Explore the psychological phenomenon of dissociation

Have you ever been driving home from work and felt your mind drift far away – so far that you couldn’t really remember how you even got home? Or have you ever been so engrossed in a movie that you felt as if you were right there alongside the characters instead of sitting on your couch?

If either of these descriptions sound familiar, you’ve experienced a minor instance of dissociation. Dissociation is usually a mechanism our brains use to help us cope with emotionally overwhelming situations and traumas. But it comes with a catch: it’s easy for us to get used to dissociating, with our brains constantly “checking out” and avoiding emotionally challenging situations.

If we want to begin to live more honestly and fully in the present, we must confront the phenomenon of dissociation and understand why it develops in the first place.

A quick warning before we begin: this content contains discussions of child abuse, trauma, and suicide.

Let's learn...

why it’s difficult to express traumatic memories through language;

how dissociation can be responsible for out of body experiences; and

how it’s possible to die from hopelessness.

Dissociation functions as a survival mechanism, but it can be a double-edged sword.

Picture this. It’s a calm, clear evening, and you’re in your car heading home after finishing a tough workout at the gym. You’re about to drive through a green light at a busy intersection when you see it: someone has run the red light and is going to slam directly into the right side of your car.

You understand what’s going to happen before it actually does, and suddenly, it feels like you’re no longer the person at the steering wheel. In fact, it seems as if you aren’t inside your own body at all – like you’re watching the accident happen rather than participating in it.

The term for what you’re experiencing in this situation is dissociation, and it’s a common and normal reaction to traumatic and highly stressful situations. When we dissociate, our brains allow us to “disconnect” emotionally from a situation so that we can act calmly and coolly rather than panic.

Dissociation is undeniably useful during traumatic events. However, it tends to have lasting impacts that are anything but useful after the events are over. In a situation where you’ve dissociated, your brain has potentially drawn a connection between something traumatic and something that might seem completely benign to everyone else. And that means you could be tossed into a state of dissociation at completely unexpected moments.

To illustrate this, consider an imaginary woman, who’s reading a newspaper while waiting for a train to arrive. She’s so engrossed in the paper that the arriving train’s loud signal causes Beverly to jump in her seat. Suddenly, her heart is pounding, she feels the desire to run, and she even notices an unexplained scent of chlorine.

She doesn’t know it, but her brain has emotionally thrust her into a moment in her childhood, when she watched her younger sister jump out into the street and be hit by an oncoming vehicle after walking home from the town swimming pool.

As a result of her dissociative reaction, she might feel inexplicably tired, paranoid, or afraid for the rest of the day. But that’s just a minor dissociative reaction. People who experience more extreme traumas will also experience much more extreme dissociative reactions.

Trauma disrupts the brain’s memory-storing processes and causes dissociative reactions.

Trauma doesn’t just create lasting emotional scars – it also has a dramatic effect on the brain itself, particularly when it comes to hormones and areas of the brain related to memory.

So, let's take a look at how memories get formed under normal circumstances. First, your five senses send information to the amygdala, the emotional processing center of your brain. Then, after “assessing” the emotional significance of the information it receives, the amygdala passes its assessment on to the hippocampus, which sorts the information according to its emotional importance and integrates it with other memories.

In overwhelming emotional or traumatic situations, though, this process breaks down.

When the amygdala registers an event as having extreme emotional significance, the hippocampus is unable to usefully organize the information or integrate it with the rest of your memories. Essentially, this means that traumatic memories often exist as isolated sensory images or bodily sensations.

And these aren’t the only differences between traumatic, amygdala-mediated memories and regular ones.

Amygdala-mediated memories may not be connected to the brain’s language-processing areas, which means we can’t use language to make sense of those experiences. Moreover, these memories are much easier for us to access than the ones that have been modulated by the hippocampus.

To illustrate the negative effects of this unique memory-making process, let’s look at one of the girls Julia. 

Julia was a highly intelligent Stanford graduate who went on to produce award-winning documentary films. But despite her success, Julia had a strange problem: she couldn’t remember any of her childhood. She had no memory whatsoever of her teachers’ names, her graduation, nor even learning how to drive. The only vivid memory she had of her childhood was of her mother having to put down her pet dog, Grin, when Julia was 12. 

Julia’s huge memory gaps were a product of her dark backstory: a childhood full of horrors, including physical and sexual abuse by both of her parents. Young Julia had learned how to “go somewhere else” while she was being abused – in other words, she had dissociated. And any time she was in that dissociated state, her memories weren’t recorded and sorted properly by her brain.

This meant that, effectively, she had been psychologically absent for much of her childhood. But that’s far from the end of Julia’s tale.

Dissociative states can cause a person to lose time or have out-of-body experiences.

Julia had a dissociative disorder with several adverse effects. One was that she frequently entered states of fugue, or “flight.” In fugue, a person’s mind is able to carry out intellectually-driven functions like waking up, going to work, and even having conversations – yet the part of the brain that experiences emotions and remembers events isn’t functioning properly.

