Dissociation, often misunderstood, is a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, or sense of identity. This podcast episode featuring Laura Wood and Michaela Beaver dives deep into the multifaceted world of dissociation, emphasizing its roots in childhood trauma and the path to healing through self-compassion. Dissociation can range from the common experience of zoning out during a mundane activity to more complex conditions like dissociative identity disorder (DID). It’s crucial to understand these experiences as protective mechanisms, particularly when dealing with overwhelming emotions or sensory overload.
In childhood, dissociation serves as a vital coping strategy. As children’s brains are naturally dissociative, they employ dissociation to integrate various action systems while developing their personalities. When trauma occurs, this protective mechanism helps shield the child from unbearable realities. However, these dissociative processes, if not addressed, can manifest into adulthood, often affecting mental health and daily functioning. By acknowledging these patterns, individuals can begin to navigate their emotional landscapes and work towards healing.
This episode highlights the differences between dissociative disorders like DID and other conditions, offering clarity on memory and identity awareness. Recognizing these distinctions helps in differentiating dissociation from psychosis, thus providing a clearer understanding of one’s internal experiences. Dissociation is not inherently pathological; it’s a normal brain function that becomes problematic only when it disrupts one’s life significantly. The hosts stress that dissociation is a spectrum, and many of us experience it without even realizing it.
Trauma often manifests in somatic symptoms—physical pain with no apparent medical cause. This episode discusses the importance of addressing these symptoms rather than dismissing them. Somatic work, such as somatic experiencing, helps uncover the emotional roots of physical pain, fostering a holistic approach to healing. By bridging the gap between mind and body, individuals can better understand their pain and embark on a journey of recovery. Techniques like heart rate variability training illustrate the interplay between physiological and psychological states, offering tools to balance and calm the mind.
Grounding techniques play a crucial role in managing dissociation and emotional overwhelm. Visualizing calming scenes or engaging in progressive muscle relaxation are effective methods to bring oneself back to the present. These techniques emphasize the importance of self-compassion, encouraging individuals to work with their anxiety and intrusive thoughts rather than against them. Recognizing these survival mechanisms as rooted in early life experiences helps in understanding their purpose and integrating them into one’s sense of self.
The episode further explores the impact of childhood trauma on adult life, stressing that while individuals are not responsible for their childhood experiences, they are accountable for their healing as adults. Childhood messages and core beliefs often shape our adult behaviors and perceptions. Acknowledging and challenging these beliefs is a vital step towards healing and personal growth. By fostering self-awareness and embracing one’s unique experiences, individuals can empower themselves on their journey to recovery.
Techniques for grounding and reorienting during dissociative episodes are also discussed. Simple strategies like time orientation and sensory grounding can effectively reconnect individuals with the present moment. Breathing exercises, such as box breathing, help manage stress by balancing the body’s nervous systems. These practical methods provide a sense of control and presence, aiding in the journey toward healing.
The episode closes with a reminder of the normalcy of dissociation as a brain function, reassuring listeners that they are not alone in their experiences. The therapeutic potential of discussing dissociation is highlighted, encouraging compassion and support for those navigating these complex experiences. By understanding dissociation as a part of the human experience, individuals can work through their patterns with greater empathy and insight.
Read the full transcript
Laura : 0:00
Hello and welcome to. Why Am I Like this? The podcast for those who didn’t get enough hugs as a child? I’m Laura Wood and I’m a trauma therapist.
Michaela: 0:10
Hi and I’m Michaela Beaver. I’m a psychiatric nurse practitioner.
Laura : 0:15
So, Michaela, why are we doing this?
Michaela: 0:17
podcast. I’m so glad you asked. We want to help you understand yourself a bit better how the things you learned about yourself and the world and childhood are still affecting you today. We want to figure out why are we like this, those random things about ourselves you might wonder about, like why am I so jumpy? Why am I so anxious? Why do I take everything so personally? Why are my thoughts so negative? Why do I feel like I have to fix everything all?
Laura : 0:43
the time negative. Why do I feel like I have to fix everything all the time? Yes, and today we are talking about dissociation and we are going to try to answer the following questions what is dissociation and what is its purpose? When is it a problem? What can we do to get back into the present? So let’s get into it. What dissociation, what is this and why are we doing it?
Michaela: 1:08
okay. So I would say, like dissociation is disconnecting from ourselves, from our like emotions, our thoughts, feelings, kind of being disconnected from the present.
Laura : 1:24
Yeah, I think of when we are overloaded or overwhelmed and we kind of just zone out a little. But I hear dissociation said all the time. I hear especially now lately I’ve been hearing like oh, I’m dissociating, or people say disassociating, which drives me crazy because that’s not what it is. So what do you think people are talking? What do you think they mean when they say that?
