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Understanding Dissociation: Causes and Treatments

What is Dissociation

Dissociation used to be a rare condition, but it has unfortunately increased and become more common for people to experience dissociative symptoms in recent years. Dissociation is a brain disconnection between our emotions, thoughts, environment and memories. Many individuals may call it now “daydreaming” or “zoning out”. In fact, day dreaming is a normal symptom for any person and even though that is the vocabulary that is used, dissociation is quite different. It can affect your sense of perceiving time, your surroundings and self-identity.

One of the main contributors to dissociative symptoms include trauma that is also called peritraumatic dissociation, in which the brain may block traumatic events in order to protect itself. Traumatic events include:

  • Sexual/physical/emotional abuse
  • Motor vehicle accidents
  • Combat
  • Natural disasters
  • Torture

Technology and Trauma: Sources of Disconnection

Another contributor that I would like to mention is the disconnection that is caused by traumatic events or just regular day to day activities that prevent people to have a connection with others. For example, technology use has increased as well, and our day-to-day activities has significantly shifted. More and more you see individuals using technology as their way of coping with stress and they tend to choose numbing those emotions with it instead of addressing them.

Recognizing Dissociative Symptoms: Awareness, Duration, and Effect

A person can have dissociative symptoms and not be aware about them. People tend to learn about them if people around them see the individual staring at a blank spot for long periods of times, or the individual experiencing these symptoms may not be able to remember details or long periods of time. Often individuals may experience it for a short time such as hours or days but for some individuals it may be a period of weeks or months.

The symptoms when experiencing dissociation are based on the severity of it on each person. The following symptoms include, but it is not limited to:

  • Anxiety or depressive symptoms
  • Unable to concentrate
  • Feelings of the world not being real
  • Not being able to remember details, or memory lapses
  • Feelings of disconnection with oneself
  • Mood swings
  • Inability to manage emotions

Seeking Treatment

It is important for an individual experiencing these symptoms to seek help from a professional because it can have possible complications such as severe depression, anxiety, sexual problems, insomnia, broken relationships, job loss, self-harm, and drug addiction. Treatment that can help with Dissociative symptoms would be:

  • Psychotherapy
  • EMDR
  • Mindfulness
  • CBT
  • DBT
  • Psychiatric drugs
  • Safe environment
  • Stress management

References:

Eating Disorders - It's Not About the Food

By Kelly Lopez

If it’s not about the food, what is it really about?

The eating disorder serves a function, it does a job. Despite the problems an eating disorder creates, it is an effort to cope, shield against, communicate, and solve problems. Behaviors may be a way to establish a sense of power or control, self-worth, strength, and containment. Bringing may be used to numb pain. Purging may be a way to release emotions. When one cannot cope in healthy ways, adaptive functions (behaviors) are created to ensure a sense of safety, security, and control.
According to Carolyn Costin*, some of the “adaptive functions that eating disorder behaviors commonly serve are”:
  • Comfort, soothing, nurturance
  • Numbing, sedation, distraction
  • Attention, a cry for help
  • Discharge of tension, anger, rebellion
  • Predictability, structure, identity
  • Self-punishment or punishment of "the body"
  • Self-cleansing or self-purification
  • Protection or safety (through creation of a small or large body)
  • Avoidance of intimacy
  • Proof for self-blame instead of blaming others (for exampl, abusers)
It’s not about the food, it’s a way of coping with low self-esteem, negative emotions, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, unstable home, difficulty resolving conflict and much more.
*Costin, Carolyn. The Eating Disorder Sourcebook: A Comprehensive Guide to the Causes, Treatments and Prevention of Eating Disorders. 3rd. edition, McGraw Hill, 2007.
Fuller, Kristen. “Eating Disorders: It’s Not All about Food.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 22 Mar. 2017

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-is-state-mind/201703/eating-disorders-it-s-not-all-about-food