October 13, 2025 • 46 mins
Have you ever felt like the world around you isn’t quite real, or like you’re watching your life from the outside? Have you ever driven somewhere and suddenly wondered how you got there? It might be dissociation - a surprisingly common psychological experience that can be both protective and, at times, unsettling.
In this episode we look at the psychology behind dissociation – what is going on in our bodies and brains during this state, what triggers us and how it interacts with wider factors in our lives.
We explore:
• The science of why we freeze in this state
• How it can help us cope, and when it becomes maladaptive
• Interactions with ADHD, trauma and survival mode
• Why it feels so unsettling
• Strategies to pull you back in
• Reminders for when we don’t feel real
If you’ve ever felt like you were living on autopilot, this episode is for you.
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The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it is so great to
have you here. Back for another episode as we, of
course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, we're
going to dive into something that can be quite unsettling.
We're going to discuss the psychology of dissociation. Now you
(00:50):
may have heard of this, you may have experienced this.
It is this disconnect we have at times between our
reality and ourselves. It's this feeling where like a weird,
blurry screen almost goes up between you and the world.
And let's be just completely honest straight off the bat,
it is super scary. It's honestly, really terrifying, and it's
(01:13):
also deeply misunderstood and something that because it feels so terrifying,
we don't talk about because we think it's going to
validate the thoughts that we have about the experience, and
that actually means that the panic that we feel or
the stress becomes a lot stronger. When I say dissociation,
I want you to think of a very old, very
(01:37):
dramatic survival strategy that our brain has. It is this
ability that we all have to disconnect from our thoughts,
our feelings, our surroundings when things get really overwhelming. Now,
because it's automatic, that's why we have a lot of
confusion and fear towards the sensations that it brings up,
(01:58):
even though it's not our actually a sign always of
anything actually going wrong within our brains and within our psychology.
This is something that I think is really helpful to
understand if you have been experiencing dissociation recently, sometimes dip
into this state of mind. It doesn't necessarily mean that
(02:21):
you are going so called crazy, that you are losing
your mind, that you are losing touch with reality. There
are a lot of other explanations that I think are
really helpful just to know about. So that's what we're
going to talk about today. We're going to talk about
why it happens, what it is most importantly as well,
what you can actually do when your brain kind of
(02:43):
seems to stop being sure of whether you're here or not,
because you most certainly are. I can promise you that
you are here, You are alive, The world is real.
You just need to find ways to get back in
touch with the parts of your brain that will help
you believe that. We have quite a science packed episode
today for you guys, which I know a lot of
(03:03):
you love. And sometimes I think with something as irrational
as dissociation, like the only real like counterweight is just
to hit it with like a fist full of reason
and rationality, and that's hopefully what we're going to do.
I also want to talk about my own experience with this.
I literally had a moment like this last night, and
(03:24):
there are a couple of strategies that I always use
that I find pretty full proof that I want to
also kind of let you guys in on as well,
to hopefully help you in these like scary moments. So
you're going to get the personal insights, you're also going
to get the scientific background, the perfect combination, if you
ask me, without further ado, let's get into the psychology
(03:44):
of dissociation. Let's start super simple. Dissociation is one of
those words that floats around a lot in mental health conversations,
but it is of course often misunderstood honestly at this stage,
like what term isn't misunderstood? But I always feel the
(04:08):
need to just give like a bare minimum definition at
the beginning, even if you've heard of the thing we're
talking about before.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So. In psychology, dissociation refers to basically a disruption in
the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, and perception.
In other words, it's what happens when parts of our
mental experience, our thoughts, our awareness, our connection to our
body or the world around us, it just kind of
(04:36):
stops lining up in the ways that it usually would.
And it's often because we are avoiding some kind of
emotional information or emotional pain to protect our fragile psyche,
our sense of continuity. This thing that you know, joins ourselves,
that joins time, our actions, the world around us into
(04:57):
one singular thing and singular exca experience that becomes fractured.
And we feel that fracturing as intense discomfort, anxiety, but
also like there is a fuzziness to our experiences that
you know, maybe we're not really here or the world
around us isn't here either. Now, both of these things
(05:18):
being here and the world existing are pretty fundamental to
our sense of psychological stability. That is probably the understatement
of a lifetime. And that's why this creates so much terror.
It's not because those things are true. It's because the
possibility of them being true makes us feel like we
don't really know anything. Pierre Janet he was a French
(05:40):
psychologist writing in the late nineteenth century. He was actually
one of the first to start to describe dissociation, and
he described it as a breakdown in the mind's integrative capacity.
And what he essentially concluded when he was looking at
patients he was looking at people with extreme trauma, was
that when stress or trauma overwhelms us, the brain breaks
(06:01):
up how it experiences that in order to protect deeper
parts of ourselves. It is our brain, as he says,
trying to survive hard things so that our soul suffers less.
That's one explanation. It is not, as some movies would suggest,
someone flipping into a completely different person without warning like
(06:23):
it does not make you dangerous. It is also not
the same thing as psychosis. Dissociation can feel strange, and
it can feel scary and floaty. It doesn't mean that
you're losing touch with reality in a psychotic sense. It
doesn't also mean that you may be having delusions or
hallucinations that could or maybe would indicate a more serious diagnosis,
(06:47):
like schizophrenia, for example. A lot of other things have
to be present and happening for that to be considered.
Dissociation cannot be your only symptom, you know, psychosis, you
have to be delusional, You have to really not be
able to question the fact that maybe what you're thinking
is wrong. Dissociation, though, there is like a part of
(07:10):
you that knows that this probably isn't real and that
can recognize that this is some kind of split, and
it's a defense mechanism. They definitely overlap at times. But
I just feel the need to address this because it's
a common fear that I've had and that I know
other people have had that they're dissociating, They're feelings super weird,
(07:30):
super unreal, and they think that maybe this is a
sign of something a lot more serious to do with
their mental stability, that they are developing schizophrenia, that they
are going into a psychotic episode. The majority of the time,
I can promise you that is not the case. Now.
Dissociation also exists on a spectrum, and the other thing
(07:52):
that's important to note is that pretty much everyone will
experience some level of this in their life. Maybe that's
comforting to you, you know. At one end of the spectrum,
the most extreme end, we have dissociative identity disorder also
known as multiple personality disorder. That is like the most
extreme version of this, But for most people, the everyday
(08:14):
experience of dissociation is just you know, blanking out during
a stressful conversation, losing a few minutes, feeling disconnected during
exam season, after a breakup during a really hard day.
Now you've probably heard of depersonalization as well, and derealization.
These are basically forms of dissociation that people may experience differently.
(08:39):
So we have dissociation as like the blanket idea of
feeling disconnected, feeling that there's a lack of continuity. Then
we have underneath that depersonalization. And this is when this
feeling of being disconnected is feeling disconnected from your own
body or your own thoughts, like you're kind of watching
(08:59):
yourself from the outside. In this form, you don't feel real,
the world feels real, You're seeing things happen to you
and to your life or your environment. You just don't
feel it. Then there's demrealization, and that's when the world
seems fake but you feel real. The world feels colorless, flat,
dream like. You know you exist, but there's all these
(09:22):
questions of like, how can I be sure that what
I'm seeing and observing isn't just a figment of my imagination.
Obviously that's quite existential, and it can really make you
feel detached from the world around you. It's not always
cause for concern. Some other forms of this that you
may see or hear discussed are dissociative amnesia. This is
a lot less common. It's when you can't recall personal information,
(09:46):
especially around like traumatic or highly stressful events in your life.
Clinicians will also talk about peri traumatic dissociation, which is
kind of similar. It's like the kind of association that
happens right after a traumatic event, and also chronic dissociation,
which is when this detached state exists long after the
triggering event has occurred and then just a circle all
(10:09):
the way back because I feel like I didn't give
it enough attention. We have dissociative identity disorder. This is
the idea that when someone goes through something really terrible,
their personality can literally split so that they are they
completely dissociate from who they are and all of their
(10:30):
thoughts and feelings become contained by another personality. This is
extremely rare, and it's even worth noting that its existence
is even disputed by some. I definitely think that it exists,
Like there's definitely there are so many cases of this happening.