Michaela: 1:55
Well, I think that they’re hearing a lot of things, probably like on TikTok, and I think that people are the word about things is getting out more, and so people are registering that this is the thing that they’re doing. Right, because we all do it. We all get into that daydreamy, hypnotic state. Maybe we drove our car from home to work and we’re like man, that was fast, how did I get here? That’s kind of being in that hypnotic, dissociated state, and so I think that people are hearing these things and recognizing that it’s something that they’re doing, that they they feel when they they get a little bit you know, they got into a fight with their parents or their friends and they just kind of want to check out from those feelings for a little bit. I think that even being on like TikTok itself is dissociated. Yeah, you’re probably right about that. You’re using that as a skill to get out of what you’re feeling.
Laura : 2:59
Yeah, I think about it like zoned out. I think about it like zoned out or when you’re like if you’re watching TV and somebody’s talking to you and you just can’t hear them and you’re just so tuned into the television or to whatever you’re doing or watching that you have no idea what’s going on around you. You’re just sort of in your own world. I guess I could say is the way that I hear it described a lot In your own world. I guess I could say is the way that I hear it described a lot. But you know, like you said, we all do this.
Laura : 3:30
Why do we do this? We dissociate all the time. We have dissociative processes happening all the time that are totally normal and that our brains are just doing this. Because if we were to be registering consciously every single thing that’s going on around us at all times, we would totally explode. It would be way too much. There’s so much stimulation, there’s so many thoughts and there’s so many pieces of information floating around around us all the time that our brains just can’t possibly be on and alert at all times. And so we sort of check out and our brain gives us a break. It’s like taking a rest from the world and from all of the things that are going on in our minds and bodies and in our environment that are going on in our minds and bodies and in our environment, right?
Michaela: 4:32
And so then, like in someone who maybe doesn’t have more of that, like, isn’t just that normal coping mechanism, right? Someone who may have had like early childhood trauma, how does that change in that time of, you know, affecting those kids?
Laura : 4:48
Well, the purpose is still the same. So kids are always kids are really dissociative because their brains are inherently dissociated. They’re not connected yet they’re not integrated. Integration is the process of learning and growing up and learning. I should say that the other way Learning is integrating right. So when we are growing up we’re learning information and we’re integrating information. But when we’re babies our action systems are all pretty separate. We have an action system for sleep, we have an action system for food, we have an action system for connection and attachment, and so we’re using those action systems pretty disparately. They’re not interconnected necessarily within ourselves just yet.
Laura : 5:34
We don’t have a sense of a whole self when we’re born. We just have a sense of, like, getting needs met right, and then we start developing a personality and that’s when our brain starts to integrate and interconnect all of these different aspects of ourself into one whole self. But that doesn’t really fully occur until we’re, you know, adolescents and even early adults. We’re still learning and integrating all the time and with neuroplasticity our brains are constantly capable of doing more of that. Like, personalities can change. They change over time. There’s, I think, the myth of the personality test that one person can take and as if that’s going to be fixed for your entire life is just simply not true.
Laura : 6:24
We change and grow and learn. There are aspects of our personalities that are sort of inborn, but they’re changeable too. At the same time, with any learning we do, we have the opportunity to make different decisions, have the opportunity to make different decisions so like, for example, a child who is not experiencing trauma, is maybe daydreaming and has a really vivid imagination and has an imaginary friend for connection. That’s a dissociative process. Right, we’re just dissociative. As kids. We sort of find different ways of our mind. Our mind is just working with us in different ways, and so having an imaginary friend is a way to combat loneliness or to find entertainment in boring things, a way to avoid negative feelings of aloneness or of isolation or anything like that. We have an imaginary friend. Most of us can remember having something like that as a child, and then we can simply grow out of it because it’s not pathological, it’s just brains.
Laura : 7:36
And then somebody who does have a lot of trauma might have an imaginary friend that is saving them from that trauma or even taking on the trauma themselves. So perhaps the other is actually the one experiencing the trauma and it’s not me. And that’s helpful because it saves me from having to fully know and embody that experience, because I still need to be connected with my attachment figures and I can’t connect with someone who’s hurting me. Those two competing realities are very difficult. A child’s mind just can’t process that, and so the sense of separation is incredibly helpful in those moments.
Michaela: 8:19
Right, I’m the good, normal child, and then that’s the. Not me is the one that gets punished. Or even I wonder too, like um, if we are a kid who say gets in trouble a lot, maybe we have a dissociated self, could develop a dissociated self of like that’s the bad version of me, right, like I don’t do, I didn’t do that stuff. That was that, wasn’t, that was somebody else.
