“I Was Looking at Myself Do It, but It Wasn’t Me”: Experiences of Dissociative Violence by People With Histories of Violence Perpetration

Although a small body of research has convincingly established the occurrence of dissociative violence, we continue to have little understanding of the forms or types of dissociative experiences identified and the context in which they occur. With this research gap in mind, we used reflexive thematic analysis of interview transcripts to understand participants' accounts of their physical violence use toward partners, family members, friends, and associates while experiencing dissociative symptoms. Participants were 17 men and women completing community-based family violence perpetrator treatment programs or prison-based high-intensity treatment programs for violent offending. Three overarching themes and two subthemes were generated. The first theme, "Becoming overwhelmed by emotions" described participants' experiences of intensely unpleasant emotions immediately prior to entering a dissociative state. The second theme, "Transitioning between states" was split into two subthemes ("Disconnection" and "Reconnection") that described participants' experiences of disconnecting from and then reconnecting to their usual way of experiencing themselves and the world around them during the violent event. The final theme, "Going to the extreme" described the extreme nature-both objectively and subjectively-of participants' physical violence while experiencing dissociative symptoms. Taken together, our findings highlight the potential importance of taking into account dissociative phenomena as contributors to violent behavior in adult survivors of childhood trauma, and in the assessment and treatment of violent offending.