Acupuncture,
Trauma &
Dissociative
Identity Disorder
Looking at the person rather than simply at the diagnosis.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a complex condition that is deeply connected with trauma and dissociation.
Treatment can be complicated, particularly because people with DID frequently experience other conditions alongside dissociation, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, sleep disturbances, and chronic physical symptoms.
Acupuncture does not replace appropriate psychological or psychiatric treatment for DID. But it can have a place within a broader approach to care, particularly when the goal is to support the nervous system, reduce physical and emotional symptoms, and help the person feel more regulated in their body.
Trauma changes the way we experience the body.
Trauma can profoundly affect the way a person experiences both the mind and the body. Severe and prolonged childhood trauma can lead to patterns of dissociation that become deeply established over time.
Dissociation is not simply something happening in the mind. Trauma can affect sleep, digestion, pain perception, muscle tension, autonomic regulation, emotional responses, and the way a person experiences their own body.
This is one reason I find the traditional Chinese medicine perspective valuable.
Chinese medicine does not separate the physical and emotional aspects of a person into completely different systems. The signs and symptoms are considered together. A person’s physical state, emotional state, constitution, history, and current patterns all contribute to the diagnosis.
Trauma may manifest differently from one person to another.
The treatment has to be individualized.
One person may experience anxiety and insomnia. Another may have digestive problems, chronic pain, exhaustion, muscular tension, or difficulty settling into the body.
Traditional Chinese medicine uses pattern diagnosis rather than treating a diagnosis in isolation.
The Five Phases and the functions associated with the internal organs provide one framework for understanding how emotional and physical patterns interact. The Heart, Liver, Spleen, Lungs, and Kidneys each have physiological and emotional associations within the traditional system.
The treatment therefore has to be individualized.
Acupuncture is not treating a label. It is treating the pattern that is present in the person sitting in front of you.
Supporting the whole person.
People living with DID may also experience depression, anxiety, PTSD symptoms, insomnia, chronic pain, and other conditions that can significantly affect quality of life.
Acupuncture has been studied for several of these conditions and may help reduce symptoms such as anxiety, depression, pain, and sleep disturbance.
For someone who is already receiving appropriate treatment for DID, acupuncture can therefore be considered as one component of a larger treatment plan.
The purpose is not to force integration or to eliminate parts of a person’s experience. The focus is on supporting the person as a whole and addressing the symptoms and patterns that are present.
The body and emotional experience do not have to be treated as separate things.
One of the things I value most about Chinese medicine is that it gives us a way to look at the person rather than simply at the diagnosis.
Trauma is experienced through the body as well as through thought and memory. When someone has lived with prolonged trauma, the body may remain in patterns of tension, vigilance, exhaustion, pain, or dysregulation long after the original circumstances have ended.
Acupuncture can provide a physical point of entry into that experience.
It may help calm the body, regulate physiological patterns, relieve pain and tension, support sleep, and create a greater sense of physical ease. These changes can be meaningful when someone is already doing the deeper psychological work required to address trauma and dissociation.
DID requires specialized care, and acupuncture is not a treatment for DID by itself.
But complementary treatments can still have an important role.
For me, the value of acupuncture in this context is its ability to address the person in front of me as a whole: the body, the emotions, the physical symptoms, the history, and the patterns that have developed over time.
That is where traditional Chinese medicine can offer something different.
It does not require the physical body and the emotional experience to be treated as separate things.
When
the Hun
Flies
Dissociation, the Liver, and the ancient language of Chinese medicine.
There are things in the ancient Chinese medical texts that can sound almost poetic to the modern mind.
The Hun is one of them.
In Chinese medicine, the Hun is associated with the Liver. It is often described as having a quality of movement. It is connected with dreaming, vision, imagination, planning, movement beyond the immediate physical self, and the ability to move through life with a sense of direction.
The Hun travels during dreaming.
The Ethereal Soul.
In traditional Chinese medicine, the Hun is often translated as the “Ethereal Soul.” It is associated with the Liver and is understood as one aspect of the human psyche or spirit.
The Hun is connected with dreaming, imagination, vision, planning, movement, and our ability to move beyond the immediate physical experience. It is the part of us associated with our inner sense of direction and with the capacity to imagine what has not yet happened.
The Hun is not the entire self. Traditional Chinese medicine describes several different aspects of the psyche, each associated with a particular organ system and function. The Hun is the aspect associated with the Liver.
One of the most striking traditional descriptions of the Hun is its relationship with movement. During sleep, the Hun is said to travel. Dreaming is therefore not necessarily viewed as something abnormal. The movement of the Hun is part of its nature.
