Dissociation: Feeling Out of Touch
Dissociation is the word we have to describe the sensation of being out of touch with your environment, your body, and/or the people around you. It’s a feeling that is scary for many people and can be really hard to explain to anyone else.
Rickety Dams
Disconnecting or blocking off pieces of yourself (like unwanted thoughts or feelings) can be temporarily helpful. It can help us leave work at work. It can provide a short term solution to refocusing on the task at hand. You may have experienced a major loss and need a moment to set aside the onslaught of emotional responses to make sure you pay the bills on time today instead of falling to pieces. So, if it’s sometimes okay then why not do it all the time? In short, consequences.
Trying to hold off all of your emotions is like building a rickety dam just before the rainy season. The next time it rains just a little too hard the whole thing can burst apart and send a tsunami of consequences tumbling down stream. One possible type of tsunami can come in the form of symptoms of dissociation.
Feeling Lost
Dissociation can make you feel ‘lost’ even if logically you know where you are. It can feel like losing your sense of identity and wondering who you are. It can feel like being disconnected from yourself, your surroundings, or even reality itself. Frankly, dissociation can feel scary, make you wonder if you are ‘going crazy,’ and is very difficult to explain to someone else.
"Helpful" Brains
If we attempt to “deal with” things by not dealing with them the system may decide to “help” by making changes. It can shave off the edges of memories or attempt to hide them completely so that recall later is next to impossible, dull or distort our senses so that we cannot accurately perceive our reality, and ramp up our ability to avoid unpleasant things by making it impossible to concentrate on any one thing. So, I like to imagine symptoms like dissociation as the brain’s way of saying, “Oh, we don’t want to feel anymore? Let’s just hit this button and move this wire and… that helped right?” It seems like our system doesn't really understand that dissociation just creates a different set of difficult experiences on top of the ones that never went away in the first place.
Words and attempts at logic will not make dissociation go away. Your mind already decided to try to alter your reality to run away from your facts and logic. Instead, the best response we can have starts with empathy and facing what you were running from in a safe, healthy way.
Getting Real Help
Check-in with what is going on and try to define a healthy way to respond to current needs. Practice doing the opposite of sweeping things under the rug (or you will continue to risk falling on your face whenever you try to walk across it in the future). If that sounds like something really big to tackle on your own then please recognize you may have more options than trying to soldier this by yourself. Whenever you experience symptoms that affect your ability to function please remember it is okay to seek help from a trained professional. It is completely understandable that the same brain that decided dissociation was a great idea is going to have trouble coming up with alternative solutions on its own. A licensed mental health counselor could make the process of addressing your symptoms much easier and go about it in a much healthier way for you.
Note: Always use reliable resources such as licensed mental health professionals when trying to explore symptoms and diagnoses. Dissociative disorders are often wildly misunderstood or purposefully bent in order to make more interesting plot lines or posts on social media. Popular media is not going to be the best place to look for accurate information on mental health symptoms.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Title of chapter. In Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.)
Vignette
Some Posts have matching Vignettes, fictitious short stories to illustrate an example related to the topic of the post. This post shares more about what Vignettes are and what they are not.
“Stevie? Stevie!” Mom heaved a sigh so hard it nearly knocked the cat off the back of the couch. She shoved Stevie’s legs over and sat perched on the edge of the cushion. She grabbed the headset and pulled. “Stevie?”
Stevie startled by first grabbing at the controller. Blinking, she took in her mom sitting fully dressed on the couch next to her and the abnormal amount of light for 3 AM. Oh. It wasn’t 3 AM. Stevie fell back. Initial panic of nodding off mid-game started wearing down. New panic of why Mom was sitting on the couch was beginning to crest.
“You have to get dressed. The Zoom is going to start soon.”
“I don’t…”
“This is important, Stevie. We already can’t get together like we should be able to with the world,” Mom’s arms gestured wildly to indicate everywhere else, “and masks and all that.”
“I don’t think anyone would want to see me.”
Mom ignored her and glanced over her. “You have to at least put on a top. You know how grandma feels… felt about seeing straps.”
“Yeah.”
“Now, to your room. I’ve got to dismantle this nest you’ve built and figure out where to set up the camera.”
