Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation

There may be times when you feel spacey, foggy, or fuzzy. You may lose a firm connection with the present without even being aware of it, and only realize afterwards that you were not very present. Perhaps you become engulfed by negative images, feelings or thoughts from the past, or worries about the future such that you are so preoccupied in your own mind that you are not aware of the present.

In addition to alienation from yourself, you may also have the unsettling experience that your surroundings or people around you seem unreal. For example, your own house may appear to be unfamiliar, strange, or unreal, as though you are visiting someone else’s house. Or a person you know well may seem strange and unfamiliar. The world may feel unreal as though you are in a dream or a play. Sometimes your surroundings may appear hazy, foggy, or distant. People’s voices may sound very far away, as if down a long tunnel, even though they are close, or they seem far away visually even though they are right next to you. In people with a dissociative disorder, these symptoms of unfamiliarity or unreality may, at least some of the time, be related to parts of the personality that are living in trauma time, that is, they confuse the present with the past and thus do not experience the present as real or familiar. These parts may influence your perception of the reality to such an extent that you can become confused.

Usually, people function in a coordinated way so that they make smooth transitions between their response patterns to adjust and adapt to different situations, like shifting gears in a car. They can go from home to work and smoothly shift their thinking, feeling, decision making, and acting, yet still experience themselves as the same person. In this sense, our personality is stable and predictable. Yet, to be most effective in our lives, we are always subtly changing, adjusting, adapting, and reorganizing our personality as we learn and experience more. In this sense, our personality is flexible.