Intro to Dissociated States

Back in August, I had written a post about dissociation. In that I had written that everyone dissociates to some degree - I stand by that, 100%. I want to clarify that what I mean by that does not mean that everyone has out of body experiences, or that everyone has an extreme version of multiple personalities. I (and many others) view dissociation as a scale, a spectrum, a range.

On one side, you might find people who experience "Highway Hypnosis" only or people who experience some small experiences of shut down, but are otherwise very in tune with and experience their emotions. I truly believe that VERY few people live all the way at this end. Then on the other end of the distribution are individuals with dissociative disorders, including but not limited to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). DID is very, very rare - to the point that some therapists and psychiatrists do not believe it to be real. In this disorder, there are distinct personalities that arise in the person and have lived experiences seemingly independent of one another - sometimes there is awareness of the other personalities, and sometimes there is not. Due to its rarity, I try not to bring it up as much with regard to dissociation because in the "everyone else who dissociates" category, the vast majority of people are experiencing a different level/experience of dissociation.

This post is more geared toward the "everyone else" category - for individuals who would not meet the DSM-V criteria for a dissociative disorder, those folks who do not live on either end of this spectrum.

[TW: Sexual assault]

The key components of dissociation include a level of shut down during times of distress. The body says, "this sensation/feeling is not safe"during these times. This can be anything from someone reaching out for support and being denied that support to someone experiencing an assault and realizing that the body is not safe in these conditions. In the former example, take the image of a child reaching out to their parents for support and their parents either not being there at all or actively shutting them down. That child then learns to stop reaching out, to shut down those emotions because "they have no place here" or they are not safe to feel because it is too hard to manage on their own. Over time, any time that person might feel sad, or mad, or afraid, the body takes over and leads to shut down. This is so common - that people will shut down emotions or will shut down parts of themselves as a survival technique at one point and then the body remembers "ah, this feels like this, let's shut it down" without any conscious awareness. In the assault example, the body can take over when someone is trying to be intimate again by saying "this is not safe" and shut it down. This can be very distressing for survivors who are trying to connect in these ways and finding themselves feeling unsafe in these situations where they desperately want to feel safe.

So what can we do? Try to sit present with these feelings, try to communicate what is happening for you to yourself, your therapist, your partner, a close friend/family member, or someone with whom you feel it is safe to do so. Allowing yourself to call awareness to these parts that have been shut down for so long is the first step, and it can often be one of the harder steps. Take all the time you need and allow for a lot of patience in this process. The biggest part is that you are trying - that you are attempting to sit present with these feelings or experiences and to learn that they can be safe in the present. We want the body to learn that things are different now, that you have grown up, that you are in a safe relationship, that you are here in December 2020. We want to learn that the parts that have shut down have done this to protect us, to help us survive to this point, but that they no longer need to be doing what they are doing. This realization can be overwhelming for some parts of you to remember, so it will take time, patience, and support.