Recognizing Everyday Dissociation

My child says my name once. Then again. Then a third time. I’m sitting on our living room couch with my laptop in my lap. He’s sitting across from me in a chair.

I have about five tabs open on my screen. I’m jumbled—clicking back and forth, losing my train of thought. On one tab are my practice notes. Two left to finish. But wait, I think there were two from earlier in the week. When I open a client’s chart from a few days ago, I see one note missing. My stomach tightens. Ugh.

Then my mind does what it always does when I feel overwhelmed. It leaves.

I don’t want to live here anymore. I’m tired. I’ve been wanting to leave Texas for a while now. I click to another tab: houses in Colorado. I dream. I imagine a different life—one where everyone walks around healthy and whole in sandals and hiking boots, long wavy hair, unshaven legs, drinking coffee and talking about integration and alignment.

I know I’m here, technically. I can hear sound—his voice. The TV. Music in the background. He multitasks like I do, lost in his own worlds. But my attention is already somewhere else, pulled forward into imagining, budgeting, planning—constructing a future that feels safer than the present moment.

It’s so hard to come back. He says my name again. This time there’s frustration in it. He’s now next to me, pulling my face toward him with his hands. He’s autistic and doesn’t wait politely for my attention to return. He brings me back.

Only then do I realize how far gone I was. I had heard the sentence he was saying, but I hadn’t caught up to its meaning until several seconds later. My body was here. My mind was not. I wasn’t choosing to ignore him. I was already in the future—problem-solving, fantasizing, trying to secure something that didn’t yet exist.

I’d been seeing therapy clients all day, and I was running on empty.

I feel the tightness in my chest when I come back. The familiar ache. The longing I hadn’t wanted to feel. I take in his face, now close to mine, and notice how hard it is to stay in this moment and how agitated I feel inside my own skin. The sensory overload feels like nails on my skin, but it’s just cold hands.

Nothing dramatic happened. I didn’t disappear. I didn’t lose time. I just left quietly—into planning, into an illusion of certainty—until someone who needed me pulled me home.

That’s what worked when I was a child. I used my imagination to escape the pain of a very broken home—cockroaches in corners, a stepmother who walked around naked with a joint in one hand, a father who went into blind rages. And this escape tactic worked—it got me this far. I’m living my dreams, kind of. I became a therapist. No one else in my family went to graduate school. I broke some generational patterns. I stopped living like women weren’t allowed to belong to themselves. I learned how to take care of my body, my needs, my life—and I created stability for my own kids—and I’m proud of that.

“I’m sorry,” I tell my son. “But don’t pull my face—you know I don’t like that.”

Even as I apologize, I feel the itchy ache in my chest again, the urge to leave. And I realize what I’ve been doing: using the old coping tool that once kept me alive, a tool I don’t want to hand down to him as absence. Imagination works great as a form of escape—until it doesn’t. I don’t want to repeat what happened to me. I look at him—his face, the curve of his mouth. He really is handsome, and not just because I’m his mother. We sit together on the couch.

“What is it, sweetie?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says. “I just feel kind of sad.”

I know what it’s about. There’s been a lot lately, for him and for me: stress, uncertainty, and the way old attachment patterns resurface under pressure. When things feel like this, I tend to run into my mind. He runs toward connection with me. I’m his person and I know that, but sometimes being one person’s person is a heavy responsibility.

“I know, honey,” I say, using the same tone I’ve learned to use with my clients—and with my own inner child. “I’m right here with you.”

We sit in silence. I notice my chest again, an opening, small, but still accessible.

I picture my younger self. I say to her, quietly, I’m here. I love you. I’m not going to run from you. I imagine holding her, telling her how sweet she is. My attention moves gently back and forth—between her (my chest) and my son. He shifts beside me. His posture softens. I can feel him coming back, too.

All it took was my presence—with myself, and with him.

When he gets up, I stay where I am. I sit with my younger self for a few more minutes. I’m learning how to do this—one small moment of awareness at a time. It doesn’t come easily. It never did. But it became imperative during the pandemic, when I learned how much of life can’t be planned for—and how imagination, the very tool that once saved me, can turn against me when it pulls me too far from now.

I used to think of dissociation as something dramatic—blankness, shutdown, losing time. That’s how it’s often taught. But more and more, I see it show up like this: quiet, functional, woven into the rhythms of ordinary life.

Everyday Dissociation

As therapists, we’re particularly good at staying with others—tracking emotion, attuning to subtle cues—but we’re not always good at staying with ourselves. We learn to listen exquisitely to what’s external, while missing the quiet hum of our own unease.

We don’t always call it dissociation when it looks like planning. Or scrolling. Or fixing. Or fantasizing about moving to a new state where everyone’s already healed. But that’s exactly what it is—a movement away from what’s unbearable or uncertain inside us and around us.

We live in a culture that’s remarkably connected and yet profoundly disconnected at the same time. We interact asynchronously on a thousand platforms—but rarely synch up to our own heart. We’re not just encouraged, but often rewarded for looking outward, achieving more, staying busy. Meanwhile, the quiet truth of what lives in our bodies often goes unrecognized.

We leave ourselves to cope.

In spite of—or maybe because of—how much I do this in my own life, I’ve come to pay close attention to this everyday dissociation in my therapy practice. There might be a certain flicker in a client’s eyes, a faraway gaze. The way someone’s story gets emotionless, faster, more abstract. They’re still talking, but I can feel them pulling away. Sometimes they don’t even know they’ve left.

When I see my clients do this, I slow down, lean in, drop way down into my own body and say, “Just for a moment, see if you can notice what’s happening in your body. This isn’t about fixing anything. Just checking, Where are you? What’s here?”

I pause and allow time and silence to do its job.

“Do you feel an ache? If so, how old does it feel and where does it live? Can you imagine what it might look like, if it had a shape, or a face?”

This kind of gentle imagining can reengage the part of us wired for connection, attunement, and care: the social engagement system. And when you do this regularly—not just noticing but staying with what you find—it becomes more than mindfulness.

It becomes compassion and a return to the one home that will always be yours: yourself. That ache—and how old it feels—is one way to recognize the part of yourself that you disconnect from. For me, it lives in my chest. My diaphragm tightens. So does my jaw. That’s my cue: she’s needing my attention. The little girl who was abandoned. I’m learning to not abandon her. I’m learning to show up.

This is a lifelong practice. Not something you arrive at in one moment, but in many small ones, strung together over time. Going back to sleep—and waking up. One conscious breath, one moment of awareness, at a time.

This is not about making dissociation wrong. It’s a brilliant survival tool. It’s how many of us made it through the parts of life that were too much. It’s how I became who I am. And it’s how many of my clients have protected what was most sacred in them.

But survival isn’t the same as presence. And eventually, our old tools start asking to be updated. For me, the shift doesn’t happen through effort. It happens through contact. My son’s hand on my face. My own breath. The ache in my chest reminds me I’m still here. It lets me know that something in me still longs to be met.

I can’t control when dissociation shows up. But I can learn to notice it. I can practice returning—gently, briefly, again and again. That’s the work. And it doesn’t have to be heroic. Sometimes it’s just sitting with someone you love and staying.

There’s no finish line with this kind of healing, no arrival. Just moments—small and sacred—where I catch myself leaving, and choose, for a breath or two, to stay instead. With my son. With myself. With the ache and the aliveness of being here. It’s not always graceful. But it’s real. And for now, that’s enough.