Working With Dissociation
If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, did it actually make a sound?
My frustration boiled over halfway into my third two-week meditation retreat. As training for my mindfulness-based graduate psychology program, I had now been meditating regularly for a year and a half and attended multiple retreats - yet I still felt just as completely flat and disconnected as I did when I started. Disconnected from myself, from my emotions, from the picturesque Rocky Mountain winter landscape that surrounded me. From pretty much everything.
The end of undergrad had brought with it the unmistakable sense that I was not yet ready to be thrust into the real world. And so 21-year-old me signed up for the Contemplative Psychology program at Naropa University, intent on finally getting in touch with my feelings and learning how to actually do this human thing. (And at the time, my thought was that if I actually ended up wanting to be a therapist by the end of it, that would have been a bonus.)
My plan was to use this experience to heal. To finally “sit with” my feelings, facing and untangling whatever pain or terror I needed to, however difficult, in order to be able to move forward with my life. To be free of the emptiness and the dull ache of disconnection that had plagued my life up until that point.
For over a week now, I continued to diligently practice what I had been learning. Coming back to the breath, identifying my thoughts and sensations, desperately trying to connect with anything in my internal world. But I didn’t feel any closer to any of it.
In fact, the disconnection was getting worse.
I had the psychological vocabulary by then to know that another word for that disconnection was dissociation: an experience of absence to my own life and experience that simply wouldn’t leave me alone. Even (and, it turns out, especially) in the distraction-less environment of a retreat.
Dissociation: An Absence?
On a cloudy, frozen walk, I confided to one of the retreat teachers that I simply didn’t know what to do anymore. In the language of the mindfulness world, I wasn’t “present.” And all the meditation seemed to be doing was making me more and more acutely aware of that fact.
And wasn’t the point of this whole meditation thing to help you be more present? To truly be here and connect to the now? To actually be in my life? Finally? (Spoiler alert: Meditation and mindfulness don’t actually work like that.)
And then it hit me.
It turned out that the stuff I had been learning about mindfulness had integrated just enough for the right question to drop into my mind.
As I was looking at the mountains in the distance, trying to know that they were real but feeling like it was all a dream, I asked myself:
How do I know that I’m not here?
How do I know that these mountains don’t feel real?
What’s happening right now that’s telling me I’m disconnected?
The flatness, the emptiness, the dull ache.
However subtle, cloudy, or fuzzy they were, these were things that were actually happening inside of me. It’s not that I wasn’t present. It’s just that these things were also present.
The dissociation, then, was actually the presence of something and not the absence of myself.
Now this was something I could sit with.
In that moment, the mountains, the cold, the light - it all felt just a bit more real. And I finally felt a twinge of hope.
The Experience of Dissociation
So then if dissociation is the presence of something, what exactly is it?
Like pretty much everything else we might struggle with, dissociation is actually an attempt at protection against the full-on assault of our internal and external experience.
It can take many forms, such as the sensations of:
Being draped with a heavy blanket or cotton wool
Mental fuzziness or confusion
Leaving your body, whether feeling like you are just outside of yourself up to seeing yourself from the outside
Having filter or barrier around you, dimming your experience of the external world
Having a filter or barrier inside of you, dulling your internal experience of sensations or emotions
Sleepiness or sluggishness
Apathy or flatness
Emptiness
Numbness
Being cut off from some specific part of your body (often from the neck, shoulders, or abdomen down)
Feeling spacey, floaty, or suspended
All of these are ways that dissociation works to create the illusion of “not being present” while something overwhelming is happening, whether inside or outside of us.
It is helpful to keep in mind that the kind of dissociation I’m talking about here is just the more extreme version of something our system is always (necessarily) doing. One of the main functions of our brain is to filter out inputs that it determines are not important, only allowing what it deems as relevant information into our consciousness. Think of your ability to disconnect from the need to use the bathroom in the middle of an important conversation. This is also dissociation. And thank goodness we can do that!
All the time, we are filtering out the awareness of our heartbeats, the sensations of breath coming in and out of our body, the sensation of every place where our clothes are touching our skin, the background sounds of our environment. If we didn’t do that, we would certainly lose it from overstimulation.
When the situation we are in is particularly overwhelming, though, the volume simply gets turned up. And if we don’t get the support and integration after an acute overwhelming incident, or if the overwhelm goes on over a long period of time, our system continues to keep that volume up. And it doesn’t care if filtering out the negative also means filtering out the positive, so long as we can avoid becoming overwhelmed.
How Dissociation Protects Us (And Where it Misses the Mark)
The experience of “not being present” does two things:
It can reduce our perception of the intensity of our experience (either while it is happening or when our system is reminded of it)
It can create the illusion in the conscious mind that we are not actually there while something overwhelming is happening
Dissociation functions based on the belief that if we experience ourselves as not fully being present, then either the overwhelming experience isn’t happening/didn’t happen at all. Or, if it did happen, that it doesn’t/didn’t actually impact us.
It’s like that thought experiment: If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, did it actually make a sound? Dissociation would answer a resounding: nope.
The problem with the logic of this particular form of self-protection is that dissociation is just the presence of a filter, not the absence of us.
All of what we experienced still happened in the moment that it happened and still impacted us, regardless of how dissociated we were. And all of what we experience now when our system is reminded of what happened in the past still happens now. It’s just that this information is not making its way to our conscious awareness in the way it otherwise would if we weren’t dissociating.
The goal? To protect us from overwhelm so that we can continue to live our lives.
And in the short term, it works. I can attest to that based both on my own experience and the experience of hundreds of clients I’ve worked with. I am actually immensely grateful for the ways my dissociation kept me safe until I was able to eventually tend to the overwhelm.
The unintended consequence? When the dissociation continues well after the overwhelming experience ends, our day-to-day life can feel like it’s lacking in aliveness. And often that is a part of what people describe as “not being present.”
The irony is that the strategy our system used to keep us going by reducing our overwhelm eventually creates so much disconnection that it becomes hard to keep going.
Working with Dissociation
What I have learned the hard way is that trying to “get past” dissociation or get rid of it doesn’t get us any closer to feeling more alive and connected. It either just gets stronger, pushing us further into disconnection. Or it eventually cracks, throwing us into overwhelm and giving our system even more reason to double-down on the dissociation the next time. This is especially true if we are currently in an overwhelming situation when we try to get past the dissociation.
The good news is that the way of working with dissociation that I offer here is something you can do in any situation that isn’t immediately dangerous. And spoiler alert: it doesn’t involve trying to get rid of dissociation.
In fact, it is just an invitation to approach your dissociation with openness, asking yourself the exact same questions that occurred to be that snowy afternoon:
How do I know I’m not here?
What is happening that tells me I am disconnected?
Once you start to get clear about the answers to those questions, you can also start to ask:
What is my dissociation trying to do for me?
What is it that my dissociation believes would happen if it didn’t keep doing its job?
Those familiar with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of internal work will recognize these questions as the same ones that get asked of all protective parts of us. And dissociation is simply another tool of these protective parts to take care of us.
The irony is that when we start to bring awareness and curiosity to our dissociation - including how it shows up and tries to take care of us - the more present we actually feel. Even if that just means being present with our dissociation.
We can then finally start to experience the truth: It’s never that we are not present. It’s just that dissociation is also present.
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