eli5 what is disassociating? Tried looking online but I don’t understand.
In: 3094
When the things in your head seem more immediate, pressing, and real than the things physically arouns you. Or when you don’t feel much of anything at all, including what’s around you.
DisAssociating is where you cease to associate. Examples include being disassociated from your church.
Dissociating is mentally leaving the scene. It’s a protective mechanism during a traumatic experience. Sometimes trauma sticks around. This condition is called “post traumatic stress disorder.” One symptom of ptsd is dissociating. Sometimes, certain sounds, smells, or situations can remind someone of the traumatic situation so their mind sort of tunes out from the current reality.
You ever suddenly feel like you’re in a Dream? Or for me, I suddenly become very aware of everything. Aware of my own awareness, if that makes sense. That’s dissociation, to me.
A lot of responses here are going by the clinical definition. Dissociation is a spectrum. Majority of people perceive it to be the intense personality shift of D.I.D, the feeling like you’re in a dream/living third person, or like you’re juuuust out of phase with yourself, so you’re on extreme autopilot.
I won’t get into how the DSM-V is under-serving us here since it doesn’t talk about complex/early childhood PTSD or the emotional dysregulation that comes with ADHD.
Dissociation can be as simple as doom scrolling, time blindness due to intense focus on a game or hobby, the “blah”, numb feeling at the end of the day where you’re not really present or paying attention to what’s going on around you. Intellectualizing, compartmentalizing, etc.
It’s a response to stress, which is often due to external stimulation and not knowing how to and/or feel safe to identify and feel your emotions. We go through the day dismissing and minimizing are emotions and that feedback goes somewhere, which is back into our central nervous system.
Nearly all of us don’t know how to exist in emotions we don’t want to feel (“negative” emotions”) safely, and we feel those daily. We’ve often had to adapt to not having the space, modeling, or language to express our emotions because our family of origin and cultures shame us for having them. So our mind finds ways to protect us from the stress and constant feedback loop without direct release because we learned that we are bad if we express emotions that aren’t socially acceptable to express.
A real ELI5: Your brain and central nervous system learned years ago that it’s not safe to feel distressing emotions due to fear of rejection, disconnection, and loneliness. Now all stress and trauma follow the same path to varying intensities. From avoiding existing in your body quietly without distraction to full on creating an altered state of consciousness.
A really real ELI5: Your brain learned first person view is too intense, so it tries to make you play in third person to reduce feeling overwhelmed.
…true ELI5: Your brain would rather exist outside of you than in if you make it feel like a it’s in a bear hug by the human torch.
Dissociating can be even just daydreaming at work on the highway or in class. Its simply NOT being in your current reality.. mentally being elsewhere.
We all dissociate sometimes. Doing it isnt a disordered behavior.
Its common.
However, some people do it TOO much, and have a hard time controlling it.
Some people dissociate from one aspect of their life only.
Some dissociate and go into an alternate reality.
Most of the time, dissociation has nothing to do with psychosis, which is a full break from reality.
The lights are on but nobody is home.
I’m present, my body is there, but my mind is very distracted. I am not aware of myself usually.
Ever drive to work, get there, and have no memory of the drive?
That’s like a very minor form of dissociation. You were fully conscious and aware the entire time, but somehow the “you” in control during the drive did not sync up with the “you” that left the house and arrived at work.
A serious form of dissociating would be someone who is/has experienced severe trauma, almost acting as though it didn’t happen as a way to cope. Hostages that have been rescued after extended ordeals, usually after having been assaulted numerous times, might express concern to their rescuers about missing school or work or other mundane daily activities rather than breaking down and crying. They were conscious and aware the during their entire trauma, but as a coping mechanism, seem to be processing it as an out-of-body experience, as though it didn’t happen to them somehow.
It’s like your brain isn’t “showing it’s work”, it’s just writing down the answers.
Dissociating is a problem I’ve had my entire life as I developed C-PTSD from my loving family.
I’ll try to explain my experience:
Say I’m at a gathering of friends. There are 8 people in total. These are people that I’ve grown up with and am comfortable around. I always start out focusing on the conversation and the events taking place, but I slowly start feeling my focus drifting until my body seems to be running on autopilot while my mind is just elsewhere. I experience none of the emotions my friends are experiencing, I listen to their conversations but I don’t actually HEAR any of it. I remember nothing. The entire experience of spending quality time with my friends has been reduced to just another jumbled mess in my head that I can’t quite piece together. I barely know what was said and it just makes me feel like more of an outsider.
The biggest problem for me is that this happens every. single. day. In every. single. encounter I have. I always feel so far removed from everyone and everything.
Mental health professional here. My ELI5 answer:
“Disassociating” (known more often as “dissociating”) is typically experienced by most people either as feeling “outside of your body” (i.e. seeing the things you are doing/happening to you as if watching yourself in a movie) or feeling as if things are not “real” (i.e. you have a sense you are in a dream but you are still inside your own body). This also typically happens as a result of very difficult feelings related to trauma.
More in-depth (non-ELI5) answer, including definitions from the DSM-5 and ICD-11, here:
https://estd.org/what-dissociation
For ease of access, here are the DSM-5 and ICD-11 definitions:
DSM-5: a disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior
ICD-11: involuntary disruption or discontinuity in the normal integration of memories, thoughts, identity, affects, sensations, perceptions, behavior, or control over bodily movements
I have depersonalization, too, along with trauma based dissociation.
It’ll feel like I’ve been pushed to the back of my skull and my body is acting independently. Sometimes it’s an extreme freeze response (I can’t move at all), other times my body does an action on autopilot and it’s like I’m watching from the back of my head. If I’m in that state and doing a thing like playing a video game, my body acting independently can result in mistakes I wouldn’t usually make because it gets stuck in a motor pattern (like muscle memory) that may not apply to that moment in game. For example, I’ll go into the pause menu over and over, or be trying to get back out of it but click the options or settings over and over instead.
The depersonalization feels like I’m no longer a real human. It can happen when I’m ignored because someone didn’t hear me talk (I’m a quiet speaker). I’ll get this sudden feeling like everyone else is real but I’m a ghost, I’m not really there, I’m the only one who can see and hear me, etc. It happens more often when I’ve had trauma dreams the night before (cptsd is a bitch).
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