own narrator stuck in 1p perspective, telling ourselves, the reader, stories in alternating tenses through a character we identify as self — a story and leading star that we have become “seized” by in the Joseph Campbell sense.
With the use of pronouns you and yours in second person (2p) narration you are assigning an identity, relationships, circumstances as well as the private psychological reactions to a reader.
So we go from I to You, from Us to Them.
In our personal narratives this can manifest as transference, parataxic distortion or projection of aspects of one’s own denied personality traits onto another individual, leading to projective identification and self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, by use of 2p you are drawing an individual into a story not of their own as you accomplish distance from that story.
In the book Stranger in the Mirror: Dissociation — The Hidden Epidemic, authors Marlene Steinberg, MD, and Maxine Schnall describe dissociation as representing a continuum with adaptive association at one extreme end and maladaptive dissociation on the other.
Maladaptive dissociation — defined as a “persistent, recurrent and disruptive to social relationships and job performance” — is a psychological defense mechanism triggered in response to stress and is characterized by a distancing and distortion from one’s senses, memories and sense of self. It is thought that traumatic histories involving abuse or negligence in the early years can nurture maladaptive dissociative tendencies.
When a child is exposed to a trauma from which one cannot run or hide nor has anyone in which to confide, we might expect this 2p function to kick in as a psychological survival mechanism.
Moving from “I am being abused” to “you are being abused” requires either repression and projection or dissociation and identity alteration.
If not projected onto an Other in your social environment, than the embodiment is custom-made as the alternate personality or Alter in the psychological environment. Here your dissociated parts take on the form of an imaginary friend, enemy, or the ever-ambiguous frienemy. To this imaginary entity the dissociated memories can be attributed, and so securely compartmentalized in the 2p Land of Not-Self.
This extreme end of maladaptation in the whacky world of dissociation comes to us in the form of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), otherwise known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Here the aforementioned imaginary entity can develop into a full-blown alternate identity or Alter.
In DID, at least two distinct personalities constantly take the driver’s seat of the body. The alter may identify with a different age, sex or species. It will have its own distinct body language and speech pattern. To boot, the Alter can take the wheel and assume position in the driver’s seat of the body.”Switching” is the term used to denote the transition from one personality to another, but this is not a simple on/off switch.
Partial dissociation involves varying degrees of overlap where both personalities are consciously involved in the body at once. It would seem to comprise both the experience of depersonalization and derealization. In depersonalization, you look at yourself from an outside perspective or feel detached from parts of your emotions or body. In derealization, you are instead detached from your immediate environment, now distorted, and familiar people seem foreign.
As an important additional ingredient, however, there is what Steinberg elected to call “identity confusion,” which is a overwhelming sense of uncertainty or conflict with respect to one’s sense of self. The host may find himself compelled to do things without any sense of control over them. Depending on the degree of the switch, one may feel like a passenger in one’s very own skin.
Full dissociation involves the complete “switching” from one personality to the other, leading to “dissociative amnesia” — loss of memory regarding your past or identity — for the Host. Having evolved now from identity confusion, we are faced with “identity alteration.”
Typically we use 1p and moderate 2p in our life narrative, but there is indeed a third. You get there by the following pronouns: he, she, it, him, her, his, her(s), they, them and their(s). In this third person (3p) narrative perspective, the narrator impartially observes the story unfolding from an outside-looking-in perspective. The style in which the narrator does this fractures into 3p into four different subcategories, namely the objective, omniscient, subjective and limited 3p perspectives.
3p objective is limited to descriptions of the physical circumstances and conveys details in a neutral or impersonal manner without any direct insights into the subjective processes of the characters. You are a camera, a fly on the wall, just looking over the shoulder of the character or characters in a neutral, uninvolved fashion. 3p omniscient has an additional degree of freedom in that not only objectivity but telepathy with those of one’s choosing is available, and even some interpretations of the events. The 3p subjective narrator reveals the narrative by honing in on different characters, one at a time.
Then there is 3p-Limited, which offers an additional dimension of perspective to the first person perspective. The narrator closely follows a single individual and knows his thoughts and emotions directly, though from a distance but everyone else is perceived externally.
Mild degrees of dissociation are experienced to some degree by ordinary individuals in response to emotional stress, sensory overload or experiences perceived as life-threatening. These are rare, swift episodes that have minimal effects on one’s ability to function. There are other important distinctions, however.
“The two main characteristics of dissociation are that it occurs automatically, and that it allows a person to not experience something,” writes Stephen Wolinsky in his book Quantum Consciousness.
A paragraph later he adds:
“The dis-association of self-observation, by contrast, allows you to become aware of what you are already feeling, and happens only as a consequence of conscious choice.”
This is the “witness” consciousness, which seems synonymous with adaptive dissociation.
The mind is like a camera with a zoom lens. Concentration, which is exclusive to whatever you happen to be zooming in on, is cultivated through forms of meditation like trakata. It narrows the attention down on a specific target as periphery awareness dims to nonexistence. Mindfulness, also cultivated through meditation, is inclusive. It involves stepping back, zooming out with broad awareness covering the full scope and depth of the present moment. This is accomplished through becoming attentive to our thoughts, emotions and sense data without judgement, manipulation or identification.
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