Pod Insights The Psychology of your 20s 342. The psychology of dissociation About this episode Have you ever felt like the world around you isn’t quite real, or like you’re watching your life from the outside? Have you ever driven somewhere and suddenly wondered how you got there? It might be dissociation - a surprisingly common psychological experience that can be both protective and, at times, unsettling.
In this episode we look at the psychology behind dissociation – what is going on in our bodies and brains during this state, what triggers us and how it interacts with wider factors in our lives.
We explore:
• The science of why we freeze in this state
• How it can help us cope, and when it becomes maladaptive
• Interactions with ADHD, trauma and survival mode
• Why it feels so unsettling
• Strategies to pull you back in
• Reminders for when we don’t feel real
If you’ve ever felt like you were living on autopilot, this episode is for you.
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2:31 Jemma Sbeg? Hello everybody and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.
2:50 Jemma Sbeg? Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, we're going to dive into something that can be quite unsettling. We're going to discuss the psychology of dissociation. Now, you may have heard of this, you may have experienced this, it is this disconnect we have at times between our reality and ourselves. It's this feeling where like a weird blurry screen almost goes up between you and the world.
3:33 Jemma Sbeg? And let's be just completely honest, straight off the bat, it is super scary. It's honestly really terrifying and it's also deeply misunderstood and something that because it feels so terrifying, we don't talk about because we think it's going to validate the thoughts that we have about the experience. And that actually means that the panic that we feel or the stress becomes a lot stronger. When I say dissociation, I want you to think of a very old, very dramatic survival strategy that our brain has. It is this ability that we all have to disconnect from our thoughts, our feelings, our surroundings, when things get really overwhelming.
4:17 Jemma Sbeg? Now, because it's automatic, that's why we have a lot of confusion and fear towards the sensations that it brings up, even though it's not actually a sign always of anything actually going wrong within our brains and within our, within our psychology. This is something that I think is really helpful to understand if you have been experiencing dissociation recently, sometimes dip into this state of mind.
4:45 Jemma Sbeg? It doesn't necessarily mean that you are going so-called crazy, that you are losing your mind, that you are losing touch with reality. There are a lot of other explanations that I think are really helpful just to know about. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about why it happens, what it is. Most importantly as well, what you can actually do when your brain kind of seems to stop being sure of whether you're here or not, because you most certainly are, I can promise you that. You are here, you are alive, the world is real. You just need to find ways to get back in touch with the parts of your brain that will help you believe that. We have quite a science-packed
5:27 Jemma Sbeg? episode today for you guys, which I know a lot of you love. And sometimes I think with something as irrational as dissociation, that the only real like counterweight is just to hit it with like a fistful of reason and rationality. And that's hopefully what we're gonna do. I also want to talk about my own experience with this. I literally had a moment like this last night. And there are a couple of strategies that I always use that I find pretty foolproof that I want to also kind of let you guys in on as well to hopefully help you in these like scary moments. So you're going to get the personal insights, you're also going to get the scientific background, the perfect combination, if you
6:07 Jemma Sbeg? ask me. Without further ado, let's get into the psychology of dissociation.
6:17 Jemma Sbeg? Let's start super simple. Dissociation is one of those words that floats around a lot in mental health conversations, but it is of course often misunderstood. Honestly, at this stage, like what term isn't misunderstood? But I always feel the need to just give like a bare minimum definition at the beginning, even if you've heard of the thing we're talking about before. So in psychology, dissociation refers to basically a disruption in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, and perception.
6:52 Jemma Sbeg? In other words, it's what happens when parts of our mental experience, our thoughts, our awareness, our connection to our body or the world around us, it just kind of stops lining up in the ways that it usually would. And it's often because we are avoiding some kind of emotional information or emotional pain to protect our fragile psyche. Our sense of continuity, this thing that, you know, joins ourselves, that joins time, our actions, the world around us, into one singular thing and singular experience, that becomes fractured. And we feel that fracturing as intense discomfort, anxiety,
7:35 Jemma Sbeg? but also like there is a fuzziness to our experiences that, you know, maybe we're not really here or the world around us isn't here either. Now, both of these things, being here and the world existing, are pretty fundamental to our sense of psychological stability. That is probably the understatement of a lifetime. And that's why this creates so much terror. It's not because those things are true. It's because the possibility of them being true makes us feel like we don't really know anything. Pierre Genet, he was a French psychologist writing in the late 19th century. He was actually one of the first to start to describe dissociation. And he described it as a breakdown in the mind's integrative capacity.