But we're going to talk more about that later and
how and when that develops within somebody. Most of the time,
(10:54):
what you will be experiencing is just everyday dissociation. This
is what happens when you know you're driving home from
work and you don't remember the last ten minutes, or
you're zoning out during a conversation, or like you blink
in an hour's past. It's like you go into some
kind of trance. Sometimes it's called highway hypnosis or white
lined fever. Especially like when you're driving. You can just
(11:16):
see that there are very different levels of this feeling,
and I think that's really crucial to understand so that
we don't experience association and suddenly think that we're going
to split into a completely different person. Sometimes it's just
because you're tired, or you're stressed, or you know, from
(11:37):
a myriad of other factors you're experiencing this. You have
to understand that this is actually your brain doing exactly
what it has evolved to do, which is protect you,
no matter how scary or shocking it is. At its core,
this is just a coping mechanism. Even if it's made
like life feel very non linear or blurry or odd,
(11:59):
you and we will come back. Your brain is just
going a little bit too far. And I know that
my brain does this for everything right. My brain loves
to do things at one hundred and fifty percent, whether
it comes to love, whether it comes to ambition, perfectionism, anxiety,
and it also does that with dissociation. It just takes
it too far. This is really often in response to
(12:21):
some kind of threat that we have either been able
to consciously detect or not so. According to what we
know as polyvagal theory, our nervous system when it sees
or encounters a threat follows a bit of a hierarchy.
First we feel the urge to fight, then flight, so
then run away, and if neither of those is possible,
(12:44):
if the danger feels inescapable, the body will shift into
a free state or a shutdown state. Dissociation is what
is linked to that last pathway. It's also sometimes called
the dorsal vaguel state vaguel meaning agual nerve. This is
the body's longest nerve. It's the main pathway for regulating
(13:05):
almost every system in our body, specifically our power sympathetic
nervous system, which slows things down, shuts things off. So
when we experienced dissociation, that state is triggered, and that
is what's creating this narrowing of awareness, this kind of detachment,
lack of focus. It's what causes our heart rate to drop.
(13:27):
It's your nervous system basically saying, if I can't escape this,
if I can't fight back against this, I'll just disconnect
and maybe I'll survive with a few less emotional scars,
or at least with some energy for later. When we
look at the brain, neuroimaging studies will show that something
fascinating happens during this process. When people with trauma related
(13:51):
or stress related association are reminded of distressing experiences or
put into a stressed state, the amygdala, our brain's alarm system,
often actually shows reduced activity compared to the intense activation
that you would expect if someone was in a hyper
aroused state. So this gets kind of complicated here. But
(14:15):
how people respond to trauma is different. Some of them
have hyper arousal, some of them have hypo arousal. So
either you stay in this quarters or fight or flight
state and you are constantly hypervigionant or alert, or some
people go this way and they stay in this dissociative
or hypo arousal state where they kind of just tune
out and they feel completely disconnected. In those cases, the
(14:40):
part of our brain that would usually be like everything's
on fire, like run, run, run. For people who are
experiencing dissociation, perhaps more than others, it seems that that
part of their brain something is kind of not working.
There's not as much communication going on. Meanwhile, there's another
part of our brain that is important for integrating emotion
(15:00):
and for regulating emotions, and during this state it also
goes quiet. This is important because this is the prefrontal
cortex that's responsible for these things. When that goes offline,
we lose a lot of our sense of processing, rational processing,
and a sense of like I'm here and this is
happening now we can lose our sense of being present,
(15:23):
which is probably what's creating that weird feeling. There's one
final area of the brain that's involved, and that is
the insular cortex. This is basically your ability to introspect,
your ability to feel your body, your body's signals to
understand that you are here. And it also shows dampened
(15:45):
activation during dissociation. So all of these things are kind
of combining. And when you dissociate, your brain is basically
trying to reroot around a bunch of systems that have
all walked out on you. It's trying to get to
the place. The thought patterns, the things in your thoughts
(16:06):
in your brain are trying to get to the same place,
and there's a whole lot of roads that are not working,
so it takes longer to get there, and maybe those
messages never get there. Our awareness of our bodies, of
our emotions, of our sense of continuity, of our memories,
they've all been switched off, flooded, overwhelmed. And again it's
this protective reflex that we have evolved as humans so
(16:29):
that we can survive hard things. Research shows that healthy
adults can experience dissociation. Yes, because of trauma, but also
because of really every day I don't want to say
simple but common things, intense anxiety, stress from conflict, from exams,
(16:50):
from work, even when they're just exhausted. For example, a
twenty fourteen study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy
and Experts Mental Psychiatry looked at a sample of five
hundred and sixty healthy participants who didn't have any serious
mental health conditions, and they basically split them into two groups.
(17:11):
Half of the participants were placed in the experimental condition.
They were deprived of sleep for thirty six hours. The
other half had a super normal night sleep. They then
asked the participants to rate their levels of sleepiness, their
mood symptoms, their dissociative symptoms, and what they found was
that sleep deprivation alone can push people into a dissociative
(17:36):
moment or state of mind. It can make them depersonalize
or make them derealize. So again, you're not going and
I'm going to use air quotes here you can't see
me use them, But you are not going crazy. Sometimes
it's just that you are tired, you are overwhelmed, you
are at a low your brain doesn't have the same cognitive, psychological,
(17:57):
and mental resources that it usually would just shuts things down.
It will pass these everyday stresses. They feel big, they
feel scary. They're also typically short lived. It's just that
your nervous system doesn't discriminate. It's just trying to do
what it's meant to do. It has like its manual
(18:19):
in front of it. It's reading from the manual, and
it's not very flexible. It's just this is what I've
been told to do. This is the systems that I
have available to me. They're feeling stressed. Okay, my manual
tells me press this button. That's what's happening to your
brain right now. Okay, we're going to take a short
break here, but when we return, I want to talk
(18:40):
about the unique relationship between ADHD and dissociation as well
as trauma and dissociation. Stay with us. We will be
right back. So something that you may not know, or
maybe you do. I don't know what you do and
don't know, but I certainly wasn't entirely over this idea
(19:02):
is that dissociation and ADHD are actually deeply linked. People
with ADHD, for example, may find that everyday stresses are
even more extreme, meaning their brain has to rely on
association more. There's the sensory overload, there's the cognitive load
of having to juggle multiple tasks of shifting attention, remembering deadlines,
(19:25):
managing impulses, plus the emotional dysregulation that people with ADHD
can experience where small things trigger really big reactions. All
of this adds up. The nervous system for someone with
ADHD is constantly taxed, and when that combination of sensory, cognitive,
and emotional demands reaches a tipping point, the brain again
(19:49):
presses the button, activates the same protective mechanisms that we
sometimes see as a trauma response, even if no trauma
is actually present. Dissociation in the sense is not caused
by ADHD itself, but it often is something that a
lot of people find themselves slipping into in these moments
(20:10):
because it's just the only way to survive the overload.
It's also worth noting that dissociation and ADHD in particular
can be very very subtle, so a lot of people
don't always put this label on it. It might show
up as zoning out a lot more, which people can
get frustrated at. You for even though you know you're
(20:31):
not deliberately trying to do it, losing track of time
whilst you're hyper focusing on a task. Some people have
labeled that as a form of dissociation or just feeling
really really numb during moments of high stress, like someone is,
you know, bringing something to you, or someone is putting
(20:53):
something on your plate that needs to be done immediately,
and you just operate. You can just do it. This
is like a weird skill that I have a couple
friends with ADHD that they just seem to be able
to do where it's like everyone else is freaking out
and normally I would assume that they would be having
the same, if not a more emotional reaction, and they
just become like hyper focused and they can just deal
(21:16):
with it. This may be again because of this high
reliance on association, the brain can use it to its
advantage during these moments. There is also, of course a
link between dissociation and anxiety and depression and other mood disorders.
But the biggest risk factor here, like the one that
(21:40):
everyone is going to talk to you about if you
mentioned association in an academic room or in a room
full of psychologists, is trauma. Trauma is the biggest thing
that researchers will cite for you when it comes to association.