Laura : 8:50
Yeah, absolutely Absolutely, because that’s a way to cope with the fact that we have done something that is disappointing to our caregivers, or we have done something and it’s created a consequence of, you know, a negative reaction with our caregivers. We are constantly. A child’s job is to control the behavior of the parents. That’s really what they’re trying to do at all times is manage their parents’ distress and manage their parents’ behavior so that they can continue to get their needs met.
Laura : 9:27
And in the mind of a child, I can’t necessarily hold two truths at once. I can’t hold the fact that I did this thing and my family is upset with me and I’m a good kid and I still deserve love and connection and care. It might be too big for me to process that information, and so I sort of separate it into a version of myself that likes to get into trouble or mischief. And in these situations I might not even be talking about abuse. I’m just talking about like, oh, I have this, you know. I think I hear a lot of people saying, oh, my alter ego did that. You know what I mean.
Michaela: 10:09
Like as a joke.
Laura : 10:11
But the reality is we may have this sort of sense of ourself of like a version of us that is different than us, that a version of us that is somebody that we can’t really be, that we have to avoid certain things, but this version of us, when we, when it comes out, like it gets to have all the fun and like, take all the risks and do all the things and and that’s not pathology, that’s just human development and personality, right, right, well, and you hear people talk all the time like they say oh, part of me wants to get cake for dessert, but part of me knows that I shouldn’t do that right?
Laura : 10:52
So yes, that’s absolutely right, and so not all parts of oneself are dissociated parts, but every single person has parts of ourself that we can call ego states or dissociated parts, and that not interchangeably. Ego state is not the same thing as a dissociated part. Essentially, they’re just parts of myself that I disagree with. Like I have conflict right Internally and that internal conflict just represents, like different ego states, different states of my mind, different states of my being. I contain multitudes, right? I?
Michaela: 11:42
mean everyone does. There’s times where you go through that you’re eating super healthy and you can stay on the bandwagon and you feel really, you know, convicted, and you’re working out. And then there’s another part of you that takes over and doesn’t want to do all those things and just wants to go have fun and enjoy life, and so, yeah, there’s lots of parts of self.
Laura : 12:06
That’s right. And we’ve all heard of our inner child, right. When we think of an inner child part, sometimes we can be thinking of a part that is really rooted in deeply rooted in trauma and deep pain and that could be a dissociated part that feels really separate from us, like that’s not me, that was someone else, like it feels like a different person went through that. It feels like a different life that I haven’t lived right. We hear that sometimes when we hear recounting of trauma. When we hear recounting of trauma, sometimes we hear that I was outside of myself watching it happen and I wasn’t there, I went away.
Laura : 12:48
Those are dissociated processes that are really helpful because we are escaping and taking a rest from the difficulty and the pain of that experience. And we need that. We need our mind needs to do that, and so it’s inherently adaptive and we need that. We need our mind needs to do that, and so it’s inherently adaptive. When the issues of dissociation come up, when it feels problematic, it’s when we’re losing control and it’s maybe interfering with our lives in a really negative way, but having those experiences isn’t inherently pathological.
Michaela: 13:23
Yeah, that makes sense. So what other symptoms might someone experience if they’re dissociating? We talked a little bit about you know, kind of like that dreamlike state or like getting like you know kind of daydreaming what else could someone have?
Laura : 13:41
A friend of mine mentioned recently losing time. A friend of mine mentioned recently losing time. Um, you know, she mentioned she’s late all the time and she is like it all of a sudden is you know, time to go and I was starting this project and you know I thought I had all this time and now I’m late and you know, it’s really just a sense of not being present, a sense of um. Sometimes people describe feeling like the world is a simulation, where, like nothing, I’m not really real, I’m not really anything, I’m sort of part of the simulation and nothing matters and nothing means anything. Some people describe recognizing or like not recognizing themselves in the mirror. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you. If you look at a picture from, this has happened to me. If I look at a picture from a certain time in my life, a picture of myself, I don’t recognize myself in that photo. It seems like a totally different person, like that’s not me.
Laura : 14:40
And that’s from a time in my life that was particularly challenging, particularly challenging and where I experienced some really difficult things. So when we are thinking about just those normal dissociative processes, we’re thinking about the time you’re driving in the car and then you don’t even realize the trip. Or, you know, you are so engrossed in like a show or a game that you like are imagining yourself as part of the game, like you feel like you’re in it, or you feel like you’re a character in the show, or you feel like you are. You know, you just it’s almost like an overactive imagination, right. You get so engrossed in it that you become part of it or it becomes part of you.
Laura : 15:29
That can happen, I think, of like acting as dissociative, especially method acting in particular, and I don’t know you would have to channel it. Well, that’s right, you have to channel these parts of oneself that otherwise are completely disconnected from the real you, and so that’s not. This is not clinical in any way, but like that’s just my opinion. I’ve sort of always noticed like acting feels inherently dissociative to me.
