Most of what you’ll find online about dissociation—whether it’s academic or more general-public stuff—focuses on the extremes. They’ll give examples of the everyday dissociation everyone experiences, like highway hypnosis, where you drive somewhere, zone out, and suddenly realise you have no memory of the trip from point A to point B. Then, they’ll swing to the other end of the spectrum—to dissociation caused by quite severe childhood trauma -except they don’t clarify that the dissociation they’re talking about is actually caused by severe trauma.
But what about everyone in the middle? In my personal and professional experience, there’s a huge number of people who’ve been through trauma and dissociate regularly, but you’re invisible online—no one talks about you! I have no idea why, but today, I’m going to.
First things first though.
Why do we dissociate?
I touched on this in Dissociation Part 1. Dissociation comes under the collapse part of our stress response system (fight, flight, freeze, collapse). Since children have very little power in an adult-child dynamic, often the only way they can escape trauma is by disconnecting their mind through dissociation. It becomes a mental escape when physical escape isn’t possible.
Dissociation is a highly creative and adaptive response to a traumatic situation —one where there is no escape from fear or pain.
What happens when we dissociate?
When someone dissociates, they disconnect from one or more of the following:
- Thoughts
- Feelings
- Memories
- Behaviours
- Physical sensations, or
- Sense of identity
If you’re reading this, you probably still dissociate as an adult, even though the original danger has stopped. Triggers—whether you recognise them or not—can prompt your brain to recall the original trauma, causing you to dissociate as if the threat were still present. As an adult, dissociation can shift from being adaptive to problematic.
Symptoms of dissociation
This is where this article differs from a lot of what’s out there online. If you’ve been through childhood relational trauma or other kinds of trauma growing up, it’s very likely that you dissociate as an adult. And for those who think they don’t, it’s common either not to recognise it or to have structured your life in a way that keeps you away from the triggers that would bring it on. Dissociation is quite common in therapy, and it’s often a focus of treatment from the start and throughout the process.
Some symptoms of dissociation you might experience:
- Feeling light headed or dizzy
- Not being able to feel your arms of legs well
- Feeling your body is slightly in front of, behind, or to the side of your actual body
- Feeling like you are on the ceiling, and your body is in the chair
- Feeling very distant, like the therapist’s voice is very far away
- Feeling like your in a dream
- Feeling like you’re not quite ‘in’ your body
- Having a vacant stare for a moment or longer
- Feeling like you’ve gone into a trance
Techniques for coming out of dissociation
When we dissociate, our blood rushes away from our limbs and towards our vital organs. This happens because dissociation is part of the collapse/freeze or “playing dead” response in our survival system. In these imobile states, your body focuses on staying alive rather than using the limbs to fight or run from danger.
To reverse dissociation, you need to help your body shift its state from immobile to active, by helping the blood move from your core back to your limbs.
Here are some ideas you might try, but really, anything involving movement will work:
- Gently rock our body back and forth, side to side
- Feel the texture of your clothes, the chair you’re sitting on or a blanket. Rub your fingers over it, then something different. Notice the differences in the textures.
- Smell something with a strong scent -like coffee beans, or essential oils, or peppermint lollies.
- Feel your sit bones, now alternately push them into the chair to make your body wiggle
- Stand up and do some Tai Chi -or what you imagine Tai Chi looks like (it doesn’t matter!) Slowly move your arms back and forth in slow, graceful movements. If you can, do this while slowly transferring weight from one foot to the other.
- Grab an object, like your car keys, a fidget, a paperclip, anything that’s close by. Run your fingers over it, run it over your leg, your arm, feel the sensation it makes.
- Make yourself a warm drink and mindfully drink it.
Dissociation isn’t just those extreme examples explained in many of those online articles, it’s feeling light headed as well. That’s by far the most common experience.