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May 5, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:40
1346 Dissociation - A Listener Conversation

How to avoid the final and most emptying defense.

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Hey, how's it going? Hi.
Good. Okay, so...
So, about selfie ratio, I want to understand more of, like, what happens, like, how to identify it when it happens, when you're talking to somebody else.
That's what I want to start out with.
Well, tell me a little bit more about what, just so I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.
Just tell me, if you can, a little bit more about what you mean by self-erasure?
About it?
Yeah, about self-erasure, what it means to you and what you mean it as.
Okay, well, I think it means when somebody is talking to you, like when you bring up maybe a problem to them and they go, well, What are you talking about?
You know, something like that.
And then for me, what happens is I just kind of...
I kind of blank out, like...
And then I have to regroup.
So when the person denies something, I kind of deny it in myself, I guess.
Sure. Yeah.
And... Is that the right description of it?
So if someone says, I don't like this movie, you feel the same way?
Is it that you feel the same way?
Or if you don't feel the same way, you can't talk about it?
Yeah, if I don't feel the same way, I can't talk about it.
Okay, that's not quite the same as self-erasure, and I just want to make sure that we're, and again, these terms are all somewhat subjective, so, you know, take it or leave it, but self-erasure is when you don't know what you think.
Like, self-erasure, to erase a personality is like, you know, takes significant, you know, brainwashing and torture and all that, like, you know, really cult moony stuff, right?
Yeah. And that's not what you're talking about.
What you're talking about is having a fear of contradicting people.
Ah. Then I would have to talk about another situation which I really was erased.
your emotions can get erased, right?
Like, okay, well, I want to get into the situation that I wrote in the email because that's when it happened.
Well, as I said, I don't want to talk about anything specific that you were talking about in the email.
I'd rather just talk in general principles because I don't know the facts and I'm only going to get one side and this and that.
So if we could just stick with the general principles, I'm sure they will be helpful enough to help you with other situations.
Okay. All right.
Right.
Well, if somebody...
Sorry.
Do you want me to just ask you some questions, and then we can see if we can go from there?
Yeah. Well, I mean, there are different levels, of course, of conformity, really, is what we're talking about.
And there are different levels of conformity.
And some levels of conformity, in my opinion, and all of this is just my opinion, as you know, some levels of conformity are good, right?
So if you're at someone's house for dinner and you're served something that you don't Really like.
It doesn't taste like horrible, but you just don't like it.
And they say, are you enjoying your meal?
I think it's okay to say yes.
I mean, it's...
It's sort of a minor social lubricant, so to speak.
I just don't think it's a big deal where you say, well, you know, I don't find this particularly tasty or that.
Because you can enjoy a meal even if you don't love the taste of something, right?
I mean, you enjoy the company, whatever, right?
Yeah. So to me, there's, you know, little things.
There's a certain amount of conformity.
You don't do it out of fear.
It's just a kind of graciousness, if that makes any sense.
Politeness And so there's that level.
Now, that's sort of one extreme of conformity.
And at the other extreme is, I don't know, you're drafted into the military and turned into some stone-cold psycho-killing machine or something, right?
So there's other...
You're kidnapped by some, I don't know, Che Guevara cult and turned into a soldier or something, right?
A gorilla. So there's sort of really, really big extremes.
And I don't think that if you make a choice...
To conform to a particular situation, if you know that you're making the choice, that's not self-erasure.
As I understand it, and again, this is just me, right?
So I'm no expert in this.
This is just the way that I think of it.
But if you don't know that you're conforming, then that is self-erasure, if that makes sense.
Ah. Um...
And so it's unconscious.
And you don't know until it actually already happened.
Right, so afterwards you're like, why did I do that, right?
Yeah. And at the time you don't even know that you don't want to do it, right?
Right. Right, so you can think of this in sexual matters, right?
So, you know, some relationships have this conflict where, you know, to take a stereotypical example, the guy wants to have sex and the girl doesn't, right?
