What is Dissociation Really?
On why we dissociate, the reclamation of our primal body wisdom, and the re-wilding perspective.
So! I decided to give this audio version a try! If you would rather listen then read, here it is! Keep in mind that I have linked to other essays I wrote while in my own dissociation process, a post by , and a little scene snippet from Moana (yes, the one that makes me cry every time without fail).
At the end of the recording I offer an invitation to create a specific type of practice that is supportive in helping your body come out of dissociation. If you want to jump ahead and hear that part (as I did not include it in the written form) then jump to minute 16:25 :)
Lastly I would love to know what you think about having the audio form.
Continue on down if you would prefer to read (or watch the scene from Moana)
Something really important happened last year for me. And it happened within a container filled with a great deal of pain, loss, & dissociation. I completely rewrote my relationship with my dorsal vagal state. As you may (or may not) know, when we dissociate, we are essentially leaving our body while our spirit hovers just slightly outside of our embodied experience. While dissociated we are not fully alive. But also not fully dead.
I often teach a very specific story to my students and clients regarding this state. I teach them that this state is the body's mechanism to spiritually remove us from the experience of spiritual, emotional, or physical pain when we cannot physically fight or flee the perceived threat.
In more physiological terms, when we are in a dorsal survival state, we have less access to our felt sense, meaning we don’t feel our bodies as much or at all, our pain tolerance increases along with this lack of our felt sense, we breathe much more shallow, our heart rate is nearly imperceivable, we don’t have much or any access to emotions (noted instead with feelings of numbness, nothingness, emptiness), and we often have an emptiness of mind. We might have thoughts but they are hard to follow and even harder to express. We also tend to have a very challenging time connecting to others. This is because dissociation is a withdrawal from connection, aka the opposite of connection, disconnection or dis-association from experience. Our society calls this state depression. And with this name comes a slew of ideas, perceptions, and visualizations of the person experiencing so-named depression.
I see how my clients and students suffer in deep fear regarding this dorsal state. They wonder what is wrong with them. Or worse… They think this is just who they are and how they were made; imprisoned by a diagnosis that they now believe they will have to live with, unchanging for the rest of their lives unless medicated. This identification of and approach to this state is a gross misunderstanding of what is really going on. Or rather, our society's perceptions of this identification causes a great deal of added harm to the individual who is the one experiencing this state.
We do not leave our bodies for no reason. In fact we leave for very BIG reasons. We leave our bodies because to be in a body meant at some point to our nervous system a great deal of mental, emotional, spiritual, or physical pain & in some cases obliteration in any of these regards. This might have been because of one big event or an accumulation of a lot of painful “smaller” events which I might add is still just as painful & harmful to our sense of wellbeing.
We also leave by means of dissociation if we feel powerless to change our external situation. What I mean by this is that if we, for whatever reason (and there are many), feel like setting boundaries, saying no, trying to get away, or fend off whatever the threat was/is would be to no avail, unsuccessful, or put us into even more danger, then our nervous system chooses dissociation as the last option. It says in Sarah Baldwin's words “I love you so much and I see how bad this might hurt, so I am going to make it so that you can’t feel it.”
We leave our bodies as a means of self preservation in the face of what our nervous system senses as grave danger & when we are close to spiritual obliteration. Dissociation IS NOT ITSELF spiritual obliteration. It is a strategy to preserve our spirit and everything at the core of us. It is a way for us to withdraw from the world, momentarily while we reconnect to our deepest sense of ourselves before we return to life.
“Trauma is hell on earth.
Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.”
– Peter Levine
Last year, I spent the entire year in and out of an intense dissociative state. Because of my training & understanding of what it was I was going through internally & externally, I was able to maintain a sense of calm love for myself while I witnessed my spirit maintain a bit of distance from my physical body. This understanding allowed me to receive with both hands a gift from the gods.
I want to preface this part by saying that up until this point of intense dorsal dissociation & grief, I had established a great deal of safety in my life & body. I had been working and training in the field of Somatic Experiencing for 3 years up to this point and had been in the support system of Somatic Therapy for 5 years. In other words, this work had developed deep roots in my body by the time of this great & painful shifting in my life. Along with this, my home was my sanctuary, my partner gave me unwavering & spacious love, and I worked from home. I had constructed a very grand opportunity for myself to stay in my immobilized state for as long as it needed to in order to complete “peacefully” and without disruption of things like shame, blame, self judgment & criticism, or external pressure to be anything and anywhere other than what/where I was.
During that time my body would not allow me to move in fear. In fact when fear would enter in, I would become immobilized. I was unable to think about the future and by future I mean my brain & body would dissociate if I even so much as thought about tomorrow. I would also experience waves of nausea in response to thoughts that were harmful to my spirit. This became the way my body showed me what internal constructs were poisonous to my system.
That deep state of dissociation FORCED present living. It forced a great deal of awareness as I navigated nearly every moment to moment decision. It was all I was “allowed” to do. My nervous system as the gatekeeper to my experience (as it always is btw) made very clear and unbreakable rules for me to live by. A spell cast for my highest self revelation. I watched, listened, waited, and let go of my grip of what I thought reality should look like. In other words I let go of all grip on who and how I thought I needed to be.
When I would experience moments of mini-mobility; aka motivation, I could only move VERY slowly & VERY intentionally. I would hold the thought of what I might try to do in my head. And if I dissociated while thinking about it or became nauseas, I knew that that was my body's way of telling me “no, baby. Not that. Not now.” I would hold different ideas until one “felt right”. Until my body responded with feelings of openness, calm, non-resistance. That was how I learned to move through life. For a year.
