Irina Alexe

Dissociative disorders are generally understood in psychiatry as a disruption or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control or behavior. Still, no definitive theoretical model makes sense of the full spectrum of experiences that currently fall under the large umbrella of “dissociative”. This lack of a sturdy theoretical foundation encourages cross-sectional studies that seek to correlate dissociative experiences with pathologies, and relatively few articles focusing on case studies or phenomenological investigation. I first present two main explanatory paradigms that contend to capture the fairly wide array of dissociative experiences. Then I attempt to enrich the trauma-based model with a 4E understanding of traumatic experiences. I propose that the kind of trauma that may lead to dissociative experiences can be understood as continuous disturbances in an individual’s ecological niche. This would put them in the position of not having constant and predictable access to a personalized regulatory affective, cognitive and instrumental niche, which are integral parts of the individual’s whole ecological niche. To flesh out the hypothesis, I articulate making sense of developmental trauma in the language of affordances, and explore the implications for derealization and depersonalization as a subset of dissociative experiences.