Summary of Marlene Steinberg M.D. & Maxine Schnall's The Stranger in the Mirror

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Dissociation is not always the worst case scenario you may think it is. It is a continuum that runs along with many other symptoms, and it can affect people in different ways. It can be mild, moderate, or severe, and it can be caused by a dissociative disorder or not.

#2 The public’s unfamiliarity with dissociative symptoms has caused dissociation to become the silent epidemic of our time. Without being tested for dissociative symptoms, people who have undetected dissociative disorders can be in therapy for a long time without making any real progress.

#3 A secretary was working at her desk in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, when a bomb exploded. She was severely burned and bleeding from flying glass, but she was able to make her way out of the building to safety.

#4 The human trauma response is to dissociate, which is a natural coping mechanism for people in grave danger. It helps them detach from the situation and focus on quickening thoughts of self-preservation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822515086

IRB Media

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Insights on Marlene Steinberg M.D. & Maxine Schnall's The Stranger in the Mirror

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Dissociation is not always the worst case scenario you may think it is. It is a continuum that runs along with many other symptoms, and it can affect people in different ways. It can be mild, moderate, or severe, and it can be caused by a dissociative disorder or not.

#2

The public’s unfamiliarity with dissociative symptoms has caused dissociation to become the silent epidemic of our time. Without being tested for dissociative symptoms, people who have undetected dissociative disorders can be in therapy for a long time without making any real progress.

#3

A secretary was working at her desk in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, when a bomb exploded. She was severely burned and bleeding from flying glass, but she was able to make her way out of the building to safety.

#4

The human trauma response is to dissociate, which is a natural coping mechanism for people in grave danger. It helps them detach from the situation and focus on quickening thoughts of self-preservation.

#5

Dissociation is a way of coping with a life-threatening trauma. It allows certain perceptions, feelings, sensations, thoughts, and memories related to the trauma to be split off from full awareness and encoded in a peripheral level of awareness.

#6

The SCID-D is a diagnostic tool that can be used to determine if a person is experiencing dissociation, which is a reaction to stress. Normal people experience brief, rare dissociative episodes that have little impact on their social or job functions. People with a dissociative disorder have persistent, recurrent, and disruptive dissociative episodes that affect their social relationships and job performance.

#7

The life review, or panoramic memory, experienced by normal people dissociating in a close brush with death does not occur in people with a dissociative disorder. They have amnesia for traumas and persistent and recurrent episodes of unaccountable lost time or large memory gaps.

#8

The brain has two separate tracks for local and out-of-town mail, and fear determines which set of sensory information goes where. When danger is perceived, fear-inducing information is split off from the rest of the input and sent to the amygdala for emergency processing.

#9

When people with a dissociative disorder are exposed to any type of stress, they often overreact and dissociate in an attempt to numb their emotions. They may also try to numb their emotions with drugs or alcohol.

#10

The child who is being sexually and emotionally abused or physically beaten is afraid that she will either die or go insane. She can’t run or hide, so she escapes mentally. She floats outside her body, imagining that somebody else is being raped or beaten, and turns off her emotions.

#11

The memory of a person with a dissociative disorder is often impaired. They may look whole on the outside, but inside their sense of self and connection with the outside world has been splintered into bits and pieces.

#12

The field of dissociation has been demonized and misrepresented to the public,