The Gray Background
Why Dissociation Belongs in Disability Pride
As we begin Disability Pride Month, I want to share why the disability pride flag's gray background resonates so deeply with my research on trauma, dissociation, and revictimization.
When Ann Magill redesigned the disability pride flag in 2021, she made a deliberate choice about that charcoal gray background. It represents mourning—mourning for victims of ableist violence. As someone who researches clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse and its aftermath, I see that gray background as a stark reminder of how society's misunderstanding of trauma responses contributes to ongoing harm.
Dissociation: An Adaptive Response, Not a Disorder
My recent research, funded by a grant from the Center for Institutional Courage and featured this month in CSM Insights, found that 100% of clergy abuse survivors experienced institutional betrayal. But there's another finding that deserves equal attention: the prevalence of dissociative responses among survivors, and how these responses are systematically misunderstood.
Dissociation—that disconnection from one's sense of self or surroundings—isn't pathology. It's what I call an "immune system response" to severe psychological injury. When someone experiences deliberately inflicted, chronic interpersonal violence, their nervous system adapts. It protects. It survives.
Yet society treats dissociation as a stigma to ostracize rather than an adaptation to honor.
Where Dissociation Lives on the Flag
Looking at the disability pride flag's colors, dissociation doesn't fit neatly into just one stripe. It spans multiple categories:
The gold stripe represents neurodiversity—and this is where I see dissociation's truest home. Dissociation is fundamentally a form of neurodivergence: a brain that has adapted, reorganized, and developed different pathways in response to trauma. Like other forms of neurodivergence, it represents natural variation in human neurological functioning.
The white stripe represents invisible and undiagnosed disabilities. Many people who dissociate have never been formally diagnosed, or their experiences have been dismissed or misunderstood by medical professionals.
The blue stripe encompasses psychiatric disabilities. While I resist the pathologizing language often used around dissociation, the reality is that many survivors navigate mental health systems that categorize their adaptive responses as disorders.
The red stripe signifies physical disabilities. Trauma literally rewires the brain and nervous system. Dissociation involves real, measurable neurological changes—it's as physical as it is psychological.
But perhaps most importantly, dissociation exists against that gray background—born from ableist violence that refuses to see trauma responses as natural human adaptations.
The Revictimization Pipeline
Here's what keeps me up at night: people who dissociate are at the highest risk for revictimization. My research confirms this pattern, but understanding why requires us to examine the systems that fail us.
When institutions respond to abuse disclosures with DARVO tactics—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender—they specifically target survivors whose trauma responses make them seem "unreliable." A survivor who dissociates might have fragmented memories. They might seem detached when recounting their experiences. They might struggle with linear timelines.
Instead of recognizing these responses as evidence of severe trauma, institutions exploit them as reasons to discredit survivors entirely.
This isn't a coincidence. It's systematic targeting of disabled people—because yes, trauma responses like dissociation are disabilities, deserving of accommodation and understanding, not suspicion, dismissal, or worse.
Rewriting the Narrative
The gray background of the disability pride flag mourns victims of ableist violence. But it also calls us to action.
What if, instead of treating dissociation as something to ostracize, we treated it as something to understand? What if institutions developed trauma-informed responses that accommodated rather than exploited dissociative experiences? What if we recognized that survivors who dissociate aren't "unreliable witnesses"—they're people whose nervous systems are telling the truth about what happened to them?
This Disability Pride Month, I'm thinking about the 115 survivors who shared their stories with me. Many experienced dissociation. All experienced institutional betrayal. The connection isn't coincidental—it's systematic.
But their courage in participating, despite everything they've endured, despite the ways their adaptive responses have been weaponized against them, represents something powerful: disability pride in action.
Moving Forward
As a researcher who studies these intersections, I see hope in reframing dissociation within the context of disability pride rather than medical pathology. When we understand dissociation as a natural neurological adaptation—one that deserves accommodation, respect, and protection from further violence—we create space for true healing.
The gray background reminds us of how far we have to go. But the colorful stripes ahead remind us that human diversity includes all of us, including those whose nervous systems have adapted to survive the unthinkable.
This Disability Pride Month, I'm committed to research that honors rather than pathologizes trauma responses. Because the problem was never the survivor's adaptation—it was the violence that made adaptation necessary, and the systems that continue to inflict harm by misunderstanding it.
What does disability pride mean to you? How can we better support survivors whose trauma responses are misunderstood? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.