**🔼 Up:** [[Defence Mechanisms]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychology #DefenceMechanism > **🌱 Planted:** Sat 4 January 2025 --- ***Dissociation is the disconnection and withdrawal from external reality***. Dissociation is a [[Defence Mechanisms|Defence Mechanism]] where someone experiences a disconnection from their thoughts, feelings, memories, and therefore their sense of reality as a way to protect themselves from overwhelming or [[Trauma|Traumatic]] experiences. Where [[Denial|Denial]] rejects external truths, dissociation pulls the person away from the emotional or sensory impact of those truths, leaving them feeling numb or detached. Dissociation occurs automatically and unconsciously when the brain perceives a threat that is too great or overwhelming to metabolise. In a lot of cases, it works alongside [[Publish/Elements/Dictionary/Repression|Repression]], where the emotions, feelings or memories tied to the overwhelming situation or [[Trauma is not the event, it's our internal experience|Traumatic]] event are blocked from being experienced or felt. Where repression blocks the emotional and feeling content, dissociation removes someone's conscious connection to the present moment. Similar to [[Denial|Denial]] which is often experienced alongside dissociation, even though there is a disconnection and withdrawal from external reality, the body still remains attuned to what is happening and therefore still remembers and reacts to the unconscious material, which can have a deep and lasting impact on us (see [[Character Strategies]] and [[Muscular & Emotional Armouring]]). An example of dissociation would be if someone experiences a car accident where they dissociate during the event, they might later describe it afterward as if they were in a dreamlike state, feeling like it happened to someone else.