What Causes Dissociation? Why You May Feel Detached From Yourself or Reality
A reflection in the mirror that seems to belong to someone else. A drive home with little memory of the roads you took. Most of us have brushed against some version of this, a sense of being detached from ourselves or from the world around us. That experience is what psychologists call dissociation.
Dissociation is a sense of disconnection from your thoughts, feelings, memories, identity, or surroundings1. It can range from everyday experiences such as zoning out or becoming completely absorbed in something, to persistent detachment linked with trauma, stress, or a dissociative disorder. When it happens during an overwhelming experience, that distance may reduce how much of what is happening you have to emotionally process all at once.
Why Does Dissociation Happen?
There is no single cause of dissociation2. For one person, it may be closely connected with trauma. For someone else, it may emerge during severe stress, sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression, or substance use.
This is also why asking what causes dissociation does not always lead to one identifiable event. Sometimes the connection to a difficult experience is apparent. At other times, you may only notice that you feel distant, numb, unreal, or absent when your system is under strain.
1. Trauma and Experiences of Abuse
Trauma has a well-established association with dissociation. A meta-analysis covering 65 studies3 found higher levels of dissociation among people who had experienced childhood abuse or neglect, with earlier, longer-lasting and parental maltreatment associated with higher dissociation scores.
Experiences linked with dissociation can include:
Childhood trauma: Repeated physical or sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and severe neglect are among the experiences associated with longer-term dissociation. When trauma happens early, and there is no safe way out of it, dissociation can become an ongoing method of coping, a way the child’s mind creates distance from what the body cannot escape.
Severe or one-off trauma: Kidnapping, assault and invasive medical procedures are among the events that have been associated with dissociation. A person may feel numb, unreal or detached during or after an event that overwhelms their usual capacity to process what is happening.
2. Stress, Anxiety and Other Mental Health Conditions
Trauma is not the only route, though.
Intense stress: Short episodes of dissociation can occur during periods of heavy stress or emotional overwhelm, even with no history of trauma.
Anxiety and related conditions: Dissociation can appear alongside anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder.
This does not automatically mean you have a dissociative disorder. Someone may experience periods of detachment during an especially stressful stretch of life without developing persistent difficulties with memory, identity or their sense of reality.
3. Other Situations That Can Trigger Dissociation
The same feeling of distance can also happen without trauma or another mental health condition. For example:
Extreme tiredness or sleep deprivation: Being severely tired can contribute to temporary feelings of depersonalisation or derealisation.
Alcohol or recreational drugs: Substances including cannabis, ketamine and hallucinogens may trigger temporary experiences of detachment from yourself or your surroundings.
Everyday zoning out: Mild dissociation is a normal part of life, such as becoming absorbed in a book or film, or driving a route you know by heart and getting to the end without recalling the journey.
What separates these everyday experiences from a clinical concern is often how persistent, distressing or disruptive the dissociation becomes.
What Are Dissociative Disorders?
Dissociative disorders4 involve disruptions to memory, identity, awareness or the connection between yourself and your surroundings that become substantial enough to interfere with everyday life. The experience can look very different depending on which aspect of that connection is affected.
1. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
With dissociative identity disorder, a person experiences two or more distinct identity states alongside gaps in memory that go beyond ordinary forgetting.
Those gaps may involve events from childhood, everyday activities, personal information or things the person discovers they have done but cannot remember doing. Changes between identity states can also affect behaviour, emotions, preferences or a person's sense of who they are.
For someone living with DID, the experience is not simply feeling like a different version of yourself on different days. There is a deeper disruption in continuity of identity and memory.
2. Dissociative Amnesia
Memory can also be the main difficulty without the identity disruption associated with DID.
Dissociative amnesia involves being unable to recall important personal information, often connected with trauma or severe stress, beyond what ordinary forgetfulness would explain. The gaps can involve a particular event or a period of someone's life, and their duration varies considerably.
This can be especially difficult when you know something happened but cannot access parts of your own memory of it.
3. Depersonalisation and Derealisation
Other people remember what happened but feel separated from themselves or the world while it is happening.
Depersonalisation: You may feel detached from your body, thoughts, emotions or sense of self, sometimes as though you are observing yourself from outside.
Derealisation: Your surroundings may feel unreal, distant, dreamlike or strangely unfamiliar.
You can experience either one or both together. Temporary depersonalisation or derealisation is relatively common, while an estimated 1 to 2% of people meet the criteria for depersonalisation/derealisation disorder5.
How Can You Tell if You’re Dissociating?
Not every dissociative experience fits neatly into one category. Sometimes the first thing you notice is simply that parts of your life seem to disappear from memory, your surroundings do not feel quite real, or you keep feeling detached from yourself without knowing why.
Dissociation can include:
Gaps in memory, including difficulty recalling certain periods, events or personal information
Feeling disconnected from your body, as though you are observing yourself from outside
Feeling detached from your surroundings, which may seem unreal or dreamlike
Uncertainty around your identity or a disrupted sense of who you are
Reduced awareness of physical sensations
For some people, these experiences pass. For others, they return often enough that they begin affecting work, relationships, memory, sleep, or simply how comfortable it feels to move through everyday life.
Feeling detached from yourself or reality can be frightening, especially when you cannot immediately explain why it is happening. You might wonder whether something is seriously wrong, or why you cannot just pull yourself back into the present.
If the episodes keep returning, leave substantial gaps in memory, or interfere with your ability to function, speaking with a mental health professional gives you a place to explore what is happening.
At The Psychology Atelier, our clinical psychologists in Singapore work with people experiencing emotional difficulties connected with trauma, dissociation and low mood. If these experiences are connected with a difficult past or depression, you can also explore trauma counselling or therapy for depression with our team, at a pace that respects what feels manageable for you.
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