8:17 Jemma Sbeg? And what he essentially concluded when he was looking at patients, he was looking at people with extreme trauma, was that when stress or trauma overwhelms us, the brain breaks up how it experiences that in order to protect deeper parts of ourselves. It is our brain, as he says, trying to survive hard things so that our soul suffers less. That's one explanation. It is not, as some movies would suggest, someone flipping into a completely different person without more warning. Like, it does not make you dangerous. It is also not the same thing as psychosis. Dissociation can feel strange and it can feel scary and floaty.
9:01 Jemma Sbeg? It doesn't mean that you're losing touch with reality in a psychotic sense. It doesn't also mean that you may be having delusions or hallucinations that could or maybe would indicate a more serious diagnosis, like schizophrenia, for example. A lot of other things have to be present and happening for that to be considered. Dissociation cannot be your only symptom. You know, psychosis, you have to be delusional. You have to really, like, not be able to question the fact that maybe what you're thinking is wrong. Dissociation, though, there is like a part of you that knows that this probably isn't real and that can recognize that this is some kind of split. And it's a defense mechanism. They definitely
9:46 Jemma Sbeg? overlap at times, but I just feel the need to address this because it's a common fear that I've had and that I know other people have had, that they're dissociating, they're feeling super weird, super unreal, and they think that maybe this is a sign of something a lot more serious to do with their mental stability, that they are developing schizophrenia, that they are going into a psychotic episode. The majority of the time, I can promise you that is not the case. Now, dissociation also exists on a spectrum. And the other thing that's important to note is that pretty much everyone will experience some level of this in their life. Maybe that's comforting to you. You know, at one end of the spectrum,
10:29 Jemma Sbeg? the most extreme end, we have dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder. That is like the most extreme version of this, but for most people, the everyday experience of dissociation is just, you know, blanking out during a stressful conversation, losing a few minutes, feeling disconnected during exam season, after a breakup, during a really hard day. Now you've probably heard of depersonalization as well and derealization. These are basically forms of dissociation that people may experience differently. So we have dissociation as like the blanket idea of feeling disconnected, feeling like there's a lack of continuity.
11:15 Jemma Sbeg? Then we have underneath that depersonalization. And this is when this feeling of being disconnected is feeling disconnected from your own body or your own thoughts, like you're kind of watching yourself from the outside. In this form, you don't feel real. The world feels real. You're seeing things happen to you and to your life or your environment. You just don't feel it. Then there's derealization and that's when the world seems fake, but you feel real. The world feels colorless, flat, dreamlike. You know you exist, but there's all these questions of like, how can I be sure that what I'm seeing and observing isn't just a figment of my imagination? Obviously, that's quite existential and it can really make you feel detached from the world around you.
12:00 Jemma Sbeg? It's not always cause for concern. Some other forms of this that you may see or hear discussed are dissociative amnesia. This is a lot less common. It's when you can't recall personal information, especially around like traumatic or highly stressful events in your life. Clinicians will also talk about peri-traumatic dissociation, which is kind of similar. It's like the kind of dissociation that happens right after a traumatic event. And also chronic dissociation, which is when this detached state exists long after the triggering event has occurred. And then just to circle all the way back, because I feel like I didn't give it enough attention. We have dissociative identity disorder.
12:42 Jemma Sbeg? This is the idea that when someone goes through something really terrible, their personality can literally split so that they are, they completely dissociate from who they are and all of their thoughts and feelings become contained by another personality.
13:01 Jemma Sbeg? This is extremely rare. And it's even worth noting that its existence is even disputed by some. I definitely think that it exists, like there's definitely, there are so many cases of this happening. But we're going to talk more about that later and how and when that develops within somebody. Most of the time, what you will be experiencing is just everyday dissociation. This is what happens when, you know, you're driving home from work and you don't remember the last 10 minutes. Or you're zoning out during a conversation or like you blink and an hour has passed. It's like you go into some kind of trance. Sometimes it's called highway hypnosis or white line fever, especially like when you're driving.
