Capt SpaceBat

Last night on the radio, completely unaware of context, I heard the phrase “Hysterical blindness.”  I can only hope that the programme was a psychological discussion, rather than a film review.  That aside, I looked up the term and discovered that it is a “Conversion disorder” linked closely to other “dissociative disorders.”  More and more of my life started falling into neatly arranged pigeon holes.  Whether or not this was useful was not clear, but it did go some way to explain a lot of experiences; mostly based around stress and trauma.

According to Staci Haines in ’Healing Sex : A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma’ Dissociation is a normal response to trauma, and allows the mind to distance itself from experiences that are too much for the psyche to process at that time.

This, tied in with the nature of PTSD & BPD having an unmanageable, continually re-affirmed, ever-present acute awareness of the traumata suffered, to be suffered and the danger of recurring suffering, makes for startling, autonomous intrusions into ways of responding or functioning. This can be quite unsettling, given the unexpected, unpredictatable and inexplicable nature of such dissociation; for the sufferer and those around.

I have tried to convey some of this fractured sense of identity and self in my art works: the pieces based on a single idea tend to be very simple and striking; as soon as a second influence enters the fray, the scene is set for chaos, as almost everything is let into the equation, everything being inter-related and much of it having some association of background in trauma.

My painting “You DID this” tries to express some of these aspects of “Dissociative Identity Disorder”

“You DID this”  (approx 1mb)