And now, if she, you know, says, okay, well, let's go, you know, kiss me and I'll, you know, I'm sure I'll get in the mood, right?
That's one example of a kind of conformity.
Whereas if she ends up just having sex with the guy and then afterwards says, I didn't even think about saying no, that's a kind of self-erasure.
I mean, I think that distinction is important because you want to be precise.
And, you know, when I say something is precise, I don't mean that my definition is the be-all and end-all, but what I mean is that I think that distinction is important.
Yeah, that's a good example, yeah.
Right, and we're not talking about sex, because I'm British, right?
I just wanted to give that as an example, but when you think about situations in your life where this comes up, is it more like you know that you don't agree, but you decide to say you do, or do you not even know that you don't agree?
Well, what happens is, because it's more around...
If I'm around my abusive parents, then I would feel fear if I wanted to express my preference about something, if they were going to attack me.
But when I'm around, just a normal person like on FDR or something, I still fear that sometimes.
Sure, sure. And that's probably, I mean, I would say that's probably healthy myself.
But anyway, come on. Really?
Like, okay, because, I mean, if, say, you have a friend and you want to be able to express your preferences around them, you know, and let's just say they're not abusive, I felt that, I just felt really anxious, like, about that happening.
Sure. And you understand, to me, that makes total sense, given what I know about your history.
That, to me, makes complete sense.
In fact, if you didn't feel that anxiety, that would be really weird.
Yeah. Right?
And simply because you grew up in the household you grew in, right?
You grew up in the household you grew up in, right?
And in situations...
And so you have trained yourself, or been trained, right, by harsh circumstances...
You have been trained to feel fear in the expressing of your opinion in the same way that other people feel fear when they think of putting their hand into an open flame or a blender or something, right? Because it causes pain and suffering.
And so for you, in your environment, the expressing of true thoughts and feelings caused an attack, right?
Right. And you have to be blanket.
You can't sort of pick and choose, right?
Because, and I'm guessing, and you can tell me if I'm way off base, of course, if you grow up in an environment where Your thoughts and opinions are attacked.
If you hesitate, you get attacked as well, right?
Yeah, like they might make fun of my hesitation if it looks weird or something.
Right, right. So if someone says, what do you think?
And you're like, oh, is it safe?
Is it not safe?
Then you're attacked. So it has to be immediate, right?
Any hesitation, when conformity is demanded from you, any hesitation provokes further attack.
That's a general rule, it's not necessarily universal, but I don't know of a single exception, but that's what I've seen.
Right, so the only way that we can...
The only way that we can survive or avoid these attacks in this environment is it becomes instantaneous, right?
Conformity becomes instantaneous.
You don't pick and choose it, it's just automatic.
Right. And so now you're saying, okay, well, when I'm dealing with people who aren't my family, I feel this same fear.
Well, of course, because it's become automatic, right?
Right. And...
I'd like to grow out of that, but I don't know.
It's still there. I mean, I'm still with my parents, but when I leave and everything, I want to be able to find a way to get out of that.
Sorry, what do you mean to say you say grow out of it or get out of it?
What does that mean? I... I want to stop conforming when I don't need to.
Okay. Go on.
Because, I mean, if you want to have a friend who really cares about who you are and everything, having that fear is really maladaptive.
And it takes a lot of effort to work through it.
I want to know how to go from where I am now to, you know, being comfortable being myself.
Right.
Around people who matter.
Thank you.
Right, right, okay, okay.
So you would like to have the choice to not You'd like to have the choice to not conform, right?
Yeah. Now, when you say you'd like to have the choice to not conform, again just for my own annoying precision, do you mean to say that you want to feel the fear of not conforming and choose to not conform?
Or do you want to not even feel the fear?
Well, I would like not to feel the fear, if that's possible.
I can tell you just my own experience and opinion, and it doesn't mean anything, except it's my own experience and opinion.
I've been working on this stuff for a quarter century.
I still feel fear in the face of non-conformity.
Now, maybe you can do something that I haven't and figure something out, but I still feel that.
