What is Dissociation in trauma?
Have you ever wondered what is dissociation in trauma? It’s a mechanism that happens during trauma, and it’s a symptom that happens after trauma. It happens during trauma in order to help you survive physical or psychological pain and overwhelm. It’s an automatic biological mechanism, that’s beyond your conscious control.
It has a biological objective which is to help your body survive if it’s maimed and losing blood. It releases hormones that numb sensation and pain. It has a similar psychological objective to help you survive the terror, horror and pain of what’s happening.
Problems arise if the dissociation keeps happening after the trauma has passed, when in reality you’re safe.
When Dissociation Starts
The mechanism happens during a traumatic experience such as sexual abuse or a car crash (single event trauma) when life is under threat.
Or it can happen in a relational context such as with parents/caregivers (developmental trauma), where little traumas happen repeatedly over time and add up to feel overwhelming and too much for the child to bear.
It could be due to no fault of the parent if they were emotionally unavailable and unattuned. Or it could be due to physical or psychological abuse and having an unpredictable, disconnected parent/caregiver (for eg a parent with addictions or personality disorders). In these cases, the child may dissociate as a matter of course and keep doing so throughout life until treated.
Triggered Dissociation
When dissociation is triggered after the trauma has passed (months, years, or in some cases decades afterwards), it’s usually because the original trauma/s haven’t been processed. They were experienced as too overwhelming and too painful with no one there to support you through it.
Being triggered is when something in the here and now triggers the original trauma (a smell, a sound, an expression, a person or thing), and it’s as if you’re reliving the trauma all over again. It’s unpredictable and can seem like your body is an unsafe place that’s out of your control, like a nightmare that repeats over and over again.
Triggers can be unknown and unconscious. It makes the world seem like an unsafe place and interferes with being able to live a normal life.
How to Recognise What is Dissociation in Trauma
"If you dissociate, you may feel disconnected from yourself and the world around you. For example, you may feel detached from your body or feel as though the world around you is unreal. Remember, everyone’s experience of dissociation is different." - mind.org.uk
To understand what is dissociation in trauma, it’s helpful to know how dissociation can show up:
Clumsiness
Disconnection from your body
Certain areas of the body that can’t be sensed or felt
“Checking out” during conversations
“Checking out” emotionally
Not feeling real
Not remembering how you got somewhere
Losing time (all of a sudden it’s the end of the day or hours later and you’ve no idea what you’ve been doing)
Feeling as if you’re watching yourself without any control over what you say or do
Being completely outside of your body such as on the ceiling looking down on yourself
In severe cases of dissociative identity disorder (DID), it shows up as switching between different personalities (with different names, ages and identities) who may or may not be aware of each other
I hope this blog has helped you to get a better understanding of what is dissociation in trauma, and how to recognise it. Remember that dissociation can show up differently for everyone, and to different degrees of mildness or severity.
One person can experience something as traumatic where another person doesn’t, we’re all unique and respond to things differently depending on our character and resilience.
If you can relate, would you like some help?
If you can relate to anything in this blog on what is dissociation in trauma and would like help, I’d be happy to hear from you. Use the contact form and we can book a time for a free 15-minute telephone consultation to talk about how I might be able to support you.
If you’d like to learn more about how to manage your dissociation, take a look at my blog on 10 Grounding Techniques for Dissociation.