Stevie’s body felt heavy as she moved slowly toward her room. Time was dragging and moving too fast. This day had come after nights of dread. Shuffling through clothes on the floor and digging through crumpled things stuffed into the dresser was exhausting. She could see her hand reaching out to grab fresh underwear, but it didn’t feel like hers. The hand. The underwear was hers. It had purple cats. She couldn’t remember much of the past two weeks but she could remember buying the underwear. She was pretty sure whoever had designed them were in the midst of a fever dream. Now, it kind’ve felt like she was in a fever dream trying to decide what to wear.
She got the basics on and found some pants. Some options for shirts were thrown on the bed. She wasn’t sure when she last slept there. It had become a required decor object to make the room a ‘bedroom’ and not a ‘bedless room where I keep stuff.’ She stared at the upright rectangle glob covered by a blanket in the corner. She closed her eyes, took hold of the blanket, and tugged. It fell in the loudest whisper to the floor. She immediately turned her back and grabbed the first shirt option. She turned.
The mirror looked like a portal into a worse reality than this one. Stevie sighed at the image of herself because it still did not look like her. It used to. She remembered that it used to show her. Now, it showed someone who had some features like her. It was a horrifying feeling. It reminded her of thousands of sci-fi plotlines that once entertained her. Now, it was just exhausting and scary. She worked quickly to check the hair on the body she saw, adjust the shirt, and spit-scrubbed off caked sleep under the eyes. As soon as she was done, the blanket was tossed back over. She knew Mom had seen it. Every reflective object was covered or had been tossed out. Mom didn’t ask questions. So far.
Stevie wordlessly allowed Mom to adjust the camera, sit next to Stevie, and then get up to adjust it again. Three boxes of tissues were now on the coffee table in front of them. The cat playfully tapped at Stevie’s feet from beneath the couch. Stevie tried to hold back the sound she wanted to make. Being touched felt horrible. It felt unreal. Numb. It wasn’t right. She reached down to briefly toss a toy across the room. The cat darted after it.
The unfortunate familiar noises started. Mom was sitting close enough that her leg brushed against Stevie’s. It was the only way for them to both fit in the frame and not be crazy far from the camera. At least, that’s what Mom had claimed. Stevie braced for it. She was pretty sure Mom needed touch right now. Faces started appearing on the screen. Tiny squares full of people and places Stevie had not seen in a long time. She felt hollow in her chest.
A man in a suit sat in front of what looked like the biggest flower arrangement ever. It was pretty. It made him look smaller than he probably was. She wasn’t sure. He gave instructions for everyone to mute their mics while he set something up. Silence. People kept joining. Stevie had the urge to run. The man’s camera panned. Now, the view was a wide shot. Suited man she had never seen. Expensive flower arrangement. Picture of grandma.
Mom’s hand grabbed her leg. Stevie hoped she didn’t feel the flinch. Or didn’t care. Mom’s hand moved to grab a few tissues and strategically place them around herself on the couch below the camera line. She started tearing one apart. The cat was transfixed as soft snowflakes trickled down.
Another pair of familiar faces popped up, entering this virtual space. One tapped the other’s shoulder and pointed. It looked like their finger was touching their camera. “Look, she showed up.”
“What? Really? After what she did?”
“I know right. She’s the one that got her sick to begin with. Who goes to a party during a pandemic?”
Stevie felt like dozens of eyes shifted on screens to find her. It was every nightmare.
Mom’s arm wrapped around Stevie’s shoulder while the other hand tapped unmute. Her smile was sickly sweet at the camera. Stevie had always hated when that was directed at her. It meant you’d done messed up. Bad.
“Hello, my lovely nieces.” Both girls froze and stared as if whatever device they were using were haunted. “The funeral director has asked that we mute our mics until he says otherwise.” Her head tilted. “Unless of course you’d like to throw more accusations about where someone could have picked up an illness during a global pandemic?”
The little emblem for mute popped up on their square.
Stevie caught the look on the funeral director’s face as he watched family drama unfold at a virtual funeral. No where was safe.
“We’ll be muting our mic and our screen, sir. Sorry for the disruption.”
Mom’s hand dropped away after hitting the buttons. She leaned and whispered for Stevie to check that she had done it right. Stevie double checked as requested. Privacy was achieved. Stevie still felt disconnected from the hand she put on Mom’s. It didn’t feel like her hand. But Mom was Mom. And that was good. Mom had her back even if it did not feel like her own back right now. Stevie decided she’d tell Mom about this weird experience soon. It sucked to go through this alone.