eli5 what is disassociating? Tried looking online but I don’t understand.
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It kind of feels like you are looking through your eyes as someone else. You feel like you are inside your body instead of being your body.
The movie being john Malkovich (thank you orange fudge for the correct spelling) is a good artistic analogy.
I’d relate it to looking through a window, but the window is your own eyes. Your conscious is separated from your body in some way. However, if you really want to know, try some ketamine, horses love it.
If you are talking about psychology, it is a state where “you” are not experiencing reality as it is normally, functionally experienced.
Typically “you” are experiencing the world around you through your own senses and making decisions based on your interactions with that world. Subject to limitations of perspective, the reality that you describe will be consistent with what others around you also describe.
Somebody dissociating may no longer feel like they are inhabiting their own body. There’s somebody over there who you know is “you” but you are not controlling that person directly, or experiencing what they are experiencing, or feeling what they are feeling.
Another example is if you have created a false reality that “you” are sure is correct. You distinctly remember having a conversation with a friend about a certain topic, but that friend claims it never happened, and others support their claim.
In both cases, you are not experiencing reality in a functional way.
Why can this happen? Personally, I have narcolepsy, and like most people with the condition, my dreams are cinematic. It’s like they are really happening. False memories are easy to generate if you dwell on those dreams. Combine that situation with the “brain fog” that comes from a lack of proper sleep that is also part of narcolepsy, and both forms of dissociation described above can occur all too easily. I constantly fight to stay centered in reality, refusing to dwell on my dreams, and continually reminding myself to stay in the moment during my waking hours.
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inNoStupidQuestions
I suffer from mental illness (PTSD) and I have a history of disassociation. I’ll try my best.
First, it’s helpful to understand why disassociation happens and I think it is best from an evolutionary perspective.
Suppose you’re in nature and a Jaguar attacks you. It starts dragging you back to its tree to eat you. In those moments, you could feel the pain of the initial attack, the blood, the fear, your impending death. You could feel every sensation and pain. It would be excruciating.
Or you can disassociate from the pain. Your brain shuts off various processing. Just like shutting down or pausing a computer program. Your know what’s happening. You’re not spaced out and unaware of your surroundings. You know you’re being prepared for a Jaguar’s meal. Yet, you don’t feel anything and you don’t really act as one might expect given the danger. You’re not thrashing your arms about trying to escape or yelling and screaming. Those are to a large extent unproductive and might even agitate the Jaguar to hurt you more. You’ll often see this on nature shows where a gazelle goes kinda limp after being attacked. It’s still very much alive. It’s just not doing anything as it knows it is gone. Believe it or not, if the Jaguar lets it go to fend off some hyenas, it’s possible the gazelle snaps out of it and runs away to safety.
That’s basically what happens to me when I face terribly painful events. I just accept it’s happening to me and go through the motions. Eventually I hope I snap out of it and then I can take action or something. It’s extremely frustrating because once you snap out of it, you obviously think… why didn’t I do this or that to get me out of the situation. You get a lot of regret.
It’s why even as a guy when a woman says she was raped and froze, I have a lot of empathy there. I know what that’s like. You very well might just disassociate and feel you have no choice in what is happening and just let the rapist go through the motions until it’s done.
Or a child who has abusive parents who beat them daily for the sake of it. That child might not leave or take ‘rational’ action. They might just disassociate from the daily beating and just take it and go through the motions. They don’t really process what is happening or decide to take action.
As a guy, I stayed in terrible situations, even abusive situations for way longer than I should have. I just disassociate from the pain. That’s what it is. It’s a coping mechanism I developed in childhood from abuse and violence.
I don’t think you’d want to do it. Your body can do it. You probably have the genetics to do it. If you’re ever in a truly horrific painful experience, your body will probably do it automatically. I guess you could try and put yourself in such a situation, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Maybe there are drugs or methods to simulate disassociation, but it’s something I try to avoid, not do 🙂
On the other hand, people have said I’m oddly calm in emergencies. The one time I got caught in public disassociating was in a car accident where I got hit by a truck. I could have died I suppose. I just disassociated and went through the motions not processing the danger I went through. Everyone was panicking around me, I was just numb. Okay, lets get insurance… I texted my wife ‘Going to be late. Got in accident’ She got pretty upset I didn’t call or anything. But again, I’m in a dissociative state, just taking care of what is needed. My brain was just thinking. Report back to wife. Let her know reason. Very primitive thinking
Ever drive somewhere that you’ve gone to plenty of times and you know the route by heart, and every once in awhile you say stop at a light or sign on the way and have a momentary flash of not exactly remembering every moment of getting there?
If you are looking at TikTok videos with people disassociating, that is fake. Disassociative identity disorder (DID) is devastating and there isn’t anyone online doing cutesy videos where they will themselves into other personalities or nonsense like that.
If you are talking about disassociation in the casual sense, that would be considered closer to a meditative state that is induced through relaxation and sensory depravation where one can feel separated from themselves and become unaware of the physical body. Think of your lower back, you are always aware of where it is and can touch it, being disassociated would be not being aware of your lower back, or anything about your physical form at all. Noises stop making sense and are just sounds in the background.
During trauma, many people disassociate from the situation and just go into their own world and become detached from the events occurring around them. This is considered much more common than DID and is much closer to the meditative state I describe earlier, but it does not require meditation to enter, just a mental retreat into a place that is away from the current situation.
Disassociation is, quite simply put, feeling disconnected from your body. Typically you feel like you’re in a brain fog, you aren’t very focused on feelings or sensations–often feeling removed from them, have trouble concentrating, etc.
There is also, ‘Blackout Dissociation’, were you “wake up” in a place in a place and have no idea how you got there or what happened. About 15 years ago, I was under a ton of stress, both at work and at home, and this would happen to me, I would “black out” anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours. For example, I was at work in a very stressful meeting, I “woke up” about 5kms away, just walking down the street, I looked at my watch, 2 hours had passed since I was in the meeting. When I got back to work, everyone was worried, I asked what happened, they said I just got up from my chair, walked out without saying a word, and left. Very scary feeling.
I’ve dissociated from PTSD only once in my life, but it was scary. My hearing was muffled, I couldn’t speak or make eye contact, I felt that there was an invisible barrier between me and my surroundings keeping me from interacting with anything. It lasted 20 minutes or so.
Your brain prioritizes different mental processes and inputs by how important it judges them to be in a particular moment. When your brain significantly decreases priority for much more external inputs than it usually does, you feel dissociated.
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