Remember

Overcoming Dissociation: A Guide to Reconnection

This is in response to the post I wrote about my dissociation experience.

How to Reconnect After Dissociating

There were three main areas I needed to focus on:

  1. I needed to reconnect with my body (this deals with depersonalization)
  2. I needed to increase my conscious awareness of the present moment (this deals dissociative amnesia)
  3. And I needed to reconnect back to the world (this deals with derealization)

Reconnecting with Your Body (Depersonalization)

Depersonalization involves feeling disconnected from yourself—your body, thoughts, and emotions—almost as if you’re watching yourself from the outside. Reconnecting with your body and sense of self is the key focus.

Addressing Depersonalization:

1. Body Awareness and Grounding:

• Body-focused grounding techniques are essential for depersonalization. Practices such as body scans, progressive muscle relaxation, and physical sensations (e.g., feeling textures, taking a warm bath, or holding something cold) help you reconnect with your physical body.

• Breath awareness is also useful—focusing on the rhythm of your breathing and the sensation of air entering and leaving your body helps you feel more embodied.

2. Physical Movement and Exercise:

• Moving your body—through yoga, stretching, or even walking—helps bring awareness back to the physical sensations of being in your body. Activities that require focus on your body, like dancing or working out, can be particularly helpful.

3. Connecting with Emotions:

• Depersonalization often involves emotional disconnection, so engaging in practices that help you reconnect with emotions—like journaling about how you feel, discussing emotions in therapy, or expressing emotions through creative outlets—can help reduce depersonalization episodes.

4. Self-Compassion and Reaffirming Identity:

• Reminding yourself who you are and engaging in self-compassion practices can help restore a sense of identity. Activities that reinforce self-awareness—like affirming your values, engaging in hobbies, or talking about yourself in a positive way—can reduce the detachment caused by depersonalization.

Reconnecting with the World (Derealization)

Derealization is the feeling that the external world is unreal or distant. People feel detached from their surroundings, as if they are in a dream-like state. Reconnecting with the external world is the key focus.

Addressing Derealization:

1. Sensory Grounding:

• To address derealization, grounding through the five senses is a crucial strategy. Focusing on tangible aspects of the environment—what you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell—helps reconnect to the world around you.

• Examples include naming objects around you, feeling the texture of surfaces, or focusing on sounds and smells in your environment.

2. Mindfulness of the Present Moment:

• Mindfulness practices help you anchor your awareness in the present. For example, focusing on your breathing or the sensations in your body can help counter the dreamlike disconnection of derealization.

3. Physical Movement:

• Moving your body in space, such as going for a walk or engaging in physical tasks, helps you become more aware of your environment and reconnect with reality.

4. Environmental Engagement:

• Actively interacting with your surroundings, such as touching or manipulating objects or focusing on the layout of the space, can help break the sense of detachment from the world.

How to Address Dissociative Amnesia:

Dissociative amnesia involves memory loss, often related to trauma, where the brain blocks out specific memories. Addressing dissociative amnesia focuses on recovering and reintegrating memories and processing trauma that may have caused the memory loss.

Addressing Dissociative Amnesia:

1. Memory Recovery:

• Gradually explore gaps in memory through trauma-focused therapy (e.g., EMDR or somatic therapy), where a trained therapist guides you in revisiting the past safely and at your own pace.

• Journaling can help you track your daily experiences and explore lost memories over time.

• Mindfulness and meditation can assist in bringing forgotten memories to consciousness by increasing self-awareness and helping you stay present.

2. Processing Trauma:

• Since dissociative amnesia is often linked to unresolved trauma, therapeutic work focuses on trauma processing. Techniques like CBT, EMDR, and somatic therapy help to work through trauma, reduce the need for dissociation, and reintegrate the blocked memories.

• Grounding techniques can be useful to avoid becoming overwhelmed while revisiting traumatic memories, helping to stay anchored in the present.

3. Stabilizing Your Environment:

• Creating a sense of safety and security is essential. Dissociative amnesia often occurs as a defense mechanism, so working on feeling safe in the present (e.g., through support networks, safe spaces, or reducing stress) helps to lessen the brain’s need to block memories.

