Dissociation and Attachment: Causes, and How to Heal

Image credit: Glen Jackson at Unsplash

Have you ever been in the middle of something and suddenly realized you’d lost track of time, and that you feel mentally checked out? Or had a conversation with someone, only to drift off into a thought. Do you ever feel like you’ve momentarily left your body? Maybe you feel like it’s difficult to stay fully present, moment to moment.

This is called dissociation. Sometimes, it can feel like random daydreaming. Other times, dissociation can be a near-constant state of being for people, and it can leave you feeling disconnected, disoriented, or stressed in daily life.

What Is Dissociation?

Dissociation is a response to stress triggered by feelings of overwhelm, difficult life events, oppression, trauma and flashbacks. At times, it can seem to happen randomly. Some felt-experiences include:

• Feeling spaced out

• Feeling emotionally numb

• Unexplainable gaps in memory

• Being somewhere, and feeling the space feels “unreal” (derealization)

• Feeling like you aren’t real, while the world around you is (depersonalization)

As distressing as these experiences can be, dissociation itself a protective mechanism, and is often your nervous system’s way of shielding you from emotional pain. Like a turtle retreating into its shell, or a gazelle freezing up before an attack, dissociation taps into your body’s deeply-rooted survival mechanisms to protect your mind, body, and spirit.

Attachment Trauma

Dissociation can begin in childhood when faced with violence, neglect, or emotionally unsafe environments. It can stem from insecure attachment, for example, having an anxious parent relies on you for emotional stability, or having a parent who is cold, emotionally unavailable, or withdrawn in their connection with you.

When a child is exposed to their parent’s unboundaried emotions, and feels responsible for their parent’s anxieties and comfort, a child becomes parentified. This also happens inversely, when a parent is emotionally unresponsive to a child’s needs. This creates an insecure and stressful attachment between a child and their caregiver. If a parent fixates on the child’s reactions or emotions to feel secure themselves, a child may emotionally withdraw as a response. A child may also learn to “act out” in a family, in order to fight against their own perceived abandonment but also receive attention and “connection” with family members, just not necessarily attunement.

Later in life, these forms of relating can lead to anxious and avoidant attachment styles, or manifest in obsessive work habits, intense focus on hobbies, addictions, or other compulsive behaviors, which can all compound and work to assist a lifestyle built around dissociation.

Children also rely on their parents for mirroring: to be seen, understood, and reciprocated in a way that they understand is safe and validating, and confirms their existence as authentic human beings. Children rely on their parent’s facial expressions and vocal responses to make sense of the world around them, and to know that the world will receive them with a level of acceptance. Without adequate mirroring, a child can learn to emotionally withdraw, and may have later difficulties responding to social cues in social environments. A child may learn that it is safer to exist in dissociation, than to live openly in social contexts.

Physical abuse is also a driver of dissociation, and children will mentally retreat to protect themselves from a caregiver’s open aggression.

Everyday Stressors and Coping

Dissociation can develop from complex trauma, with repeated, long-term stress and trauma events in childhood, and the chronic repression of thoughts and feelings. Daily experiences of attachment injury can cause complex PTSD. People with complex PTSD often have stress responses to their own emotional world. It can become a habit to avoid feeling by staying in stress, or by taking part in more seemingly-innocuous behaviors like scrolling on the phone. More harmful behaviors can include addictions, or thrill-seeking.

Harmful Adult Relationships

Later in life, abusive, passive-aggressive, or chronically invalidating adult relationships can also trigger dissociation. If you receive harm in your significant relationship, emotionally “checking out” can become armor. You might remain physically present in a relationship, but also be mentally and emotionally absent.

It can become easier to justify harmful behaviors to preserve a relationship at the expense of your own. These patterns can echo earlier experiences with neglectful or abusive caregivers, and recreate the same dissociative responses we learned as children.

In this way, dissociation can exist as both a form of resilience, and tolerance of harmful others. It can cause us to stay in harmful relationships, as we tune out our conscious signals of harm. It is a deeply ingrained survival mechanism that is there to help us endure painful circumstances.

Shame and Dissociation

Shame can be a powerful driver of dissociation. If you have core beliefs that you are not good enough, not worthy of love, or undeserving of opportunities, it can feel safer to disconnect from life than risk feeling. Shame often stems from PTSD, childhood trauma, or harmful adult relationships.

Shame vs. guilt:

• Guilt says, “I did something wrong.”

• Shame says, “I am wrong.”

