Why Parts of You Might Not Realize You Are Human

1. If children are sometimes treated as less than human, parts of them can come to accept that identity.

2. In order to minimize pain or distress, parts of a child can train themselves to cut themselves off from their feelings. Since humans feel and have emotions, their lack of feeling could cause them to conclude that they are not fully human.

3. Parts of their consciousness can be scared to admit to themselves that they are human because their experience tells them that being human exposes oneself to distress and abuse.

Most of us can understand people suppressing conscious awareness of their past because they find it too distressing. A simple blocking out of past traumas, however, will not work for children whose traumas are not restricted to the past but keep recurring. If they are give themselves any reprieve from having this weighing down their minds 24/7, these children need a more sophisticated mental trick whereby although part of them has no alternative but be aware of the suffering, another part of them is spared this awareness and is able to function free from the mentally crippling effects of having to cope with the memory and fear repeats during those brief moments (such as when at school) when abuse is not occurring. This ability to give oneself a reprieve by dividing one’s consciousness is known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. Although it is not particularly common, far more people have this condition than are aware of it.

Some survivors of child abuse have parts of them that have trained themselves to cope by cutting themselves off from their feelings. This has the potential of being so far-reaching that those parts of them can lose the ability to detect when they need sleep.