What Dissociation is Trying to Tell Us (about PTSD & CPTSD)

In therapeutic circles, dissociation has a bad reputation. It's the rebel who skips class, stays out late, and won't follow the rules. Dissociation frustrates us because it won't be pinned down and refuses to submit to authority. It can't be bullied and pushing against it only makes it stronger.

I think that's why I love it so much. Dissociation has the same street-smarts and mistrust of hierarchy that I value in all my heroes.

I love it when dissociation shows up in my trauma healing work. It always signifies we're right where we need to be, at the boundary where the nervous system and conscious awareness collide. 

Most people with trauma experience dissociation and either give up or want to fight it. We feel ashamed that we're no longer fully present, as if we've done something wrong. We blame ourselves and decide to try harder, to no avail. We can't force our nervous system to do something it doesn't want to do.

We might learn to hide just how deeply and how often we dissociate, because we're not sure what else do to about it and are wary of being judged.

Our minds might drift into daydreaming or "space out." We might be told to pay attention as if dissociation was about willpower. But it's not.

Our bodies might go into numbness or shutdown, not feeling anything strongly or even at all. We want to feel pleasure and avoid pain, but we can't seem to summon enough presence to take an active role in our lives.

Dissociation can also look like emotional distance or avoidance, preferring isolation and disconnection from others because we don't want them to see how hard we struggle to say present.

Dissociation is the nervous system's way of containing overwhelming and distressing experiences until the nervous system is sure we can handle them.

When we have unresolved trauma (PTSD) or complex trauma (CPTSD), accumulated stress and nervous system activation remain in the body. During the overwhelming experiences that caused the trauma, the body was unable to release the stress and activation, so it stays trapped inside until we can safely allow it to release.

The trauma healing process is often much gentler and easier than we think. It’s nothing like the intensity of the original distress.

But until we do the healing work, the nervous system energy of activation stays frozen in the body's tissues. This is intelligent because we need to contain it somehow. We need to isolate the unresolved activation we’re carrying so the nervous system can function. Without pushing the trauma away somewhere, we simply wouldn't be able to get through daily life.

The nervous system encapsulates unresolved trauma, wrapping a dissociative barrier around the feelings, sensations, and even memories of it, cocooning them away until the right time to digest it out of the system.

This dissociative barrier is extremely intelligent and adaptive. Trauma survivors can go about our daily lives because we "just don't think about it." But “not thinking about it” comes with a price.

It takes tremendous energy to maintain the dissociative barrier around a traumatic imprint in the nervous system. The energy that would otherwise create wellbeing gets diverted to maintain the barrier, bouncing our awareness into dissociation whenever we get close to the traumatic material. If we don't see dissociation as a signifier that something needs healing, it makes healing seem harder than it needs to be — maybe even futile.

It's hard to notice dissociation in our daily lives.

It's more conspicuous when we notice what's missing, because of the space taken up by the trauma that dissociation is protecting. We might notice we aren't experiencing as much aliveness, enjoyment, or relaxation as we would like. Life might start to feel grey and our bodies constantly on edge.

Dissociation is not meant to be a permanent or even a long-term solution. It's meant to point us towards the inner territory that needs healing.

But we can't meet it head-on, because challenging our dissociative patterns only further entrenches them. We need a new approach that creates inner and outer safety, so the nervous system can know for certain that it's safe enough to heal.

Here are some ways we can respond to dissociation, that help to create more safety and goodness in our bodies and nervous systems.

How to Respond to Dissociation in PTSD and CPTSD

1. Relational safety

It's helpful to think of our nervous systems not as individual systems, but networks of social engagement and co-regulation that occur when we're with trusted others. This is why trauma healing happens most powerfully with others. It's relational. When we feel connected and attuned to people we trust and care about, we are held in an adaptive and resilient system that creates mental, emotional, hormonal, and immunological balance. This cues to our nervous systems that it's safe enough to begin to dissolve our dissociative barriers so our unresolved trauma can begin to heal.

 2. Recognition

Most of us see dissociation as a sign that something is wrong, rather than a nervous system pathway that, with the right support, will catalyze trauma healing. Instead of trying to fix or change dissociative patterns, we can recognize them as the intelligent and adaptive protective mechanisms they are. We can bring presence to them and to the body, without pushing for anything to be different. Dissociation isn’t something to fix or challenge. It’s trying to keep the system safe. When the nervous system feels safe enough, the dissociation will let down its guard.

3. Neurobiological healing

Talking about dissociation brings up the original experiences that made us feel unsafe, without clearing them from the nervous system, and tends to make dissociation worse instead of better. To heal, we need deep brain and body-based modalities that safely bypass the thinking, logical neocortex and go to the parts of the brain and nervous system that hold the trauma in the first place (like the midbrain, where the amygdala is, and brain stem, where we connect awareness with physical sensation). Brainspotting, an evidence-based modality that emerged from EMDR therapy, is the most rapid and effective way I know to do deep trauma processing in a way that honors our dissociative barriers and encourages them to heal at their natural pace. We gently and safety work with dissociated material without needing to understand or even remember it. We heal at the level of the body and the nervous system, below the level of the logical mind. This is often a great relief to the mind that has been ruminating without being able to find lasting solutions.

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I want us to end the war with dissociation and see it as the trusted, loyal protector that it truly is.

If we don't, our dissociative barriers will feel unsafe and continue to protect us by siphoning energy and keeping us out of the places we most want to heal. We will miss out on the fullest enjoyment of achievements and of life because our nervous systems are focused on the unresolved trauma and not on enjoying the goodness around us.

If we decide to befriend dissociation and allow it to take us where we need to heal, our energy is gently and reliably liberated so we can experience more aliveness, joy, and attention towards our goals.

It takes courage, but it's worth it.

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