- Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey
Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make videos about
mental health education and self-improvement. Today I'm talking about dissociation, how it can be helpful and hurtful for you. Then I'll talk about something
that you can do about it. Dissociation's an experience
where your attention and emotions are disconnected
from the present moment. It's like you're here, but your mind and emotions are somewhere else. And this is a general term and experience. I talked in a previous video about depersonalization and derealization, and those are specific kinds
of dissociative experiences. With depersonalization, you feel detached or disconnected from yourself, so you may feel like
you're observing yourself. With derealization, you feel disconnected from your environment, so you may feel like you're in the room,
but the room isn't real, or that you're in a different
place than you really are. An example of this is
experiencing a car accident where you smelled the
burning rubber of the tires at the time of the accident. Then whenever you're riding in a car, you think you can smell that rubber again. That's an example of a
dissociative experience that you can have after
the trauma experience. But sometimes you can dissociate
during the traumatic event, and this can be your mind's
way of protecting you from a situation where there's no escape. This is pretty common during
physical or sexual trauma when you can't get away. In order to endure the assault, your brain turns down
your response to pain and numbs your emotional response. In your mind, you may go to another place such that it feels like it's
not really happening to you. During the traumatic experience, that kind of reaction
helps you to survive it. But then sometimes association becomes a built-in defense mechanism that you employ in other situations that are unrelated to the trauma. For example, you can be
triggered to feel disconnected or numb in response to something that reminded you of the trauma, even if you weren't consciously
aware of the trigger. You can just feel empty all
the time and not know why, because keep in mind
even though this reaction is defensive and protective, it's still what we would call
a primitive defense mechanism. It comes from a place of being helpless and feeling defenseless. It's like a trapped animal playing dead. So it works in the moment,
but it's not really adaptive. It doesn't help you in the long run. Even though your mind
protected your conscious self from experiencing the trauma, your unconscious self still experienced it and still remembers. But that memory is fragmented. So at the time, you escaped
fully dealing with the trauma, but it's just a temporary deferral. As you go on in life,
the effect of the trauma accrues interest and
continues to affect you on an unconscious level
beyond your awareness. And that can look like you feeling empty or having flashbacks of the trauma, having memory lapses for times
that you can't account for because you just zone out. Smells and sounds can
remind you of the trauma in a way that your body
responds with anxiety and fear, but you don't always put it together why you're feeling anxious. It's like the fragmented
memories can come flooding back in response to sights, sounds and touch. Anxiety is another trigger that can send you into
a dissociative state. Let's say you're under
a lot of stress at work. You could have trouble
relating to people at work because with the added stress,
you start zoning out at work, or you start withdrawing from people because you feel like you're a stranger, and your coworkers make
you feel uncomfortable. What can you do about this? The best treatments are trauma-focused cognitive behavior
therapy, prolonged exposure and eye movement desensitization
and reprocessing. These therapies help
you reprocess the trauma in a safe environment. It helps you get some closure
on how the trauma affected you and pays down the interest
on the emotional loan that the dissociation
took out in your name. One self-help approach is
to use grounding techniques. Grounding techniques bring your awareness back to the present
moment where you are safe. It's like getting your
bearings and refocusing. You can use sensory grounding
or cognitive grounding. Sensory grounding uses the five senses to bring you back to the present moment, and cognitive grounding uses your thoughts to remind you that you
are in a safe place. I'm gonna give you four of
each that you can start with. You can do the five, four,
three, two, one sensory exercise where you name five things
you can see around you, four things you can hear,
three things you can touch, two things that you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Use a grounding smell that
can bring your attention back to the present. Use strong smells like
ammonia or tea tree oil. You can even use a fragrant hand cream if that's something that
you use and have handy. Carry a sensory-grounding
object in your pocket. And it should be something
that's pleasurable for you to touch, like
a squishy stress ball or a smooth pebble. Splash cold water on your face and neck. And if that's too much for you, like you don't wanna mess up your face, run cold water over your
hands or your forearms. Here are some cognitive
grounding exercises. Show yourself that you're safe. Remind yourself when and
where the trauma occurred, and then stay where you are now. You wanna say this out loud to yourself. How far is that from the trauma? How long has it been
since the trauma ended? Orient yourself to time and place. Describe where you are and
what you see around you. Then tell yourself when you are. Say what year, month, day and time it is. Repeat an inspiring quote, or say something that's comforting to you. And this can be something
that you commit to memory, or you can write it on a
card and keep it with you. Say coping statements
like I can handle this. My situation is so much better now. These feelings will pass. I'll have a followup video
talking about another technique that you can use to address dissociation. See you next time.
