Explore how dissociation protects us from trauma, and discover simple ways to reconnect with your body, mind, and emotions.
Your mind drifts while you stare out the window, watching clouds gently shifting in the cool breeze. The hum of everyday life fades into the background. For a moment, you’re lost in thoughts, perhaps about dinner or your next holiday, that have little to do with the present. It’s a harmless daydream — just your mind taking a brief detour. It happens to us all.
Yet, when daydreams linger, when life feels like a blur, when you’re often running on autopilot, it becomes something more. Dissociation, a quiet escape from overwhelming feelings, can take hold. When life throws something hard our way, the body and mind can instinctively check out. While this is a natural coping response, if it sticks around, it can leave us feeling numb and distant from the world around us.
Dissociation creates a temporary sense of distance from the pain of trauma. Whether it’s an unhealthy relationship or the sudden death of a loved one, the body and mind work together to buy you some time. Rather than processing the trauma on the spot, you can defer making sense of the experience until you are more resourced to do so later. Humans have developed incredible methods of coping with events that, if fully felt at the time, could completely overwhelm the nervous system.
Trauma and dissociation
It’s important to remember that trauma exists on a spectrum, and what constitutes a traumatic incident is highly contextual. For a concert pianist, an injury to a finger will be far more debilitating than for an office worker whose professional identity doesn’t revolve around bringing Vivaldi to life. While the traumatic incident varies, the symptoms people show in the aftermath are starkly similar.
Dissociation is more common than you may think. Around 73 per cent of people who have been exposed to a traumatic incident will experience dissociative states during the incident or in the hours, days and weeks following. Several studies have shown that for people struggling with C-PTSD — a catchall term for complex post-traumatic stress disorder — the prevalence of dissociative symptoms may range from 28.6 per cent to 76.9 per cent. This coping mechanism, if it goes unaddressed, can cause issues from not being able to connect deeply with others to IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and depression. Regardless of past experiences, understanding dissociation, its eff ects on the nervous system and how to reconnect with your emotions can empower you to regain balance and become more resilient.
Symptoms and consequences
Dissociation feels like being cut off from your body and surroundings, like you’re watching life happen from a distance. You might go blank on important details or realise hours have passed without consciously noticing the time go by. These are common signs of dissociation.
It’s not just in your head, either. Your body releases endorphins to dull the pain, which can trigger a sense of disconnection. As a result, many people describe it as feeling a lack of safety, hopelessness, emotional numbness or just sheer exhaustion. You’re unable to engage with what’s happening in the moment.
Dissociation is the nervous system equivalent of pulling the handbrake in a car and coming to a complete stop. In the short term, it prevents you from experiencing immediate harm but, in the long term, dissociation may lead to greater danger. This might include neurological challenges, including memory gaps, difficulty concentrating and emotional numbness. It disrupts the brain’s ability to process emotions and creates a distorted sense of time and sensory awareness. Over time, chronic dissociation can reduce the nervous system’s flexibility and adaptability, making it harder to cope with stress and engage in meaningful relationships.
Tuning back in
Instead of “escaping” the painful feelings, it’s important to slowly retrain your capacity to let those feelings come up. This allows you to slowly release some of their energy, rather than burying them in your subconscious. This is not just a nice-to-have. Your ability to tune into your bodily signals is critical to making clear decisions.
How do you move back into the “just right” zone from a more frozen state? You can break the pattern of dissociating before it becomes entrenched. Your brain-body system must detect a sense of safety. At the time of a traumatic incident, that sense of safety is disrupted. The unexpected occurs, and your sense of how the world works is upended. Depending on your unique needs, you can help to coax that sense of safety back online through a mixture of play, sharing an intimate moment with another person, sleep and deep relaxation.
Play as an antidote
Many stress-coping methods, including some forms of deep breathing, mindfulness and stillness, can worsen dissociation pushing you deeper into immobilisation. The antidote is to bring more mobilising energy into your system — this is known as up-regulation. Activities that activate your sympathetic nervous system without triggering fight-or-fl ight mode are key.
This blended state, called “play”, is like a staircase you can use to climb out of the downward immobilisation spiral. The energy of play feels energising, exciting and socially connected. Play can be movement-based, such as dancing to music, and it’s most eff ective when shared with others. Going to a