Shame can guide us toward repair and belonging in healthy families, communities, and relationships. It can show us how to align properly with others, and how to coexist. But in less nurturing environments, shame can become a toxic system that dictates how we relate to one each other. A family can become “shame-based,” and becomes a toxic family system. Living in a shame-based family system can shape your entire identity and how you relate to the world. Without consistent attunement from primary caregivers, while receiving toxic, negative messaging, it becomes survival to hide your authentic self and to be performative on some level, rather than to simply exist. A “false self” is created, while authentic emotions and experiences become hidden and repressed.

Toxic shame demands dissociation. Disconnecting from our bodies and emotions becomes safer than the damage of chronically invalidating caregivers.

But shame also is a signal for compassion and safe relationships, and is calling for connection where we can repair our wounds and be fully accepted. Healing means slowly reclaiming those repressed parts of ourselves, and meeting them with the acceptance that has been ignored.

Cultural Trauma and Dissociation

Dissociation can also be shaped by cultural trauma and the collective impact of oppression, displacement, racism, or historical violence on an individual. This kind of trauma can be intergenerational, affecting communities over decades.

Dissociation can be caused by:

• A feeling of shame as codified, oppressive responses to your culture

• Intergenerational trauma passed down from parents in your childhood as nervous system responses

• Growing up in an indigenous community affected by colonization

• BIPOC communities dealing with systemic racism and being othered

• Daily, received micro-aggressions.

• Living in constant fear in the threats of deportation and violence against family

In these contexts, dissociation can be a survival strategy, and help people cope when the world is oppressive and challenging a person’s basic right to exist. Healing often involves reconnecting with your cultural identity, communities, and broader spaces that validate your lived experience.

How Dissociation Shows Up in the Body

Dissociation is both a mental and physical process. Our nervous system reacts to stress through freeze, flight, fight, or fawn responses, to varying degrees.

The Many Faces of Dissociation: Flight, Freeze, Fawn, and Fight

Dissociation can manifest in different ways, depending on a number of factors including how our nervous system learned to protect us, and what our family roles were. You might recognize yourself in one response more than another, or notice that you move between them. Each is a survival strategy, even if it no longer serves us in the present.

Flight: Always Moving
Sometimes dissociation looks like staying busy as we constantly stay in motion, rarely slowing down enough to feel. Doom-scrolling on the phone is one example: scrolling for the sake of scrolling without much thought or feeling, chasing quick dopamine hits without a real sense of enjoyment, just doing and filling the silence. Flight can appear to be a productive on the surface, but underneath the action is often an active escape from the discomfort of awareness towards ourselves.

Freeze Response: Feeling Numb
Sometimes, our body pumps the brakes completely. In response to high-stress, a freeze response can leave us feeling foggy, disconnected, or unable to take action. You may feel the weight of all the things you “should” do, yet lack the energy to start. We might feel lazy or unproductive, when it’s actually your body protecting you from overwhelm by shutting down.

Fawn: People-Pleasing for Safety
Fawning causes us to put others’ comfort above our own as we dissociate. We tell people what they want to hear, without checking in with ourselves first. We stay agreeable, avoid conflict, and ignore our own needs to prevent harm. On the surface, it can look like being caring or accommodating, but underneath can be a survival habit formed in unsafe relationships. Over time, it can blur our sense of self, create unstable relationships, and attract people who take advantage of inherent openness and lack of boundaries.

Fight: Push for Safety
In a fight response, dissociation can look like the need to control people, places, or situations. It might sound like, “I know best, and I’m not ever going to budge.” A fight response doesn’t necessarily mean being loud—it can be quietly rigid or defensive. For some, it’s also a necessary survival response to cultural injustice and oppression. A fight response can often receive a lot of stigma in mental health circles, when there is a reality of hurt and wounding beneath the fight. In childhood, this is often a necessary response to invalidating others, to “fight” for attention, and also fight back against perceived aggression. Living in a constant state of fight can leave you exhausted, burned out, and experiencing a number of other mental and somatic pain.

How Dissociation Affects Daily Life and Relationships

Dissociation becomes a greater issue when it interferes with your daily activities. If you find yourself checking out during conversations, while answering emails, attending to tasks, or even during basic self-care, daily functioning can become a significant challenge.

In relationships, dissociation can make it difficult to stay attuned. Instead of fully noticing someone’s words, emotions, and body language, you may not feel fully present, even with loved ones. Stress can overshadow the positive moments in your life, where positive experiences are instead overshadowed by a critical voice. When we don’t feel safe in our bodies, it becomes harder to connect with others as well as our own experiences in a way that feels positive. Over time, we can isolate ourselves from our communities and those around us.

Dissociation doesn’t just create an emotional disconnect. It can also intensify depression, anxiety, and anger. Tuning out can fuel the fear, worry, and self-blame, and reinforce a toxic cycle of self-neglect or self-hatred.