FAQs

The key to preventing dissociation is to increase the flexibility of your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). By doing so, you improve your body’s ability to adapt to internal and external stressors more efficiently.

Staying consciously aware and grounded in the present moment allows your ANS to heal and recover over time. Mindfulness is essential—pay attention to your thoughts, recognize your triggers, and address the root causes of stress. Grounding techniques can help you stay connected to the present when you feel yourself beginning to space out or dissociate. It’s helpful to have a “grounding plan” in place for moments when dissociation starts to take hold.

Here are some strategies to support your well-being and prevent dissociation:

  • Prioritize physical health: Eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly, and ensure you’re getting enough rest.
  • Use grounding techniques: Try slow, mindful breathing, focus on surrounding sounds, or walk barefoot to reconnect with your environment.
  • Develop mindfulness skills: Mindfulness can help you confront difficult emotions and make space for them, rather than avoiding or dissociating from them.
  • Build a support network: Engage with others who have had similar experiences through support groups, online communities, or personal stories.
  • Reduce daily stress: Work to prevent anxiety from becoming overwhelming by managing stressors in your day-to-day life.

Additional ways to help prevent dissociative episodes include keeping a journal, practicing visualization, and developing a personal crisis plan for when dissociation starts to occur.

Effective treatments for dissociation include:

  • Medications: Such as antipsychotics, antidepressants, or anti-anxiety medications to help manage symptoms.
  • Psychotherapy: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) can be particularly helpful.
  • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): A therapy designed to help process traumatic memories.

Dissociation refers to being disconnected from the present moment. It is a subconscious way of coping with and avoiding a traumatic situation or negative thoughts.

Dissociation usually happens in response to a traumatic life event such as that which is faced while being in the military or experiencing abuse. In this way, dissociation is usually associated with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, dissociation can also happen in the context of anxiety symptoms and anxiety disorders.

Often, dissociation that happens due to extreme stress or panic is recognized but attributed to other causes such as health issues. A person with panic disorder may seek medical attention for these symptoms and feel powerless to stop them.

Overall, dissociation interferes with the treatment of all types of disorders and makes it hard to pay attention to the present moment. It can also slow or prevent healthy trauma processing and coping. Because of this, it’s important to address dissociation through treatment and learn ways to cope.

Grounding techniques often use the five senses—sound, touch, smell, taste, and sight—to immediately connect you with the here and now. For example, singing a song, rubbing lotion on your hands, or sucking on sour candy are all grounding techniques that produce sensations that are difficult to ignore or distract you from what’s going on in your mind.

This helps you directly and instantaneously connect with the present moment. At the same time, grounding reduces the likelihood that you will slip into a flashback or dissociation.

How you ground yourself is highly personal. What works for one person may trigger anxiety or flashbacks in another. You may need to do some trial and error to figure out what grounding techniques work best for you. Pay attention to the coping mechanisms you’ve already developed to help you get through flashbacks and anxiety and see if you can build on them and/or use them as grounding techniques.

While the exact cause of dissociation is unclear, experts note that dissociation correlates with mood and anxiety disorders and is also a way of dealing with trauma. As a result, dissociation often affects people who have experienced the following types of trauma:

  • Accidents
  • Assault
  • Natural disasters
  • Military combat
  • Sexual or physical abuse

When dissociation is related to anxiety or panic, it tends to occur for a shorter period of time than when it is due to trauma or abuse or as a symptom of a diagnosable dissociative disorder.

In the case of anxiety, it is constant, low-level stress that puts a strain on your nervous system and eventually may cause you to dissociate to protect yourself; but remember, this all happens mostly at a level that you are likely not aware of.

There are three types of dissociative disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). However, these are separate from dissociation related to anxiety:

  • Depersonalization disorder: Characterized by ongoing feelings that you are detached from the world around you
  • Dissociative amnesia: Characterized by trouble remembering events or having amnesia for events due to dissociation
  • Dissociative identity disorder: Characterized by the presence of two or more distinct personalities and gaps in memory (formerly known as multiple personality disorder)