Now, that doesn't mean that I'm enslaved by it.
It doesn't mean that I'm trapped by it.
And there are many times when I feel it and I'm glad that I felt it.
Because sometimes it's really not safe to conform, but you don't know that except emotionally, because you don't have the evidence empirically, right?
Like, so you meet someone new, and Bob will call him, right?
You meet someone new, and you don't know whether it's safe to be honest and open with Bob, because you haven't done it yet, right?
Right. Now, if you do it and you find that he attacks you, that's very unpleasant, right?
And that's only going to reinforce the don't do it feeling, right?
Right. So, you have a challenge, which is you need to have the feelings to tell you whether it's safe or not.
And your question is, well, how do I know whether those feelings are accurate, right?
Yeah. Right.
I agree. But I think to understand that you will almost always, and for as long as I've been around, my experience has been that you will feel those feelings of fear, but you want to be able to choose whether to act or not.
And I think the important thing is just to have realistic expectations because you can't erase the first 20 years of your life, right?
It's like saying, I want to learn French, and I want to forget English, right?
Well, you can learn French, but you can't forget English, right?
Right. Right, so you have a language called fear, and you want to learn how to speak another language.
That does not mean that you're going to forget the language called fear.
It's not going to happen. Ah, I'm going to learn the language called courage.
Right. You want to learn the language called, you know, courage and so on, but you'll never lose the language of your history.
In my experience, again, maybe there's some way of doing it that I've never heard of and don't know about, but I've been doing this for quite a long time now, and I don't know of anything like that.
And I say that not to make you feel bad, though I'm sure it doesn't make you feel good, but to give you a sense of...
The journey and what is reasonable and possible.
And also, because if you have a goal called, I don't want to be afraid of nonconformity, that's a dangerous goal to have, because it's dangerous at times to not conform.
Yeah. Right?
Like, when I was in the business world, politics...
Would come up, right?
And people would say stuff that was just...
Well, you know, right?
I don't have to tell you, right?
Or religion, or whatever, right?
And I did not stand up on a soapbox and give everyone the introduction to philosophy speech, right?
Right. It can be dangerous.
Yeah. Oh, I'm so sorry.
I'm going to have to call you back just in two minutes.
Isabella is stirring. Let me call you right back.
Ah, okay. Thanks. No problem.
Oh, hey. Sorry about that.
You can hear me all right? Okay.
This is my life now.
I can't do anything for more than 12 minutes at a time.
Okay, so I think it's just important to have realistic expectations because if you think you can learn French and lose your knowledge of English, you're going to get perpetually frustrated, right?
When someone talks to you in English and you reply in English, right?
Yes. So, like it or not, we can't cast away our histories to that degree, or at least, as I say, that's been my experience, maybe something's different, that's been my experience, and I would put that forward as a strong possibility, to say the least.
And you don't want to get rid of that fear, right?
I mean, if you have a fear of dogs, you don't necessarily want to get rid of your fear of dogs completely because some dogs can be dangerous, right?
Right. And actually, I have another question.
Not just fear, but blankness, which I think is dissociation.
Yes, yes, yes.
Sometimes that will happen.
And I can't think of a time specifically when it does, but I mean, do you kind of understand how that would happen?
Like, okay, let me think.
Well, of course, the problem is that if you could remember it, it wouldn't be dissociation, right?
That's the challenge. Yeah.
I could give like a small snippet of something that I talked to somebody about and it's kind of related if that works like on Skype.
So that's the only thing I can recall right now.
Right. Do you want me to send it?
No, I mean, unless you feel it's really...
I'd like to just keep talking if that's alright.
But I mean, if we get stuck, then you can send it.
Because I think we know when...
Sorry, I think we can figure out patterns about when this occurs, and if we can't, then we'll look at something in more detail.
Okay, alright. Then I'm going to need some questions, because I'm like, I know what happens.
Oh, totally, totally, totally.
No, of course. Look, and I mean, I hope that I haven't expressed it, but I just mentioned, I mean, huge sympathy.
