Dissociation and Trauma: Why the Body Feels Unsafe
Written by Roland Bal
When addressing trauma, one must be aware that dissociation is a safety mechanism — a way of dealing with the overwhelming experience of a traumatic event or period in life. It is not a malfunction. It is the nervous system doing precisely what it was designed to do when an experience exceeds what can be processed and integrated in real time.
Dissociation shows as feeling disconnected from bodily sensations or the body in general. It often goes with excessive thinking and pressure in the head. Being disconnected from feelings and being in the head is perceived to be safe. To reconnect with the body and its sensations is likely to be perceived as unsafe.
Why Pushing for Release Too Soon Makes Trauma Worse
Practitioners who ignore this survival mechanism and push for release are potentially making the symptomatic conditions of complex trauma worse rather than better. This is one of the most common errors in trauma work — and it happens with good intentions.
The assumption is that the stored charge needs to come out, that emotional release is inherently healing. But release without sufficient containment does not resolve trauma. It re-traumatises. When the nervous system is flooded before it has built the capacity to hold that flood, the experience reinforces the original conclusion: the body is not safe, emotions are not manageable, going inward leads to overwhelm.
Dissociation is bliss. Being in the body is pain. Until the nervous system learns that the body can be safe again, this will remain true.
What follows is often a deepening of the dissociation — a tightening of the very mechanism the practitioner was trying to loosen. The person leaves the session more defended, not less. Over time, they may stop trusting the therapeutic process altogether, having learned that opening up leads to being overwhelmed.
Release without containment is not healing. It is flooding. The distinction matters enormously, both for the person doing the work and for anyone supporting them through it.
The Nervous System's Role in Dissociation
These mechanisms involved in dissociation must be brought into awareness during the unfolding of a therapeutic process. Only then can an attempt be made to explore the boundaries of safe and unsafe with the aim of processing traumatic residue.
The nervous system holds the imprint of every overwhelming experience that was not fully processed at the time. That imprint is not stored as a narrative — it is stored as a state. A body posture. A held breath. A chronic tension pattern. A threshold at which the system tips from regulated to overwhelmed. Dissociation is the nervous system's way of staying below that threshold by disconnecting from the signals that would push it over.
Telling the story of what happened while gradually increasing connection to body sensations will help process and release the high energy charge in the nervous system. It is by careful monitoring — venturing into emotionally difficult territory while simultaneously building capacity to contain and hold the accompanying body sensations — that resolution becomes possible.
This is why nervous system regulation cannot be rushed. The window of tolerance — the range within which sensation can be experienced without tipping into overwhelm or shutdown — has to be widened gradually, through repeated small experiences of going in and coming back out safely.
Building Resilience by Containing Traumatic Wounds
For the purpose of clarification, let's look at an example. James recounts an incidence of torture in his early teens. As he tells his story, I notice there is no emotional presence in what he is recounting. I point this out to him. He is aware of this and we talk about dissociation, safety, and being in the head rather than the body.
Once we have addressed these mechanisms, we start working by exploring the boundaries of feeling into the body and being unsafe, and being in the head and disconnected. Through swinging back and forth, we increasingly build his capacity to stay with unpleasant body sensations. Once James gets back in touch and senses the helplessness and freeze response, we can start working to complete the biological fight and flight response — using his anger as a constructive, empowering force, helping him reestablish healthy boundaries and containment.
This process is not linear. There will be sessions where James goes further in, and sessions where the system pulls back. Both are part of the work. The pulling back is not failure — it is the nervous system consolidating what it has processed before it can go deeper. Respecting that rhythm, rather than pushing through it, is what makes the work sustainable.
How is dissociation showing up for you? Leave your comments below.
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5 Comments
Dear Roland, thanks for being so clear on a subject which is often confusing. There is another way of looking at it — through the body rather than through the language of telling what happened. You can address the body directly with touch. I examine the state of the person's autonomic nervous system. If I find that it is not in a state of activity of the ventral branch of the vagal nerve but rather in a state of stress or dorsal vagal, I teach my client to use a cranial exercise which establishes a ventral vagal state in less than a minute, and puts them into a state of social engagement. I then test again afterwards to see if I have gotten the desirable change in the nervous system. They can come back to the exercise on their own after the session. Post traumatic stress is often not a stress state, but a state of dorsal vagal activity with depressive activity.
Thanks for commenting on the article and sharing your expertise. Coming from a bodywork background (Cranial Sacral and Visceral Manipulation) I can relate to what you are saying. There are certainly multiple ways of looking at it and also various ways for treating. With some a somatic approach directly works well and with others you might have to start with the cognitive part first — ultimately seeking integration. My experience is that it is very case dependent and it is good to have different tools available.
Hi Stanley — I would love to learn more about this technique and how to do it. Particularly for my husband who I don't believe can successfully access his childhood traumas with words. He persevered but I believe he suffers every day from having emotions he cannot access or understand.
I had 13 years meditation/breathwork practice now shown in studies to precipitate and exacerbate dissociation. Since stopping any such practices I rarely experience what I call the acute symptoms: internal disorientation and feeling like bits of my body are separated from my body or missing. I do still experience hypoarousal symptoms, losing hours of time, inability to concentrate, fixed stare, amnesia which affects my ability to work and be present with people. Even part time work hours is a struggle. I have a great therapist and finding inner child approach useful.
"Dissociation is bliss, being in the body is pain" hit me square in the face. I've never had the words to describe how I exist. Only, I would swap 'bliss' with 'safe' and 'pain' with 'excruciating'. I don't know if I'll ever feel safe in my own body.
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