The Pnictogen Wing

one of the horrible ironies I've come to realize about the difficult relationship between my older sibling and myself, which I'm starting to remember in better detail from past decades, is that we were both maximally afraid all the time, but our addled brains went in two completely different directions with it. and I rather wonder why that might have been. I went towards total dissociation; Frisk went towards the far less pleasant option, extreme paranoia.

cw: mental illness, dealing with extreme emotional pain, paranoia vs. dissociation

I think I need something to spark myself with. I have been thinking about this issue—what gets us out of the dissociative rut? (I've been meditating on the nature of that rut.)

The issue is simply explained: dissociation is a protection against pain, so there's a kind of automatic optimization process going on with it, a balance between opposing forces. Going in deeper into dissociation lessens the pain, but also reduces the ability to function and respond, so your brain is trying to keep that balance. But if you attain a place of relative safety, now you don't ever want to leave it again: leaving it always means a sharp increase in pain and the resumption of that constant tension of maintaining the optimal dissociative state, so your body and brain just don't want to do it. "I'm safe, it's safer NOT to move," becomes the overriding concern.

This happens all the time to us and saps our abilities. It's also been a drug or drink trigger: I'll realize I need a kick of some kind and that's one of the strongest ones.

So why not a spark? What if I shocked myself? There must be many small devices that can produce a safe but slightly painful shock. It'd have to be pocketable I think.

~Chara

There's this one moment in Chapter One of Deltarune and two similar incidents in Chapter Two of this shocking sequence: Kris, without any help from the player, seems to reach inside themself, pull out their own SOUL (or at least, a red heart that we've been invited to equate with the SOUL), and stash it somewhere in the room. A birdcage, a sink cabinet, and the living room sofa all serve as temporary hiding-places for Kris's SOUL. What's going on here?

I don't know myself. We have serious imaginative difficulties that have, so far anyway, prevented us from being able to conceptualize the SOUL. Whether or not we even have a SOUL is a matter of insoluble doubts. I envy the Undertale fans who seem to have no problem with playing around with SOULs in their fiction—dividing them up, compounding them together, assigning them different colors, and so on. I couldn't do that myself, because we can't imagine the SOUL as more that a cloud of uncertainty.

However, I believe that I see a parallel in Kris's SOUL-wrenching episodes to real-life experiences of extreme dissociation. This is something that's happened to our system countless times, in various ways and circumstances. It's difficult to recall specific instances because of the nature of such extreme dissociative episodes, but the general pattern is something like this: we will be almost disabled by extreme fears or traumatic memories, but still able to keep up a bare minimum of functioning in the world by clinging hard to some one particular thing in it.

cw: talk about extreme dissociative experiences

I keep coming back to this video clip—it's from the first Heaven's Feel movie, and the moment I first saw it I knew that I'd seen an accurate representation of what a dissociative experience is like.

Emiya Shirou hits an invisible "Bounded Field" (a magical construct) that's been erected round his high school, and he zones out. but more to the point: he does not know that he has zoned out.

there's a bustle of people around Shirou as he hits the field, and then he's glancing around, and his perception seems normal. there's still a sound of bustling people; he sees students walking and stretching, though his glances have a curiously blurred and distorted look about them, like he's got tunnel vision. it seems like only a few moments have passed.

and then suddenly he's interrupted: really Shirou has been standing there frozen for a while, and everyone's gone. his sense of internal time was all wrong; it's not been "a few moments", and now Emiya Shirou's late for school. how did this happen?

"dissociation" is the answer but now my (unanswered) question is why dissociation should produce that sort of dislocation in time. what's actually happening when someone's internal perception of the passage of time is so completely out of whack with their surroundings?

~Chara