13:43 Jemma Sbeg? You can just see that there are very different levels of this feeling. And I think that's really crucial to understand so that we don't experience dissociation and suddenly think that we're going to split into a completely different person. Sometimes it's just because you're tired or you're stressed or, you know, from a myriad of other factors, you're experiencing this. You have to understand that this is actually your brain doing exactly what it has evolved to do, which is protect you. No matter how scary or shocking it is, at its core, this is just a coping mechanism. Even if it's made feet, like life feel very nonlinear or blurry or odd, you will come back.
14:27 Jemma Sbeg? Your brain is just going a little bit too far. And I know that my brain does this for everything, right? My brain loves to do things at 150%, whether it comes to love, whether it comes to ambition, perfectionism, anxiety, and it also does that with dissociation. It just takes it too far. This is really often in response to some kind of threat that we have either been able to consciously detect or not. So according to what we know as polyvagal theory, our nervous system, when it sees or encounters a threat, follows a bit of a hierarchy. First, we feel the urge to fight, then flight, so then run away.
15:09 Jemma Sbeg? And if neither of those is possible, if the danger feels inescapable, the body will shift into a freeze state or a shutdown state. Dissociation is what is linked to that last pathway. It's also sometimes called the dorsal vagal state. Vagal meaning vagal nerve. This is the body's longest nerve. It's the main pathway for regulating almost every system in our body, specifically our parasympathetic nervous system, which slows things down, shuts things off. So when we experience dissociation, that state is triggered and that is what's creating this narrowing of awareness, this kind of detachment, lack of focus. It's what causes our heart rate to drop.
15:54 Jemma Sbeg? It's your nervous system basically saying, if I can't escape this, if I can't fight back against this, I'll just disconnect and maybe I'll survive with a few less emotional scars or at least with some energy for later. When we look at the brain, neuroimaging studies will show that something fascinating happens during this process. When people with trauma-related or stress-related dissociation are reminded of distressing experiences or put into a stressed state, the amygdala, our brain's alarm system, often actually shows reduced activity compared to the intense activation that you would expect if someone was in a hyper-aroused state.
16:39 Jemma Sbeg? So this gets kind of complicated here, but how people respond to trauma is different. Some of them have hyper-arousal, some of them have hypo-arousal. So either you stay in this like cortisol fight or flight state and you are constantly hypervigilant or alert, or some people go this way and they stay in this dissociative or hypo-arousal state where they kind of just tune out and they feel completely disconnected. In those cases, the part of our brain that would usually be like, everything's on fire, like run, run, run. For people who are experiencing dissociation perhaps more than others, it seems that that part of their brain, something's kind of not working, there's not as much communication going on.
17:22 Jemma Sbeg? Meanwhile, there's another part of our brain that is important for integrating emotions and for regulating emotions. And during this state, it also goes quiet. This is important because this is the prefrontal cortex that's responsible for these things. When that goes offline, we lose a lot of our sense of processing, rational processing, and a sense of like, I'm here and this is happening now. We can lose our sense of being present, which is probably what's creating that weird feeling. There's one final area of the brain that's involved, and that is the insular cortex. This is basically your ability to introspect, your ability to feel your body,
18:05 Jemma Sbeg? your body's signals, to understand that you are here. And it also shows dampened activation during dissociation.
18:16 Jemma Sbeg? So all of these things are kind of combining. And when you dissociate, your brain is basically trying to reroute around a bunch of systems that have all walked out on you. It's trying to like get to the place, the thought patterns, the things in your thoughts in your brain are trying to get to the same place. And there's a whole lot of roads that are not working. So it takes longer to get there and maybe those messages never get there. Our awareness of our bodies, of our emotions, of our sense of continuity, of our memories, they've all been switched off, flooded, overwhelmed. And again, it's this protective reflex that we have evolved as humans so that we can survive hard things.
18:59 Jemma Sbeg? Research shows that healthy adults can experience dissociation, yes, because of trauma, but also because of really everyday, I don't want to say simple, but common things. Intense anxiety, stress from conflict, from exams, from work, even when they're just exhausted.
