My therapist began by asking me if I know anything about dissociation?

‘Yea I know the word. It’s the opposite of association – to not be connected to someone or something,’ I replied. ‘Why?’

This conversation happened before I went through the physical and DSM-5 tests.

She had her suspicion.

She then started with a Godzilla movie.

“Imagine you’re in a Godzilla movie and Godzilla is rampaging an area you are in, what would you do?”, she asked.

“It depends on the situation I guess?” I replied.

“Right, so if superman was there, he would probably fight the Godzilla to protect the people. Some people run for their lives, some would be too scared to do anything and go into what we call the ‘freeze’ response,” my therapist elaborated.

“Oh, are you talking about like the fight, flight, freeze responses?” I clarified.

“Yep, but through years of research, we found there is a fourth response which is dissociation. Simply put, in the same scenario, some people would choose to drop to the floor, hold their breath when Godzilla closes in and pretend to be dead,” she further explained. “They’d play another role to survive the situation.”

“uh huh, okay and?” I questioned.

“It’s one of the brain’s coping mechanism. It’s the brain’s natural reaction to help a person survive in a trauma,” she continued “Especially a child. The child is not at fault and the child is not developed enough nor taught how to deal with difficult situations. Hence, the brain took matters into its own hands.”

“Are you trying to tell me there’s something wrong with me?” I was getting a little worried now.

“I think your diagnosis is wrong. I suspect you have some sort of dissociative disorder. I suggest to get you a reassessment but we’d need to go through the necessary physical health checks to rule out any physical causes like brain tumours etc. Are you opened to do that?” my therapist asked.

I said yes and the rest is history.

So that was how my therapist first explained dissociation to me from a mental health perspective. It’s easy to understand for a layman like me. I hope it helps you understand too but it’s certainly more complex than that.

It took me months of research and reading later to understand more. So please don’t take this blog entry as the whole picture. If you’d like to know more, I’ve shared a few links in the resource page which you can refer to.

Take care and laugh lots till the next entry!