Talking therapies are the recommended treatment for dissociative disorders. Counselling or psychotherapy can help you to feel safer in yourself. A therapist can help you to explore and process traumatic events from the past, which can help you understand why you dissociate.
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.
For many people, dissociation is a natural response to trauma that they can't control. It could be a response to a one-off traumatic event or ongoing trauma and abuse. You can read more on our page about the causes of dissociative disorders. Dissociation might be a way to cope with very stressful experiences.
Psychotherapy is the primary treatment for dissociative disorders. This form of therapy, also known as talk therapy, counseling or psychosocial therapy, involves talking about your disorder and related issues with a mental health professional.
The key strategy to deal with dissociation is grounding. Grounding means connecting back into the here and now. Grounding in therapy (therapist does). Note: It is always important to return to active treatment including doing exposure or trauma narrative.
People often "describe feeling as if they and the world are unreal or as if they are outside of their body," says Halpern. "They may say that they feel like they are watching themselves in a movie." Similarly, you might also feel "emotionally numb or detached as well as little or no pain," adds McInnis.
Dissociation involves disruptions of usually integrated functions of consciousness, perception, memory, identity, and affect (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, numbing, amnesia, and analgesia).
Examples of mild, common dissociation include daydreaming, highway hypnosis or “getting lost” in a book or movie, all of which involve “losing touch” with awareness of one's immediate surroundings.
Dissociation occurs when a person feels disconnected from themselves and the world around them. It can be a healthy response to boredom, stress, trauma, fear or emotional overload, allowing ourselves to avoid some of the strong physiological responses to a negative situation.
Dissociation is one of the symptoms of anxiety, as well as a trigger for anxiety. People with anxiety disorder may use dissociation as an avoidance coping mechanism when their anxiety levels peak and they feel incapable of handling their emotional or physical reactions.
Dissociation can distress relationships because it undermines the ability to relate and thus starves the relationship over time. It is a bit of a catch-22: people often (unconsciously) choose partners who will bring up elements of their painful past in order to grow, heal, and develop.
When should I see my healthcare provider? If you're experiencing symptoms of a dissociative disorder, talk to a healthcare provider or mental health professional. As with all mental health conditions, seeking help as soon as symptoms appear can help decrease the disruptions to your life.
Dissociative disorder clients typically spend many years in treatment. Many are hospitalized repeatedly over time.
Some anxiolytic medications reduce hyperarousal and the intrusive symptoms of dissociative disorders. SSRIs are also commonly used to treat anxiety and are good choices for people with dissociative disorders. Benzodiazepines are typically contraindicated because they typically exacerbate dissociation.
There are five main ways in which the dissociation of psychological processes changes the way a person experiences living: depersonalization, derealization, amnesia, identity confusion, and identity alteration.
Dissociative identity disorder
While the different personality states influence the person's behaviour, the person is usually not aware of these personality states and experiences them as memory lapses.
Alderson-Day, Mitrenga, Wilkinson, McCarthy-Jones, and Fernyhough (2018) found that dissociative tendencies were common in people with frequent self-talk tendencies, especially when observing themselves in a social context—speaking to themselves as if they were talking to another person.