Dissociative disorders are mental disorders that involve experiencing a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions and identity. People with dissociative disorders escape reality in ways that are involuntary and unhealthy and cause problems with functioning in everyday life.
You may feel disconnected from your thoughts, feelings, memories, and surroundings. It can affect your sense of identity and your perception of time. The symptoms often go away on their own. It may take hours, days, or weeks.
Many people may experience dissociation (dissociate) during their life. 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.
When people are dissociated, they still are out doing things, but they are not aware of doing those things. Further, they are not able to recall having done things either.
If you dissociate you might have symptoms such as not feeling connected to your own body or developing different identities. Dissociative disorder is a mental illness that affects the way you think.
Usually, signs of dissociation can be as subtle as unexpected lapses in attention, momentary avoidance of eye contact with no memory, staring into space for several moments while appearing to be in a daze, or repeated episodes of short-lived spells of apparent fainting.
Zoning out is considered a form of dissociation, but it typically falls at the mild end of the spectrum.
Dissociation is a way the mind copes with too much stress. Periods of dissociation can last for a relatively short time (hours or days) or for much longer (weeks or months). It can sometimes last for years, but usually if a person has other dissociative disorders.
Go to Therapy
The best treatment for dissociation is to go to therapy. An inpatient adult psychiatric program can be especially effective if your symptoms of dissociation are particularly intense, or if they are the result of sexual abuse.
Too much dissociating can slow or prevent recovery from the impact of trauma or PTSD. Dissociation can become a problem in itself. Blanking out interferes with doing well at school. It can lead to passively going along in risky situations.
The process of dissociation usually occurs outside your own awareness, though you may also realize it is happening, particularly if it is in the context of anxiety. The experience involves a disconnection between your memory, consciousness, identity, and thoughts.
Dissociation Symptoms
Memory loss surrounding specific events, interactions, or experiences. A sense of detachment from your emotions (aka emotional numbness) and identity. Feeling as if the world is unreal; out-of-body experiences. Mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide.
Triggers are sensory stimuli connected with a person's trauma, and dissociation is an overload response. Even years after the traumatic event or circumstances have ceased, certain sights, sounds, smells, touches, and even tastes can set off, or trigger, a cascade of unwanted memories and feelings.
Last updated December 5, 2021. Dissociation – feeling detached from yourself, like in a dreamlike state, feeling weird or off-kilter, and like everything is surreal – is a common anxiety disorder symptom experienced by many people who are anxious.
While dissociation is a way people handle stressful situations, no trained professional would recommend dissociating on purpose. By purposefully dissociating, you risk mishandling stress and could develop unhealthy patterns. Many people who suffer from severe cases of dissociation have trouble later on in life.
But dissociation is different from daydreaming in a few key ways. “Dissociation is when [one] feels physically removed from their body or the place they are in,” Cook says. “Dissociation is connected with the fight-or-flight response and usually only occurs when the person feels overwhelmed or threatened,” she adds.
Examples of mild, common dissociation include daydreaming, highway hypnosis or “getting lost” in a book or movie, all of which involve “losing touch” with awareness of one's immediate surroundings.
Dissociation involves disruptions of usually integrated functions of consciousness, perception, memory, identity, and affect (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, numbing, amnesia, and analgesia).
A growing body of neuroimaging research suggests that dissociative disorders are associated with changes in a number of brain regions. For example, studies have found links between these disorders and the brain areas associated with the processing of emotions, memory, attention, filtering of sensory input, and more.
Depersonalization is one aspect of dissociation. The term is used to describe a feeling of detachment, especially from oneself and one's identity. It may also be associated with derealization, which is characterized by an altered perception of or detachment from one's surroundings.
Findings revealed that therapists have strong emotional and behavioral responses to a patient's dissociation in session, which include anxiety, feelings of aloneness, retreat into one's own subjectivity and alternating patterns of hyperarousal and mutual dissociation.
Dissociation may be a normal phenomenon, but like everything in life, all in moderation. For some, dissociation becomes the main coping mechanism they use to deal with the effects of a trauma response in anxiety disorders, such as PTSD, or other disorders, such as depression.