Therapy for Dissociation: When You Feel Disconnected From Yourself
You are here, but you do not feel here. And you have been living like this for longer than you can remember.
Do You Experience Any of These?
- You feel detached from your own body, like you are watching yourself from outside, or like your hands, face, or reflection do not quite belong to you
- The world sometimes looks flat, foggy, or unreal, as if there is a pane of glass between you and everything else
- You lose chunks of time, arriving somewhere and not remembering the drive, or realizing hours have passed without awareness
- People say you “space out” or “go somewhere else” during conversations, especially emotional ones
- You feel emotionally numb much of the time, you know you should feel something, but there is just blankness
- You struggle to feel present during intimacy, connection, or experiences that should matter to you
- You sometimes feel like you are not a real person, or that your life is happening to someone else
- You function well on the outside but feel hollow, automatic, or on autopilot
If this describes your experience, you are not losing your mind. You are not making it up. What you are describing is dissociation, and it is one of the most misunderstood and underdiagnosed responses to trauma.
What Dissociation Actually Is
Dissociation is your nervous system’s most powerful protective response. When the brain encounters an experience that is too overwhelming to process, too painful, too frightening, too inescapable, it does something remarkable: it disconnects you from the experience to keep you functioning.
This is not a flaw. It is an extraordinary, facinating, survival mechanism. The problem is that for many people, the disconnection doesn’t switch off when the danger is over. It becomes the brain’s default setting of operation.
Dissociation exists on a spectrum:
- Mild dissociation: spacing out, daydreaming, losing track of conversations, feeling “not quite here”
- Depersonalization: feeling detached from your body, your emotions, or your sense of self, as if you’re observing your life rather than living it
- Derealization: the world looks or feels unreal, dreamlike, distorted, or flat
- Dissociative amnesia: gaps in memory, especially around stressful or traumatic periods
- Emotional numbing: a persistent inability to feel emotions, even when you want to
Dissociation is strongly linked to:
- Childhood trauma or neglect, especially prolonged or relational trauma
- Complex PTSD
- Growing up in an environment that was unpredictable or emotionally unsafe
- Experiences where escape was not possible: the body could not fight or flee, so it disconnected instead
Why Dissociation Is Hard to Treat With Talk Therapy Alone
Dissociation lives in the body and the nervous system, not in conscious thought. This means that standard talk therapy, which relies on verbal processing, insight, and emotional engagement, often can’t reach it. You might understand your history perfectly and still feel nothing. You might talk about a traumatic experience while feeling completely detached from it.
That is not resistance. That is the dissociation doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping the overwhelming material at a distance.
Effective treatment for dissociation works with the nervous system, not just the thinking mind.
How Therapy Helps
In our work together, we take a phased, nervous-system-informed approach:
- Building safety and stabilization first: developing grounding skills, body awareness, and the ability to notice when dissociation is happening in real time
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): carefully processing the underlying traumatic material that the nervous system is protecting you from, at a pace that doesn’t overwhelm your system
- Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR): working with the brainstem-level responses that occur before dissociation kicks in, helping your nervous system complete what was interrupted
- Somatic awareness: gradually reconnecting you with your body’s signals, sensations, and emotions- safely and at your pace
- Window of tolerance work: expanding your nervous system’s capacity to stay present with increasing levels of emotional intensity without shutting down
The goal is not to force you to feel everything at once. The goal is to help your nervous system learn- slowly, safely, that it is possible to be present in your body and your life without being overwhelmed. That you can feel without drowning.
About Valentina Chichiniova, MA, RCC, CCC
I’m a Registered Clinical Counsellor in Vancouver, BC specializing in complex trauma, EMDR, Deep Brain Reorienting, and dissociative responses. I work with adults who have been functioning on autopilot for years, managing life from behind a wall of numbness, and are ready to find out what it feels like to actually be present.
I understand that dissociation can make therapy itself feel difficult; it is hard to engage in a process that requires presence when your system’s default is to disconnect. I work with that, not against it.
I offer online therapy for clients across British Columbia.
Ready to Start?
You have been surviving behind the glass for long enough. Therapy can help you come back- to your body, to your emotions, and to a life that feels like yours.
Book a consultation | Call: 604-722-4534 | Email: info@emergence-counselling.com
Emergence Counselling & Wellness provides online therapy across British Columbia. This page is educational content and is not a substitute for professional therapeutic support.