19:21 Jemma Sbeg? For example, a 2014 study published in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry looked at a sample of 560 healthy participants who didn't have any serious mental health conditions, and they basically split them into two groups. Half of the participants were placed in the experimental condition, they were deprived of sleep for 36 hours, the other half had a supernormal night's sleep. They then asked the participants to rate their levels of sleepiness, their mood symptoms, their dissociative symptoms, and what they found was that sleep deprivation alone can push people into a dissociative moment or state of mind.
20:06 Jemma Sbeg? It can make them depersonalise or make them de-realise. So again, you're not going, and I'm going to use air quotes here, you can't see me use them, but you are not going crazy. Sometimes it's just that you are tired, you are overwhelmed, you are out of low, your brain doesn't have the same cognitive, psychological and mental resources that it usually would, so it just shuts things down. It will pass. These everyday stresses, they feel big, they feel scary, they're also typically short-lived. It's just that your nervous system doesn't discriminate. It's just trying to do what it's meant to do. It has, it has like its manual in front of it, it's reading from the manual and it's not very flexible.
20:50 Jemma Sbeg? It's just, this is what I've been told to do, this is the systems that I have available to me. They're feeling stressed, okay, my manual tells me press this button. That's what's happening to your brain right now. Okay, we're going to take a short break here, but when we return, I want to talk about the unique relationship between ADHD and dissociation as well as trauma and dissociation. Stay with us, we will be right back.
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24:34 Jemma Sbeg? So, something that you may not know, or maybe you do, I don't know what you do and don't know, but I certainly wasn't entirely over this idea is that dissociation and ADHD are actually deeply linked. People with ADHD, for example, may find that everyday stresses are even more extreme, meaning their brain has to rely on dissociation more. There's the sensory overload, there's like the cognitive load of having to juggle multiple tasks, of shifting attention, remembering deadlines, managing impulses, plus the emotional dysregulation that people with ADHD can experience, where small things trigger really big reactions. All of this adds up.
25:18 Jemma Sbeg? The nervous system for someone with ADHD is constantly taxed, and when that combination of sensory, cognitive, and emotional demands reaches a tipping point, the brain again presses the button, activates the same protective mechanisms that we sometimes see as a trauma response, even if no trauma is actually present. Dissociation in this sense is not caused by ADHD itself, but it often is something that a lot of people find themselves slipping into in these moments because it's just the only way to survive the overload. It's also worth noting that dissociation and ADHD in particular can be very, very subtle.
26:02 Jemma Sbeg? So a lot of people don't always put this label on it. It might show up as zoning out a lot more, which people can get frustrated at you for, even though, you know, you're not deliberately trying to do it. Um, losing track of time whilst you're hyper focusing on a task. Some people have have labeled that as a form of dissociation. Or just feeling really, really numb during moments of high stress. Like someone is, you know, bringing something to you or someone is putting something on your plate that like needs to be done immediately and you just operate. You can just do it. This is like a weird skill that I have a couple of friends with ADHD that they just seem to be able to do.
26:45 Jemma Sbeg? Where it's like everyone else is freaking out and normally I would assume that they would be having the same, if not a more emotional reaction. And they just become like hyper focused and they can just deal with it. This may be again because of this high reliance on dissociation. The brain can use it to its advantage during these moments. There is also, of course, a link between dissociation and anxiety and depression and other mood disorders, but the biggest risk risk factor here, like the one that everyone is going to talk to you about if you mention dissociation in an academic room or in a room full of psychologists is trauma.
27:31 Jemma Sbeg? Trauma is the biggest thing that researchers will cite for you when it comes to dissociation. There was a recent report that suggests that the rates of dissociation are almost sixty to seventy percent higher in people who have experienced trauma than the average individual. That is one of the most replicated findings you will find from the last fifty years in psychology. Trauma and dissociation are like two peas in a pod.