Michaela: 16:01
So also that makes me think of, like you know, having different, like parts of self like you think back of. We used to call dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder. So like how do the, how do the different voices in your head, how do you differentiate that from like a schizophrenia?
Laura : 16:23
I think a lot of the time mental health professionals misdiagnose dissociative disorders, and not necessarily dissociative identity disorder exclusively. There’s also a disorder called it’s otherwise specified dissociative disorder. So it used to be DDNOS, it’s escaping me. What is it? Osdd otherwise specified dissociative disorder.
Laura : 16:52
So OSDD is a level of dissociation that isn’t exactly dissociative identity disorder but that includes a high level of dissociation in your daily life where you might be losing time.
Laura : 17:07
You might be operating within a persona that changes very frequently.
Laura : 17:13
So I could have one persona that goes to work and then another persona that is at home with my kids, and those can be very, very different different aspects of myself, different parts of my personality, and I’m using those to get through the day and just do my daily living activities that I have to do all the time and you know I might be able to remember what I did in each moment.
Laura : 17:44
And that’s a different level of separateness than a dissociative identity disorder where oftentimes there is not a lot of consciousness between parts of self, so I might not remember at all what I did when I was operating out of one part of myself versus another. But that is less common than, say, like an OSDD, where I have more of a cohesive memory of what’s going on, but I still might lose time, I still might not have full control and I still might operate on with distinct components of my personality that could even be so different from one from one another that I could have people might not even recognize me and did the person have conversations with each other.
Michaela: 18:34
They’re aware of each other.
Laura : 18:37
Ask that again. I didn’t hear the beginning.
Michaela: 18:39
Different parts of self have conversations with each other or, you know, can they hear or know about each other?
Laura : 18:46
Yeah. So and to you kind of asked about schizophrenia before versus dissociation, and the main difference, I think, between psychosis and dissociation is that it’s internal versus, or it’s external versus internal respectively. So psychosis comes from external cues that are being misread like a different reality and it’s really a muddy line Like it’s. There’s not really a super clear distinction, but I think that gets misdiagnosed really often is. I see this all the time with somebody who maybe has depression and then it’ll say with psychotic features. But then I’ll work with the client and recognize that it’s not psychotic features.
Laura : 19:30
This is dissociative processes. Dissociative processes are more internal, they come from within. They can be known to the self as dissociative and or as parts of the self. So I might not know the word dissociative, but I know it’s a part of me, it’s an aspect of me or it’s inside of me, it lives inside of me, even if it’s a separate person. I could say I have separate people inside of me, but that’s not psychotic, that’s not psychosis, that’s dissociation versus. There’s these outside forces that I’m not aware of, that I don’t know what they’re thinking or doing or feeling, or you know they’re not using, they’re telling me to do something. They are, they’re coming from the outside versus coming from within is one way to, at a high level, delineate between dissociative processes and psychosis. But that’s a very simplified way to put it, I think.
Michaela: 20:30
For sure. Well, and I think that you know the timing potentially of the symptoms is another feature of that too. Like you know, schizophrenia is pretty. You know there’s a. You know you’re not going to normally start having those things in your fs. How about, like in DID? Are you going to start? Could you have some of those symptoms come on, or start recognizing them more later on in?
Laura : 21:00
life. Yeah, it’s not linear really. So when you are developing dissociative identity disorder, many most believe that that develops in childhood and cannot be developed later it’s. You can maybe notice it later, where you could live a long time and not realize that that’s happening for you. But dissociative features and functions are developed during your childhood because that’s when your brain is developing and when it’s figuring out how to operate. And so if your brain is operating in a dissociated way and doesn’t get that integration in childhood, then that’s when you’re going to have that. You can’t go all the way through till you’re, you know, 30 years old and never have had a dissociative experience, and then suddenly now all you dissociate all the time. That’s not a thing that happens.
Michaela: 22:00
With this, things that are developed in childhood. So we talked a little bit about like the cognitive kinds of things. What about somatic experiences? Can you have somatic type dissociations?
Laura : 22:10
kinds of things. What about somatic experiences? Can you have somatic type dissociations? Yeah, totally so. Somatic stuff, body stuff, right, feelings, different you could have pain or different, different pains or feelings that you’re experiencing could be a result of dissociative parts. So pre-verbal, dissociative, pre-verbal trauma can create dissociation that doesn’t have words, it just has feelings, it just has body sensations, and so dissociation isn’t one thing, it’s the way our brains and bodies experience information that isn’t fully integrated and processed. And so if that body sensation doesn’t have a story, it doesn’t have an integrated piece of narrative that allows it to function in an adaptive way that we think of as adults, like when we think of a narrative story.
