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Cheers

Jess

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OKAY! Continuing in this effort to summarize everything we’ve learned in the past 18 months of this show, that way we can all be on the same page moving forward like this motherfucking trauma revolution march demands. Let’s talk about something that we probably know we do – or at least we’ve heard about it a few times – but also have absolutely no idea the depths of what it really means, on a practical level.

Dissociation.

They talk about this happening in times of extreme stress. The mind and the brain unfuse, essentially, leaving the individual in an altered state. Some people go blank, some people have flashbacks, some people have elaborate behavioral instruction systems that are engaged and forgotten. It’s a whole separate spectrum of disorders, when we talk about Dissociation.

But… is it?

So here’s my easy take on dissociation.

We’ve already covered the fact that you have a basic animal survival system and a logical, higher thinking system which we associate with being human. Just like when we experience a traumatic event and our energy is reallocated to powering only the “oh shit” emergency sympathetic connections… we talked about this in the “What is PTSD” episode… it seems like we do the same thing throughout the rest of life. I would say, with increasing proficiency as we learn how to use this skill time and time again.

This mental switch towards just reacting on bare brain basics, turning off as many extra bells and whistles as possible, not consciously tuning into what’s happening, just getting through it… is what we tend to think of as dissociation, in a nutshell.

A system overreliance and a matching “shut down” that leaves you untethered from your higher brain activities, like logic, self-recognition and autobiographical memory.

But, there’s a big caveat in my dissociative views. I think (and, as always, I could be wrong) that you can dissociate in either direction – as in, in favor of using your animal brain OR your human brain. It seems like when you’re emotionally and experientially overwhelmed, you’ll prioritize handling those bodily events. You’ll lean heavily towards handling the physical concerns raging all around you – the sensory system and associated animal brain.

But, during a time of mentally stimulating density, I think you’ll flip the other way. You’ll cut the ties to your emotional system and enlist your logical brain to get through the piles of paperwork. Emotionally dissociate and power-up the logical brain, we have work to do.

So what’s it feel like?

On the level of switching into pure emotional or survival brained territory, I think this is best conceptualized through the sensation of a panic attack or grief. The depths of emotion and emergency can get in the way of fancy human functioning. If you aren’t tossed into fight or flight mode, there are a lot of “zoned out” periods, when staring at a wall seems ideal. What are you thinking about? Everything and yet nothing at all. Just feeling your memories and present moment in a way that bypasses words.

As far as getting too intellectually dominance, this feels, for me, like experiencing life from the front-top of my head, which has the sensation of being under pressure. Having no connection to my emotional core in the center of my body. Rapidly shuffling through thoughts in a frantic manner, anxious, hypervigilant and on a mission for achievement. Dizzy with details about everything I need to do.

Each time, a different system is engaged, but the mechanism is the same – your head is just trying to handle what seems most critical at that moment by playing up the academic primate brain or animal survival brain that’s most relevant.

That being said, I feel like the opposite can also happen. Those systems can be flooded and push you into the opposing option. I think that being in a place that’s TOO mentally stimulating will eventually make the human brain connection shut down. Similarly, a situation that’s TOO emotionally bumpy will cut off the links to feeling anything at all.

In both of these ways, whether we’re pushed out of a system activation or pulled into a system activation, I think we traumatized folks often volley back and forth between dominantly using our forebrain or more rudimentary brain. This also affects the access to animal or narrative memory systems, not to mention the nervous system, which will be flung into survival extremes of overdrive or underdrive.

It’s the same split-system mechanism as what takes place during trauma, with our body trying to rapidly adapt to new information with the most energy-conserving method of survival possible..

Just, we learn to do it on a day to day scale that we now accept as “normal.” and even “adaptive.”

But how does this explain the actual experience of dissociation?

Well, if you’re in a blanked out, zoned out, can’t string two thoughts together state where you’re honestly forgetting details about your own life – this is probably a dissociative event when you prioritized your feeling system. It feels like being mentally numbed.

If you’re trapped in your head, overthinking, overanalyzing, planning, and worrying, trying to make sense of a big event that just happened… you might notice that you’re physically numbed out, instead. This is when we lose track of our own bodily needs, turn off the emotional rollercoaster, and probably forget how to feel at all over enough time.

Emotional numbers out there – folks who unpredictably have 0 or 100 on the feeling scale, but nothing in between – this is you. And I know, we might not even think this is a bad thing all the time. It’s kindof helpful not to feel, when you have so much to get done. Story of this Fucker’s life.

