I dissociate

What this looks like

You’re in a conversation and you realize you’ve been gone. You’ve driven somewhere and you don’t remember the drive. You feel like you’re watching yourself through glass. You feel like the world isn’t real, or like you aren’t. You’ve lost time, sometimes minutes, sometimes longer. You can’t always predict when it will happen.

The dissociation isn’t a malfunction. It’s a survival response that worked for something specific and is now running in situations where it isn’t useful.

What you’ve already tried

• Grounding techniques during dissociative episodes
• A therapist who explained the mechanism
• Medication that didn’t quite reach it
• Avoiding situations that seem to trigger it
• Mindfulness practice that sometimes worked and often didn’t
• Telling yourself you’re being dramatic
• Pretending it isn’t happening

The dissociation keeps showing up.

What kind of trauma response is yours?

Why this happens

You very likely came up with a stretch of life when being fully present was unsafe, and your nervous system found a way to be physically present while not being there. The pattern was protective. It worked. You may have been a child in a household where the adults were unpredictable, and you learned to leave your body to get through whatever was about to happen. You may have lived through one event where dissociating was the only way to survive what was being done to you. You may have been in conditions where staying alert was unbearable and the dissociation was the only off-switch available.

As an adult, the response runs in situations that aren’t actually dangerous. The system doesn’t have a way to update the threshold for when to deploy it. So it deploys. You lose time. You come back. The losing time becomes its own problem.

The grounding techniques work in the moment for some people. They don’t change the underlying pattern that produces the dissociation. The next trigger arrives and the response runs again.

For the broader trauma context, see I have PTSD or I have CPTSD . For numbness that often runs with this, see I feel numb since it happened .

The leaving was the answer once. Different answers can become available now.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy enters at the threshold. We map the seconds before you usually leave, the cues your system has been reading as too-much, and we build different responses that become available before dissociation does. As alternatives appear, your nervous system stops defaulting to the leaving.

You stay in the room. The minutes you used to lose belong to you again.