I mean, this is... You've been given some challenges to work with, and those things can make you very strong indeed, but they are real challenges.
And the dissociation is a very big challenge.
And... The dissociation...
Look, again, just so you know, I'm just a guy talking theory, right?
I don't have any big credentials or proof for you, but this is what I have experienced in my years of working on myself and working with others.
So, again, I just put the caveat out there and then we'll keep going.
Okay. The dissociation...
Dissociation occurs when success is impossible.
Dissociation occurs when success in interaction becomes impossible Right, so if you imagine a guy, some guys start to chase him, right?
Well, he's going to run, right?
Or he's going to fight, but he's probably going to run.
Let's say five guys start chasing him or whatever, right?
So he's going to start running, right?
So he's got action that he can take.
And let's say they catch him.
Well, he's going to start throwing punches and then he's going to start kicking and he's going to bite and he's going to whatever, right?
He's going to do all of these things.
And let's say they put a hood over him and they put him in a van.
Then he's going to try and get out of the van or whatever, right?
But let's say someone puts a gun to his temple and says, if you make another move, I'm gonna pull a trigger, right?
At that moment, no further action is possible that he can succeed with, right?
Right. Now, he may sit there and think, okay, I'm going to sit still here, I'm going to not move, but I'm going to keep listening.
How many times do we turn?
I'm going to try and figure out where we're going.
I'm going to, like, all of these kinds of things, right?
Yeah. He's still got action he can take, it's just not any external action, right?
Yeah, and I can...
I can say that I've had a lot of dreams like that.
Sure, sure. And I'm sorry to be provoking these metaphors, right?
I mean, sorry to be using these violet images.
It's just they help because I think that in a lower brain, this is sort of what is going on, right?
Now, so he's still going to be planning.
He's still going to be plotting his escape.
He's just not going to be moving because the guy said, I'll pull the trigger, right?
Yes. Now, if he's taken into some horrible dungeon and he's strapped to some table or whatever, he's still going to be trying to figure out the situation, right?
What the hell do they want and so on, right?
Right. And he's going to figure out if he can bargain, if he's got any information and so on, right?
And if some guy just comes in and says to him, I'm going to torture you and then I'm going to kill you.
Right? And there's nothing you can say that is going to change the course of that.
There's nothing that I want from you.
I don't want any money. I'm just going to torture you and I'm going to kill you.
Now, once the guy believes that, he's going to give up, right?
Yeah, he's going to go limp.
Yeah, there's no further action that he can take to do anything, right?
Because there's no possibility of negotiation or need or choice or bargaining or escape or anything, right?
Right. The only thing he might do is he might try and find some way to die sooner, right?
And again, I'm sorry for the ugliness of the imagery, but I just sort of want to get to the extreme of dissociation, right?
Yes. Now, once he has gone to the extreme, and he knows he's going to die, there's nothing he can do, he's going to be tortured, he's going to be killed, or whatever, right?
The kindest thing, I think, that nature can do is just make him go bye-bye, right?
Yeah. Like, if you've ever seen pictures of people who are in front of firing squads, they never try to run.
They just stand there, right?
Yeah. I mean, that's an example of extreme dissociation, right?
Yeah. And people who have been tortured have reported this out-of-body experience.
They simply, it's like they're floating above themselves.
They just complete dissociation.
Because there's nothing that they can do.
There's no course of action that they can take.
Yeah, like...
Somebody in a surgery or something, the same thing.
Yeah, I've read about that.
Well, the surgery thing's a little different because, I mean, you're supposed to be anesthetized or whatever.
I'm talking about a specifically evil environment.
Okay. And we do this, as I've mentioned in a podcast or two, right?
We run, and then when the bear catches us, we generally go limp, right?
Right. I remember.
Right, so the way that I formulate dissociation is that dissociation occurs when you are in a no-win situation.
So to give a silly example, my brother would sometimes come up to me and say, what is one and one?
What do one and one make, right?
