The fugue state is the one where a person suddenly leaves home, travels, starts a new life, and builds a new identity. Then one day, you come across an old picture from the times you spent in college, and all the memories from the nooks and crannies of your mind come spilling into your stream of consciousness. It’s as if you joined work directly from high school, skipping college. Since you started working, you’ve hardly ever thought about college. When you leave college and work at a company for a year or two, doing a job that you don’t particularly hate, you might feel as if your mind has locked up the memories of college. If I ask you what phase of your life you don’t seem to remember, it’s likely that it’ll be some bad phase that your mind has been protecting you from by making you forget about it.įor example, say your overall experience at college was bad. They know, on the surface, that the event occurred to them, but they cannot remember the details.
The person is unable to recall the details of a traumatic life event whilst being aware that they’re experiencing memory loss. The above example of a person unable to cope with the death of a loved one commenting, “None of this feels real” isn’t saying that just because it can sometimes be an appropriate thing to say, or a useful metaphor to describe how sad or shocking an event is. The person actually feels that the world is distorted or unreal. It isn’t merely speculating that we might be living in a simulated reality. The person feels that the world is distorted or unreal. Following are the types of severe dissociation, called dissociative disorders 2… 1. Whereas mild dissociation is a temporary avoidance coping mechanism and doesn’t cause any serious hindrance to normal day-to-day activities, severe forms of dissociation can have a negative impact on one’s life. When you’re brought back to reality, you’re like, “Where was I?” or “Where had I been all this time?” Severe dissociation When you’re dissociating, it’s like having a blackout. If you don’t register what was going on in your surroundings whilst you were dissociating, you have no memory of what went on during that time. Consciously deciding not to pay attention to something isn’t dissociation.Īnother common feature of dissociation is memory lapse. You can’t intentionally zone out when you want to. Think of having to attend a boring lecture, doing a difficult math problem, or experiencing work-related stress.ĭissociation happens unconsciously. These mental states ensue when the mind is either overwhelmed with information or is forced to process the information it does not feel like processing. It ranges from mild to severe.Įxamples of mild and harmless dissociation would be boredom, daydreaming, or zoning out. Dissociation is a sort of disconnection from reality, a disconnection that a person feels from their thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity. When someone close to a person dies, the latter can be in a state of dissociation for weeks, even months, until the dissociation resolves itself and they’re brought back to reality. Their mind has dissociated or detached them from reality because reality is too harsh to cope with.
What this confused person is experiencing is called dissociation. “Are you okay? How have you been holding up?” You walk up to them and try talking to them… They act like they don’t understand what’s going on. While almost everyone is grieving and mourning the death, you might find that one person sitting in the corner who seems a bit confused. Strange as denial may be, there’s another behavior that people display in response to such tragedies that is even stranger.
They’ll talk to the dead person as if the latter were still alive, freaking out the other people present, especially children. Those who are in denial simply refuse to accept the death.
Most people are sad about what has happened, some are angry, and a few others are in denial. Women tend to be more vocal in their grieving, sometimes crying loudly and often being very expressive in their lamentations. Men tend to silently grieve or even cry with restrained tears if they happened to be close to the person who died. People can display a wide variety of behaviors in such situations. Let’s take the example of death in a family. Imagine how people react when tragedy strikes, be it a death in the family, a natural disaster, a terror attack, anything. Lastly, we’ll touch on the connection between dissociation and trauma. This article will explore what dissociation means in psychology and then briefly go over the different types of dissociation.
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