Laura : 23:09
If we had something happen to us that there is no narrative for, we might experience that as pain recreating itself. That doesn’t make any sense. It can be phantom pains. It can be pains that are happening with no medical cause. That’s a common thing with dissociative processes is that there’s something physically wrong, but that doesn’t have a medical explanation.
Laura : 23:36
And so often we’ll see people who are constantly going to the doctor and the doctors are saying there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you, and you’re like but I feel this pain, but this is really happening. I have this thing going on and they’re like well, there’s nothing wrong with you and then so it’s just this like cycle of invalidation and and denial of one’s self-experience, which can just make it worse. But what I find is that, when we can, I talk to the pain and ask it you know what is it doing there and what is the purpose of it and you know that sounds a little extra woo woo, but just get weird with me for a minute. You know when we can talk to that stuff, sometimes it can talk back and it can help us know what it’s doing and why it’s there and where it’s coming from and what it.
Laura : 24:25
What it needs us to know right now, and sometimes what it needs us to know, is that it needs to be healed on an emotional level in a more integrated way, and it’s not about a medical presentation as much as it’s about I have this thing that happened to me and I don’t know what to do, and that can be coming from a very young part of oneself that is experiencing something that is just too big to know and understand.
Laura : 24:48
You know we think of dissociation as a couple of different things, but one thing that it can be is non-realization, and so I can’t fully realize this thing that happened to me, because it was too big and it’s too much.
Laura : 25:01
And for a child to realize that their caregiver is hurting them is too big and too much because they have no way out. And the best thing to do is to not realize that it’s happening so that I can get through the rest of the day right, because I still have to go to school and I still have to eat and I still have to get my other needs met, and so it’s easier to just separate this from myself than it is to carry that all the time. And that’s why we see those things coming out in different ways, especially in kids, and when we’re experiencing unknown pain as an adult and other somatic symptoms, it could be helpful to talk to someone and and maybe do some somatic work. There’s a lot of great therapists that could do. There’s something called somatic experiencing and that’s a really great way to work through some of those things and to really get to the root of it and heal some of the underlying root causes of those somatic symptoms.
Michaela: 25:59
I love that and I what came up for me when you were talking was like, it’s not that the intention of the providers that are saying we can’t find anything, we can’t find anything isn’t to, you know, make typically make people feel invalidated. It’s just they, they’re that’s the lack of their medical knowledge, and they probably don’t know anything about somatic dissociation. They’re just like, go see a psych person and so then the person internalized that is that, as I’m like, I’m, oh, I’m crazy, right, like they start having those negative thoughts about themselves. But how empowering must that be to finally go see someone and they’re like, oh, I know exactly what’s going on with you. Here’s what you need to do, right?
Laura : 26:46
Well, yeah, and I love the book the Myth of Normal by Dr Gabor Mate in where he explains, as a medical doctor, that anytime someone would come into his office he would ask, like, have you experienced any trauma? And inevitably the answer is yes. But that’s the first time that they’ve been asked that question. That’s the first time that they’ve been asked by a medical professional about their history of trauma. And so these things get overlooked.
Laura : 27:18
Right, because we separate the mind and body in this arbitrary, as if they’re not connected, way. That really makes it difficult for any one professional to get the big picture, and I think we’re doing a better job of that right now. Right, and like that’s the whole purpose of you and I’s work together, shayla. Like because we’re trying to bring that back together and really understand how our mind influences our body and our body influences our mind. You know there’s more than one way to work through some of this distress. Like medicine can help with parts of it, and you know, therapy work can help with parts of it, and they could both be doing the same thing or they could be doing two different things, and it doesn’t mean one is better than the other, it just means that everything matters.
Michaela: 28:11
Right. Well, and that makes me think of, like you know, the heart rate variability training that I’m doing right now in what they’re talking about is like using what we know about our heart to help send signals and calm that part of our bodies down so that we can send those signals back to the brain and have that communicate. Hey, I got this, I’m okay. Right, like I’m not, I don’t have to be in fight or flight right now. You can be in, you know, you can have coherent state of your body where there’s balance and that’s your body actually sending signals and helping heal the brain, which I think is so powerful.
Laura : 28:53
Absolutely. What wires together fires together, right? So when we practice something over and over, it gives us the ability to call that back up on cue. So a lot of meditative states or meditative processes or like visualizations you know, we did a visualization exercise as a grounding skill recently on this podcast and those are dissociative, Like basically, we’re saying I’m going to imagine myself as not here, as somewhere else, and I’m going to put myself in this, in this state of mind that is separated from the present reality, and then that’s going to give me the ability to come back into the present reality and notice my surroundings from a fresh perspective. And so, you know, we think about how all of these things work together and they’re all really helpful.
