How long does dissociation last for?
Dissociation is a way the mind copes with too much stress. Periods of dissociation can last for a relatively short time (hours or days) or for much longer (weeks or months). It can sometimes last for years, but usually if a person has other dissociative disorders.
It may take hours, days, or weeks. You may need treatment, though, if your dissociation is happening because you've had an extremely troubling experience or you have a mental health disorder like schizophrenia.
Yes. If you have the right diagnosis and treatment, there's a good chance you'll recover. This might mean that you stop experiencing dissociative symptoms. For example, the separate parts of your identity can merge to become one sense of self.
Many people may experience dissociation (dissociate) during their life. 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.
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.
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 Symptoms
Memory loss surrounding specific events, interactions, or experiences. A sense of detachment from your emotions (aka emotional numbness) and identity. Feeling as if the world is unreal; out-of-body experiences. Mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide.
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.
Dissociation usually happens in response to a traumatic life event such as that which is faced while being in the military or experiencing abuse. In this way, dissociation is usually associated with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Dissociation may be a normal phenomenon, but like everything in life, all in moderation. For some, dissociation becomes the main coping mechanism they use to deal with the effects of a trauma response in anxiety disorders, such as PTSD, or other disorders, such as depression.
How do you feel normal after dissociation?
- Keep a journal.
- Try visualisation.
- Try grounding techniques.
- Think about practical strategies.
- Make a personal crisis plan.
- Talk to people with similar experiences.
- Look after your wellbeing.
- Dealing with stigma.
Usually, signs of dissociation can be as subtle as unexpected lapses in attention, momentary avoidance of eye contact with no memory, staring into space for several moments while appearing to be in a daze, or repeated episodes of short-lived spells of apparent fainting.
Triggers are sensory stimuli connected with a person's trauma, and dissociation is an overload response. Even years after the traumatic event or circumstances have ceased, certain sights, sounds, smells, touches, and even tastes can set off, or trigger, a cascade of unwanted memories and feelings.
Eye contact is broken, the conversation comes to an abrupt halt, and clients can look frightened, “spacey,” or emotionally shut down. Clients often report feeling disconnected from the environment as well as their body sensations and can no longer accurately gauge the passage of time.
Zoning out is considered a form of dissociation, but it typically falls at the mild end of the spectrum.
Dissociative disorder clients typically spend many years in treatment. Many are hospitalized repeatedly over time.
Dissociation involves disruptions of usually integrated functions of consciousness, perception, memory, identity, and affect (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, numbing, amnesia, and analgesia).
This is important to understand, as dissociation does not always have to occur in the presence of traumatic events. Triggers for dissociation may be non-threatening to other individuals, however for specific reasons they may generate negative feelings and/or memories in young people with lived experience of trauma.
Times of stress can temporarily worsen symptoms, making them more obvious. Treatment for dissociative disorders may include talk therapy (psychotherapy) and medication. Although treating dissociative disorders can be difficult, many people learn new ways of coping and lead healthy, productive lives.
Lots of different things can cause you to dissociate. For example, you might dissociate when you are very stressed, or after something traumatic has happened to you. You might also have symptoms of dissociation as part of another mental illness like anxiety.
What does dissociation look like in session?
If someone is experiencing dissociation during a therapy session, it may show up through a certain eye expression or through shallow breathing. Or when the attention fades or there is agitation, or other behaviors.
Definition and Explanation of Dissociation
When we look at what they all have in common, we can say that dissociation is a form of the fight, flight, or freeze response. Dissociation can happen when we experience a threatening situation which we cannot escape from, and also cannot resolve or change.
Auditory hallucinations are common in dissociative identity disorder, borderline personality disorder, and complex posttraumatic stress disorder and are not specific to psychosis.
- Keep a journal.
- Try visualisation.
- Try grounding techniques.
- Think about practical strategies.
- Make a personal crisis plan.
- Talk to people with similar experiences.
- Look after your wellbeing.
- Dealing with stigma.
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.
Dissociation involves disruptions of usually integrated functions of consciousness, perception, memory, identity, and affect (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, numbing, amnesia, and analgesia).