There was a recent report that suggests that the rates
of dissociation are almost sixty to seventy percent higher in
(22:04):
people have experienced trauma than the average individual. That is
one of the most replicated findings you will find from
the last fifty years in psychology. Trauma and dissociation are
like two p's in a pod. I feel like we've
been talking about trauma a lot on the podcast recently,
(22:25):
and just the hard parts of being human and how
our brain and our bodies respond to that. It's been
like a common theme for us in the last couple
of months. I don't know if you've noticed, but I
think it's because the deeper you get into the literature
on these topics, the more you kind of realize how
deeply shaped we are by the negative experiences that we
(22:49):
may have, and how the body instinctively holds onto these
experiences for better or for worse, in ways that do
end up shaping our personality, and how we respond to
things without even knowing. Emotional abuse, neglect, inconsistent caregiving, but
also childhood bullying, surviving a natural disaster, surviving your parents
(23:11):
divorce that can create a blueprint for dissociation later on
in life. So there is this theory called the structural
dissociation theory that explains why, according to this model, when
a child experiences repeated overwhelming stress, you know, hearing their
(23:32):
parents constantly fighting, being threatened by a caregiver, being at
school seven to eight hours a day, and feeling like
they need to hide or you know, have to look
over their shoulder, or are just constantly feeling out of place,
their personality can actually split into what we call apparently
normal parts or ANPs, which is what they use to
(23:54):
handle daily life, and then emotional parts epis, which are
the parts of them that's store the unprocessed trauma. The
system learns to switch between these parts as a survival
strategy at school, you know, with a parent, the apparently
normal parts, the A and P s will be on display,
(24:16):
but then there are these emotional parts that are hid
in a way that they only briefly kind of dip
into that they don't really want to touch. Their brain
doesn't really want to touch, but is still there. In practice,
this means that even as adults, people with this kind
of history. Can experience dissociation when a trigger comes into
their life that echoes the original trauma. A loud voice,
(24:39):
a threatening tone, a situation where they feel powerless, even
like relationship difficulties or conflict can cause people to be like,
I know how to deal with this. I'll just slip
this mask on. I'll just fade out of this, and here,
in this state, I can be saved, even if I
(25:01):
feel completely weird. It's not that the present is objectively dangerous.
It's just that the nervous system again recognizes an environmental
queue that resembles past trauma, and these patterns from early
life switch us into protective mode, because what else is
your body going to do? Just ignore when it thinks
(25:22):
something dangerous is about to happen, that's not its programming.
This is where dissociation can become really maladaptive, when it's
responding to threats that aren't there anymore, or when it
becomes the only strategy that our brain keeps going back
to when things are scary and when better options are
(25:42):
available for it. If your brain again learns that the
early world is dangerous and the only way to keep
going through this is to put large parts of that
experience offline, or to kind of float above the world
or float above yourself, dissociative patterns can become stabilized. I
(26:03):
was actually reading up on a bunch of cases about
this in a couple of psychiatric journals, just to see
how this presents, and there was one case, actually, there's
a couple cases I'll reach you that were super interesting.
The first was of a young twenty one year old guy,
and he experienced a really bad dissociative episode when he
got back in touch with his estranged father and he's
(26:26):
associated for I think it was like three or four days.
He couldn't remember being admitted into a psychiatric hospital. He
couldn't remember anything that had happened to him in the
last three to four days of his life, despite being really,
really healthy and otherwise completely fine. And afterwards he told
physicians that the last time this had happened to him
(26:48):
was surprise, surprise, when he was a young kid and
he'd last seen his father. You know, it'd been years.
I think for him, maybe he had even been over
a decade since he'd seen his father, and yet he
was right back there. And this ancient part of our
brain is like, okay, I know what to do here.
(27:08):
Another case I read was someone in their fifties who
reported that at twenty four, it was like her life
suddenly changed color and she felt like everything became dampant
after a serious traumatic event, and since then she'd only
had a few moments every year when she had felt normal.
(27:31):
But she actually was telling physicians that like she liked
how she felt. She was like, I don't I know
it's a problem. My family tells me it's a problem,
but I like this feeling of sometimes not feeling real
or not feeling like the world is real, or detaching
myself from what's going on around me. It just feels
(27:52):
more peaceful. Again, a maladaptive coping strategy. It's probably about
time we bring up dissociated any disorder, and what we
previously knew is multiple personality disorder, because when trauma is
really extreme, there is this thing that can happen, this
phenomena where someone's personality splits so deeply that they feel
(28:18):
like they are different people at different times. Now, this
is not everyday dissociation. This is not feeling unreal and
panicked by that feeling. This is when children, especially go
through such a terrible thing in their life that the
only way they endure it is to say, is to
almost create an alter or a persona that it's happening
(28:42):
to that is not them, as a way to protect
their ego and those people. Once they are created in
their mind, it's very hard to kill them. Some people
even have amnesia about this. There's an incredible YouTube video
that I think you should watch titled oh Okay, I
need to remember. I think it's titled Living with Twelve
(29:03):
Alternative Personalities for sixty years, and it interviews a woman
called Amanda who has twelve altars, twelve different personalities that
have emerged from and through traumatic periods in her life.
Some of them are children, some of them are teenagers,
some of them are men, some of them are women,
some of them are older, and she switches between them,
(29:26):
sometimes on a daily, sometimes monthly. They feel like she's
like I when I am in this person, I am
this person. I don't have amnesia about it. Like the
way she tries to explain it is like someone trying
to explain colors that don't exist, Like you just probably
can't see it or understand it unless you are her.
(29:49):
And she describes the first time she experienced this as
a child, when something horrible happened to her, and she
again was like, this is not happening to me, This
is happening to Jenny.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Jenny.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
And then Jenny was this part of her personality that
dissociated and broke off, and she just kept relying on
this strategy and kept splitting until she is the person
she is today. What's so interesting and what I found
so interesting about this video was she was like, they
all have different opinions, They kind of have different voices,
(30:21):
they have different even political beliefs, different food preferences. And
she even in this interview like switches between her and
I think the guy like one of her personalities called
Bradley like on camera. And the reason I bring this
this extreme case up is because firstly, I think it's
important to see the level, like the maximum level at
(30:45):
which this can develop to. It's almost comforting to know
that like even if that was where I ended up
or you ended up, like you would still be okay.
This woman seems actually very happy and very loved. But
also because in those unique cases you really can see
the anatomy of this mechanism. You can see exactly more clearly,
(31:08):
I guess what is happening to you. You are obviously
not splitting into a different personality, but it's the same premise.
Your brain just needs a break, it just needs to
clock out for a little bit. I will say it's
very unlikely that this will happen to you, especially if
you are over the age of twelve. You have to
(31:29):
have experienced intense trauma in your childhood to be diagnosed
with this associative identity disorder. Obviously, some people get diagnosed
later in life, but I think it's important to realize
that these really intense cases are super rare. So if
you're experiencing everyday dissociation, yes it's really scary, but you're
(31:51):
probably not going to end up in this extreme state,
and even if you do, you will survive. You may
have relied on dissociation for a long time without realizing it.
It doesn't mean that you're always going to feel this
way or be in this state. The good news is
that your nervous system is completely plastic. It is changeable.
(32:14):
There is a way to switch off chronic associative responses
and to really feel more in touch with reality and
the feeling of being real and the feeling of being alive,
even if maybe that is in itself equally equally like confronting,
it's good to know the possibility is there and that
(32:35):
you can remove this filter over your experiences. And that's
what we're going to talk about next. When dissociation feels scary,
when personalization derealization takes over, how do you bring your
self back successfully stick around. We're going to talk about
all of that and more after this short break in
(33:00):
True Psychology of your twenties fashion, I want to give
you some strategies that might help if you have noticed
in yourself that you have a tendency to not feel real,
to not feel like the world is real, or to dissociate.
Like I said, this is something that I experience quite
a bit, especially when I'm sleep deprived, especially when I'm stressed,
(33:23):
especially when I have a lot on my plate. I
often find that I will have these like really scary
moments right before I go to bed, where automatically my
brain is like, oh, well, did you know that you're
not actually real and that you're not actually here? And
I'm like, can we can we cut with can we
not with that? Like I'm sick of feeling this way,
(33:43):
like let's let's cut the cameras on that one. But
I have actually discovered some really helpful strategies that like
make me the boss of that feeling and immediately kind
of shut it up to be like the most polite
about it. You know a lot of people talk about ground,
you know, naming five things that you can see here, feel,
(34:04):
maybe even taste, placing your feet on the grass, in
the dirt, in the sand, and really connecting with the earth.