Laura : 29:50
And the biggest aspect of the benefit, like the biggest benefit here is that we can gain control over it. We can manage it, we can work with it. We don’t have to be afraid of it. We don’t have to be afraid of these things that are going on with us. We can say, oh, what is this Like? This is a signal, this is information. How can I learn more about this? How can I learn? What is this doing for me?
Laura : 30:15
We don’t do things that don’t make sense right. So we need to understand, like what is this doing for me in this moment? What’s the benefit of this right now and how can I learn what I need to learn and then move through it in a way that is of the present time and place. I love that. So when I use my grounding skills I’m getting back to the present. But sometimes I need to use a calming skill before a grounding skill, and that calming skill might be taking myself out of this moment and putting myself on a beach, you know, and on my favorite vacation, and I take myself out of the present just to be able to bring myself back into the present. It’s like progressive mind relaxation, right when you tense up your muscles. The progressive muscle relaxation, where you tense up your muscles and then you release them to get present by kind of going somewhere else and then returning to the present, is a really good way to get grounded and to get stable back in the moment and lower your heart rate.
Michaela: 31:25
Yeah, that’s huge. What else other than grounding skills is important for people to do to work through some of these things, to work through dissociation?
Laura : 32:02
I think if we’re dissociating so much that it’s disrupting our lives, where we’re not able to fully engage in our relationships and we’re not able to fully engage with ourself and our relationship’t have to villainize it. We can work with our anxiety and our depression and our you know intrusive thoughts and our difficult concentration and our you know distractibility. We can work with all of those things and bring them together as one whole person and we don’t have to be mad at those things. I think that’s really important is compassion for yourself and not villainizing these processes that were designed to keep you safe and alive and and help you. So you mentioned fight or flight. Before that survival stance, the survival mechanisms of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, submit those are all early primitive survival responses that inherently exist in all humans. So that we don’t die, we need those things and that’s where dissociative processes are born as well. So when we’re experiencing something that is so overwhelming, our body and our brain is interpreting it as life threat, and that doesn’t have to make sense in context to an adult either. Right, that’s important to think about.
Laura : 33:14
Think about the different perspective of a child versus an adult in any situation could be life-threatening. Getting lost at the mall is life-threatening. You know, waking up and not knowing where your parents are, that’s life-threatening, like thinking about not having enough food. Or, you know, not knowing where your next meal is coming from or whether or not your mom or dad is going to come home in a good mood or in a really scary mood. That terror that you’re experiencing as a child is life-threatening.
Laura : 33:45
And so that’s where dissociative processes are born. They’re born out of the survival mechanisms that we all carry, and those processes are incredibly helpful and they help us survive childhood, when childhood is really difficult and none of us get out of this unscathed. Our childhood is not for um, not for lack of trying, but is hard right. Being a kid is not always safe and stable, and that doesn’t always mean that our parents are bad parents. Sometimes we’re just struggling and, um, our parents are struggling, and that can make childhood unsafe and unstable, you know for me in that too is like not judging yourself for having had those experiences as a child, right?
Michaela: 34:33
So so often I hear like I didn’t have anything bad happen to me or that wasn’t that big of a deal. I don’t know why I’m responding like, why I can’t just handle things Right, and so it’s so. I think that we forget as an in our adult brains we’re like well, that’s not that big of a deal but but we forget what the reality was for us as a child and how that, how that was experienced back then, before we had our fully functioning, formed brains.
Laura : 35:01
That’s such a good point Not judging ourselves for the experiences that we had as a child. I love that, because the things that happen to you don’t say anything about you. You know, there’s a difference between things that I went through and things that I am, and sometimes we get those things mixed up. You know, I hear from clients all the time about the messages that we got in our childhood. I hear that, whether it’s good or bad, those messages matter. You know, we get these messages from our parents of whether or not we’re capable of something or whether or not we deserve something, and those things turn into our core beliefs. Or whether or not we deserve something, and those things turn into our core beliefs. And we need to be able to look back and recognize that as a child, we had to believe those things because we didn’t have any other context and there was no other source of information that was going to give us this truth. And we have to align with our caregivers in order to survive, and so that’s not bad. It’s just what we have to do, and sometimes what we have to do comes with shame, and shame’s job is to suppress. James’ job is to suppress, to suppress yourself, to be able to align with our caregiver, and when we have to do that, it creates a wound, a scar that then is going to recur over and over until it’s healed. That’s deep.
