Dissociation is a disconnection between things. In mental health, this often means a disconnect from oneself, the world, your perceptions, or all of the above.
Dissociation can be adaptive and common. Everyone dissociates from time to time to manage the intensity of stimuli, engage in acts of imagination, or shift their focus. It can be a helpful tool to prevent life from becoming overwhelming.
Some examples of dissociation that most people experience include:
- Daydreaming
- Driving somewhere, then realizing that you don’t remember most or all of the trip
- Not noticing the world around you while enjoying books, movies, and games
Dissociation can also be experienced in more dysfunctional or unusual ways, such as:
- The world looking strange, fake, or unfamiliar
- Feeling like you’re living in a movie or game instead of real life
- Being unable to tell whether something happened in present day, the distant past, or a dream
- Not recognizing yourself in the mirror, feeling like your body doesn’t belong to you
- Feeling that the shape or size of your body is distorted, that you’re smaller or larger than usual
- Feeling like your head is full of cotton, being unable to think
- Watching yourself act without feeling in control of your actions; feeling robotic or passive
- Feeling that you are not yourself
- Experiencing parts of your mind as “not you”, having thoughts and feelings that don’t feel like yours
- Mental numbness, an inability to feel something you know you should be feeling
- Physical numbness, lessened or missing sensation
- Being unable to feel emotion attached to your memories
- Feeling like your memories or thoughts don’t belong to you
- Outright missing memories of parts of your life that go beyond normal forgetting; missing major events or personal information that most people would know about themselves
If you’re experiencing a lot of the above examples (or things that are similar) and it’s upsetting or causes you problems in daily life, then you may want to seek out ways to reduce dissociation and increase Presence.
Relevant coping skills:
In Psychiatry:
“Dissociation is a disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions or sense of who he or she is. This is a normal process that everyone has experienced. Examples of mild, common dissociation include daydreaming, highway hypnosis or “getting lost” in a book or movie, all of which involve “losing touch” with awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.”
- The Sidran Institute’s definition of dissociation
“Dissociation is a natural response to overwhelming experiences and sensations. Dissociation is a way our mind protects itself from complete overwhelm.”
“There is a small group of people who dissociate a lot, usually due to extreme distress and trauma. They can develop separate self-states or parts, which we are calling dissociative identities.”
- International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, Supporting a Person Who Lives with Dissociative Identities
“The phenomena of pathological dissociation are recurrent, jarring, involuntary intrusions into executive functioning and sense of self.”
– Paul F. Dell, PHD.
See also: Dissociative Identities