Those are all great strategies, probably the ones that we know,
and sometimes it just doesn't cut it. So here are
some things that might take this to the next level
for you and might actually be able to pull you
back into the world when association hits. The first being
(34:27):
safety scaffolding. If dissociation happens, it really helps to have
a predictable, low effort ritual that signals safety to your
nervous system. That could be a short recorded audio that
you've made of your own voice saying a really calming
mantra or just saying, hey, I know you're not feeling
(34:47):
real right now, I can promise you definitely are. It
could also be the voice of someone else, like a
meditation that you always come back to the familiarity of
the voice, whether it's your own or a voice that
you listen to a lot, reduces the initial alarm state
that you might be feeling because it signals, Okay, something
I know well and something I know to be true
(35:11):
is here. I must be present because this is something
that I keep coming back to. This is something that
has been continuous, this mantra from myself, this meditation has
always been here through these moments. It's just like having
an anchor to hold onto. Another kind of scaffolding is
(35:32):
anything sensory, A Rubik's cube, a mint lozenge, chewing gum,
something like that. I've also given this tip before. Warheads
sour candies have been a lifesaver for me in these
moments because the extreme sensory experience of this candy, it
like genuinely shocks me and brings me back into the
(35:53):
present because it's something that I cannot ignore. It is
this like real thing that is like, of course you're alive,
because how could I be alive and be experiencing or
not be alive and be experiencing this like so intensely.
And it's just like the shock that just like catapults
me right back to where my feet are planted. I
(36:13):
think it's also like a distraction technique, like when you're
chewing or licking or whatever, consuming something that's that sour,
sometimes you just like can't really think about anything else,
and it lets you just for a moment stop thinking
about thinking about not being real or the world not
being real, if you know what I mean. I know
(36:34):
as well that when I'm flying overseas, I will or
flying anywhere like I will feel a sense of derealization
a lot. More so, I also always bring something from home,
like a little figuring from my house on every trip
that I just like sat in my hotel room or
like bring with me in my bag, and it has
(36:56):
this weird therapeutic effect on me. I don't know what
it is, but again, like I think, especially being away
from my environment that I love and then I cherish
and like from my dog and like from my life,
I can feel quite unstable, and having this like really
otherwise quite silly stupid thing that would otherwise just be
like this ornamental thing in my house with me on
(37:19):
this trip pulls me back to that environment where I
feel my safest. I've also heard of someone a friend
of mine, who brings a sheet of stickers with her
everywhere she goes, and anytime she feels strange or she
feels odd, she will pull out a sticker and it's
like one of those three D stickers, like those squishy ones,
(37:40):
and she will like stick one onto the wall or
her computer, or a mirror or like the back of
the bus seat, and just like focus on it, and
she's like, oh, well, I'm bringing like at least this
thing is real. At least I have these stickers that
I'm bringing with me and to every single different situation.
And I know it sounds silly, but sometimes for something
is like extreme and scary as derealization, you just have
(38:02):
to either beat it with complete reason or beat it
with silliness and being a little bit goofy with it
and like playing with the feeling. These are all kind
of sensory or physical anchors. We can also use kinesthetic anchors,
which is basically just a fancy word for moving your
body like and really moving it. Don't just like look
(38:24):
at your hands and feet as they like wriggle that
can still feel kind of disorientating. I want you to
like fully rapidly violently shake your whole body, dance, stretch,
move run, just like spasm in the air. Do something
that you feel reconnects you with your limbs and your
fingers and your toenails. A twenty fourteen study that I
(38:47):
particularly love explored how dance therapy specifically helps people exit
association when other things aren't working because it creates kinesthetic awareness.
And this is our body's natural ability to detect and
locate and recognize our body, our form in space and time,
and our surroundings. And that kinesthetic awareness really activates something
(39:12):
mentally within us as well that obviously recognizes that we
must be present to be having this feeling, and so
it brings us back to our sense of realness. Even
like repetitive rhythmic movements like bouncing your knee or rolling
your shoulders or flowing moving your body have been shown
to provide that same grounding experience. It positions you back
(39:37):
in the room. It shows you that you are in control,
that you can feel time and space and movement around you.
It also helps you obviously release tension. We know that
stress is like a big trigger for dissociation. Sometimes that
may also be why this mechanism works. I will also say,
(39:58):
sometimes you don't want to think even more about the feeling,
but it's kind of liberating to argue with it, to
argue with that I'm not real, I'm not here thought.
If your mind is saying that I'm not real, this
isn't real whatever it is. This may sound counterintuitive, but
(40:18):
I think about how liberating that maybe would be if
that was true. Like, I know that this thought is
scary to me, but I argue with the thought, and
I think, but what if that was a good thing.
Let me explain, Like, if I wasn't real, it meant
that something would have to be controlling this experience, and
(40:42):
that makes me feel assured in the idea that something
is out there that is bigger than us. And that's
actually deeply comforting. And it's like you were trying to
scare me with this feeling. Actually a part of it
might be deeply like existentially validating, or you know another
thought that we have, like I'm not actually here. Well,
then that's fucking great. That eliminates a lot of my
(41:05):
social anxiety, doesn't it. Why am I so worried about
being perceived? If I'm not even real? If the perception
of me isn't even happening. Sometimes that's just like helpful
to turn off the anxiousness tap before I come back
down and realize like firstly that this feeling is quite silly,
and to challenge it, but also to say that, like,
(41:26):
even if this was the case, is that even a
bad thing? Because my anxiety and my panic that is
rising in response to my depersonalization or my derealization is
only rising because it is perceiving. It is a terrible,
terrifying thing. What if it wasn't? These are actually they
have a name, they call cognitive scripts. They have been
(41:48):
proven to help with this feeling. Another really famous one
that you've probably heard comes from the philosopher Renee de
cart which says, I think therefore I am also a
Billie Eilish song. Basically, this phrase, this mantra, I think
therefore I am, tells us that the very act of
doubting your own existence actually proves that you exist. How
(42:12):
because to doubt, you have to be thinking, and thinking
is something that only a conscious mind can do. The
very act of questioning, am I real? Is this real?
Is proof that you are? And I know if this
feels a little bit better. But that's the reassuring part.
(42:32):
The fact that you are noticing that you are dissociating,
that you are questioning reality. That is all proof that
you must be existing in order to have those thoughts,
even when it feels like the world is fuzzy or
your awareness isn't in itself a solid anchor. This in
(42:53):
itself is like something we can always come back to.
It's this subtle cognitive reminder that you may feel disconnected.
That's just your individual experience. It doesn't mean that reality
itself or the world around you has disappeared. It's just
a natural response to stress. It's a natural response to
(43:13):
perhaps trauma in your past. But even just not getting
enough sleep, even just having a really hard day. I
want to again remind you, this whole process of feeling
like everything is kind of blurring out or fuzzy or
not real, is your brain trying to just give you
a bit of a break and cut you some slack.
(43:35):
It definitely doesn't feel nice. It doesn't mean that it's wrong,
and it doesn't mean that something is wrong with you
or that something is this is an indicator of something
dangerous that's going to happen to you. I think this
is a gentle reminder that this is a human process.
(43:57):
This is just noise. Your brain isn't betraying you. It's
not trying to tell you something. It's just trying to
help you survive. You are real, you are here. I
promise you that you are listening to my voice in
your ears right now, that it's confirmation, and you're gonna
(44:20):
survive this. You're gonna survive this overwhelm. I know it
can feel super unpleasant, but everyone who has been through this,
which is if the estimates say nearly every person on
this planet has come through on the other side, and
if the worst case is that you are not real
or the world isn't real, actually that's not even a
bad thing. Necessarily, you will still be okay. You can
(44:44):
still trust yourself to get through that. It's not even
like that is the case, like when you start to
really question it, like you see how ridiculous it is.
But even in the most ridiculous fears aren't really that
scary if they were to actually come true, and they
weren't even so, so you're good on both fronts. Okay.
I think that's all we have time for today. I
(45:05):
hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned something.
I hope it felt validating. I hope that it's something
you can come back to when you are feeling that same,
like very scary, panicked feeling of not being here. We've
all been there, well, at least I can say I
most certainly have, and I have made it through, so
I hope my strategies are helpful as well. I want
(45:26):
to thank our research assistant, Libby Comvert, for her excellent
help in providing some research assistance for this episode. She
does an amazing job every single week, time after time,
so thank you, Libby. We also a couple of updates.