28:02 Jemma Sbeg? I feel like we've been talking about trauma a lot on the podcast recently and just the hard parts of being human and how our brain and our bodies respond to that. It's been like a common theme for us in the last couple of months. I don't know if you've noticed, but I think it's because the deeper you get into the literature on these topics, the more you kind of realise how deeply shaped we are by the negative experiences that we may have and how the body instinctively holds on to these experiences for better or for worse in ways that do end up shaping our personality and how we respond to things without even knowing. Emotional abuse, neglect, inconsistent caregiving, but also childhood bullying,
28:47 Jemma Sbeg? surviving a natural disaster, surviving your parents divorce, that can create a blueprint for dissociation later on in life. So there is this theory called the structural dissociation theory that explains why. According to this model, when a child experiences repeated overwhelming stress, you know, hearing their parents constantly fighting, being threatened by a caregiver, being at school seven to eight hours a day and feeling like they need to hide or, you know, have to look over their shoulder or are just constantly feeling out of place, their personality
29:28 Jemma Sbeg? can actually split into what we call apparently normal parts or ANPs, which is what they use to handle daily life, and then emotional parts, EPs, which are the parts of them that store the unprocessed trauma. The system learns to switch between these parts as a survival strategy. At school, you know, with a parent, the apparently normal parts, the ANPs, will be on display, but then there are these emotional parts that are hidden away that they only briefly kind of dip into, that they don't really want to touch, their brain doesn't really want to touch, but is still there. In practice, this means that even as adults, people with this kind of history can
30:13 Jemma Sbeg? experience dissociation when a trigger comes into their life that echoes the original trauma. A loud voice, a threatening tone, a situation where they feel powerless, even like um rela- like relationship difficulties or conflict can cause people to be like, I know how to deal with this. I'll just slip this mask on. I'll just fade out of this. And here, in this state, I can be safe, even if I feel completely weird. It's not that the present is objectively dangerous. It's just that the nervous system again recognizes an environmental cue that resembles past trauma.
30:55 Jemma Sbeg? And these patterns from early life switch us into protective mode because what else is your body gonna do? Just ignore when it thinks something dangerous is about to happen? That's not its programming. This is where dissociation can become really maladaptive. When it's responding to threats that aren't there anymore, or when it becomes the only strategy that our brain keeps going back to when things are scary. And when better options are available for it. If your brain again learns that the early world is dangerous. And the only way to keep going through this is to put large parts of that experience offline. Or to kind of float above the world or float above yourself.
31:40 Jemma Sbeg? Those dissociative patterns can become stabilized. I was actually reading up on a bunch of cases about this in a couple of psychiatric journals, just to see how this presents. And there was one case, actually, there's a couple of cases I'll read to you that were super interesting. The first was of a young 21-year-old guy and he experienced a really bad dissociative episode when he got back in touch with his estranged father. And he dissociated for, I think it was like three or four days. He couldn't remember being admitted into a psychiatric hospital. He couldn't remember anything that had happened to him in the last three to four days of his life, despite being really, really healthy and otherwise completely fine.
32:23 Jemma Sbeg? And afterwards, he told physicians that the last time this had happened to him was, surprise, surprise, when he was a young kid and he'd last seen his father.
32:35 Jemma Sbeg? You know, it'd been years, I think for him, it maybe had even been over a decade since he'd seen his father. And yet he was right back there. And this ancient part of our brain is like, okay, I know what to do here. Another case I read was someone in their 50s who reported that at 24, it was like her life suddenly changed colour. And she felt like everything became dampened after a serious traumatic event. And since then, she'd only had a few moments every year when she had felt normal. Um, but she actually was telling physicians that like, she liked how she felt.
33:18 Jemma Sbeg? She was like, I, I don't, I know it's a problem. My family tells me it's a problem. But I like this feeling of sometimes not feeling real or not feeling like the world is real or detaching myself from what's going on around me. It just feels more peaceful. Again, a maladaptive coping strategy. It's probably about time we bring up dissociative identity disorder and what we previously knew as multiple personality disorder. Because when trauma is really extreme, there is this thing that can happen, this phenomena where someone's personality splits so deeply that they feel like they are different people at different times.
34:03 Jemma Sbeg? Now, this is not everyday dissociation. This is not feeling unreal and panicked by that feeling. This is when children especially go through such a terrible thing in their life that the only way they endure it is to say, is to almost create an alter or a persona that it's happening to that is not them as a way to protect their ego. And those people, once they are created in their mind, it's very hard to kill them. Some people even have amnesia about this. There's an incredible YouTube video that I think you should watch titled, oh, okay, I need to remember. I think it's titled, "Living with 12 Alternative Personalities for 60 Years."
