Could Avoiding Your Mental Health be Linked to Mild Dissociation?
By: Megan Brewer, LMHC
Caring for yourself with an emphasis on mental health has become an increasingly familiar topic, and the more we learn about mental health, the more necessary it becomes to pay attention and care well for every part of ourselves. As we discover more about the human brain and body, we recognize the greater need to tend to our internal world because it will ultimately impact all the other parts of us. However, in order to tend well to your mental health, you first have to become aware of your current mental health landscape:
- How aware are you of what you experience in your daily life or in situations that are out of the ordinary?
- Do you know how the things happening to you and around you impact how you feel and think? Do you know how they impact your relationships?
Knowing these things are prerequisites to creating healthy strategies to care for your internal world. The problem is, knowing anything requires us to be actively engaged in the present with what we seek to know. Knowing requires awareness, and awareness requires us to consciously engage with what we seek to know and change. But for many of us, we live most of our life as distant onlookers instead of conscious participants in our internal world.
If you had asked me before I became a therapist and experienced my own therapy if mental health was important to pay attention to, I would have said yes. I would have been passionate about people healing internally and growing into their unique abilities and design. But what I didn’t realize was how detached I actually was from large portions of my own internal world. It was revelatory to learn through my own journey how detached I truly was from myself. I had not realized how past trauma had disconnected me from critical parts of myself that were necessary to reconnect with in order to heal, make decisions, and live more fully into my own life.
As much as I valued healing and health, there were large parts of myself that had been closed off in order to cope with chaos, and I didn’t even realize they were. It helped me to frame what my mind had done to protect me in the language of trauma, because then I could start realizing that what I was experiencing was a level of disconnecting from my own feelings that fell on the lower end of the dissociative scale.
Dissociation, in simple terms, is a survival strategy designed to pull us away from awareness of the present moment in order to help us cope with what we are experiencing. Creating distance from ourselves and the world around us is a strategy our minds have to make the chaos around us more survivable. Dissociation exists on a spectrum, which means all of us experience it to some degree at different points in our lives. But we are usually not aware of how it impacts us and how much of a role it plays in our daily lives.
Trauma researcher Bessel Van der Kolk wrote in The Body Keeps The Score that “Dissociation is the essence of trauma,” meaning the places where we have experienced trauma over the course of our lives will necessarily bring a level of dissociation as a protective mechanism to cope with trauma’s effects. Bessel Van der Kolk also explains that “Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling” because trauma turns our own emotions and physical sensations into overwhelming experiences that have not experienced the tending and care they so deeply need to heal.
Dissociation’s job is to keep you unaware of the distress you are feeling so that you can continue on with your life. Unfortunately, this strategy makes it impossible for us to fully engage ourselves in our lives and connect more deeply to the people around us. It’s likely that when you began disassociating in your life, you really needed it. It was a strategy that helped. We do not come into the world knowing how to discern the deep parts of our heart, but we are wired to take the journey with others, and together we come to know the vast corners of our internal world. We learn to navigate our internal world when we are growing up with the help of our early caregivers.
But when our internal world remains unexplored, we are left to navigate difficult situations and overwhelming feelings on our own. We learn to tune them out in order to manage them. Dissociation helps to keep us from feeling pain, but also keeps us from walking on the path towards healing and participating in our own lives.
So, starting to prioritize mental health may be much more difficult than initially thought if you have trouble connecting to your internal world, because dissociation is playing a part in your story. There are ways to begin the journey into the landscape of the world that belongs to you through actively becoming aware of what is happening in your body and mind on a daily basis, but it is not a journey that is meant to be taken alone. We do not outgrow the need to have someone alongside us to help us navigate and live more fully into the landscape of our own heart. If this is a journey you want to walk deeper into, find a good friend or a therapist and ask them to go with you as you brave the terrain of your own mental health.
Please call our office at 407-647-7005.
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