Dissociation and its discontents
What actually is this oft-maligned habit of the mind?
[Content warning: mention of severe dissociative episodes, suicidality, childhood trauma, drug overdose, and alcohol.]
“It’s a dissociative technique, to be sure,” my therapist said to me after offering the image of a parade passing noisily by during an EMDR session. “But dissociation gets a bad rap.”
It would sound like a strange statement, if it weren’t something akin to what I’ve been saying to my own clients quite a bit lately. Dissociation is a term that’s come more into the mainstream, as discussion of trauma as a widespread phenomenon has increased. For most folks who know a little about it, dissociation evokes stories of people floating above their bodies, looking down at themselves while something awful happens to them. Or they think of what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder, where a person has experienced such severe trauma that their personality has split into several pieces as a way to cope with it.
But dissociation, as a brain/body phenomenon, is far more common and complex than that. It also happens to be one of the more fascinating and helpful things our bodies do for us when we’re under stress.
Mind you, I’ve experienced a few serious dissociative episodes in my life. My now-ex-husband once overdosed on anti-anxiety meds, and when he passed out and couldn’t be revived, my magnificent housemates sprang into action. While they variously tended him and packed things and called 911, I wandered lost, numbed to everything, and couldn’t seem to take any action at all. I remember looking at the table in the living room, at my hands, at the window through which I eventually saw the EMTs, firefighters, and cops that filled my house for a few harrowing minutes. Nothing seemed real to me, and I couldn’t feel or cry about it until much later in the night, after a sleepwalking hospital visit and then lot of wine.
This incident, though, is just an extreme example of the kind of protective mechanism that kicks in, in greater and lesser forms, throughout our daily lives.
Like many phenomena—gender, neurotype, sexuality—that involve the intersection of the mind and the social constructs we’re expected to participate in, dissociation is more of a spectrum. It can be a total out-of-body experience accompanied by memory loss. Or it can be zoning out during a boring lecture. You might distract yourself by vividly imagining a pleasant memory while undergoing an uncomfortable medical procedure. A light kind of dissociation happens whenever you get immersed in a movie, or lost in the pages of a book. Imagination—the driver of a huge part of the world economy—is a type of dissociative state. Essentially, dissociation is what happens when your mind is in a different place than your body. It’s a normal feature of consciousness, and it happens near-constantly.
Where it starts to become a problem is when trauma—either a single traumatic event, or circumstances of abuse, neglect, or other ongoing trauma—teaches a body to retreat to a dissociative state in times when it’s not needed. This can manifest in PTSD of the type we think of in veterans and survivors of accidents, natural disasters, or one-time attacks: such folks may have severe flashbacks, and dissociate such that they feel they are experiencing the trauma again rather than being in the present.
Or it can manifest far more subtly, as when a survivor of childhood abuse develops habits of dissociation which persist into adulthood. One survivor may drink to excess in order to numb themselves; another may retreat into fictive worlds rather than risk engaging with the real one. A child who protected themselves from their caregivers by being as quiet and invisible as possible may suffer in work and relationships as an adult, as their body continues to “protect” them from perceived threats by sending them messages of danger whenever anyone gets too close.
In my sessions, sometimes, clients will dissociate when attempting to talk about a difficult event, or access emotions related to it. Even over Zoom, it’s easy to see when it’s begun to happen: the client will drop eye contact, their face will lose expression, and often they’ll forget what they were talking about. The mind has powerful ways of shielding us from pain. But these numbed-out states are often more painful and limiting, in the long run, than working through the trauma. Doing so becomes a matter of helping someone feel safe enough to stay present in their bodies while the emotions move through.
The trick with dissociation, then, is to learn to recognize it, to have some respect for it, and even sometimes, to learn to use it deliberately.
Back to my therapist, and the parade. I’d been working on a difficult aspect of a relationship, and looking for a way to escape the anxiety spiral certain conversations would spin me into. It’s very difficult to stop your brain and body from automatically activating deeply-ingrained habits of relating; it’s why trauma triggers are called “triggers.” Stimulus, repsonse: a spark sets off a well-worn pathway in the neural network, and a kind of muscle memory plays out the rest. My dissociative habit in this case is a people-pleasing, or “fawn,” response. In my activated state, I can no longer read the present moment for what it is, and instead revert to a defense mechanism that used to keep me safe, but now only causes more conflict.
My therapist’s suggestion was indeed dissociative, as she said, but it was a harnessing of dissociation toward a different outcome. It was an invitation to practice a bit of distancing, a bit of going into the imagination, when faced with a particular trigger. Picturing the trigger as a parade passing in front of me—a parade whose end is in sight, and will soon clear the way for me to pass—allowed me to pause and practice an alternative to the fawn response. Instead of jumping straight into my desperate attempts to manage someone else’s emotions, I could take a breath, see the other person’s feelings as a kind of storm, completely outside my control, and wait for it to calm down.
A lot of us do this kind of harmless or even beneficial dissociation all the time. We watch a silly movie to get our minds off our friend who’s in the hospital. We read a book to fall asleep so we can stop our brains spiraling about work the next day if we just lie there. People sometimes use alcohol or drugs in moderation to change their consciousness, so they can have a different experience of their current reality. I’m not trying to say that watching TV all the time, spacing out during meetings, or drinking to numb your problems are great habits. But again: there is a spectrum of behavior, and some amount of dissociation is just part of how our minds work. Acknolwedging this, and gaining some control over it, can be part of a healing journey.
Dissociation, imagination, and even spiritual practices like meditation are all related: they are ways of reshaping the relationship between reality and the mind. That reshaping can be unconscious or conscious, beneficial or harmful, deliberate or habitual. The more deliberate and conscious the practice, the more beneficial it’s likely to be. But it’s also worth remembering that these kinds of consciousness changes are built in to the machinery of our brains, and are a remarkable means of shielding us from the worst the world has to offer.