Why Do We Dissociate?

Dissociation as Evolution’s Adaptive Last Resort

Imagine you’re a child who has just been kidnapped and locked in a room. You move into action: you scream for help, try to find anything to break the door or window that is bolted shut, and search the room for hours, hoping to find something you missed, yet you are still locked in the room. There’s nothing left to be done; there is nowhere to flee, no one to fight, and no one to appease. There is just the unavoidable reality of being locked in a room you cannot escape.

When there is nothing left at our disposal to survive, dissociation may kick into action. Dissociation has been described as a last resort response to threat when we are unable or fail to execute other survival methods (Van der Kolk, 2014). The most adaptive response when stuck after having exhausted other options for survival is to separate from what is happening. It would be unnecessarily distressing to remain completely attuned to emotions and sensations if there is a certainty of entrapment.

Children Adapt to Inescapable Environments

When children are trapped in traumatic environments at home, dissociation is an adaptive way to endure the inescapable. Children can attach to their caregiver and continue functioning despite chronic trauma due to the distance dissociation creates between the child, their traumatic experiences, and their caregivers. These children still need their caregivers for survival, despite them being the source of chronic trauma. If children were unable to utilize dissociation, they would be forced to navigate the overwhelming and distressing realities of their trauma without an attachment figure.

How Dissociation Occurs

Dissociation allows children to distance by believing the harm was happening to someone else and in a different reality or world. The frequency and duration of dissociation in childhood impacts the severity of dissociation in adulthood. Severity is based on several factors, including level of awareness, degree of compartmentalization, ability to remember dissociation and various dissociative states, and identity fragmentation.

Derealization and Depersonalization

Derealization is the experience of feeling as though the environment is unreal, dreamlike, lifeless, distant, fake, or distorted. Derealization can feel as if familiar places or people are unfamiliar and foreign. Some will describe the experience like a fog, where people and places are in the fog and no matter how far they walk, they will never reach their destination. Others will report uncertainty about the realness of where they are, or that they cannot make sense of where they are in the current moment.

Depersonalization occurs when someone feels disconnected from themselves. This can be reported as feeling unrecognizable, feeling like a stranger, unreal, robotic, on autopilot, or disconnected from their emotions. When depersonalizing occurs, many report looking at themselves from above, without connection to their physical or emotional experience. Someone might express that they are “no one,” or that they do not have a “self.” They might be aware of having feelings but won’t have the ability to feel them.

Dissociative Amnesia and Fugue

Although many people experience dissociation with memory recall, some people also experience dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia is the experience of consciousness disconnecting from the present, resulting in loss of memory. Some people may have no awareness of amnesia, while others may have some realization that they experience memory gaps or loss of time. Some have described a “woosh” sensation, where consciousness comes “back online.” They can report that they’ve regained consciousness noticing they’re talking or engaging in a behavior with no recollection of the event that led them there.

When people report that they regain consciousness in a different location than they remember last being, they have experienced dissociative fugue. Some have reported that they have driven across state lines without the intention or memory, have ended up in a crowded place without knowing where they are, or simply move from one spot to another in the same room without the memory of moving. This experience can cause incredible confusion and bewilderment, because there is no understanding of how they got from point A to point B.

Identity Fragmentation and Self-Alienation

When growing up in traumatic environments, children may have experienced treatment by caregivers that required them to separate from the parts of themselves that were vulnerable. Survival meant disowning the needs, wants, thoughts, and emotions that were disregarded, ridiculed, and punished by their caregivers. When children compartmentalize these aspects of the self, self-alienation and identity fragmentation occurs. The more a child disowns to adapt and survive, the more fragmented a child’s sense of self becomes. Children who experience self-alienation focus more on others than themselves without a sense of who they are.

Identity fragmentation can manifest throughout development and adulthood as self-loathing, chronic ambivalence, feeling numb, intellectualizing, overwhelm, self-destructive behaviors, paradoxical behavior, aggression, chronic depression, anxiety, and lack of ownership for shame-inducing behaviors. The dissociation that was incredibly adaptive in the traumatic environment becomes the exact mechanism that prevents the experience of joy, excitement, connection, and sense of self when they no longer are required to endure. Those who experience identity fragmentation tend to ask, “who am I” and tend to make decisions based on the behavior of others, rather than reflecting on their own hopes, wants, and desires.

Dissociation as an Automatic Response

Like other responses to trauma, dissociation becomes an automatic response, where the degree of dissociation and compartmentalization shifts depending on the person and how the person needed to adapt in a previous traumatic environment. When someone experiences a triggering event, the body and brain assume previously understood patterns as certainty and brings forward these adaptations. This can result in lack of awareness and presence in moments where it is desperately needed, or in moments where the nervous system only assumes danger due to its resemblance.

When dissociation occurs in a moment where presence is needed, retraumatization can occur. Let’s return to the original scenario and imagine a child locked in a room who couldn’t leave. Months later, the child, Sam, is let go by her assailants. Sam is now an adult, going on a first date, where she is invited back to her date’s home. Before Sam can make her decision, dissociation occurs. Sam now finds herself locked in a room without understanding how she landed in this situation. Sam was kidnapped as a child: she couldn’t fight, flee, or appease, and her system behaved years later in the way she learned being trapped for months.

When the nervous system predicts danger inaccurately, previously learned adaptations are utilized in situations where survival adaptations aren’t needed. Having been in a confined space for months, Sam begins to dissociate when she is in crowds. She notices this especially at concerts, where she begins to feel as though she is in a dream and loses time. The lack of space and feeling stuck creates a similar feeling of being trapped in a room as a child, which activates the adaptation previously used to survive the trauma she endured.

The Cost

Dissociation is an incredibly adaptive way to survive unimaginable harm that was inescapable. While enduring the traumatic environment, there is an uncanny ability for those who dissociate to function. Although there’s functioning, there are massive costs to dissociation. Dissociation means being an adult without ever having a sense of self, having an internal belief of being defected, wrong, or bad without explanation, and repeating traumas without the conscious choice and memory of being traumatized.

Presentations of dissociation, its intricacies, and how it impacts relationships, identity, and personality is currently being explored and debated by theorists. This series makes sense of the nuance.