Protecting your Self from upset, overwhelm, or trauma by emotionally disconnecting from what is happening.
Discussion
Note: Dissociation is yet another term that is used in different ways by different groups and different generations. I’m defining it and using it here in its colloquial 21st century usage as it refers to trauma response, and not its technically “correct” psychoanalytic connotations.
Dissociation is a strange experience and is quite difficult to understand if you’ve never been through it.
Basically, the mind can cut itself off from what the body is experiencing. When this happens, the body still feels pain or discomfort, but that pain is blocked from your conscious awareness. The mind does this particularly when you are physically overwhelmed, meaning that there’s nothing you can do to stop the bad thing from happening.
For example, if you have broken your leg and you have no painkillers around, you might dissociate from the pain because you can’t un-break your leg to make the pain go away. Similarly, if you are being attacked or abused by someone who is much bigger or more aggressive than you, you might dissociate instead of fighting back, because fighting back could provoke the attacker and get you killed.
Passivity and Aggression
For some people dissociation has a strong element of fantasy and imagination. They become passive and allow the bad thing to happen, and escape from it by imagining that they are no longer in their bodies, or that their body is somewhere else altogether.
Other people don’t become passive, and instead become quite aggressive when in a dissociated state. In this case we’d say that their mind was dissociated from their actions. Afterwards, the person might say it was as if they were no longer there and something within them took control of their body.
Disintegration Anxiety
Personally, I think about dissociation in terms of disintegration anxiety: what every human being fears most is our identity and sense-of-self being destroyed. And people often refer to this feeling of destruction in terms of “falling apart,” “going to pieces,” “dissolving,” “evaporating,” and “disintegrating.”
Traumatic experiences always involve an overwhelming loss of control that threatens to disintegrate our Self. Dissociation is often our last-ditch effort to protect our inner Self from this dangerous/disintegrating outside situation, by allowing us to mentally escape from an physically inescapable situation.
If you think about it in those terms, dissociation is a wonderful ability that allows us to survive experiences that would otherwise literally drive us crazy. But it does have a problem: when dissociation becomes too powerful or we rely on it too much, we aren’t able to function in day to day life.
I Was Never Here
If I am so worried about being emotionally destroyed that I am constantly disappearing into my imagination or being taken over by my aggressive/protective impulses, then I’m not really in control of myself. This makes it very difficult to hold down a job or maintain relationships in a satisfying way. It can also be very frustrating and tiring for the people around us because it’s difficult to anticipate what’s going to cause a dissociation reaction. It’s just as upsetting for me, because dissociation also often interferes with memory formation, leading to my sense of self becoming even messier and more fragmented.
The technique of progressive exposure can be very helpful here. This is where you expose yourself to a frightening thing a little bit at a time so that you slowly get used to the frightening thing being around. In terms of dissociation, this means “staying conscious” while talking about, thinking about, or interacting with the triggering person, object, or experience.
For trauma and PTSD, however, this can also be very difficult, because often the bad thing you’re trying to get used to is a memory inside of your own head. This is partly why therapy for trauma can seem to last forever: you have to go very slowly and cautiously so that you don’t overwhelm yourself and get trapped inside your head with memories you can’t escape. You’ll get there eventually, but it takes a lot of time and patience and perserverence.
Quotes
“A process whereby a group of psychological activities possessing a certain unity among themselves lose most of their relationships with the rest of the personality and function more or less independently.” (English and English 1974)