Dissociation: when you switch off to survive

“When he started shouting, I looked at the pattern on the tablecloth. I counted the little flowers. I could hear him, but as if through thick glass. Then suddenly it was over and I had no idea what he had actually said.”

People describe it in different words. “I zoned out.” “I went somewhere else.” “I was there, but I wasn’t.” Some are ashamed of it, because they think they were cold or indifferent. Others don’t notice it at all — they only notice the consequences: a gap in their memory, a partner who accuses them of not caring, and a strange emptiness after something that should have hurt.

We call this dissociation. And although the word sounds technical and slightly ominous, it describes something very human: the mind’s ability to step back for a moment from what it cannot bear. In this post I will write about what dissociation is, why the body uses it, how you can recognise it in yourself, and when it is time to look for someone specifically trained to work with it.

What dissociation is

Dissociation means coming apart. Things that normally run together — perception, sensations in the body, emotions, thoughts, memory and the sense that this is you — separate for a while. A person can see what is happening but feel nothing. Or they feel intense fear but don’t know where it is coming from. Or it seems as if they are watching themselves from the outside.

You will also find a short explanation of the term in the knowledge base under dissociation. Here I would like to add something the definition doesn’t say: dissociation is not a choice. You don’t decide to zone out. It happens, much as you pull your hand away from a hot stove before you even think about the heat.

The most common forms people describe are:

• Depersonalisation — the feeling that you are not in your own body, that your hands seem foreign, that you are speaking but hearing yourself from far away.
• Derealisation — the world around you seems unreal, flat, like a stage set or a dream.
• Emotional numbness — you know you ought to feel something, but you feel nothing.
• Gaps in memory — parts of a conversation or a day are missing, as if someone had cut them out.

It is not as rare as it might seem. A review of epidemiological research by Elaine Hunter, Mauricio Sierra and Anthony David showed that a large share of people know a passing experience of depersonalisation at some point in their lives — estimates in individual studies ranged from roughly a quarter to three quarters of the general population. A lasting disorder is far rarer. But the feeling of “as if I’m not here” is familiar to many people who have never been in therapy.

Why the body switches off

When we are in danger, the nervous system has several responses available. The best known are fight and flight: the heart speeds up, the muscles tense, attention narrows. But what if you can neither run nor fight? When you are a child and the danger is an adult you depend on. When someone is holding you down. When the situation is too big for you to change.

Then a different response can switch on: freezing, and then collapse. Maggie Schauer and Thomas Elbert described this sequence as a defence cascade — from alertness and freezing, through fight or flight, to a state in which the body “gives way”, the muscles go limp, sensations fade and consciousness withdraws. This is not weakness. It is the last defence an organism has when the others don’t work: if you cannot leave with your body, at least part of you can go somewhere else.

I have written more about how such experiences are recorded in the body, and why we can’t simply “get over” them, in How trauma stays written in the body — and how the body can let it go. What matters here is this: a response that once helped someone survive tends to persist after the danger is gone. The body learns that switching off is a safe route and starts to take it under smaller loads too — a raised voice, criticism, too much closeness.

Brain-imaging research supports this. Ruth Lanius and her colleagues showed that in some people with post-traumatic stress disorder the brain does not respond to a trauma memory with heightened arousal, as you might expect, but by dampening emotional responses. Findings like these are why the diagnostic manual DSM-5 now recognises a dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The psychiatrist Daniel Siegel used the term window of tolerance for the zone in which we can feel and think at the same time. Above it lies overwhelm; below it, numbness. Dissociation is one of the ways we drop below the lower edge. The post The window of tolerance: why you sometimes flood and sometimes go numb looks at that window in more detail.

From everyday absent-mindedness to switching off

It is important to know that dissociation is not only a sign of trauma. We all dissociate sometimes. When you drive home and can’t remember the last three junctions. When a book absorbs you so completely that you don’t hear someone calling you. When, after a long day, you stare at the wall and think about nothing. These are mild, ordinary forms and there is nothing wrong with them.

Researchers therefore understand dissociation as a spectrum. In the 1980s, Eve Bernstein and Frank Putnam developed a questionnaire that measures how often people experience different forms of detachment — precisely because the phenomenon is present in everyone to some degree and differs mainly in frequency, intensity and how much it gets in the way of life.

