You may know about dissociation already, or you might not be familiar with the term. You should be aware that it exists, though. Sometimes, someone will use this as a strategy to cope with trauma, particularly if it is severe.
You may need to seek out Orange County residential treatment if this is something that you do. Before you think about that as an option, though, you should know all about dissociation and what it means when you do it.
What is Dissociation?
Dissociation means entering a condition where you have temporarily broken with reality. You may not be aware of who you are in these moments or what is happening to you. You might come back to yourself in a half hour, or after a few days, or sometimes much longer than that.
Often, trauma brings on this condition. If something is happening to you that is simply too much for you to handle while remaining conscious of the events, your mind essentially turns off. You may still be awake and functional on some basic level, but it’s like your brain is on autopilot.
You May Learn to Use This as a Way of Coping with Ongoing Trauma
What’s perhaps the most fascinating about dissociation is that you might enter into this condition once when something awful happens to you. If your plane goes down in the ocean, for instance, and you’re eventually rescued from shark-infested waters, you might dissociate. When people ask you later about what happened, you may remember nothing.
However, you might also learn how to dissociate regularly if there’s a traumatic event that keeps happening to you. For instance, if a family member molests you as a child, you may learn to deal with that through dissociation. It’s the only weapon you have to fight back and protect your fragile psyche.
There’s a Link Between Trauma and This Condition
You don’t normally dissociateunless there’s something terrible happening to you. There’s no need for this rather extreme reaction if everything in your life is basically okay.
Most people will go through their lives and never do this. If you do it, whether it’s one time or many times, you can feel certain something went dramatically wrong.
You can even develop dissociative identity disorder in some extreme instances. This is where you have dissociated so many times that your mind has created two or more separate individuals living inside your own skin. You might call on one of them sometimes as a way of dealing with external pressures or stressful situations.
Dissociation is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, it’s all that keeps you from having a complete and permanent mental breakdown. If you’ve ever done this, though, whether you’re aware of it or not, that’s probably a sure sign that you need help from a mental health professional to get past whatever painful or traumatic event occurred.
It’s usually with a mental health professional helping you that you can determine you’ve dissociated at some point.