34:47 Jemma Sbeg? And it interviews a woman called Amanda, who has 12 alters. 12 different personalities that have emerged from and through traumatic periods in her life. Some of them are children, some of them are teenagers, some of them are men, some of them are women, some of them are older. And she switches between them, sometimes on a daily, sometimes monthly. They feel like she's like, "I, when I am in this person, I am this person. I don't have amnesia about it." Like, I, the way she tries to explain it is like, someone trying to explain colors that don't exist, like you just probably can't see it or understand it unless you are her.
35:30 Jemma Sbeg? And she describes the first time she experienced this as a child, when something horrible happened to her. And she, again, was like, "This is not happening to me, this is happening to Jenny." "Hi Jenny." And then Jenny was this part of her personality that dissociated and broke off. And she just kept relying on this strategy and kept splitting until she is the person she is today. What's so interesting and what I found so interesting about this video where she was like, they all have different opinions, they kind of have different voices, they have different even political beliefs, um, different food preferences. And she, even in this interview, like, switches between her and I think the guy, like, one of her personalities called Bradley, like, on camera.
36:16 Jemma Sbeg? And the reason I bring this, this extreme case up is because firstly, I think it's important to see the level, like, the, the maximum level at which this can develop to. It's almost comforting to know that, like, even if that was where I ended up or you ended up, like, you would still be okay. This woman seems actually very happy and very loved. But also because in those unique cases, you really can see the anatomy of this mechanism. You can see exactly, more clearly, I guess, what is happening to you. You are obviously not splitting into a different personality, but it's the same premise. Your brain just needs a break.
36:59 Jemma Sbeg? It just needs to clock out for a little bit. I will say it's very unlikely that this will happen to you, especially if you are over the age of 12. You have to have experienced intense trauma in your childhood to be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. Obviously, some people get diagnosed later in life, but I think it's important to realize that these really intense cases are super rare. So if you are experiencing everyday dissociation, yes, it's really scary, but you're probably not going to end up in this extreme state. And even if you do, you will survive. You may have relied on dissociation for a long time without realizing it.
37:44 Jemma Sbeg? It doesn't mean that you're always going to feel this way or be in this state. The good news is that your nervous system is completely plastic. It is changeable. There is a way to switch off chronic dissociative responses and to really feel more in touch with reality and the feeling of being real and the feeling of being alive. Um, even if maybe that is in itself equally, equally like confronting, it's good to know the possibility is there and that you can remove this filter over your experiences. And that's what we're going to talk about next. When dissociation feels scary, when depersonalization, derealization takes over,
38:27 Jemma Sbeg? how do you bring yourself back successfully? Stick around, we're going to talk about all of that and more after this short break.
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41:52 Jemma Sbeg? In true psychology of your twenties fashion, I want to give you some strategies that might help if you have noticed in yourself that you have a tendency to not feel real, to not feel like the world is real, or to dissociate. Like I said, this is something that I experience quite a bit, especially when I'm sleep deprived, especially when I'm stressed, especially when I have a lot on my plate. I often find that I will have these like really scary moments right before I go to bed, where automatically my brain is like, "Oh, well, did you know that you're not actually real and that you're not actually here?" And I'm like, "Can we, can we cut with, can we not with that?
42:34 Jemma Sbeg? Like, I'm sick of feeling this way. Like, let's, let's cut the cameras on that one." But I have actually discovered some really helpful strategies that like make me the boss of that feeling and immediately kind of...
42:47 Jemma Sbeg? Shut it up, to be like the most polite about it. You know, a lot of people will talk about grounding, you know, naming five things that you can see, hear, feel, maybe even taste, um, placing your feet on the grass, in the dirt, in the sand, and really connecting with, with the earth. Those are all great strategies, probably ones that we know, and sometimes it just doesn't cut it. So here are some things that might take this to the next level for you and might actively be able to pull you back into the world when dissociation hits. The first being safety scaffolding. If dissociation happens, it really helps to have a predictable, low effort ritual that signals safety to your nervous system.
43:30 Jemma Sbeg? That could be a short recorded audio that you've made of your own voice saying a really calming mantra, or just saying, hey, I know you're not feeling real right now, I can promise you, you definitely are. It could also be the voice of someone else, like a meditation that you always come back to. The familiarity of the voice, whether it's your own or a voice that you listen to a lot, reduces the initial alarm state that you might be feeling. Because it signals, okay, something I know well and something I know to be true is here. I must be present because this is something that I keep coming back to. This is something that has been continuous.
