Dissociation can be difficult to explain, especially when you don’t have words for what you are experiencing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Perhaps you sometimes feel disconnected from yourself, your emotions or your body. The world around you might feel distant, unreal or somehow different. You may lose track of time, struggle to remember parts of your day, or simply have moments when you don’t feel quite like yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For some people these experiences happen occasionally. For others, they can be a much bigger part of everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And sometimes, if you have experienced things this way for a long time, you may not realise that what you are experiencing has a name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its simplest, dissociation means disconnection<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Usually, our thoughts, feelings, memories, sense of ourselves and awareness of the world feel connected. With dissociation, some of those things can become separated or feel less connected than usual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That can happen in lots of different ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might feel emotionally numb when you know you would normally expect to feel something. You might feel detached from your body or as though you are observing yourself from a distance. This is sometimes called depersonalisation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At other times, the world around you may seem strange, distant, foggy or dreamlike, even though you know where you are. This is known as derealisation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some people there may be gaps in memory or periods of time they find difficult to account for. Others may experience changes in their sense of themselves or feel disconnected from different aspects of who they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There isn’t one particular way that dissociation is supposed to feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There isn’t always a simple answer to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dissociation can happen during periods of anxiety, panic, stress or overwhelm, and it is also commonly associated with trauma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes experiences are simply too much to take in all at once. When we can’t escape what is happening around us, creating some distance from our emotions, sensations or awareness can be one way of getting through something that feels unbearable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For people who experienced overwhelming or frightening things when they were young, dissociation may have developed before they had the words or understanding to make sense of what was happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that way, rather than thinking of dissociation as something strange or wrong, it can sometimes be helpful to become curious about what it may have been doing for you<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Something that helped you cope at one point in your life, though, may continue to happen long after the circumstances around you have changed. That can become confusing, frightening or exhausting, particularly when you don’t understand why it is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dissociation is different for everyone. You might recognise some of these experiences and none of the others:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some people know that these experiences are unusual and find them frightening. Other people have lived with them for so long that they simply seem normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have always experienced the world in a particular way, how would you know that other people experience it differently?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes it is only when somebody describes dissociation that things begin to make a little more sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Experiencing dissociation doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a dissociative disorder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some people it is occasional and doesn’t particularly trouble them. For others, it can happen frequently and begin to affect everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Losing time, struggling with memory, feeling disconnected from yourself or finding that the world around you doesn’t feel quite real can be difficult to live with. It can affect relationships, work, study and ordinary day-to-day activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps one of the hardest things can be not knowing what is happening<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People can spend a long time trying to make sense of experiences they don’t have language for. Some may worry that something is terribly wrong, that they are losing control, or that nobody will understand them if they try to explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finding a name for an experience doesn’t provide all the answers, but sometimes it can make things feel a little less confusing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are different types of dissociative disorder, but experiencing dissociation doesn’t automatically mean that you have one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A diagnosis isn’t something you need to work out from a list of symptoms on a website. People’s experiences are much more individual and complicated than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you recognise yourself in some of what you have read here, it is okay not to know exactly what it means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can begin simply with noticing what you experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If dissociation is frightening, confusing or making everyday life difficult, you may find it helpful to talk to someone who understands dissociation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is okay to ask a counsellor or other professional about their experience and knowledge in this area. Not everyone will have the same understanding of dissociation, and finding someone with whom you feel safe enough to talk about experiences that may already be difficult to describe can matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Counselling doesn’t have to begin with trying to make the dissociation stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes it begins much more gently: noticing what happens, becoming curious about when it happens, understanding what might make things feel safer or more difficult, and gradually finding ways of staying connected to the present when that feels possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There doesn’t need to be a rush to understand everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Experiences that may have developed over many years can take time to make sense of, and that understanding can develop gradually within a relationship where you feel listened to rather than judged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have recognised something of yourself while reading this, you don’t need to have it all figured out before talking to someone about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes being able to say \u201cthis happens to me, but I don’t really understand it\u201d<\/strong> is enough of a place to begin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover image courtesy of Elijah Hiett.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dissociation can be difficult to explain, especially when you don’t have words for what you are experiencing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":221,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why does it happen?<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What might I notice?<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
When dissociation becomes difficult<\/strong><\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What about dissociative disorders?<\/strong><\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Finding support<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n