Sharing – How to use mindful practices to manage dissociation

I dissociate. I did it as a child to protect myself from the trauma that surrounded me. I did it to an extreme level in my 20s in response to significant depression. I learned how to prevent myself from allowing my brain to take it to the extreme of losing weeks the way I did in my 20s, but I still dissociate.

It’s often how I get through painful moments when I have no choice. It’s how I can be utterly heartbroken by events only to turn around and return to work a few minutes later, engaging the people I’m training as if nothing happened. It can be helpful in small doses.

It can also be dangerous. I know that all too well. (See my comment above.) In my 20s, I didn’t just dissociate to get through a painful moment; I dissociated to escape a painful life to the point of losing myself for weeks at a time. Dissociation that leads to temporary homelessness is not helpful to anyone.

When I saw this article about using mindful practices to manage dissociation, I wanted to read it because, as I said, dissociating can be useful, but it needs to be managed.

https://chipur.com/how-to-use-mindful-practices-to-manage-dissociation/

After reading it, though, I had another thought.

I’ve never been taken to mediation the way other people have. I don’t particularly like the experience. It makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

I don’t know why; it doesn’t seem to work for me. I wonder, however, if part of my issue is that I need to live with some low-level dissociation. Maybe I’m so used to being slightly detached that focusing my attention entirely inward is too much. It’s overwhelming. It’s too much of a risk.

Have I spent so much time managing my dissociation that I don’t know how to live without it? Am I ever fully in the moment? Is that possible for me?

I don’t have answers. I know the only way to find out is to do more things that allow me to attempt to be in the moment instead of watching the moment. Can I do that? I can think of some situations I believe I have, but they are few and far between. It’s far more likely that moments I have enjoyed have always been appreciated with a little distance from my raw emotions.

Raw emotions are difficult for those of us who grew up with trauma. They can be uncontrollable. We don’t like anything to be beyond our control. Meditation and mindfulness invite us to give up that control and focus on the “now.”

That seems pretty risky. On the other hand, how much are we missing out on? How much have we already missed?