Trauma and Dissociation: How It Works and How to Come Back to the Body

Written by Roland Bal

Dissociation is a safety mechanism which helps you to survive when fight, flight, or pleasing aren't possible anymore. Dissociation is set in motion to ensure your survival through physiological immobilization and psychological disconnection.

When animals come out of a freeze or dissociation response, they shake out the stress that has accumulated in their nervous system. Unfortunately, with us humans, to undo a freeze/dissociation response is often a bit more complicated.

Dissociation and the Freeze Response

The reason that it is more difficult for us humans likely is because abuse, neglect, or an abusive environment may have continued for an extended period and hence the possibility to discharge traumatic stress wasn't available.

Dissociation is a safety mechanism which helps you to survive when fight, flight, or pleasing aren't possible anymore.

Secondly, our ability to think and reason can perpetuate a dissociative state indefinitely.

Thinking brings in judgment towards ourselves or towards others, and thus the traumatic energy gets channeled into guilt, blame, self-reproach, shame, embarrassment, comparison, self-pity, jealousy, pride, fault finding, self-righteousness, regret, or distrust.

Thinking excessively prevents you from connecting to the body — and this forms part of dissociation. When you are overwhelmed by emotion, you disconnect from the body. Your energy moves upward into the chest resulting in shallow breathing, and into the head, which results in excessive thinking.

Dissociation Is a Gradual Process, Not a Single State

Dissociation isn't a static state you move into when you come out of a fight and flight activated state; rather, it is a gradual process in which, with each step, you dissociate further into a state of disconnection.

Each time you further disconnect from yourself through dissociation, you leave behind a part of your awareness. As a consequence, a sense of forgetfulness or amnesia sets in. This can manifest in your not being able to feel certain emotions clearly anymore, or not remembering what happened to you.

It isn't that your memory is lost to you; it is more that your focus has shifted to something that you feel you are more capable of dealing with. For example, addiction is part and parcel of trauma and is a way of dissociating to help you "forget" yourself for a moment. It helps you cope with the underlying emotional stress of feeling activated.

Over time, the process can deepen. The longer the emotional residue of trauma stays alive, the greater the chance that you will further dissociate into a collapsed state. That state will be marked by a shut-down, depression, and numbness. You will move in and out of it, and similarly, you will move in and out of the ability to remember what happened to you.

Dissociation and Coming Back into the Body

Coming back into the body and meeting the frozen high energy charge in the nervous system is where your potential for healing lies.

There are a variety of difficulties regarding coming back into the body, and this mostly is because your survival is invested in the dissociated state.

To come back to the body will ring all of your alarm bells, as you will have to meet the pain, the fight, flight, and please response and their associated emotional states of anger, anxiety, despair, hopelessness, helplessness, dishonored vulnerability, and overwhelming grief.

You have to go extremely carefully into working with and reversing dissociation. You will have to negotiate that space between connection and dissociation. Working through trauma can often feel like navigating a minefield.

Connection and Disconnection Both Have a Function

Both connection and disconnection have a function. Connecting with your body, emotions, and sensations helps you to relate to the world and others. When we rest, however, we need to disconnect from our daily reality in order to regenerate — to replenish our energies.

The meaning of connection and disconnection drastically changes when trauma is in the picture. When being connected to oneself and others becomes associated with being in danger, the only option we have is to disconnect — to dissociate — especially so during childhood. It is not a voluntary decision but rather is precipitated by necessity.

Feeling the disconnected state is normal for both client and therapist while working together through trauma. Rather than judging the client for not being serious or resisting treatment, this disconnection needs to be honored and renegotiated.

How Dissociation Shapes Identity

When you go through trauma you disconnect with a part of yourself. You give up a sense of integrity in order to survive the overwhelming surge that floods your body and mind. To be overwhelmed by an incidental or developmental trauma is to lose a sense of control — and with it, a sense of who you are.

The fear of reconnecting — by working through dissociation and addressing the overwhelming helplessness — also means dying of one's "trauma-identity." You tend to prefer staying with the familiarity of the known — even if it is painful and destructive — than face the unknown and potential healing.

Let me put forward an example to clarify this: Carry's parents split up when she was just two years old and she has, since then, lived with her mother. As her parents were not on good terms she hardly saw her dad who, by then, also happened to have moved far away. In her current life as an adult, she has had trouble maintaining steady personal relationships. She falls very easily in love and is prone to get attached. The loving and attachment come with a fair amount of possessiveness and jealousy out of a fear of losing that person, which is what tends to happen in the end.

This is a classic example of dissociation regarding a developmental issue. Carry's initial trauma of abandonment and loss fuels emotions of fear and attachment. In her attempt to fill up the gap formed by the trauma, she projects it outwardly in trying to find the perfect partner. However, the dynamics of the relationship are still based on a past traumatic tragedy, which sets her up for a reenactment of her initial trauma on an emotional level. Blaming men for being unreliable keeps her "trauma-identity" alive.

The Cycle of Dissociation and How It Perpetuates Itself

Dissociation isn't an end result. It often is a process where you take your awareness away from one part of yourself, often where the hurt is, and invest that in a more superficial part of yourself, as in addiction and coping mechanisms.

The cycle of dissociation is perpetuated by your internal reaction to "what is." When you are overwhelmed, your energy moves into thought patterns of "I should" or "I shouldn't," "I want" or "don't want." That internal reaction creates separation and it is that separation that perpetuates your conflict as you are not meeting your hurt at the most basic level.

Negotiating Dissociation to Heal

First of all, negotiating dissociation has to start by your becoming aware of the dissociated state and by being able to differentiate between the necessity of it in the past for survival, and how it is working against you right now and impacting your health.

When that awareness is present, and there is a willingness to work on it, regardless of the resistances that will surface, only then can any progress realistically be made.

What reversing and negotiating dissociation entails is for you to start feeling below the level of dissociation into the sensations and emotions that made you dissociate.

You will need to allow a temporary giving up of control to enable you to move through the dissociated state. This is where the hard part comes in as doing so will make you feel vulnerable and possibly overwhelmed.

Working Through Dissociation Somatically

You must, therefore, carefully move into the feelings that are beneath or within the dissociated state. When you get too activated, you need to be able to manage that activation. And, you do this by not going any further into exploring the activation and its accompanying emotions.

It is through the "holding" of your emotional activation that you create more resilience. Slowly on, you will start to contain the whole of your wound and process the emotional residue within.

Reversing and negotiating dissociation is a process. You will find that you will have to move back and forth between connecting and disconnecting repeatedly until you can feel more of yourself and can successfully manage your boundaries. Up to that point, your trauma-informed therapist is providing that management of what you can contain and hold, and when to temporarily break off the process and disconnect from what you have been working on.

Dissociation, the Nervous System, and the Somatic Path Forward

What makes this work possible is nervous system regulation — the capacity to move between activation and settling without tipping into overwhelm or shutdown. A dissociated nervous system has lost that capacity; it swings between being stuck "ON" in fight-flight and stuck "OFF" in freeze, with thinking, judgment, and addiction binding the loop together.

The four survival responses — fight, flight, freeze, and the fawn or please-appease response — are not separate from dissociation. They are forms of it. Each one is a way the nervous system moves energy away from the core of the hurt in order to keep you functional. Understanding them as dissociation, rather than as isolated symptoms, is what makes somatic trauma recovery coherent.

This is why a purely cognitive approach — understanding your history, naming what happened — can take you only so far. Dissociation is held in the body and the nervous system. Reversing it means building enough somatic resilience to feel what was unbearable before, at a pace your system can hold. That is the work.

How is dissociation for you? Leave your comments below.