theriverscribe:

denugis:

So I was just talking about how Sam’s reactions are often postponed, displaced, made indirect. But think about how that overlaps with the places where Sam is literally displaced from himself. Meg stole his body and mind and played out some of Sam’s deep fears about his darkness. It was, among other things, an intrusion into and disruption of Sam’s own grappling. And I’ve mentioned before that, so far from being excessively emotional, Sam’s anger about Gadreel is unnervingly rational and temperate. There are lots of reasons for that, but one of them may be that by the time Sam became aware of the possession, Gadreel had already played Sam’s reaction. By the time Sam actually had a chance to react as himself, he would have been able to remember Gadreel pretending to be Sam punching Dean, Gadreel pretending to be Sam saying “Maybe I would have liked the choice” (and how horrifying is it that that bid for agency in his own life was not Sam speaking at all, but the being who was using his tongue and the contents of his brain without his will or knowledge? that’s a whole lot of irony, there). If Sam just sounds emptied and exhausted when he’s finally aware and face-to-face with Dean at the end if 9.10, it’s partly because he’s bleeding out of holes in his brain, but it must also have been partly because he’s crucially belated: the immediacy of his response to what was stolen from him is one of the things that was stolen from him. 

It’s no wonder Sam has trouble with direct, immediate reactions to his own experience. 

I often wonder how much Sam dissociates on average.

Between depression, PTSD, constant retraumatizing events that impact his autonomy, and actually having his personality split three-ways (s6 finale, anyone?), Sam has to have some some hardcore dissociation skills.

And that goes with delayed emotional reactions.

Compartmentalizing trauma is a survival technique. It allows him to function each day with all these memories weighing him down. But eventually, that stops working or one of those carefully sealed “boxes” breaks open and all those issues pour out.