Laura : 36:41
I know this experience that we’re having, that is shaping us, and we have no say in what’s going to happen, in what’s going on, in who our parents are in, who our support system is in, where we go to school and where we live. We don’t have any say in that. And yet everything that’s happening is teaching us something about ourselves. And then, all of a sudden, you’re supposed to know that none of that is really true and that you can be anybody you want at the day that you turn 18. How arbitrary that is Right. And so this experience that you had is going to stick around. It’s not just going to go away. But we don’t have, we’re not responsible for it. We’re not responsible for our childhood, we’re responsible and accountable for healing as an adult. That’s the difference. We’re not responsible for our childhood, we’re responsible and accountable for healing as an adult. That’s the difference. We’re not responsible for our childhood, we’re responsible for our adult healing.
Michaela: 37:49
And we can’t make our parents have gone and done that work.
Laura : 37:55
No, we can’t make them different, and we can’t control other people’s behavior with our behavior, even though, as a kid, that’s essentially our primary goal in life is to control our parents’ behavior. And so we’re learning how to try to change people’s behavior with our behavior, because our survival depends on it. But then, as an adult, that strategy is going to cause us a great deal of harm because we can’t change other people, and we don’t need to, because we can depend on ourselves.
Michaela: 38:30
Right, but I think again, going back to not blaming ourselves for creating the strategy to begin with, because it was born out of trying to find safety. It’s just that we don’t have to choose to do it anymore because it’s maladaptive, it’s not helpful anymore, it’s not going to serve us anymore.
Laura : 38:50
Yeah, it’s not a problem until it’s a problem. So once it’s no longer serving us, then we need to do the work to help our brains get that new information, fill in those missing pieces and get the extra support that we need to do that integration that we couldn’t do back then because it wouldn’t have made sense. But it makes sense now because we’re safe now or we’re safe enough. I like to say safe enough, right, because nobody can guarantee that nothing bad is going to happen. But what we can do is we can live as presently as possible in order to recognize that we have the survival skills and we have what we need in order to get through really difficult things and it’s okay if something bad happens in the future. We have the responsibility of being okay enough right now.
Michaela: 39:44
Yeah, and we can handle it, because we can handle more than what we think we can.
Laura : 39:49
We can handle a lot more than we think we can. And so, different ways of getting back to the present, getting back to knowing that we’re safe enough, there’s lots of things that one can do. One thing is just a grounding skill that is based in the present moment, which is like looking around for things that you recognize, like looking for find five things that are blue and name them. Count four things that are circles and name them. So what you’re doing is you’re bringing yourself into the room and you’re doing that externally, not necessarily internally. So those are grounding skills that don’t require the brain to come up with anything imaginative. Right, Like we’re. Just we’re using our senses of sight. Perhaps we do what are three things that we hear right now. So we’re using our senses. When we use our senses, it helps us reorient to where we are right now and that helps us get out of our heads and into the space that we’re in.
Michaela: 40:56
Yeah, Sometimes I hear people say that like they don’t feel safe when they’re having that experience of not feeling like things are real, and so would a sensory grounding thing be like holding an ice cube or something like that splashing cold water in your face be a good option, especially if you’re kind of feeling that out-of-body experience.
Laura : 41:24
Definitely, that derealization, that out-of-body experience, is something we need to bring ourselves back into our body right. So bringing yourself to the present with something that you can feel and touch, that’s tangible, that can be really helpful. Some people use what we call anchors, where, in therapy or in a positive space or state, you have a talisman. Maybe it’s a coin, maybe it’s a stone, a crystal, anything that you can hold on to, that anchors you into that present moment. What we want to do is we want to connect it to the positive experience that you’re having, the positive sense of safe enough, connect it with that anchor and then every time you hold that talisman you can recognize oh right, there’s safety there, I have that safety, right. So you’re wiring something together that you later want to fire together and call up on on demand I love that so that’s a really good one too well, and then I think about like from like a medication standpoint.
Michaela: 42:30
Right, there’s not really any medication that will treat um, dissociation, um, but you know, if you’re having severe enough anxiety, you know looking at treating the anxiety and the depression that go along with it can help reduce the amount of time that you feel like you need to be, that you feel like you can’t handle things right when you’re going to go check out Um and and, and oftentimes we see like a lot of depersonalization and derealization within like PTSD, and so if there is like a PTSD diagnosis, there are things that we can do to manage and treat that specifically.
Michaela: 43:10
Um so there’s options out there. There’s different supplements and things that I use to kind of help with reducing anxiety as well. Um, I think like essential oils are really good too, like lavender, for example. That’s the one I can think of off the top of my head that I use the most. I like mint, mint, okay, or lemon.