And I would originally say, this is when we were very young, right?
I'd say, two, right?
One and one make two, right?
And he'd say, no, idiot.
And he'd put two ones next to each other, and you see, they make eleven, right?
No, that's mean.
Yeah, or if I would say eleven, he'd say, no, dummy, it's two, right?
One plus one equals two.
Right. Or he'd come up to me and he'd say, no means yes, and yes means no.
Do you want me to hit you?
And if I said yes, he'd say, oh, the game just ended, and he'd hit me, right?
And if I said no, he'd say, oh, that means yes, and he'd hit me, right?
Yeah. So it's kind of like when you...
If it's not actually happening, it's a dissociation.
No, sorry. If you dissociate and you're...
And you're in that kind of situation, that's really an impossible situation, then you will dissociate.
Yeah, I mean, that's my long-winded way of sort of trying to explain what it is that I'm trying to get at in terms of dissociation.
And so to go, I mean, this is my brother with mind games and whatever, whatever, I mean, that's, but the guy being tortured, I mean, these are just two examples, extremely disparate examples of impossible situations.
You can't win.
Because conformity is a strategy that says, I can win if I do this, right?
Or at least I can not lose, right?
Right. So if some really aggressive guy comes up to you and says, I hate whites, don't you hate whites?
And you feel like, well, if I say no, he's going to do something horrible, right?
Then you may say, oh yeah, those damn honkies, they stole my loafers, right?
Right. Or whatever, right?
And that's a strategy to try and get him to not do something aggressive towards you, right?
So conformity is a strategy that we use when we think we can win.
Or at least it'll do us some good, right?
Yeah, okay. And so if I perceived that I was in an impossible situation, like Would the same thing occur?
Regardless of whether it's actually happening?
Well, let me just distinguish this.
When you are conforming to someone, you are more optimistic than when you are dissociating.
When you dissociate, it means that you're in a situation that you genuinely believe no action is possible to improve the situation.
Ah.
Okay, so when...
Yeah, I mean, when you conform, at least you have a chance of not getting hurt.
Yeah, you're trying something, right?
You're doing something, right?
But dissociation is when there's nothing I can do, so I'm going to check out.
Yeah, I see that now.
Dissociation is the anesthetic, right, for whatever it's coming.
Like, if you and I get our appendix out, we sure as hell don't want to be conscious, right?
We want to be in the extreme dissociation of anesthesia, right?
Right. I mean, hell, I want an out-of-body experience if I'm having an operation, right?
Yeah.
Right, so dissociation, it's important to understand that it occurs in a situation where no further strategy is possible to succeed or to minimize harm.
Okay.
That makes sense.
And I'll just give you one last example and we'll move on, right?
Just to make it a little bit more personal, at least to me.
When I was a kid, my mother would sometimes just come home and be in a bad mood.
And I would try certain things to see if I could make her happier, or at least less angry.
Make her a cup of tea, or I would offer to tidy up the living room, or I would clean my room, or whatever.
I would try something to make her feel better, right?
And that's a positive strategy in a difficult situation, a dangerous situation, because when my mother would get really angry, she would get violent, and so there was physical risk involved.
So I did what I could to try to solve the problem, right?
Now, if my mother got more angry because I was trying to make her feel better, then I would try and make up some excuse to leave, right?
I've got to go to the store, a friend's going to meet me, or whatever, right?
And if she said, you are forbidden from leaving this apartment, and I could see that she was just She just wanted to blow up.
It was just her way of relieving her tension, right?
Abuse would just relieve her tension.
And so I would try these strategies, but after a certain amount of time, I would realize that I was basically trying to talk a storm away from coming, right?
It was never going to work.
She was just going to blow up.
Make some crap up.
And anything that I did would make it worse, right?
Right. And so I would give up.
I can't leave.
I can't affect the situation positively.
I just have to try and, you know, like I'm lashed to a tree in a thunderstorm.
I just have to ride it out, right?
Right. And that last part for me was where I dissociated.
