Dissociation & Relational Physicality
Dissociation
When the mind cannot stay inside the experience
One of the most important mechanisms in trauma work is dissociation. When an experience becomes too overwhelming to process, the nervous system may reduce the person’s conscious contact with what is happening.
In synonymous opposition, by spontaneous attraction we can advance and develop more toward the awakening. Moving onto the other stages comes by doing our duty properly over time and allowing a natural awakening.
Imagine facing an impossible contradiction: “this person is hurting me” at the same time, “this person is who I depend on for survival.”
There may be pain, fear, helplessness, love, attachment and the inability to escape – all at once. For anyone, especially a child, this can be too much to integrate. Dissociation can therefore function as a protective response, involuntarily.
Awareness may become distant. Body may feel unreal or numb. Time may feel different. The person may feel as if they are observing rather than fully experiencing. The body remains present, but psychological contact with the experience becomes reduced. This can be profoundly adaptive in the moment.
A traumatic experience does not necessarily become stored as one coherent story and fragments may remain instead:
- a sensation
- an image
- a sound
- a smell
- a touch
- a facial expression
- a bodily position
- a feeling of freezing
- an emotion without a clear narrative
This is why a person can intellectually understand their history and still have reactions they cannot explain. The mind-body knows well what the spirit-body has understood more deeply. For example they may know, “I am safe now,” while their nervous system responds, “something is wrong.”
Knowing that you are safe does is not always the same as experiencing safety.
How does the nervous system return from dissociation – and why can ordinary sensory input later become connected with trauma? Apasmṛtiḥ is a Sanskrit word which means experiencing forgetfulness of the present body or one’s own identity. This forgetfulness is not always in our control.
Sensory Re-entry
How the body can remember what the mind does not
When a person begins to come out of dissociation as a protective response, they don’t return to reality through thinking alone. They return through the body: vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, temperature, movement, pressure, breathing, and other bodily sensations.
After a traumatic experience ends, awareness begins to return. Maybe we first notice a sound, a smell, a texture against the skin, a particular light in the room, a facial expression, or perhaps see their mother embracing their father. There is no conscious decision that this will relate to our trauma. The nervous system is simply processing sensory information while returning to ordinary awareness.
Under certain conditions, to be precise, sensory information present in an extremely emotionally intense context can become associated with the broader traumatic network.
Later, a similar cue may activate a bodily or emotional response even when the original danger is completely absent. This is where things can become very confusing.
For example, when an adult can see two people hugging and they suddenly feel disgust, anger, an urge to leave, then they think, “I hate when people hug like that.” Or when another person may not know that they dislike hugs at all. They believe, “I don’t get enough physically affection.” They complain to their partner and yet, when the partner hugs them, the body becomes tense.
The Paradox
The conscious mind can want something that the nervous system has learned to associate with danger, helplessness or loss of control. Both of these experiences are real.
This is why the question cannot only be, “What do you think you want?”
It must be curious of, “What happens in your body when you actually receive it?”