It was during these periods of fugue that Julia felt as if she “lost time.” On one occasion, she woke up on what she thought was a Tuesday but was informed by a coworker that it was actually Friday. Strangely, no one had noticed her acting any differently on the days in between, when she wasn’t mentally present.

Julia’s drawn-out states of fugue were triggered when her brain made associations between traumatic memories and elements of everyday life. But for many people, fugue doesn’t involve losing such huge gaps in time. Much more common is demifugue, which involves a temporary feeling of separation from reality rather than a total severance.

Just take it from another girl  Lila, who describes her state of demifugue as her “flyaway self.” At a Seven-Eleven store one day, Lila had an argument with a cashier, whose snide and condescending expression reminded her of the way her stepfather had looked at her when she was a child. The experience thrust Lila into her “flyaway self,” where the world seemed to shrink and become very small, almost as if she were looking at things through the wrong end of a telescope.

The definition of demifugue includes other types of “out of body” experiences as well.

Imagine a college sophomore who’s heading home to her parents’ house for Thanksgiving weekend. Everything seems fine until her plane lands. This is when she begins to feel extremely tired and heavy, like her body suddenly weighs a ton. The entire Thanksgiving weekend, she feels almost as if she isn’t really there at all. That’s because she’s dissociated – probably as a result of some childhood trauma associated with her home.

You may have noticed that many of the dissociative individuals we’ve discussed so far have been survivors of childhood trauma.

Children are much more vulnerable to trauma than adults.

Child abuse is disturbingly present in the world. In America, for instance, almost 5 percent of all children are reported as victims of abuse. And conservative estimates suggest that 38 percent of all American girls and 16 percent of American boys experience sexual abuse before the age of 18.

Aside from direct abuse, many children also frequently witness secondhand violence, like muggings and shootings, especially in urban environments. And on a more global scale, tragedy is ever-present – disasters affected three billion people in just the years between 1967 and 1991.

Of course, the majority of children are still “ordinary” – neither victims of abuse nor witnesses to it. But keep in mind that children are highly vulnerable to frightening situations and are therefore much more likely to be traumatized than adults.

Traumatic situations are events that disrupt or violate our existing worldview, making us feel helpless and overwhelmed. And because children are so much less experienced than adults, their sense of meaning is highly subject to influence by emotionally overwhelming situations.

Imagine a nine-year-old child called Matthew, whose parents are never physically violent with one another but frequently have verbal arguments.

On one occasion, Matthew finds his mother in the kitchen after his father has stormed out of the house. His mother is muttering profanities when she notices her son enter the room and says, “Hello, offspring. Watch this.” She opens her china cabinet and begins hurling plates against the wall, smashing them to bits. With every plate broken, she yells “That maggot!” – an epithet directed at her husband.

During the whole incident, Matthew feels hollow and numb. The next day, he hardly remembers it at all.

Now, imagine Matthew as an adult. Whenever a conversation with his wife, friends, and colleagues reminds him of his parents’ arguments – even if the connection isn’t obvious – Matthew spaces out, getting a faraway, glazed look in his eyes.

As an adult, Matthew dissociates because his brain was trained to do so whenever his parents fought during his childhood. He was never directly abused, but he was traumatized by his parents’ fights, which to him were utterly terrifying.

In its most extreme cases, childhood trauma can result in dissociative identity disorder, the condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder.

Dissociative identity disorder usually develops as a survival mechanism for an abused child.

Much of what causes dissociative identity disorder, or DID for short, is unknown. What psychologists do know is that the disorder almost invariably occurs in chronically abused children as a survival mechanism.

In situations of hopelessness, the body often “gives up” and dies – it simply cannot withstand protracted extreme stress. As far back as 1957, psychologist C.P. Richter demonstrated that mice placed in situations of hopelessness, where no fight or flight response was possible, often died of heart failure.

However, unlike mice, humans are gifted with psychological mechanisms that allow us to successfully cope with extreme stress. In the most drastic cases, this can result in dissociative identity disorder – a condition where a person’s mind is “split” between different identities, or “alters,” with separate memories and character traits.

For a chronically abused child, dissociating can allow for a kind of mental vacation. Each separate alter can cope individually with the abuse, compartmentalizing it and allowing the child to survive.

It’s only when the child grows into an adult and escapes his abusive circumstances that his condition starts to become problematic. A person with dissociative identity disorder may lapse into one of his alters at any moment, leading him to act strangely or inappropriately.

One of the most extreme cases of DID  encountered was with a patient called Garrett. When Garrett was a child, his abusive uncle frequently beat him and his younger brother, Lef, for real or imagined offenses. And knowing that Garrett was fiercely protective over his brother, the uncle often beat Lef for things Garrett had done. One day, the unthinkable happened: Garrett’s uncle became so violent that he kicked Lef to death while Garrett watched. Lef was just six years old. Garrett’s life was forever changed. 