This gives us an interesting starting point when we begin thinking about dissociation.
If the Hun is naturally capable of moving beyond the immediate physical experience, then movement itself cannot be the pathology.
The question becomes what happens when the movement occurs at the wrong time, becomes excessive, becomes difficult to control, or becomes difficult to return from.
That is where an ancient concept can give us a fascinating way of thinking about a very modern experience.
That, in itself, is not pathology.
The Hun was never meant to be still.
Dreaming is part of being human. Consciousness changes. We enter another kind of experience, and then we return.
But what happens when that movement seems to occur when we are supposed to be fully present?
What happens when a person feels that they have left themselves, become detached from their body, lost time, become someone they do not recognize, or suddenly find themselves somewhere psychologically other than where they physically are?
Modern medicine has language for these experiences.
We call them dissociation.
And yet I sometimes wonder whether the ancient language gives us another way of looking at what is happening.
Not necessarily a competing explanation.
A different map.
Is this pathology?
This is where I become interested in the distinction between pathology and humanity.
We tend to divide human experience into two categories.
Healthy.
Pathological.
But where exactly is the line?
Is dreaming pathological?
Of course not.
Is grief pathological?
Not simply because we grieve.
Is fear pathological?
Not simply because we experience fear.
Is changing our identity throughout life pathological?
No. We are constantly changing.
The human being is not a static object that is supposed to remain in one perfectly regulated condition.
We are moving through time.
We are responding to circumstances.
We become frightened. We recover. We fall in love. We lose people. We change direction. We sleep. We dream. We remember. We forget. We become overwhelmed. We find our way back.
There may never be a permanent state of “non-pathology” in the sense of a human life untouched by disruption.
Chinese medicine does not describe health as static perfection.
It describes relationships.
Movement.
Balance.
Transformation.
Yin becomes Yang. Yang becomes Yin. Qi moves. Blood moves. The seasons change. The body changes. Emotions arise and pass.
Nothing remains exactly as it was.
The question is not simply what is wrong.
If the Hun is associated with movement, imagination, dreaming, and the ability to extend beyond the immediate physical experience, then perhaps we can ask what happens when that movement becomes excessive, deficient, constrained, or difficult to anchor.
The question is no longer simply:
“What is wrong with this person?”
We can ask:
“What has happened to the movement?”
Has something become separated from something else?
Has something become stuck?
Has something become excessive?
Has something become deficient?
Has something become separated from something else?
Has the person lost the ability to return?
These are very different questions.
They do not begin with the assumption that the person is defective.
They begin with observation.
Chinese medicine has always been interested in patterns.
The same symptom can arise from very different underlying patterns, and the same pattern can manifest through very different symptoms.
This is why the person matters.
The diagnosis is not the whole person.
The body and emotional experience were never completely separate.
The traditional Chinese medical model does not make the sharp separation between mind and body that modern Western thinking often does.
The emotional and physical are constantly interacting.
The Liver is not simply a physical organ in the modern anatomical sense. Within the traditional system, it has a functional and energetic relationship with movement, planning, vision, emotion, blood, and the Hun.
This creates a language in which psychological experience can be discussed alongside physical experience without having to choose between the two.
A person experiencing dissociation may also experience insomnia, muscular tension, digestive disturbance, pain, fatigue, anxiety, or a sense of being disconnected from their physical body.
TCM does not require these experiences to be placed into separate compartments.
They can be observed as part of the person’s overall pattern.
That is one of the things I find so valuable about Chinese medicine.
The most important part of the image of the Hun flying away is not the flying. It is the return.
The Hun travels during dreaming, but we wake.
We return to the body.
We return to the room.
We return to the day.
We return to ourselves.
This movement away and back is part of being human.
The difficulty arises when the return becomes difficult.
The work is not necessarily about destroying the capacity to move. It may be about creating enough stability, enough embodiment, enough regulation, and enough connection that movement is possible without losing the ability to return.
We are more complicated than our diagnoses.
A diagnosis can describe something real.
It can give a person language for an experience that previously had no name.
It can help direct treatment.
But it does not describe the entirety of a human being.
We are changing constantly.
There is no final version of ourselves that we reach and then remain there forever.
We are on a journey.
And perhaps health is not a place we arrive at once and for all.
Perhaps it is the continuing capacity to move through experience, to adapt, to transform, and to return.
Not whether the person is pathological.
But whether they can still find their way home.
Join the crowd.
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