Articles and Blogs

Duncan Craig is the founder of Survivors Manchester. In this powerful article he examines the impact of sexual abuse on men.

You don't need to be an expert to work with people who dissociate, but you do need to understand these fundamental issues. Here are ten steps.

After trauma our brains are sensitised to threat and our amygdala – our brain’s ‘smoke alarm’ – tends to react to burnt toast as if the house is on fire. In this article I show how to turn down the sensitivity of our smoke alarm – and overcome the impacts of trauma.

Denial and dissociation are two sides of the same coin. In employing dissociation, we are employing denial: “This isn’t happening” or “This isn’t happening to me.” We create alter personalities to whom it happened, so that it didn’t happen to me.

Once we understand dissociation as a logical response to overwhelming trauma, it stops being so dramatic and different, and the person suffering dissociation stops being ‘complex’ and ‘bizarre’ too. There is nothing bizarre about dissociative disorders—what is bizarre is how some people can be so badly mistreated that they end up with a dissociative disorder.

Sexual abuse is still a taboo subject. It is generally thought that between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4 girls experience sexual abuse before the age of consent. But despite this, we rarely read about the impact that might have on women experiencing pregnancy, birth and then parenthood. And it can have a huge effect on any or all of those aspects of life.

Men with dissociative identity disorder are in the minority, at least in terms of being diagnosed. This series of interviews explores the experience of dissociation and recovery from child sexual abuse from a male perspective, with stark honesty and vulnerability.

Someone who has dissociative identity disorder may have distinct, coherent identities that are able to assume control of their behaviour and thought. Read on to find out more about this poorly-understood phenomenon.