Now we have a substack. If you've ever wanted a
script for an episode or a transcript, we have one
(45:47):
of those available on our substack. You can go and subscribe,
And we have a YouTube channel. Every second episode every
episode on Friday is a video episode that you can
go on access there. I don't really talk about it enough,
but I probably should. So if watching podcasts is more
your thing, that's now an opportunity, that's now an option
for you. Make sure as well that you are following
(46:08):
us on Instagram at that Psychology Podcast You can send
me a dam with further questions or like queries or
episodes suggestions over there. But until next time, stay safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself. Remember, I promise you
are real. I promise you are present. I promise this
is real. We will talk very very soon.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it is so great to
have you here. Back for another episode as we, of
course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, we're
going to dive into something that can be quite unsettling.
We're going to discuss the psychology of dissociation. Now you
(00:50):
may have heard of this, you may have experienced this.
It is this disconnect we have at times between our
reality and ourselves. It's this feeling where like a weird,
blurry screen almost goes up between you and the world.
And let's be just completely honest straight off the bat,
it is super scary. It's honestly, really terrifying, and it's
(01:13):
also deeply misunderstood and something that because it feels so terrifying,
we don't talk about because we think it's going to
validate the thoughts that we have about the experience, and
that actually means that the panic that we feel or
the stress becomes a lot stronger. When I say dissociation,
I want you to think of a very old, very
(01:37):
dramatic survival strategy that our brain has. It is this
ability that we all have to disconnect from our thoughts,
our feelings, our surroundings when things get really overwhelming. Now,
because it's automatic, that's why we have a lot of
confusion and fear towards the sensations that it brings up,
(01:58):
even though it's not our actually a sign always of
anything actually going wrong within our brains and within our psychology.
This is something that I think is really helpful to
understand if you have been experiencing dissociation recently, sometimes dip
into this state of mind. It doesn't necessarily mean that
(02:21):
you are going so called crazy, that you are losing
your mind, that you are losing touch with reality. There
are a lot of other explanations that I think are
really helpful just to know about. So that's what we're
going to talk about today. We're going to talk about
why it happens, what it is most importantly as well,
what you can actually do when your brain kind of
(02:43):
seems to stop being sure of whether you're here or not,
because you most certainly are. I can promise you that
you are here, You are alive, The world is real.
You just need to find ways to get back in
touch with the parts of your brain that will help
you believe that. We have quite a science packed episode
today for you guys, which I know a lot of
(03:03):
you love. And sometimes I think with something as irrational
as dissociation, like the only real like counterweight is just
to hit it with like a fist full of reason
and rationality, and that's hopefully what we're going to do.
I also want to talk about my own experience with this.
I literally had a moment like this last night, and
(03:24):
there are a couple of strategies that I always use
that I find pretty full proof that I want to
also kind of let you guys in on as well,
to hopefully help you in these like scary moments. So
you're going to get the personal insights, you're also going
to get the scientific background, the perfect combination, if you
ask me, without further ado, let's get into the psychology
(03:44):
of dissociation. Let's start super simple. Dissociation is one of
those words that floats around a lot in mental health conversations,
but it is of course often misunderstood honestly at this stage,
like what term isn't misunderstood? But I always feel the
(04:08):
need to just give like a bare minimum definition at
the beginning, even if you've heard of the thing we're
talking about before.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So. In psychology, dissociation refers to basically a disruption in
the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, and perception.
In other words, it's what happens when parts of our
mental experience, our thoughts, our awareness, our connection to our
body or the world around us, it just kind of
(04:36):
stops lining up in the ways that it usually would.
And it's often because we are avoiding some kind of
emotional information or emotional pain to protect our fragile psyche,
our sense of continuity. This thing that you know, joins ourselves,
that joins time, our actions, the world around us into
(04:57):
one singular thing and singular exca experience that becomes fractured.
And we feel that fracturing as intense discomfort, anxiety, but
also like there is a fuzziness to our experiences that
you know, maybe we're not really here or the world
around us isn't here either. Now, both of these things
(05:18):
being here and the world existing are pretty fundamental to
our sense of psychological stability. That is probably the understatement
of a lifetime. And that's why this creates so much terror.
It's not because those things are true. It's because the
possibility of them being true makes us feel like we
don't really know anything. Pierre Janet he was a French
(05:40):
psychologist writing in the late nineteenth century. He was actually
one of the first to start to describe dissociation, and
he described it as a breakdown in the mind's integrative capacity.
And what he essentially concluded when he was looking at
patients he was looking at people with extreme trauma, was
that when stress or trauma overwhelms us, the brain breaks
(06:01):
up how it experiences that in order to protect deeper
parts of ourselves. It is our brain, as he says,
trying to survive hard things so that our soul suffers less.
That's one explanation. It is not, as some movies would suggest,
someone flipping into a completely different person without warning like
(06:23):
it does not make you dangerous. It is also not
the same thing as psychosis. Dissociation can feel strange, and
it can feel scary and floaty. It doesn't mean that
you're losing touch with reality in a psychotic sense. It
doesn't also mean that you may be having delusions or
hallucinations that could or maybe would indicate a more serious diagnosis,
(06:47):
like schizophrenia, for example. A lot of other things have
to be present and happening for that to be considered.
Dissociation cannot be your only symptom, you know, psychosis, you
have to be delusional, You have to really not be
able to question the fact that maybe what you're thinking
is wrong. Dissociation, though, there is like a part of
(07:10):
you that knows that this probably isn't real and that
can recognize that this is some kind of split, and
it's a defense mechanism. They definitely overlap at times. But
I just feel the need to address this because it's
a common fear that I've had and that I know
other people have had that they're dissociating, They're feelings super weird,
(07:30):
super unreal, and they think that maybe this is a
sign of something a lot more serious to do with
their mental stability, that they are developing schizophrenia, that they
are going into a psychotic episode. The majority of the time,
I can promise you that is not the case. Now.
Dissociation also exists on a spectrum, and the other thing
(07:52):
that's important to note is that pretty much everyone will
experience some level of this in their life. Maybe that's
comforting to you, you know. At one end of the spectrum,
the most extreme end, we have dissociative identity disorder also
known as multiple personality disorder. That is like the most
extreme version of this, But for most people, the everyday
(08:14):
experience of dissociation is just you know, blanking out during
a stressful conversation, losing a few minutes, feeling disconnected during
exam season, after a breakup during a really hard day.
Now you've probably heard of depersonalization as well, and derealization.
These are basically forms of dissociation that people may experience differently.
(08:39):
So we have dissociation as like the blanket idea of
feeling disconnected, feeling that there's a lack of continuity. Then
we have underneath that depersonalization. And this is when this
feeling of being disconnected is feeling disconnected from your own
body or your own thoughts, like you're kind of watching
(08:59):
yourself from the outside. In this form, you don't feel real,
the world feels real, You're seeing things happen to you
and to your life or your environment. You just don't
feel it. Then there's demrealization, and that's when the world
seems fake but you feel real. The world feels colorless, flat,
dream like. You know you exist, but there's all these
(09:22):
questions of like, how can I be sure that what
I'm seeing and observing isn't just a figment of my imagination.
Obviously that's quite existential, and it can really make you
feel detached from the world around you. It's not always
cause for concern. Some other forms of this that you
may see or hear discussed are dissociative amnesia. This is
a lot less common. It's when you can't recall personal information,
(09:46):
especially around like traumatic or highly stressful events in your life.
Clinicians will also talk about peri traumatic dissociation, which is
kind of similar. It's like the kind of association that
happens right after a traumatic event, and also chronic dissociation,
which is when this detached state exists long after the
triggering event has occurred and then just a circle all
(10:09):
the way back because I feel like I didn't give
it enough attention. We have dissociative identity disorder. This is
the idea that when someone goes through something really terrible,
their personality can literally split so that they are they
completely dissociate from who they are and all of their
(10:30):
thoughts and feelings become contained by another personality. This is
extremely rare, and it's even worth noting that its existence
is even disputed by some. I definitely think that it exists,
Like there's definitely there are so many cases of this happening.