Where someone sits on this spectrum isn’t revealed by a single experience. It is revealed by the pattern: whether switching off happens only with truly terrible things or already with small ones; whether you come back quickly afterwards or stay in the fog for hours and days; whether you are missing parts of memory you ought to have. If you recognise the far right of the picture, that is a reason to talk to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist experienced with dissociation — not to diagnose yourself from the internet.

What it looks like from the inside

Dissociation is hard to describe, because by definition it is an absence. People often don’t know it has happened until someone asks them. In therapy it therefore often shows up in small things: a suddenly flat tone of voice, a gaze that settles on one point, an answer of “I don’t know” that doesn’t mean the person doesn’t want to say, but that in that moment they truly have no access to themselves.

A conversation might sound like this (composed, not a real person):

“When we were arguing, I just floated away. I could see him, but like on television.”
“What did you feel in your body then?”
“Nothing. That’s what scared me most. Later he told me I’d been completely cold.”
“And now, as you tell me this?”
“Now my throat feels tight. A little.”
“Good. Let’s stay with that little bit. No need for more.”

This short exchange contains something that is key with dissociation: the aim is not to bring the person as quickly as possible to all the feelings they cut off back then. The aim is that, in a safe relationship, they learn to stay a little longer with a little more. Dissociation is a protection, and protections are not removed by force.

Dissociation in relationships

As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I also look at dissociation through the lens of relationship. Because switching off doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Most often it happens around another person — a partner who raises their voice, a parent who looks at you in a certain way, a boss who starts a sentence with “We need to talk”.

In couples, a painful loop therefore tends to form. One partner switches off during conflict. The other experiences this as indifference and pushes harder: “Are you even listening? Don’t you care?” More pressure means more danger, more danger means switching off more deeply. In the end one is shouting, the other is silent, and both are convinced the other doesn’t understand. In relational family therapy, which I am training in at the Franciscan Family Institute, this is exactly the loop that interests us — not only what happens inside one person, but what keeps repeating between two.

It often helps a partner a great deal to learn that zoning out is not the message “I don’t care” but “this is too much for me”. That changes the response. Instead of pushing, they can slow down, lower their voice or suggest a break. And it helps the person who switches off to be able to tell someone: “I’m leaving right now. Not because I don’t care.”

Dissociation is often linked to closeness in general, too. Someone who learnt as a child that closeness is dangerous may switch off precisely in moments of tenderness, not only in arguments — during a hug, an honest conversation, a moment when they might show that they need someone. This is not coldness either, but an old protective mechanism that learnt that vulnerability is dangerous.

How to notice that you are drifting away

Dissociation rarely arrives out of nowhere. Mostly it has forerunners — small signs you can notice if you know what to look for. The first sign is the most valuable, because at that point you can still come back with small steps.

It is worth adapting this list to yourself. For one person the first sign is staring at the floor. For another, feeling very cold. For a third, starting to answer with “mm” and “yeah, yeah”. Once you know your first sign, you have something you didn’t have before: a moment of choice.

Exercise: coming back into the room

This exercise is not meant for processing memories. It is meant to help you return to the present at the moment you feel yourself drifting away. It works best if you try it a few times while you are calm, so that your body knows it when it needs it.

1. Name what is happening. Silently or out loud: “I’m drifting off now.” Simply noticing means part of you is staying here.
2. Press your feet into the floor. Feel your heels, your toes, the weight of your body on the chair. If you are sitting, hold the edges of the chair with your hands.
3. Find five things you can see and name them. Not in general but precisely: “a blue mug with a chipped rim”. This is the basis of the grounding 5–4–3–2–1 exercise, which you can continue with sounds and touch.
4. Add a strong sensory stimulus. Cold water on your wrist, something sour in your mouth, a strong smell, an ice cube in your palm. The senses are the quickest way back into the body.
5. Tell yourself where and when you are. “Today is Tuesday, I’m in the kitchen, I’m an adult, and what happened is not happening now.”

Don’t expect the exercise to work perfectly every time. If you come back only halfway, that is already a lot. And if it makes you feel worse — if instead of the present it pulls you into a memory — stop and talk it over with a professional.

