cannibal

What "counts" as enough trauma to get a CDD? Honestly, I don't entirely know, and I don't know how good a grip professionals have for it either. However, there are a few things that I do know regarding what trauma can cause CDDs.

The ICD itself states "onset of Dissociative Identity Disorder is most commonly associated with traumatic experiences, especially physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or childhood neglect." and "Dissociative Identity Disorder is commonly associated with serious or chronic traumatic life events, including physical, sexual or emotional abuse. " This itself says that basically any form of abuse or neglect is associated with DID itself (and therefore likely the other CDDs). I do believe medical abuse/neglect also count within this. But that only really covers the "types" of traumatic experiences, and not the other stuff that leads to the formation of a CDD.

As I stated above, the ICD says that DID is associated with "serious or chronic" traumatic life events (you'll see why I'm making the "or" bold in a minute). What is said there, means that it can't just be one event of a parent hitting a child, but that it has to be of a "serious" nature or a "chronic" nature.

Now I can't find any information as to what "serious" is in the context of trauma, and I asked my friend who is currently studying CDDs at university and what they said was "tldr, if it is traumatic and repetitive to a child, repetitive is the important part". So basically, if a child finds a situation traumatic and it is repetitive enough that the child dissociates as a way to cope, then they could form a CDD. A child has to have dissociation in their coping set as they are going through the trauma, and it has to be before the age of integration of ego states (which I think is around 8-11) in order to form a CDD.

There's also the thing to remember that a child is going to have less coping mechanisms and stress tolerance than an adult would as well. The CTAD clinic on youtube explains it really well. Video is linked there, but I will summarise it now as well. It's a mix of tolerance sizes and why/how alters are formed.

Basically, if you think of "stress tolerance" as being a glass, when you're a toddler that glass is small, so think the size of a shot glass, and as you grow up and gain coping skills and more tolerance to stuff, your glass grows so when you're a child (say 5-7 ish) your glass can hold around 1 cup (230ml), and as a teen it grows to 3 cups (690ml) and by the time your an adult, it is a full jug of water (so probably around say 8.5 cups (2 litres).

Now obviously, if you take a stressor that might fill up a toddler's glass and pour it into an adult's glass, they're not going to notice it as much due to a shot glass being around 1-2% of their tolerance. It might need a minute or two of space to sort out, but they have the tolerance and coping skills to deal with it.

Now take that same stressor and put it in child's glass, while it still doesn't fill up the glass it is around 10-20% of their tolerance so it will affect them much greater than it affected the adult, however they will likely still have the ability to cope with it.

Now, if we take the child's glass, and they experience a bit of trauma, then the glass fills up a bit but they still have room to cope, but if that happens every day or every week for an extended period of time then they get less and less space to cope until their glass is continuously overflowing, which is what's called "complex trauma" and it often causes some sort of disorganised attachment with caregivers. This is often when dissociation occurs as the child has no other ability to cope with the trauma.

When this dissociation occurs, it allows the trauma and stress to be held in different glasses to their own, in different parts of the brain, aka the ego states which will then develop as alters. And even when the child grows up and gains more tolerance, the other glasses never leave, and more may come if the child goes through more trauma that overwhelms them and the other alters again.

That wasn't a short summary, my apologies, but I hope it explain some stuff to a degree. The way I interpret it is that it doesn't necessarily matter what the trauma is, just so long as it overwhelms the child's ability to cope, meaning that the ego states have to take on the trauma and dissociative barriers get formed.

I've not touched on the "combined with other disabilities" bit yet, but from what I have researched, disabilities can affect the likelihood that a child forms a CDD. People with disabilities, mainly going to be referencing neurodevelopmental disabilities here, often have less tolerance to begin with due to the way their brain works. So that means that their "glass size" is going to be slightly smaller to begin with, or some of their glass is already filled with the day to day struggles of their disability.

This then results in less space to cope with additional trauma or stressors, so therefore means less trauma might be required for them to reach the point of complex trauma and dissociation. However, like I said at the start of my post I am not a professional and may have got this slightly wrong (if anyone knows anything that goes against what I have said feel free to lmk and I can correct it).

So no, you don't have to be "#1 traumatised person" like what syscringe likes to imply a lot.