But we're going to talk more about that later and
how and when that develops within somebody. Most of the time,
(10:54):
what you will be experiencing is just everyday dissociation. This
is what happens when you know you're driving home from
work and you don't remember the last ten minutes, or
you're zoning out during a conversation, or like you blink
in an hour's past. It's like you go into some
kind of trance. Sometimes it's called highway hypnosis or white
lined fever. Especially like when you're driving. You can just
(11:16):
see that there are very different levels of this feeling,
and I think that's really crucial to understand so that
we don't experience association and suddenly think that we're going
to split into a completely different person. Sometimes it's just
because you're tired, or you're stressed, or you know, from
(11:37):
a myriad of other factors you're experiencing this. You have
to understand that this is actually your brain doing exactly
what it has evolved to do, which is protect you,
no matter how scary or shocking it is. At its core,
this is just a coping mechanism. Even if it's made
like life feel very non linear or blurry or odd,
(11:59):
you and we will come back. Your brain is just
going a little bit too far. And I know that
my brain does this for everything right. My brain loves
to do things at one hundred and fifty percent, whether
it comes to love, whether it comes to ambition, perfectionism, anxiety,
and it also does that with dissociation. It just takes
it too far. This is really often in response to
(12:21):
some kind of threat that we have either been able
to consciously detect or not so. According to what we
know as polyvagal theory, our nervous system when it sees
or encounters a threat follows a bit of a hierarchy.
First we feel the urge to fight, then flight, so
then run away, and if neither of those is possible,
(12:44):
if the danger feels inescapable, the body will shift into
a free state or a shutdown state. Dissociation is what
is linked to that last pathway. It's also sometimes called
the dorsal vaguel state vaguel meaning agual nerve. This is
the body's longest nerve. It's the main pathway for regulating
(13:05):
almost every system in our body, specifically our power sympathetic
nervous system, which slows things down, shuts things off. So
when we experienced dissociation, that state is triggered, and that
is what's creating this narrowing of awareness, this kind of detachment,
lack of focus. It's what causes our heart rate to drop.
(13:27):
It's your nervous system basically saying, if I can't escape this,
if I can't fight back against this, I'll just disconnect
and maybe I'll survive with a few less emotional scars,
or at least with some energy for later. When we
look at the brain, neuroimaging studies will show that something
fascinating happens during this process. When people with trauma related
(13:51):
or stress related association are reminded of distressing experiences or
put into a stressed state, the amygdala, our brain's alarm system,
often actually shows reduced activity compared to the intense activation
that you would expect if someone was in a hyper
aroused state. So this gets kind of complicated here. But
(14:15):
how people respond to trauma is different. Some of them
have hyper arousal, some of them have hypo arousal. So
either you stay in this quarters or fight or flight
state and you are constantly hypervigionant or alert, or some
people go this way and they stay in this dissociative
or hypo arousal state where they kind of just tune
out and they feel completely disconnected. In those cases, the
(14:40):
part of our brain that would usually be like everything's
on fire, like run, run, run. For people who are
experiencing dissociation, perhaps more than others, it seems that that
part of their brain something is kind of not working.
There's not as much communication going on. Meanwhile, there's another
part of our brain that is important for integrating emotion
(15:00):
and for regulating emotions, and during this state it also
goes quiet. This is important because this is the prefrontal
cortex that's responsible for these things. When that goes offline,
we lose a lot of our sense of processing, rational processing,
and a sense of like I'm here and this is
happening now we can lose our sense of being present,
(15:23):
which is probably what's creating that weird feeling. There's one
final area of the brain that's involved, and that is
the insular cortex. This is basically your ability to introspect,
your ability to feel your body, your body's signals to
understand that you are here. And it also shows dampened
(15:45):
activation during dissociation. So all of these things are kind
of combining. And when you dissociate, your brain is basically
trying to reroot around a bunch of systems that have
all walked out on you. It's trying to get to
the place. The thought patterns, the things in your thoughts
(16:06):
in your brain are trying to get to the same place,
and there's a whole lot of roads that are not working,
so it takes longer to get there, and maybe those
messages never get there. Our awareness of our bodies, of
our emotions, of our sense of continuity, of our memories,
they've all been switched off, flooded, overwhelmed. And again it's
this protective reflex that we have evolved as humans so
(16:29):
that we can survive hard things. Research shows that healthy
adults can experience dissociation. Yes, because of trauma, but also
because of really every day I don't want to say
simple but common things, intense anxiety, stress from conflict, from exams,
(16:50):
from work, even when they're just exhausted. For example, a
twenty fourteen study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy
and Experts Mental Psychiatry looked at a sample of five
hundred and sixty healthy participants who didn't have any serious
mental health conditions, and they basically split them into two groups.
(17:11):
Half of the participants were placed in the experimental condition.
They were deprived of sleep for thirty six hours. The
other half had a super normal night sleep. They then
asked the participants to rate their levels of sleepiness, their
mood symptoms, their dissociative symptoms, and what they found was
that sleep deprivation alone can push people into a dissociative
(17:36):
moment or state of mind. It can make them depersonalize
or make them derealize. So again, you're not going and
I'm going to use air quotes here you can't see
me use them, But you are not going crazy. Sometimes
it's just that you are tired, you are overwhelmed, you
are at a low your brain doesn't have the same cognitive, psychological,
(17:57):
and mental resources that it usually would just shuts things down.
It will pass these everyday stresses. They feel big, they
feel scary. They're also typically short lived. It's just that
your nervous system doesn't discriminate. It's just trying to do
what it's meant to do. It has like its manual
(18:19):
in front of it. It's reading from the manual, and
it's not very flexible. It's just this is what I've
been told to do. This is the systems that I
have available to me. They're feeling stressed. Okay, my manual
tells me press this button. That's what's happening to your
brain right now. Okay, we're going to take a short
break here, but when we return, I want to talk
(18:40):
about the unique relationship between ADHD and dissociation as well
as trauma and dissociation. Stay with us. We will be
right back. So something that you may not know, or
maybe you do. I don't know what you do and
don't know, but I certainly wasn't entirely over this idea
(19:02):
is that dissociation and ADHD are actually deeply linked. People
with ADHD, for example, may find that everyday stresses are
even more extreme, meaning their brain has to rely on
association more. There's the sensory overload, there's the cognitive load
of having to juggle multiple tasks of shifting attention, remembering deadlines,
(19:25):
managing impulses, plus the emotional dysregulation that people with ADHD
can experience where small things trigger really big reactions. All
of this adds up. The nervous system for someone with
ADHD is constantly taxed, and when that combination of sensory, cognitive,
and emotional demands reaches a tipping point, the brain again
(19:49):
presses the button, activates the same protective mechanisms that we
sometimes see as a trauma response, even if no trauma
is actually present. Dissociation in the sense is not caused
by ADHD itself, but it often is something that a
lot of people find themselves slipping into in these moments
(20:10):
because it's just the only way to survive the overload.
It's also worth noting that dissociation and ADHD in particular
can be very very subtle, so a lot of people
don't always put this label on it. It might show
up as zoning out a lot more, which people can
get frustrated at. You for even though you know you're
(20:31):
not deliberately trying to do it, losing track of time
whilst you're hyper focusing on a task. Some people have
labeled that as a form of dissociation or just feeling
really really numb during moments of high stress, like someone is,
you know, bringing something to you, or someone is putting
(20:53):
something on your plate that needs to be done immediately,
and you just operate. You can just do it. This
is like a weird skill that I have a couple
friends with ADHD that they just seem to be able
to do where it's like everyone else is freaking out
and normally I would assume that they would be having
the same, if not a more emotional reaction, and they
just become like hyper focused and they can just deal
(21:16):
with it. This may be again because of this high
reliance on association, the brain can use it to its
advantage during these moments. There is also, of course a
link between dissociation and anxiety and depression and other mood disorders.
But the biggest risk factor here, like the one that
(21:40):
everyone is going to talk to you about if you
mentioned association in an academic room or in a room
full of psychologists, is trauma. Trauma is the biggest thing
that researchers will cite for you when it comes to association.
