The Truth about Dissociation

How much time did we spend today scrolling the Internet, binge watching television series, or eating in a rush? I’m not here to lecture. I want to map how dissociation (and its less intense cousin, distraction) show up in our lives. And I want to suggest tools to work with dissociation, not against it.

Being hard on ourselves and judging ourselves for distracting and dissociating doesn't help. Making friends with dissociation does.

When I support people one-on-one in my trauma specialist practice, we work extensively with dissociation. It's one of the trauma symptoms people get the angriest at themselves for, because of how vividly it stops them from enjoying life.

Mapping Dissociation

I'm not talking about contemplative daydreaming, where we let our thoughts wander and play. Notice how settled and embodied in pleasure that experience is.

Dissociation is a pattern that takes us out of our body. It's a response to not feeling comfortable or safe.

The part of us that dissociates uses this pattern as a strategy to lessen our experience of pain and discomfort. It tries to help by removing us from our experience, which always means shutting down our access to the body. It often creates a kind of fog, haziness, or floating out-of-body feeling.

Dissociation patterns look different for everyone, but common ones include numbness or not feeling emotions, not knowing what we're feeling, feeling frozen, an extreme external focus, or racing or repetitive thoughts. In the body, it can feel like coldness, lightness, airiness, fogginess, floating, or drifting. It doesn't feel good.

Dissociation tries to solve whatever discomfort we're facing by taking us out of the experience, but it only creates more unease. Maybe we stop feeling our bodies entirely, or our emotions completely shut down.

It makes us feel like we're observers in our own lives. Like nothing matters. We feel disconnected from ourselves, our bodies, and our emotions. It's a fundamentally depressive experience because it keeps us from the full experience and flow of life.

What Dissociation Can Do for You

Dissociation is a response to discomfort and a perceived lack of safety. It's a survival response embedded in the body's self-defense systems. It plays an important role by doing what it can to avoid more pain.

Here's what most people, including therapists, get wrong about dissociation.

We can't stop the pattern through focus, concentration, or willpower. Trying to make it go away only makes it stronger. Telling someone who's dissociated to try meditation or spiritual practices without addressing the underlying cause for their dissociation bypasses the issue and only gives people better tools to dissociate.

Instead of going to war with our dissociation, we need to learn to work with it. We can befriend it, so it becomes a valuable ally, a litmus test of our levels of presence and embodiment.

After all, the part of us that uses dissociation is trying to help us not feel pain and discomfort. It wants us to be okay. It just has a rather extreme way of going about it.

Let's explore how to work with dissociation, instead of fighting it.

How to Make Dissociation an Ally

1. Breathe and stay present with the pattern. Don't attack it, shame it, or make it wrong. 

We're often used to getting angry at the part of us that dissociates. We don't want it to happen, so we reason that we just need to try harder, catch ourselves in the act, and force ourselves through sheer effort to stop doing it. If that worked, it would have worked already. My invitation is to try the opposite. Practice staying with it as best you can.

2. Notice what happens when you dissociate.

This is a challenge because bringing awareness to dissociation may interrupt the pattern. Instead of trying to counteract it, I invite you to notice how dissociation feels, as an experience. Where do your thoughts go? What kind of emotions arise? What do you feel, if anything, in your body? Remember that numbness, feeling frozen, or feeling nothing are also feelings. Getting to know what dissociation looks and feels like, for you, is the first step to befriending it and making it an ally.

3. Notice why you got startled or felt unsafe or uncomfortable.

Notice what happened just before you dissociated. Was there a thought pattern, a conversation, or a feeling that sparked the pattern? Track, again and again, what was going on in your thoughts, feelings, and body in the moments before it happened. You'll start to see patterns of pain and discomfort that your system has decided it's better to avoid.  

4. Ask yourself, "What do I need? And how can I give it to myself?"

Rather than continuing to avoid the pain and discomfort, notice what you need in response to it. Value the dissociation as an indicator that something isn't right and needs shifting, for you to return to a state of safety and wellbeing. Listen to the message that it's sending, about what you need to do to take care of yourself. Take action to work with the underlying cause, so your system no longer feels the need to surrender and retreat. This is brave work.

5. Thank the part that's dissociating for amplifying the alarm, so you can hear and attend to your needs. 

Show gratitude for the part in you that has an ejector seat on life and knows, when things get bad, how to take you out of your experience. Knowing how to not feel is an adaptive survival response to intolerable situations. But we have the power to change our inner state and external situations. Rather than staying in dissociation, we can use it as an indicator and learn how to attend to our needs.

*

If we allow ourselves to use dissociation as an escape from discomfort and pain, we avoid opportunities to identify our needs. We isolate and escape into mental worlds of distraction and disembodiment, missing the goodness and glory of life that surrounds us.

After all, life isn't on our screens. It isn't in the rush of distraction. Life is right here, right now, in our bodies.

When we learn to befriend dissociation, we learn how to bring ourselves back to the present moment. Again and again, we see where we need to attend to ourselves and our experience. And we take action to support ourselves.

I hope this has helped you become a little more present to the pleasure of life today.

*

Thanks for reading. I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter below, if you’d like to hear more from me. And if you think this might resonate with someone you know, I hope you’ll share it with them.