For a whole fucking year, my body forbade me from moving unless it was in true alignment with my essence self. It only gave me permission to move from a place of neutrality, love, or nourishment. And I listened. There was a lot of staring off, zoning out, and nothingness. There was a lot of nap time, lounging, sitting in silence, crying, and journaling. I’ll tell you what there was not a lot of; Dopamine. HA (funny not funny).
Thanks to every mentor and every moment of study I had put in up until this point, I knew what I was doing. Or rather, I knew I could trust my body to do what was needed. I knew what my body was doing. I trusted that I would not stay here. I trusted that this was a temporary visit into the depths of soul preservation & self retrieval. She was showing me a new way forward. Ironically, just like I had asked her to.
I remember craving so deeply to be able to move through my life by more peaceful mechanisms. I remember longing to know what it was like to be moved by the forces of love rather than fear. I asked; “Reveal to me that I can live in this life without fear being the main motivator to move, create, and live.” And she did. She sure as shit did it. And it was not a peaceful process. I think now of the story of Durga & Kali Ma fighting the two demon brothers, Shumbha & Nishumbha as told by Sally Kempton in Awakening Shakti. These two demon brothers amassed a great deal of power and ruled the upper and lower worlds & caused immense suffering. Then one day a sage sends a different ruler to request the presence of Durga; their only hope at defeating these 2 tyrant brothers. Durga went to battle. The battle was ferocious and bloody. Thousands of warriors were lost to the power of Durga. Then finally, as the 2 kings lay dying, Durga takes the last warrior demon into her arms. She holds him after a long and brutal war. With his dying breath he whispers “Ma” in reverence to her. A smile comes over his face as the ecstasy of the goddess fills his being. In that instant, the demons are transformed, when the ego (wounded self) dissolves, even the most demonic soul comes home.
These fear based constructs are much like that. They will not be dismantled easily. I think of Te Kā from Moana. They appear as monsters that are approached by many as needing to be conquered and destroyed (like Maui thought). But in actuality, they are pieces of our own spirit waiting to be returned to their sense of wholeness.
This state is a rich and deeply protected under-world of human experience; where we go to retrieve ourselves and repair after great harm has been done to us. Sadly this process is completely disrupted by the shame we tend to place on ourselves when we enter into this state of self preservation. And furthermore disrupted by the complete misunderstanding of society’s and grandfather psychological theories' view of this primal state.
I wrote a lot during this time.
I wanted to document this state. To remember where it took me. This is ONE (of the many) best part about being an SEP. My own personal work is my training in action. To traverse the full spectrum of my own human experience is my training ground. To face my own humanity is to face humanity at large in a way that is ACTUALLY digestible, unlike being an online activist and immediately experiencing overwhelm at the state of pain that plagues so much of our earth. I am reminded of a quote from a beautiful essay written recently by
on :“I remember that the only way to truly be in the big picture is by bringing enough resilience on board to be in the big picture without collapsing.”
What that ends up meaning is that, when my system is so overloaded that it feels the need to remove me from my body experience I must learn to trust that wisdom (and hold the hand of my mentor SEP) so that I might retrieve my spirit and welcome it back into my body in a more whole and integrated way than it was before. Put same-same but differently:
When your system is so overloaded that it feels the need to remove you from your body experience you must learn to trust that wisdom (and hold the hand of a mentor SEP) so that you might retrieve your spirit and welcome it back into your body in a more whole and integrated way than it was before.
Dissociation (as with all nervous system states) is a sacred state that is the framework for a sacred process of self retrieval. It is the state we go to to rediscover our sense of self, to pick up the pieces that may have been blown apart by experiences that greatly hurt us, and reintegrate and reorganize those precious pieces back into the wholeness of our Self, so that we may be transformed (like Te Kā when she transformed into Te Fiti, her radiant self, and her power of destruction transformed into her power of creation).
To me this is a process of re-wilding.
Coming home to your source self.
That part of you that cannot be destroyed or harmed.
That part of you is very much alive within you.
And it is your birthright to be connected to it.
FINAL NOTE: As an SEP myself and someone who has gone in and come out hundreds of times from my own under-world, I strongly STRONGLY advise you to do this work with an SEP. Someone who has traversed this space before you & has a rooted understanding of how the nervous system works. Who is unafraid and can be that unwavering presence while you consciously step foot into your own under-world. We are meant to learn from each other and if you have no model or previous experience (most of us don’t), how are you meant to know how to go in and come out successfully and in a way that does not deepen the disorganization within. It does not take long to learn, and once learned, you will never be the same. I still rely on my mentor to be with me when these states arise from within, because we are meant to heal together, not in isolation (in fact, small tangent, it is often the case that our dis-integration takes place in having to face our under-world in isolation).
OK LET’S TALK!
What are your internal stories about the Dorsal Vagal State (aka depression?)
when you experience it and/or when you see others experience it.
When you imagine in your mind a world where you move unafraid through the full emotional spectrum or nervous system states, what happens in your body?
What about in your mind?
How might refusing to move in fear (unless obviously necessary because fear is NOT a bad emotion, but one that tends to get over-utilized), change your life?
Love this exploration into dissociation and how you weaved in polyvagal AND myth/spirituality to support a deeper understanding of it all. My own experiences with dissociation have been similar...requiring a deep trust of the body and it's innate wisdom without the intellectual understanding of what exactly it's protecting me from. Thank you for sharing so vulnerably about your own story! Grateful we've connected in this space <3
So much within this that I will need to revisit. Thank you for sharing such depth, I feel like I’m very much on this path to fully inhabiting my body but it’s slow and gentle and to be honest has already been many years long. Your words are so comforting and supportive. I loved listening to the recording, I absorb information best this way!! Xx