Dissociation (including depersonalisation and derealisation)
A disruption of the normal integration of awareness, memory, identity, emotion and perception. Depersonalisation is feeling detached from oneself, as if watching from outside; derealisation is the world seeming unreal, dreamlike or flat.
What drives it
When escape is impossible, the mind escapes instead; it cuts the link between the self and an overwhelming experience. In adults it can switch on under far less stress than the original event.
How it shows
Work
In tense moments the person's eyes glaze, they answer slowly or flatly, lose track of the conversation, later have gaps ('I don't remember agreeing to that'). Describes feeling 'not there' or on autopilot during conflict.
Relationships
Goes blank and distant during arguments or intimacy; partners say 'you just disappeared'; missing chunks of memory for intense events.
Self
Your own voice sounds distant; your hands look unfamiliar; the room looks like a film set; time skips. It feels strange or frightening rather than restful.
What tells it apart
Schizoid fantasy (withdrawal into fantasy): Daydreaming and retreat into fantasy are absorbing and usually pleasant, and the person can snap back at will and report what they were imagining; dissociation is involuntary, often unpleasant, triggered by stress, and leaves gaps or a sense of unreality.
Emotional numbing: Numbing is reduced feeling with intact sense of self and reality; dissociation alters perception of self or world, with lost time or feeling unreal.
Isolation of affect: Isolation of affect keeps full awareness and clear memory while stripping feeling from the topic; the dissociating person loses contact with the moment itself and may not remember it well.
A test
Ask whether under stress they have felt unreal, outside their body, or lost time they cannot account for, and whether they can pull themselves back at will; involuntary, unpleasant, memory-affecting episodes indicate dissociation.
Questions to carry
- Under stress, when the person seems far away, what was happening just before they went?
- When things get too much, where does my attention go, and what brings me back?
How strong the research is
moderate. Depersonalisation and derealisation are well described and measured; the causes of severe dissociation, especially dissociative identity disorder, are debated between trauma-based and sociocognitive models.
Where it comes from
Pierre Janet, 1889; Eve Bernstein and Frank Putnam, 1986 (Dissociative Experiences Scale); DSM-5-TR, 2022
On the family tree: Pierre Janet
Sources
- Pierre Janet, L'Automatisme psychologique (1889)
- Sándor Ferenczi, Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child (1933)
- Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
- Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)