Emotional Dissociation: Essential Insights for PTSD Recovery

Working Through Emotional Dissociaton

Let us look at an example of emotional dissociation and how that grows into complexity over time.

It might start with anger in childhood that hasn't been expressed but needed to be suppressed because expressing your anger, expressing your yes or no, expressing your boundaries would be met with abuse—either psychological abuse or physical abuse—and so you learned to keep that energy inside and not express yourself.

What happens though, over time, is that not expressing your boundaries gives rise to issues of self-esteem and self-worth and over time even morphs into anxiety.

The Various Layers of Emotional Dissociation

Now, as an adult when that anxiety might be more present for you and the anger becomes more unconscious, your focus will be on overcoming the anxiety.

You might want to be more assertive, be more in control, be more dominant in certain situations.

Your whole energy gets wrapped up with overcoming the anxiety and because that rests on a deeper emotional pattern, that overcoming of the anxiety will always be self-defeating and eventually leads into depression or periods of depression.

You can see from this example how it starts with anger, lack of boundaries, how that then morphs into anxiety, lack of self-worth, and lack of self-esteem and then you get wrapped up with trying to overcome that state of anxiety and eventually fall into periods of depression.

Emotional dissociation, as described above,  seems to be a very prevalent pattern that we nowadays see reflected in society.