If not treated appropriately, long-term experiencing of the somatic disturbance and above symptoms can lead to fatigue, exhaustion, sense of hopelessness and the sensation of constant threat and danger, including the desire to flee or flight when experiencing stressful situations.
If you have a dissociation problem, stress or boredom can cause the following: your head feels filled with fog or sand and you can't think straight. you feel very tired or even struggle to stay awake.
If you dissociate, you may feel disconnected from yourself and the world around you. For example, you may feel detached from your body or feel as though the world around you is unreal. Remember, everyone's experience of dissociation is different.
Too much dissociating can slow or prevent recovery from the impact of trauma or PTSD. Dissociation can become a problem in itself. Blanking out interferes with doing well at school. It can lead to passively going along in risky situations.
Shutdown dissociation simulates central nervous system neuropathy. Peripheral neuropathy describes the damage to the peripheral nervous system. Peripheral damage affects one or more dermatomes and thus produces symptoms for specific areas of the body.
Dissociation can help a person feel as if situations, his or her body sensations, emotions that would have been overwhelming, etc., are muted and distorted so he or she can then go into “autopilot” mode and survive extreme situations and circumstances.
When a person experiences dissociation, it may look like: Daydreaming, spacing out, or eyes glazed over. Acting different, or using a different tone of voice or different gestures. Suddenly switching between emotions or reactions to an event, such as appearing frightened and timid, then becoming bombastic and violent.
Some signs your therapist can sense if you're dissociating:
They feel confused. They feel numb. They feel like you've gone somewhere else. Things don't add up.
Zoning out is considered a type of dissociation, which is a feeling of being disconnected from the world around you. Some people experience severe dissociation, but "zoning out" is considered a much milder form. Daydreaming is the most common kind of zoning or spacing out.
Recognizing Signs and Symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Most people with DID rarely show noticeable signs of the condition. Friends and family of people with DID may not even notice the switching—the sudden shifting in behavior and affect—that can occur in the condition.
Dissociation and Sleep
Dreamlike phenomena, which are ordinarily confined to sleep, thus intrude into waking consciousness and are expressed as dissociative symptoms, including depersonalization and derealization, and, in the extreme case, identity fragmentation evident in DID.
' Recent research is showing that some people can feel quite dizzy or lightheaded when they dissociate and the fear of what is happening to them helps to hold them in that state.
Dissociative symptoms include brain fog, out of body experience, watching self from a distance, emotional numbness, delayed reactions, difficulty making decisions, and bad memory.
Dissociative identity disorder
Previously called multiple personality disorder, this is the most severe kind of dissociative disorder. The condition typically involves the coexistence of two or more personality states within the same person.
They can happen to us all sometimes. For example, during periods of intense stress or when we're very tired. Some people also find that using drugs like cannabis can cause feelings of derealisation and depersonalisation. Dissociation is also a normal way of coping during traumatic events.
Awareness of yourself and what's going on around you can be compromised during dissociation, which might feel like an unwelcome and frightening intrusion into your mind. On a psychological level, dissociating can be an involuntary means of coping with acute stress, such as physical abuse.
Some of the symptoms of dissociation include the following. You may forget about certain time periods, events and personal information. Feeling disconnected from your own body. Feeling disconnected from the world around you.
Those with BPD experiencing dissociation often feel lost, scared, and detached from reality. While dissociation is not the primary symptom of BPD, it is one of the symptoms that make getting treatment for BPD all the more urgent.
Dissociation involves disruptions of usually integrated functions of consciousness, perception, memory, identity, and affect (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, numbing, amnesia, and analgesia).
Some grounding exercises that we find most helpful include giving the person in a dissociative state something to taste or feel. Ways you can do this is by giving them a candy and asking them to describe the taste and sensation.
It is a regular function of the human brain to be able to detach from reality and cling to something reassuring to avoid anxieties. Dissociation may be a normal phenomenon, but like everything in life, all in moderation.
Dissociation and disassociation are basically the same things, except when referring specifically to the field of psychology. They both mean to stop associating or to disconnect. The big difference is that dissociation strictly applies to psychology and disassociation can apply to anything.