Dissociation as a Two-Sided Coin

Through our most difficult moments, dissociation helps us survive emotional pain. But over time, it can become a painful, numbing default, leaving us disconnected from our joy, creativity, and authentic relationships.

When repressed emotions surface, sometimes unexpectedly, it can flood us with feelings of pain, confusion, or shame.

Healing from Dissociation

Healing isn’t about “snapping out of it.” It’s about building the awareness, curiosity, and compassion to guide your inner experience, and gently increasing your capacity to stay connected with yourself.

In short, here are some focused strategies for healing dissociation:

• Mindful Meditation

  • Start with 5 minutes a day. Focus on your breath and scan your body, noticing sensations—even if they’re faint or hard to describe. If it feels difficult to do, that’s okay. Over time, you can develop greater awareness of your inner state and what you experience.

• Sensory Noticing

  • Pay attention to small details around you: the smell of coffee, the texture of a blanket, or the different shapes and colors in your environment. Pick an object, and spend a minute or two noticing as many details about it as you can. Noticing the world around you can help anchor your attention in the present.

• Self-Compassion

  • Many people with dissociation have a strong inner critic, often developed in childhood as a shield. Practice gentle affirmations like, “I did well today,” or “I’m proud of myself for trying.” Gratitude and loving-kindness exercises help shift this inner dialogue.

    Notice when your inner critic shows up, and practice meeting it with curiosity. Self-compassion doesn’t mean erasing that voice—it means choosing a kinder, more conscious response.

• Creativity and Self-Expression

  • Creative acts like painting, writing, music, connect you with those resilient, authentic parts of yourself. It empowers you to engage your mind and body together in a way thats taps into your deep authenticity.

• Journaling

  • 10 to 20 minutes of free writing allows you to speak with connectedness to yourself, unfiltered. It creates a bridge with the most authentic parts of yourself. With intentionality, reading what you wrote the following day can bring an added perspective and tap into your self-compassionate voice. Journaling is both creative and somatic, and grounds your experience within the present moment.

• Music

  • Listening to music with intention and presence can evoke identity, emotion, and grounding. It can offer a safe, uplifting space where you can move freely and connect with something bigger than yourself.

• Reading

  • Finding literature that you identify with becomes a major key in orienting with your mind, body, and spirit. When you develop wisdom around your own lived experience, you allow your authentic self to grow beyond the shell of dissociation.

There are many resources that expand more on these strategies, which have informed my work and can be found in my resources section.

Grieving

Sometimes when we slow down enough to feel what’s underneath, we can find grief waiting for us. It can be a deep sense of underlying sadness, or even unexpected tears of gratitude.

Grief is an immensely personal experience. We may wish we could share our tears with the people who should have been there for us, but they may be people that are not safe to turn to. In this way, grief can feel challenging. For many who’ve experienced trauma, a path towards grieving can feel like a lonely one. We have a deep need and want to be understood.

Allowing ourselves to grieve takes a certain courage. It takes strength to allow sadness to move through us, and to soften the shell that’s been protecting us for so long. In grief, we give our emotions space to breathe. Over time, grieving can shift from being a rare, overwhelming moment to a gentle, ongoing practice. We can start to notice when our guard goes up and when dissociation creeps in, and notice how to come back to ourselves more quickly.

The more we develop the skills and sight around feeling, the more room there is for a gentle transformation.

Therapy

Talking with a “good-enough” therapist can be the start of repairing the emotional and relational wounds that keep us disconnected. In therapy, you get to bring your full self into the room: your confident parts, your hidden parts, and parts that may have discomfort.

With the right therapist, you get something that might have been missing before in a safe, steady presence who listens without judgment, reflects your truth back to you, and helps you make sense of what’s happening. Together, you can explore how dissociation shows up for you and find new ways to feel grounded, connected, and present in your own life.

Cultivating A Sense of Ease

Regaining a sense of ease is key to healing dissociation. Trusting others begins with cultivating a feeling of connectedness within your own body. If your parents lacked a sense of safety or worth in their own lives, or experienced cultural violence, then dissociation can be an inherited response and a continuation of trauma. We can make the conscious effort to be present for ourselves, and to find a new definition of safety and worth.

Dissociation is more than just surviving: it is pointing the way. Healing means gently reclaiming your presence, reconnecting with your authentic self, and building relationships and practices that affirm self-compassion, belonging, and joy.

If you’ve been feeling disconnected or “checked out,” therapy can support you in exploring these patterns and rebuilding presence, resilience, and connection to your life.