The repeated abuse led Garrett to develop several different identities to compartmentalize the abuse he endured. One identity was called James, a young boy who appeared almost exclusively when Garrett was alone. Another was Gordon, a foul-mouthed tough guy who emerged to protect Garrett when he needed it. There were others still, but the darkest of all was Abe, who was convinced that it was Garrett who had killed Lef and that he deserved to die by suicide as punishment.

Not every case of DID involves dramatic switches between different characters. Usually, the changes are more subtle.

Dissociative identity disorder can cause drastic behavioral switches.

How well do you think you understand your closest friends and family members? Could you come up with a list of personality traits to describe them and be reasonably sure they were accurate?

You might be thinking, “Yes, of course I could!” But you’d probably be wrong. That’s because most people aren’t just objective, casual observers of other people – instead, they often mentally distort facts or events such that their image of a person remains consistent over time.

For instance, if your partner appears to be sullen and irritable one evening, you’re more likely to attribute this to an external event than to integrate the trait of sullenness into your mental profile of them. And if this behavior surfaces regularly, you might reclassify them instead as moody. But you’re not very likely to consider that your partner might be showing signs of dissociative identity disorder – even though that might be exactly the problem.

Less than one percent of the American population is likely to have the form of dissociative identity disorder characterized by different named personalities. Far more common are cases that involve a kind of “switch” to a person that appears to be the one we know but who acts in unrecognizable ways.

Take the case of Nathan, a colleague of mine. Most of the time, Nathan was extraordinarily jovial, sociable, and warm. He and his wife had been married for 15 years, and, in his wife’s opinion, he was a wonderful father to their two children.

However, Nathan occasionally lapsed into some strange behavior. He would sometimes disappear for long periods of time with no warning or explanation, no matter what prior commitments he’d made to his family or friends. He also had the tendency to fly into fits of jealous rage around his wife. One moment, he’d be acting like his usual self – but then, suddenly, he’d grow inconsolable, asking his wife incessant questions about her past relationships.

As a result of Nathan’s strange behavior, his wife often felt like she didn’t really know her own husband, and worse, that she didn’t matter to him at all. This is an entirely common problem for people dealing with “switches” – they often feel like they’re walking on eggshells, afraid of triggering that person’s most frightening and alienating behavior.

To overcome dissociative states, we need to take responsibility and confront past traumas directly.

All of us experience dissociative states at one time or another, whether they’re as simple as spacing out and daydreaming on the commute to work or as dramatic as lapsing into an entirely different persona. No matter where you fall on the spectrum, is there any way to overcome these dissociative states?

The remarkable recoveries of some of the  patients give us a hopeful answer to that question. Stare at your most painful memories in the face – and don't back down.

First, Garrett, whose alter-ego Abe was hell-bent on convincing Garrett to take his own life. 

During several of their therapy sessions, Garrett was hypnotized, allowing Abe to take the reins. Over and over, Abe replayed the memory of Lef’s death, an incredibly painful experience for which Abe thought he was at fault. At long last, after a series of hypnosis sessions, Abe finally “learned” that in fact, he was not responsible for his brother’s death. Two months after this realization, Abe disappeared from Garrett’s psyche.

It was a similar story for Julia, the woman who’d been repeatedly abused by her parents. For her entire adult life, she held almost no memories of her childhood. But with the help of hypnosis, she slowly began to recover her memories and confront them by revisiting her old neighborhood in Los Angeles and even the beach where she’d tried to kill herself.

These success stories are inspirational, and you may be wondering what you can do if you suspect you’re dealing with someone with dissociative tendencies.

Well, if that person is violent, the first and best thing you can do is remove yourself from the situation. But if you’re sure she’s not likely to harm you,  you might try to coax out her “real” self after she’s switched by asking something like, “May I speak to Sarah when she’s ready to come back?” Next, you could gently suggest therapy – although this is unlikely to work if she’s unwilling to recognize her problem.

If you suspect that you yourself might have a dissociative disorder, there are plenty of options for you, too. You might try keeping a dream journal or practicing meditation to “see” your mind and memories clearly, without trying to influence them in any way. You may visit old places associated with your most uncomfortable memories, and most importantly, stop self-pity and identifying yourself as a victim. By doing so, you’re just giving more power to the people who have abused and tormented you.

Dissociation is a normal and necessary defense mechanism the brain uses to protect us from overwhelming emotional situations. Unfortunately, as children, we’re sometimes too good at dissociating—so much so that it impacts us deeply in our adult lives, causing us to mentally detach and avoid being emotionally challenged. The good news is that, even in their extreme forms, dissociative disorders can be overcome by facing our traumas head-on and taking responsibility to live our lives more fully in the present.

Actionable advice: 

Ask yourself important questions.

In order to overcome dissociative behaviors, it’s important to ask yourself tough questions about the traumatic experiences you’ve had. If you survived a plane crash, for instance, your question may be, “Did the plane go down because I’m a bad person?” and “What effective precautions can I take if I ever get on a plane again?” Ask yourself questions and discuss them with other people. By doing so, you’ll begin to fight off the dissociative states and nightmares caused by your trauma.

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