There was a recent report that suggests that the rates
of dissociation are almost sixty to seventy percent higher in
(22:04):
people have experienced trauma than the average individual. That is
one of the most replicated findings you will find from
the last fifty years in psychology. Trauma and dissociation are
like two p's in a pod. I feel like we've
been talking about trauma a lot on the podcast recently,
(22:25):
and just the hard parts of being human and how
our brain and our bodies respond to that. It's been
like a common theme for us in the last couple
of months. I don't know if you've noticed, but I
think it's because the deeper you get into the literature
on these topics, the more you kind of realize how
deeply shaped we are by the negative experiences that we
(22:49):
may have, and how the body instinctively holds onto these
experiences for better or for worse, in ways that do
end up shaping our personality, and how we respond to
things without even knowing. Emotional abuse, neglect, inconsistent caregiving, but
also childhood bullying, surviving a natural disaster, surviving your parents
(23:11):
divorce that can create a blueprint for dissociation later on
in life. So there is this theory called the structural
dissociation theory that explains why, according to this model, when
a child experiences repeated overwhelming stress, you know, hearing their
(23:32):
parents constantly fighting, being threatened by a caregiver, being at
school seven to eight hours a day, and feeling like
they need to hide or you know, have to look
over their shoulder, or are just constantly feeling out of place,
their personality can actually split into what we call apparently
normal parts or ANPs, which is what they use to
(23:54):
handle daily life, and then emotional parts epis, which are
the parts of them that's store the unprocessed trauma. The
system learns to switch between these parts as a survival
strategy at school, you know, with a parent, the apparently
normal parts, the A and P s will be on display,
(24:16):
but then there are these emotional parts that are hid
in a way that they only briefly kind of dip
into that they don't really want to touch. Their brain
doesn't really want to touch, but is still there. In practice,
this means that even as adults, people with this kind
of history. Can experience dissociation when a trigger comes into
their life that echoes the original trauma. A loud voice,
(24:39):
a threatening tone, a situation where they feel powerless, even
like relationship difficulties or conflict can cause people to be like,
I know how to deal with this. I'll just slip
this mask on. I'll just fade out of this, and here,
in this state, I can be saved, even if I
(25:01):
feel completely weird. It's not that the present is objectively dangerous.
It's just that the nervous system again recognizes an environmental
queue that resembles past trauma, and these patterns from early
life switch us into protective mode, because what else is
your body going to do? Just ignore when it thinks
(25:22):
something dangerous is about to happen, that's not its programming.
This is where dissociation can become really maladaptive, when it's
responding to threats that aren't there anymore, or when it
becomes the only strategy that our brain keeps going back
to when things are scary and when better options are
(25:42):
available for it. If your brain again learns that the
early world is dangerous and the only way to keep
going through this is to put large parts of that
experience offline, or to kind of float above the world
or float above yourself, dissociative patterns can become stabilized. I
(26:03):
was actually reading up on a bunch of cases about
this in a couple of psychiatric journals, just to see
how this presents, and there was one case, actually, there's
a couple cases I'll reach you that were super interesting.
The first was of a young twenty one year old guy,
and he experienced a really bad dissociative episode when he
got back in touch with his estranged father and he's
(26:26):
associated for I think it was like three or four days.
He couldn't remember being admitted into a psychiatric hospital. He
couldn't remember anything that had happened to him in the
last three to four days of his life, despite being really,
really healthy and otherwise completely fine. And afterwards he told
physicians that the last time this had happened to him
(26:48):
was surprise, surprise, when he was a young kid and
he'd last seen his father. You know, it'd been years.
I think for him, maybe he had even been over
a decade since he'd seen his father, and yet he
was right back there. And this ancient part of our
brain is like, okay, I know what to do here.
(27:08):
Another case I read was someone in their fifties who
reported that at twenty four, it was like her life
suddenly changed color and she felt like everything became dampant
after a serious traumatic event, and since then she'd only
had a few moments every year when she had felt normal.
(27:31):
But she actually was telling physicians that like she liked
how she felt. She was like, I don't I know
it's a problem. My family tells me it's a problem,
but I like this feeling of sometimes not feeling real
or not feeling like the world is real, or detaching
myself from what's going on around me. It just feels
(27:52):
more peaceful. Again, a maladaptive coping strategy. It's probably about
time we bring up dissociated any disorder, and what we
previously knew is multiple personality disorder, because when trauma is
really extreme, there is this thing that can happen, this
phenomena where someone's personality splits so deeply that they feel
(28:18):
like they are different people at different times. Now, this
is not everyday dissociation. This is not feeling unreal and
panicked by that feeling. This is when children, especially go
through such a terrible thing in their life that the
only way they endure it is to say, is to
almost create an alter or a persona that it's happening
(28:42):
to that is not them, as a way to protect
their ego and those people. Once they are created in
their mind, it's very hard to kill them. Some people
even have amnesia about this. There's an incredible YouTube video
that I think you should watch titled oh Okay, I
need to remember. I think it's titled Living with Twelve
(29:03):
Alternative Personalities for sixty years, and it interviews a woman
called Amanda who has twelve altars, twelve different personalities that
have emerged from and through traumatic periods in her life.
Some of them are children, some of them are teenagers,
some of them are men, some of them are women,
some of them are older, and she switches between them,
(29:26):
sometimes on a daily, sometimes monthly. They feel like she's
like I when I am in this person, I am
this person. I don't have amnesia about it. Like the
way she tries to explain it is like someone trying
to explain colors that don't exist, Like you just probably
can't see it or understand it unless you are her.
(29:49):
And she describes the first time she experienced this as
a child, when something horrible happened to her, and she
again was like, this is not happening to me, This
is happening to Jenny.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Jenny.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
And then Jenny was this part of her personality that
dissociated and broke off, and she just kept relying on
this strategy and kept splitting until she is the person
she is today. What's so interesting and what I found
so interesting about this video was she was like, they
all have different opinions, They kind of have different voices,
(30:21):
they have different even political beliefs, different food preferences. And
she even in this interview like switches between her and
I think the guy like one of her personalities called
Bradley like on camera. And the reason I bring this
this extreme case up is because firstly, I think it's
important to see the level, like the maximum level at
(30:45):
which this can develop to. It's almost comforting to know
that like even if that was where I ended up
or you ended up, like you would still be okay.
This woman seems actually very happy and very loved. But
also because in those unique cases you really can see
the anatomy of this mechanism. You can see exactly more clearly,
(31:08):
I guess what is happening to you. You are obviously
not splitting into a different personality, but it's the same premise.
Your brain just needs a break, it just needs to
clock out for a little bit. I will say it's
very unlikely that this will happen to you, especially if
you are over the age of twelve. You have to
(31:29):
have experienced intense trauma in your childhood to be diagnosed
with this associative identity disorder. Obviously, some people get diagnosed
later in life, but I think it's important to realize
that these really intense cases are super rare. So if
you're experiencing everyday dissociation, yes it's really scary, but you're
(31:51):
probably not going to end up in this extreme state,
and even if you do, you will survive. You may
have relied on dissociation for a long time without realizing it.
It doesn't mean that you're always going to feel this
way or be in this state. The good news is
that your nervous system is completely plastic. It is changeable.
(32:14):
There is a way to switch off chronic associative responses
and to really feel more in touch with reality and
the feeling of being real and the feeling of being alive,
even if maybe that is in itself equally equally like confronting,
it's good to know the possibility is there and that
(32:35):
you can remove this filter over your experiences. And that's
what we're going to talk about next. When dissociation feels scary,
when personalization derealization takes over, how do you bring your
self back successfully stick around. We're going to talk about
all of that and more after this short break in
(33:00):
True Psychology of your twenties fashion, I want to give
you some strategies that might help if you have noticed
in yourself that you have a tendency to not feel real,
to not feel like the world is real, or to dissociate.
Like I said, this is something that I experience quite
a bit, especially when I'm sleep deprived, especially when I'm stressed,
(33:23):
especially when I have a lot on my plate. I
often find that I will have these like really scary
moments right before I go to bed, where automatically my
brain is like, oh, well, did you know that you're
not actually real and that you're not actually here? And
I'm like, can we can we cut with can we
not with that? Like I'm sick of feeling this way,
(33:43):
like let's let's cut the cameras on that one. But
I have actually discovered some really helpful strategies that like
make me the boss of that feeling and immediately kind
of shut it up to be like the most polite
about it. You know a lot of people talk about ground,
you know, naming five things that you can see here, feel,
(34:04):
maybe even taste, placing your feet on the grass, in
the dirt, in the sand, and really connecting with the earth.