What helps in therapy, and when to look for a specialist

In work with trauma and dissociation, a phased approach has become established, described as early as the 1990s by the psychiatrist Judith Herman. First come safety and stabilisation: the person learns to recognise when they are drifting off and how to come back. Only then, once there is solid enough ground, does it make sense to approach the memories themselves. Finally comes integration — returning to life, relationships and the future.

There are specific methods for processing traumatic memories. The best known are EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy and somatic methods that work through awareness of the body — you will find an introduction to this approach in The body says what we cannot put into words: an introduction to body psychotherapy. These methods require specialist training. I don’t practise them and I don’t present myself as a trauma specialist. If dissociation is frequent or intense for you, or if you are losing stretches of time, look for a psychotherapist with experience in exactly this, or talk to a psychiatrist.

With gaps in memory, sudden losses of consciousness or changes that appeared without any clear trigger, it is wise to see your GP first. Similar sensations can also be caused by physical conditions, some medications or substances — and these need to be ruled out before everything is put down to the mind.

What holds for every therapy, whatever the method, is this: the relationship between therapist and client is where the nervous system can learn that closeness is not necessarily dangerous. I described why in Why the therapeutic relationship heals: the science of secure connection. With dissociation, this means patience — including with yourself.

If you are ever so overwhelmed that you can’t see a way out, or if thoughts of self-harm appear, don’t stay alone. In Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am), the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day) or, in an emergency, 112. If you are experiencing violence, the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence in Slovenia is available on 080 11 55.

Where this explanation doesn’t apply

I want to be careful here, because in recent years the word dissociation has become fashionable and is used for almost everything.

Not every lapse of attention is dissociation. If you forget where you put your keys because you are thinking about ten things at once, that is distraction. If you stare at the screen at three in the afternoon, it may be tiredness, poor sleep or simply too few breaks. Difficulties with attention can also have entirely different causes that call for a different kind of assessment.

Not every dissociation is a sign of trauma. Passing depersonalisation can appear with severe tiredness, during a panic attack, after a sleepless night or with the use of some substances. People with a tendency to become deeply absorbed in imagination or music may simply work that way — and it can even be a source of creativity.

Dissociation is not always the enemy. In some situations it helped you and perhaps still does. A surgeon who “sets aside” fear during a demanding operation, a firefighter who stays calm in a burning flat — this too is a form of temporary distancing. The aim of therapy is not that you never dissociate again, but that it is no longer your only route.

And it is not proof that something happened which you can’t remember. Dissociation in itself does not mean a forgotten trauma lies hidden behind it. Careful therapy doesn’t search for memories that aren’t there and doesn’t draw conclusions about the past from today’s symptoms. Where things remain unclear, it is better to allow uncertainty than to invent a story.

Nor is it true that hard experiences automatically make us stronger and that we just have to “push through” them. The post “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — why that isn’t true of trauma explains why that saying doesn’t hold for trauma. Dissociation is often the very proof that something was too much — and that the task was to survive, not to grow.

When we know what sets off the switch

Dissociation almost always has a trigger. Sometimes it is obvious — shouting, a threat, a touch. More often it is small and hidden: the smell of a particular perfume, a tone of voice, a season, a position of the body. When you start to recognise what pulls you away, you get some control back. The post Trauma triggers: why a smell or a tone of voice brings it all back explains why a smell or a tone of voice has so much power.

Recognising triggers is not about avoiding them at all costs. It is about knowing what is happening while it is happening. Once you know that a closed door and a raised voice together pull the ground from under your feet, you can tell your partner, prepare a way out in advance, or carry something with you that keeps you in the present.

What to remember

• Dissociation is a coming apart of perception, body, emotions and memory — the mind steps back from what it cannot bear.
• It is not a choice and it is not coldness. It is an old protective mechanism that tends to persist even when the danger has passed.
• It exists on a spectrum: from everyday absent-mindedness to disorders that disrupt life. What counts is frequency, intensity and whether you can come back.
• Early signs in the body, perception and thoughts are the moment when grounding can still bring you back into the room.
• If dissociation is frequent or you are losing stretches of time, see a doctor and a psychotherapist experienced in trauma work.