Mental numbers out there – those who drudge through emotions every day but have trouble with executive functioning – I also feel like that can be acutely relieving. Sometimes it’s nice just not to think. But obviously over time this will also degrade quality of life when you have no awareness of real-life details and demands.

Problem, overall, being, this dissociation mechanism isn’t very controllable. We can’t turn it off, at will. And it leads to really only living half a life, with half of the experiences necessary to engage with the whole planet. I think we can get stuck in lifetime patterns of mild to moderate dissociation. For instance, when you end up with a completely emotionless mother or father who can only see things through humanistic, analytical glasses… they might be dissociative lifers. Focused too hard on the “human performance” part of the brain to let their living body speak up, multiplied by a few decades.

And, not only will this eventually cause health problems. But I think, at a fundamental level, that most of us are a bit disturbed when we do realize we’re emotionally numb. It feels like, well, half of this living experience is missing. “What’s the point?” when you feel completely disconnected from everything you’re stressing through? This can cause a crisis of its own.

Dissociation can be a daily event. But dissociation, itself, usually doesn’t cause you too much suffering – by design. That’s the whole point of it, right? To be less tortured in whatever way possible?

At least, until the day you stop being as dissociated, and notice everything you’ve been missing running on half a brain.

It can be pretty disturbing if you lose that full control of your head. Let’s talk about one more thing that I see as a type of full biology dissociation. Depersonalization and/or derealization.

Are they the same or different things? In my experience, it’s questionable.

During this depersonalization, you’re… unaware of your experience. Or at least extremely unsure of it. It feels like being in a dream. Watching yourself living, at times. Feeling like nothing matters anyways, because there’s no real linkage to the protein suit you’re observing. You lose the connection to a continuous identity or any familiarity with your observing consciousness, the Self.

And, man, let me say… it helps you get through completely uncontrollably upsetting times of life by being level 1000 aloof, but in the end, it’ll also really fuck with you.

Derealization?

More or less the same break from accepting your senses as valid. But you doubt if ANYTHING is real, not just YOU. DOES this sound like it’s one step away from psychosis? Yeah. And it’ll feel like it whether you’re depersonalized or derealized. I think this is where a lot of we traumatized individuals show up to therapy worried that we’re “finallly going crazy.”

Well, kid, you’re not far from it, if we can’t get your human AND animal brains back on line.

But at the base of it, I think that these extreme events are still just the same forms of strategically turning off brain connections in a dissociative manner – just… maybe a bit too thoroughly.

If you lose the human brain system AND the emotional system, such as, oh, I don’t know, during 18 months of living with increasing mental abuse up a creek without a paddle, you might end up depersonalized. I did. And I knew what was happening the whole time. And still couldn’t convince myself I was real life. That’s how powerful this brain mechanism is.

Nature finds a way.

So there you go. Daily dissociative events, explained. Extreme dissociative events: explained. What’s left?

Oh, the whole other half of this dissociative story.

Now speaking on this topic only gets more complicated from here.

Because we don’t always necessarily dissociate into a whole brain system, like I’ve described. Actually, we can also dissociate into smaller, compartmentalized portions of our learned brain system.

What the fuck does that mean? Well, when we have traumas, we tend to want to avoid those painful areas where the memories are stored on a neuronal level. We sew this information into our heads that we don’t necessarily want to replay, so we try to disconnect the neurons that store that data as much as possible to reduce the risk of accidentally wandering down a dark and dangerous thought path.

Nothing like swimming in memories from 20 years ago in the middle of a work meeting, you know? Let’s push this hard bit wayyyy over here, to the back of this mental shelf.

We also do this when we’ve adequately shamed ourselves for any past event. Like we mentioned before, we love to blame ourselves when we don’t have an explanation for things going sideways. We also love to use shame to punish ourselves for our perceived social failures, per evolution’s demands.

So, once we build up all this painful shame around any old event, traumatic or not, we also tend to start snipping those neural connections. Pushing that version of ourselves that we thoroughly hate far, far away from our usual daily programming. And by “version of ourselves” I just mean the memories and instructions that we had been using via our brain cells at the time of the negative event. Our operating program at the point of impact.

You can call this set of neurons a trauma-associated “personality” or an “identity.” A construct of self that lives in our learned brain architecture.

And when we start trying to erase our past versions of self this results in… having fragmented neural bits that can be triggered, which are full of emotional and visceral memories alongside unfinished narrative ones. When engaged, these mini brain systems launch us into dissociative hallucinations, flashbacks.

Also, into what’s known as dissociative identities.