44:12 Jemma Sbeg? This mantra from myself, this meditation, has always been here through these moments. It's just like having an anchor to hold on to. Another kind of scaffolding is anything sensory. A Rubik's Cube, a mint lozenge, chewing gum, something like that. I've also given this tip before, Warheads, sour candies, have been a lifesaver for me in these moments. Because the extreme sensory experience of this candy, it like genuinely shocks me and brings me back into the present because it's something that I cannot ignore. It is this like real thing that is like, of course you're alive.
44:53 Jemma Sbeg? Because how could I be alive and be experiencing, or not be alive and be experiencing this like so intensely? And it's just like the shock that just like catapults me right back to where my feet are planted. I think it's also like a distraction technique, like when you're chewing or licking or whatever, consuming something that's that sour. Sometimes you just like can't really think about anything else and it lets you just for a moment stop thinking about thinking about not being real or the world not being real, if you know what I mean. I know as well that when I'm flying overseas, I will or flying anywhere, like I will feel a sense of
45:32 Jemma Sbeg? derealization a lot more. So I also always bring something from home, like a little figurine from my house on every trip that I just like set in my hotel room or like bring with me in my bag. And it has this weird therapeutic effect on me. I don't know what it is, but again, like I think especially being away from my environment that I love and that I cherish and like from my, my dog and like from my life, I can feel quite unstable and having this like really otherwise quite silly, stupid thing that would otherwise just be like this ornamental thing in my house with me on this trip pulls me back
46:12 Jemma Sbeg? to that environment where I feel my safest. I've also heard of someone, a friend of mine, who brings a sheet of stickers with her everywhere she goes and anytime she feels strange or she feels odd, she will pull out a sticker and it's like one of those um 3D stickers, like those squishy ones. And she will like stick one onto the wall or her computer or a mirror or like the back of the bus seat and just like focus on it. And she's like, oh, well, I'm bringing like at least this thing is real. At least I have these stickers that I'm bringing with me in to every single different situation. And I know it sounds silly, but sometimes for something as like extreme and scary as derealization, you
46:54 Jemma Sbeg? just have to either beat it with complete reason or beat it with silliness and being a little bit goofy with it and like playing with the feeling. These are all kind of sensory or physical anchors. We can also use kinesthetic anchors, which is basically just a fancy word for.
47:11 Jemma Sbeg? Moving your body, like and really moving it. Don't just like look at your hands and feet as they like wriggle. That can still feel kind of disorientating. I want you to like fully, rapidly, violently shake your whole body. Dance, stretch, move, run, just like spasm in the air. Do something that you feel reconnects you with your limbs and your fingers and your toenails. A 2014 study that I particularly love explored how dance therapy specifically helps people exit dissociation when other things aren't working because it creates kinesthetic awareness. And
47:51 Jemma Sbeg? this is our body's natural ability to detect and locate and recognize our body, our form in space and time and our surroundings. And that kinesthetic awareness really activates something mentally within us as well that obviously recognizes that we must be present to be having this feeling. And so it brings us back to our sense of of realness. Even like repetitive rhythmic movements like bouncing your knee or rolling your shoulders or flowing, moving your body have been shown to provide that same grounding experience. It positions you back in the room. It shows you
48:31 Jemma Sbeg? that you are in control, that you can feel time and space and movement around you. It also helps you obviously release tension. We know that stress is like a big trigger for dissociation. Sometimes that might also be why this mechanism works. I will also say, sometimes you don't want to think even more about the feeling, but it's kind of liberating to argue with it, to argue with the I'm not real, I'm not here thought. If your mind is saying that I'm not real, this isn't real, whatever it is.
49:09 Jemma Sbeg? This may sound counterintuitive, but I think about how liberating that maybe would be if that was true. Like, I know that this thought is scary to me, but I argue with the thought and I think, but what if that was a good thing? Let me explain, like, if I wasn't real, it meant that something would have to be controlling this experience. And that makes me feel assured in the idea that something is out there that is bigger than us. And that's actually deeply comforting. And it's like, you were trying to scare me with this feeling. Actually, a part of it might be deeply like existentially validating. Or, you know, another thought that we have, like, I'm not actually here.