Laura : 43:32
Yeah, lemon balm. There you go, yeah. So those are really good ones that we can. Because we’re using our senses Again, our senses can bring us back to the present. Because we’re using our senses again, our senses can bring us back to the present because our senses are designed to evaluate our environment for safety. Yes, so that’s why we have them. We use them for that all the time. We use our sense of touch to see if something’s hot or sharp or safe to touch or safe to move through. We use our sense of smell to determine if something is, you know, rotten or if it’s healthy, right. So our senses are a really important aspect of our sense of safety and so when we can use our senses to find safety, that can help us a great deal.
Laura : 44:17
Another thing is time orientation, so saying, because dissociationation, derealization, depersonalization, it’s taking you out of the present space and time, right, and it’s operating. Our brain is operating from a place that doesn’t have a connection to time or space, because it doesn’t need that. When we’re surviving, we don’t need a connection to time and space. That’s not helpful. It wouldn’t be helpful. If I’m, you know, in pain or being hurt, it doesn’t help me to know how long it’s been. I need to disconnect from that sense of time so that it feels like it went by in a flash, right? So those survival mechanisms don’t have access to time.
Laura : 44:55
So when we can reorient ourself to time by like counting backwards from 10 or watching the clock for a minute, or when we can say the date, the date, the month, day and year, when we can say exactly where we are, our address, the location that we’re standing, like right now I’m in my office, or you know, and I’m in Chandler, you know, saying where you are. Another thing is saying how old you are and reminding yourself that at least part of you can recognize right now that you’re an adult and that an adult can handle things differently than a child can. And so like inviting that adult part of yourself to be the leader in charge and if you’re not an adult, then inviting the oldest aspect of yourself, right, like, however old you actually are, the oldest possible version of yourself, who has the most experience and is the most capable, is going to run the show right now. That’s what we want to ask ourselves, because we can use that information to reorient to the present time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Michaela: 46:02
Those are some really good suggestions.
Laura : 46:05
Those are my favorites. Those are the ones I use when I’m feeling out of it, because I have a dissociative mind. I have a mind that definitely can just check all the way out and completely not be here, and so I use these crowning skills. I used to say I use them 37,000 times a day. I remind myself like where am I, who am I, how old am I? Those are the things that work best for me.
Michaela: 46:33
Yeah, I just really like breathing. Like that just really helps me to like check back in, kind of take myself back down, because we have so much stress that we’re going through. You know, we have all these things that we’re trying to take care of and we’re always thinking about the future all the time, and so I think that that creates a level of stress. And so those, just those breathing skills are just, you know, box breathing, square breathing, or just like just breathing a little bit slower and a little bit deeper, like five slow breaths, and just kind of checking back in, kind of like reducing that stress back down. You know, when you breathe in, your heart rate accelerates and you’re activating sympathetic nervous system, and when you exhale you’re actually activating some of that parasympathetic nervous system. And so we can, we, we just kind of help with activating and and deactivating that and kind of just helping get into that coherent state and just feels so much better.
Laura : 47:35
And sometimes breathing because, like you said, can activate that heart rate. Sometimes that can feel like too much. So you want to do something to slow down. Like blowing bubbles is really good because you’re exhaling right. So you’re activating that sympathetic nervous system I’m sorry, parasympathetic nervous system that is going to calm you down. So I always used to have bubbles in my office and I would have people blow bubbles Like if we were feeling like things are too much, because then you’re just focusing on that exhale, yep.
Michaela: 48:08
That’s so true. I love that Bubbles.
Laura : 48:11
Bubbles.
Michaela: 48:13
The next time that my kids are fighting, I’m going to have them blow bubbles.
Laura : 48:18
I highly recommend it, and it’s just soap, so it washes out, it’s fine, it’s not messy no. So I think we’ve covered quite a lot of this. Discussion on dissociation has been quite thorough. What do you think?
Michaela: 48:36
I think it was really good. I mean, I always love hearing your perspective.
Laura : 48:40
I mean, I really feel like you’re an expert on this topic and it’s always interesting and I learn something new every time we chat about it, dissociative as I think about the way that our brains work and the way that our brains and our bodies work together, is inherently helpful. Everything is helpful, and even when it feels like it’s not so, I just want to help people know that this stuff can be okay and you’re not alone, and because if you have some of this stuff going on with you, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just stuff that needs to be worked out and you help the people that you never need to work with.
Laura : 49:33
That’s what it does to us they’re a mess. Well, thank you so much. It was great. Yeah, thank you, and thank you for listening to. Why am I like this? If you like our show and you hate us, or hate us too on your favorite podcast platform, follow the show and share it with friends. This episode was written and produced by me, Laura Wood and Michaela Beaver. Our theme song is making and unique by thick as thieves, and a special thanks to beneficiary counseling and coaching and active healing psychiatric services for sponsoring our show.
