Dissociation 101
Why do some people make watching an endless stream of videos on your couch seem cute?!
There’s something almost classy about the way they frame it: like they can watch the news the “zillenial way:” snacking on grape tomatoes and sampling on the “amuse bouche” that is whatever their favorite content creators put together as the next new trend (mark their words), and, whenever they want to, they can make that recipe they stumbled onto for dinner. Or open another app and do a suspiciously “fun” pilates class. Or just touch grass. Because your phone is a tool, and you’re not, right? Everybody might get a little lost in it, but they always come out on the other side.
Why can’t you do that? You know people spend hours watching videos galore that they never planned on making part of their Tuesday bedtime routine, and yet, for you, you do it when you’re…numb. Or want to be.
You have food you don’t want to eat at your feet (and crumbs on the floor, but…you’ll get to those…sometime), and glossy eyes reflecting that blue light on your screen. It’s 2 am on a weeknight, and you don’t know why you’re watching anymore. You might not even remember anything you watched, or how you started. But ever since life’s been a thing for you, it feels like you’ve been stuck in its grip, losing time. And if you had to describe it, you feel…grey? Highly anxious and stupidly depressed? Like you’re watching yourself live a life you can’t touch? Like everything around you is surreal? Like 20 conversations are happening in your head, each opinion is yours, but you don’t know which one is right, but you do know you’re over the overwhelm of it all.
It’s giving “menty b” every day. You just haven’t told anyone, because you’ll sound seriously crazy. Because no one else goes through this, right? They have self-control. They feel good a lot of the time and not paranoid about when the “good” may stop (because who feels bad about feeling good? Why are you like this?!). They’re not so…dramatic. Their life is theirs, singular they, in a world they’re not watching through a permanent screen. They think about what they want to do, and they just do it. Right?
You’re not crazy. If a good amount of that description sounded all too familiar to you, you may be experiencing dissociation.
What?! How Did That Happen?
When you face a life-threatening situation, you have four trauma responses you can choose from:
Fight (protecting yourself through assertive–or aggro–boundaries and baring your fangs)
Flight (fleeing, or hiding, from a situation)
Freeze (playing dead and waiting for the threat to pass)
Fawn (a partial freeze response to cater to the threat in the hope that it will leave you alone)
Your brain’s go-to responses are fight or flight. If you act on one of those (safely), you’ll recover more quickly. But what if you can’t run, hide, or fight the threat? What if it’s not safe enough?
You can freeze: play dead and wait the threat out. *,** And with repeated trauma and minimal power to stop it–like in childhood–that’s often, unfortunately, all you can do. **, ***
This incredibly sad reality is something to think about, especially if you’ve been so detached from what’s happened to you that you’ve told yourself it wasn’t so bad. It can be upsetting to realize that you experience life differently today because something wrong happened before. A lot of people seek out healing and mental health services just to understand what happened to them and have someone else validate that it wasn’t okay.
But I also want you to know that a freeze response has huge benefits in the face of such overwhelming distress.
A freeze response:
Decreases your breath and heart rate. **
Increases your pain threshold **
Helps you take in all the details of the threat around you **
Separates you from yourself and the pain you’re enduring so that you can focus as best you can **
And you don’t even need to consciously think about it. Your brainstem decides that this is the best path forward and does it for you. **
The problem is that we’re talking about repeated trauma. This means we’re talking about someone having to keep going into a freeze response. And over time, those effects stick around. *, ***
What A Repeated Freeze Response Does
Once you’re free from the trauma, you still separate from parts of the world around you. You separate from your own thoughts, feelings, actions, or the rest of the world in different ways, depending on what you were freezing to survive from.
Your pain tolerance might be so high that you lose track of how much you exercise or eat until you’re out of commission.**
The same super focus from your past might make it impossible to remember how you got on the bus and ended up on the other side of town.*
Your hands might look like someone else’s.**
You might see yourself from a bird’s eye view when things feel too intense.**
Emotions themselves might feel fuzzy and vague, and it might be hard to name them.*
Everyone else might seem like cardboard cut-outs or characters in a movie.**
You might feel like different “you”s went through different childhood experiences.**
And those different versions don't want the same things, but form puzzle pieces of the person you are.**
This makes deciding who you want to date, much less what you want to do with your life, rough, to say the least.
…That Must Be Rare
It’s not.
1-1.5% of the population has Dissociative Identity Disorder, or multiple, often overlapping selves.**
3.5% of the population has a dissociative disorder of some kind.**
15-30% of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder cases involve depersonalization (i.e., detachment from self) and/or derealization (i.e., detachment from your environment).**
In other words, you’re not the only one feeling like you have to tell your body to body, figure out you’re experiencing an emotion, keep notes on hand at all times to remember your door code to the place you’ve lived at for years, or suddenly cry and think like you’re 4 (or 8, or 12, etc.) years old. This blog post exists because more people need to be aware of how common dissociation is and what it can look like, instead of getting stuck with a sensationalized Hollywood script loosely based off of what people want to think an “exciting” version of it would be.
No matter how common it is, though, or how much you might be beginning to understand how it started, dissociation can be incredibly isolating. There’s an exquisitely painful quality to knowing something’s off about how you relate to your life even though you can still talk to people and go to work (at least some of the time) as if everything’s fine.***
Try to keep in mind that many people are going through something really, really similar. Your experience comes from the way you survived, and I’m really, really glad you did; while emotions and thoughts might seem isolated in some way, either from you or the rest of the world, there are healing resources available to you (including the odd, actually helpful #dissociation TikTok video) that can help you invite yourself into the present, should you feel safe enough to be fully here and want that for yourself.
No matter where your next steps take you, I wish you safety above all else after too many experiences without it. You deserve it.
Next Step: Have you been living with dissociation and are looking for ways to stop freezing? Therapy can help. Reach out to Ocean for a free consultation at ocean@gideonpsych.com or book an appointment with our therapist matchmaker to find the perfect therapeutic fit. (Therapy is only available in CA, coaching is available worldwide.)
Interested in learning more about our unique approach to trauma therapy?
These blogs talk more about the basics of EMDR:
You can read more about Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy here:
References:
*Caron, C. (2023, October 5). What Does It Really Mean to Dissociate? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/well/mind/dissociative-disorders.html
**Loewenstein, R. J. (2018). Dissociation debates: everything you know is wrong. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 20(3), 229–242. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6296396/
***Neuroscience News. (2022, November 3). Study sheds new light on brain activity related to dissociative symptoms. https://neurosciencenews.com/dissociation-brain-21780/