49:54 Jemma Sbeg? Well, then, that's fucking great. That eliminates a lot of my social anxiety, doesn't it? Why am I so worried about being perceived if I'm not even real? If the perception of me isn't even happening? Sometimes that's just like helpful to like turn off the anxiousness tap before I come back down and realize like, firstly, that this feeling is quite silly and to challenge it. But also to say that like, even if this was the case, is that even a bad thing? Because my anxiety and my panic that is rising in response to my depersonalization or my derealization is only rising because it is perceiving it as a terrible, terrifying thing. What if it wasn't?
50:36 Jemma Sbeg? These are actually, they have a name, they're called cognitive scripts. They have been proven to help with this feeling. Another really famous one that you've probably heard comes from the philosopher Rene Descartes, which says, "I think therefore I am," also a Billie Eilish song. Basically, this phrase, this mantra, "I think therefore I am," tells us that the very act of doubting your own existence actually proves that you exist. How? Because to doubt, you have to be thinking. And thinking is something that only a conscious mind can do. The very act of questioning, am I real? Is this real? Is proof that you are.
51:19 Jemma Sbeg? And I know this feels a little bit meta, but that's the reassuring part. The fact that you are noticing that you are dissociating, that you are questioning reality, that is all proof that you must be existing in order to have those thoughts. Even when it feels like the world is fuzzy or your awareness isn't in itself a solid anchor, this in itself is like something we can always come back to. It's this subtle cognitive reminder that you may feel disconnected. That's just your individual experience. It doesn't mean that reality itself or the world around you has disappeared. It's just a natural response to stress.
52:04 Jemma Sbeg? It's a natural response to perhaps trauma in your past, but even just not getting enough sleep, even just having a really hard day. I want to again remind you, this whole process of feeling like everything is kind of blurring out or fuzzy or not real, is your brain trying to just give you a bit of a break and cut you some slack? It definitely doesn't feel nice. It doesn't mean that it's wrong. And it doesn't mean that something is wrong with you or that something is, this is an indicator of something dangerous that's going to happen to you. I think this is a gentle reminder that this is a human process.
52:49 Jemma Sbeg? This is just noise. Your brain isn't betraying you. It's not trying to tell you something. It's just trying to help you survive. You are real. You are here. I promise you that. You are listening to my voice in your ears right now. That is confirmation.
53:11 Jemma Sbeg? And you're gonna, you're gonna survive this, you're gonna survive this overwhelm. I know it can feel super unpleasant, but everyone who has been through this, which is, if the estimates say nearly every person on this planet has come through on the other side. And if the worst case is that you are not real or the world isn't real, actually, that's not even a bad thing necessarily. You will still be okay. You can still trust yourself to get through that. It's not even like that is the case. Like, when you start to really question it, like, you see how ridiculous it is, but even the most ridiculous fears aren't really that scary if they were to actually come true. And they won't even. So, you're good on both fronts. Okay.
53:55 Jemma Sbeg? I think that's all we have time for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learnt something. I hope it felt validating. I hope that it's something you can come back to when you are feeling that same, like, airy, scary, panicked feeling of not being here. We've all been there. Well, at least I can say I most certainly have, and I have made it through. So I hope my strategies are helpful as well. I want to thank our research assistant, Libby Cobert, for her excellent help in providing some research assistance for this episode. She does an amazing job every single week, time after time. So, thank you, Libby. We also, a couple of updates now. We have a Substack.
54:35 Jemma Sbeg? If you've ever wanted a script for an episode or a transcript, we have one of those available on our Substack. You can go and subscribe. And we have a YouTube channel. Every second episode, every episode on Friday, is a video episode that you can go and access there. I don't really talk about it enough, but I probably should. So, if watching podcasts is more your thing, that's now an opportunity, that's now an option for you. Make sure as well that you are following us on Instagram at @ThatPsychologyPodcast. You can send me a DM with further questions or, like, queries or episode suggestions over there. But until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. Remember, I promise you are real, I promise you are present, I promise this is real. We will talk very, very soon.
55:26 Jemma Sbeg? This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favourite gym clothing at gymshark.com.
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