That’s it. When we talk about multiple personalities, this is the brain mechanism we’re discussing.

Compartmentalized bits of brain cell connections that present as personalities. It’s real. And we all do it. Everyone has a “work self” a “home self” a “on the town self” and so on. Our only common difference around this crowd is, we often have dissociative identities that are programmed as trauma responses and hidden away. As in, they’re extreme reactions based on extreme events using extreme survival tactics that we hate. And we don’t WANT to use them.

You might have a fight, a flight, a freeze, and a fawn dissociative response, for instance. Becoming “a different person” in every situation, based on survival system activation that knocks out your ability to perceive, process, or direct the events from your logical prefrontal cortex.

So, when you black out in a rage. When you have no idea why you said or did that atrocious thing. When you’re overcome with the feeling of being a past you, looking at a past someone from your past history in the middle of a currently rough fight… You might be slipping into a dissociative identity born of trauma learning. You had to get through those hard times, somehow. And what you learned might not have been pretty.

Now, years down the line, you’re extra-ashamed when you accidentally “become that person again” or “a part of you can’t handle that situation” or “A different side of you comes out”

Seriously, start noticing the common vernacular referencing dissociative events, we talk about them all the time in modern society. Only, we pretend this is a humanistic construct, not our biological brain doing its duties.

Anyways. Dissociative brain networks – fragmented neural systems – are some of the biggest challenges for us to overcome in trauma therapy and long term recovery. They have the power to freak us out enough that we get stuck in a ruminatory trap. They can halt our progress when we suddenly switch into “not having the personal control or faith in therapy” all of a sudden.

We can also start living out of these trauma-programmed pieces of our brains if we feel under-threat for long enough, becoming shut down, chronically angry, and unable to get away from our shit memories. Welcome to something known as a “Trauma-Self.”

So you might want to get a therapist who specializes in dissociation, Internal Family Systems, or personality disorders is what I’m saying. Add that to the challenge of getting professional help, as is.

But perhaps the most challenging part is, we can trigger all of these aforementioned “above a certain stress threshold” dissociative events…. Ourselves. Anyone and anything can, really. Because I’ve oversimplified for clarity so far. Honestly, it doesn’t have to be stress that causes dissociation.

It can literally be ANYTHING that pings one of those compartmentalized neural networks and throws you into a dissociative space.

Any stimulation that’s similar to something already stored in your head can be the match that lights the forest fire known as “completely detaching from your physical being” or “swimming in forgotten emotional oceans of the brain,” or “becoming someone else.”

It all just depends on the specifics of your learned survival responses. A mild social stress? Dissociate. A financial stress? Dissociate. An emotional being, throwing emotional vibes at you? Dissociate. A certain word, smell, song, or location? Dissociate. Even a new level of comfort that opens old brain pathways? Dissociate.

And when it gets that easy to lose control of your head, we really don’t know what to make of it. Leading to those “going insane” approximations.

But as baffling and nonsensical as the whole stupid fucking brain thing feels… it’s actually pretty fucking smart what your brain is doing. Continually just trying to learn from past experiences. To protect you from them now. But also to use them to protect you from similar danger in the future.

If you’re looking to learn more about dissociation, depersonalization, or dissociative identities in the context of this neural network talk (you probably, really should, it’ll change your outlook on everything), I’ve already put out quite a few episodes on these topics. Including real accounts from Fuckers like YOU. Also, how this plays into our feelings about other people. Also, also, how it explains things like self-sabotage, stagnation, and self-harm.

These are ranked some of the “most helpful” past podcast posts. So check out the full backlog of episodes to get more dissociation-educated.

OH, and if you want to learn from those folks – the ones who’ve already been learning and recovering through parts integration and dissociative unraveling – you might want to talk to the people in the discord and patreon communities. Some people have been at this for years already.

Where do you think I get the real life connections in MY knowledge – especially on this personality parts topic – from? It’s these folks.

But, if you’re not buying into the TMFRs life, no problem. You can also get started learning more by searching terms like “DID,” “fragmented personalities,” “Schema therapy,” and “IFS” on the google machine for more information.

Hit up Janina Fisher and thank me later.

Learn about dissociation, y’all, it’s a lot more life-prevalent than you probably realize. Which makes sense, if you’re only using half of your brain at a time and have probably been doing it since early childhood.

Start learning. Clear up some brain mysteries that have become life inhibitors. And let’s keep moving forward together, with whole brains enlisted.

See you next time.

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LOT to take in here. I’m posting it again.

Dissociation, huh?