Those are all great strategies, probably the ones that we know,
and sometimes it just doesn't cut it. So here are
some things that might take this to the next level
for you and might actually be able to pull you
back into the world when association hits. The first being
(34:27):
safety scaffolding. If dissociation happens, it really helps to have
a predictable, low effort ritual that signals safety to your
nervous system. That could be a short recorded audio that
you've made of your own voice saying a really calming
mantra or just saying, hey, I know you're not feeling
(34:47):
real right now, I can promise you definitely are. It
could also be the voice of someone else, like a
meditation that you always come back to the familiarity of
the voice, whether it's your own or a voice that
you listen to a lot, reduces the initial alarm state
that you might be feeling because it signals, Okay, something
I know well and something I know to be true
(35:11):
is here. I must be present because this is something
that I keep coming back to. This is something that
has been continuous, this mantra from myself, this meditation has
always been here through these moments. It's just like having
an anchor to hold onto. Another kind of scaffolding is
(35:32):
anything sensory, A Rubik's cube, a mint lozenge, chewing gum,
something like that. I've also given this tip before. Warheads
sour candies have been a lifesaver for me in these
moments because the extreme sensory experience of this candy, it
like genuinely shocks me and brings me back into the
(35:53):
present because it's something that I cannot ignore. It is
this like real thing that is like, of course you're alive,
because how could I be alive and be experiencing or
not be alive and be experiencing this like so intensely.
And it's just like the shock that just like catapults
me right back to where my feet are planted. I
(36:13):
think it's also like a distraction technique, like when you're
chewing or licking or whatever, consuming something that's that sour,
sometimes you just like can't really think about anything else,
and it lets you just for a moment stop thinking
about thinking about not being real or the world not
being real, if you know what I mean. I know
(36:34):
as well that when I'm flying overseas, I will or
flying anywhere like I will feel a sense of derealization
a lot. More so, I also always bring something from home,
like a little figuring from my house on every trip
that I just like sat in my hotel room or
like bring with me in my bag, and it has
(36:56):
this weird therapeutic effect on me. I don't know what
it is, but again, like I think, especially being away
from my environment that I love and then I cherish
and like from my dog and like from my life,
I can feel quite unstable, and having this like really
otherwise quite silly stupid thing that would otherwise just be
like this ornamental thing in my house with me on
(37:19):
this trip pulls me back to that environment where I
feel my safest. I've also heard of someone a friend
of mine, who brings a sheet of stickers with her
everywhere she goes, and anytime she feels strange or she
feels odd, she will pull out a sticker and it's
like one of those three D stickers, like those squishy ones,
(37:40):
and she will like stick one onto the wall or
her computer, or a mirror or like the back of
the bus seat, and just like focus on it, and
she's like, oh, well, I'm bringing like at least this
thing is real. At least I have these stickers that
I'm bringing with me and to every single different situation.
And I know it sounds silly, but sometimes for something
is like extreme and scary as derealization, you just have
(38:02):
to either beat it with complete reason or beat it
with silliness and being a little bit goofy with it
and like playing with the feeling. These are all kind
of sensory or physical anchors. We can also use kinesthetic anchors,
which is basically just a fancy word for moving your
body like and really moving it. Don't just like look
(38:24):
at your hands and feet as they like wriggle that
can still feel kind of disorientating. I want you to
like fully rapidly violently shake your whole body, dance, stretch,
move run, just like spasm in the air. Do something
that you feel reconnects you with your limbs and your
fingers and your toenails. A twenty fourteen study that I
(38:47):
particularly love explored how dance therapy specifically helps people exit
association when other things aren't working because it creates kinesthetic awareness.
And this is our body's natural ability to detect and
locate and recognize our body, our form in space and time,
and our surroundings. And that kinesthetic awareness really activates something
(39:12):
mentally within us as well that obviously recognizes that we
must be present to be having this feeling, and so
it brings us back to our sense of realness. Even
like repetitive rhythmic movements like bouncing your knee or rolling
your shoulders or flowing moving your body have been shown
to provide that same grounding experience. It positions you back
(39:37):
in the room. It shows you that you are in control,
that you can feel time and space and movement around you.
It also helps you obviously release tension. We know that
stress is like a big trigger for dissociation. Sometimes that
may also be why this mechanism works. I will also say,
(39:58):
sometimes you don't want to think even more about the feeling,
but it's kind of liberating to argue with it, to
argue with that I'm not real, I'm not here thought.
If your mind is saying that I'm not real, this
isn't real whatever it is. This may sound counterintuitive, but
(40:18):
I think about how liberating that maybe would be if
that was true. Like, I know that this thought is
scary to me, but I argue with the thought, and
I think, but what if that was a good thing.
Let me explain, Like, if I wasn't real, it meant
that something would have to be controlling this experience, and
(40:42):
that makes me feel assured in the idea that something
is out there that is bigger than us. And that's
actually deeply comforting. And it's like you were trying to
scare me with this feeling. Actually a part of it
might be deeply like existentially validating, or you know another
thought that we have, like I'm not actually here. Well,
then that's fucking great. That eliminates a lot of my
(41:05):
social anxiety, doesn't it. Why am I so worried about
being perceived? If I'm not even real? If the perception
of me isn't even happening. Sometimes that's just like helpful
to turn off the anxiousness tap before I come back
down and realize like firstly that this feeling is quite silly,
and to challenge it, but also to say that, like,
(41:26):
even if this was the case, is that even a
bad thing? Because my anxiety and my panic that is
rising in response to my depersonalization or my derealization is
only rising because it is perceiving. It is a terrible,
terrifying thing. What if it wasn't? These are actually they
have a name, they call cognitive scripts. They have been
(41:48):
proven to help with this feeling. Another really famous one
that you've probably heard comes from the philosopher Renee de
cart which says, I think therefore I am also a
Billie Eilish song. Basically, this phrase, this mantra, I think
therefore I am, tells us that the very act of
doubting your own existence actually proves that you exist. How
(42:12):
because to doubt, you have to be thinking, and thinking
is something that only a conscious mind can do. The
very act of questioning, am I real? Is this real?
Is proof that you are? And I know if this
feels a little bit better. But that's the reassuring part.
(42:32):
The fact that you are noticing that you are dissociating,
that you are questioning reality. That is all proof that
you must be existing in order to have those thoughts,
even when it feels like the world is fuzzy or
your awareness isn't in itself a solid anchor. This in
(42:53):
itself is like something we can always come back to.
It's this subtle cognitive reminder that you may feel disconnected.
That's just your individual experience. It doesn't mean that reality
itself or the world around you has disappeared. It's just
a natural response to stress. It's a natural response to
(43:13):
perhaps trauma in your past. But even just not getting
enough sleep, even just having a really hard day. I
want to again remind you, this whole process of feeling
like everything is kind of blurring out or fuzzy or
not real, is your brain trying to just give you
a bit of a break and cut you some slack.
(43:35):
It definitely doesn't feel nice. It doesn't mean that it's wrong,
and it doesn't mean that something is wrong with you
or that something is this is an indicator of something
dangerous that's going to happen to you. I think this
is a gentle reminder that this is a human process.
(43:57):
This is just noise. Your brain isn't betraying you. It's
not trying to tell you something. It's just trying to
help you survive. You are real, you are here. I
promise you that you are listening to my voice in
your ears right now, that it's confirmation, and you're gonna
(44:20):
survive this. You're gonna survive this overwhelm. I know it
can feel super unpleasant, but everyone who has been through this,
which is if the estimates say nearly every person on
this planet has come through on the other side, and
if the worst case is that you are not real
or the world isn't real, actually that's not even a
bad thing. Necessarily, you will still be okay. You can
(44:44):
still trust yourself to get through that. It's not even
like that is the case, like when you start to
really question it, like you see how ridiculous it is.
But even in the most ridiculous fears aren't really that
scary if they were to actually come true, and they
weren't even so, so you're good on both fronts. Okay.
I think that's all we have time for today. I
(45:05):
hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned something.
I hope it felt validating. I hope that it's something
you can come back to when you are feeling that same,
like very scary, panicked feeling of not being here. We've
all been there, well, at least I can say I
most certainly have, and I have made it through, so
I hope my strategies are helpful as well. I want
(45:26):
to thank our research assistant, Libby Comvert, for her excellent
help in providing some research assistance for this episode. She
does an amazing job every single week, time after time,
so thank you, Libby. We also a couple of updates.
Now we have a substack. If you've ever wanted a
script for an episode or a transcript, we have one
(45:47):
of those available on our substack. You can go and subscribe,
And we have a YouTube channel. Every second episode every
episode on Friday is a video episode that you can
go on access there. I don't really talk about it enough,
but I probably should. So if watching podcasts is more
your thing, that's now an opportunity, that's now an option
for you. Make sure as well that you are following
(46:08):
us on Instagram at that Psychology Podcast You can send
me a dam with further questions or like queries or
episodes suggestions over there. But until next time, stay safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself. Remember, I promise you
are real. I promise you are present. I promise this
is real. We will talk very very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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