Because why stick around, right?
There's no point. Can't do anything, right?
Yeah, dissociation is a kind of mental escape.
Yeah, yeah. And we do it for very sensible reasons.
Ah, okay. Because we can't do anything.
Yeah. And so pain is going to be inflicted on us and we can't do anything.
I mean, if I have to have my appendix out, I can't not have my appendix out or I'm going to die, right?
So I want to be under the...
I want to be anaesthetized, right?
Right. So it's a blessing.
We look at it as an enemy, but it's a blessing.
Yeah. Now, that doesn't mean that it's something that we say, yay, you know, for the rest of my life, dissociation, right?
But we have to understand, first and foremost, it's not our enemy.
Yeah. Okay, what about...
Okay, there's this book that I'm reading, and it's called Dissociation with Hidden Epidemic.
And it's like...
It talks about something about dissociation happening at the most inopportune times, like it's kind of unpredictable or something for some people and it depends on how badly they experience something like abuse or something.
Right. Right, like there's mild and then moderate and really high.
And if you have it really, really badly, then it's kind of a disorder.
And I took a test on the book, and I mean, I'm not really, not to say that I would take it seriously just from a test in the book, but it said I have moderate dissociative tendencies.
And I want to, because sometimes, I mean, it does, I guess I would have to examine my interactions with people more closely to see the impossible situation in it and try to figure out why it actually happened.
Is there any reason that it would come for no apparent reason that's related to The actual situation going on in the real world and just kind of something going on in my head that triggered it?
That's a huge complicated question and I couldn't conceivably do it justice.
I'll give a few thoughts about it and if they're of any use and of course they're just thoughts.
It's really hard to tell.
I mean, you're still in an emotionally challenging environment, right?
You're still trying to figure out how to get to the next level of your life, whatever that is.
And so right now, it's going to be really hard to find anything that's not historically validly triggered, if that makes sense, right?
Right. Oh, yeah.
Like, you're like some woman in a war.
She's in a war zone, right?
And she's still in the war zone, and she's going to be there for a while, saying, how do I not be afraid of bombs?
It's like, sometimes the whistling could be just somebody whistling down the street.
Well, maybe, but it's never take that chance, right?
Yeah. It's like...
I don't know. Okay, so let's say I was from a war zone, and I hear a car alarm go off, or something like that.
Yeah. That's the kind of dissociation.
I mean, because of the fainting, the limpness.
I think that would be related to my interactions with people.
Right. Now, the thing to do, though, is that feelings don't just pounce on us unawares.
Dissociation is a last-stage defense, right?
So remember the guy, he's running from the other guys and then me with my mom when she'd come home.
It's a last-stage defense.
It is not an early defense.
We will almost always try strategies before we end up dissociated.
Dissociation is no strategy will work.
And we will almost always try, even if it's very rapid, we will try or at least think of things we could do to make the situation better.
And then when we can't, we will dissociate.
So if you want to deal with the problem of dissociation, my entirely amateur advice is to...
Look at what happened before the dissociation.
What were the warning signs, right?
Did I conform before the dissociation, right?
It's about slowing your thought process down, which is really hard because this stuff is designed to be lightning quick, right?
But it's slowing your thought process down and saying, what happened before the dissociation?
How did I end up Dissociated.
Because it doesn't just happen out of the blue.
You're not just walking down the street and whatever, right?
Dum-de-dum. Oh my god, I've been dissociated for an hour, right?
What's this blood on my hands, right?
I mean, this is not the way it works.
What happens is there's a situation and some initial defenses, like a situation you perceive as threatening, some initial defenses will start up.
Right? Bargaining, projection, self-attack, you know, all the usual suspects will start to deploy, and it can be very quick, you will start to deploy your defenses, conformity, compliance, anger, manipulation, passive aggression, all of those things, and it may be very quick.
And if those don't work, And you don't leave the situation, then you will dissociate.
But I guarantee you, there's stuff that happens before the dissociation.
Because dissociation is a final strategy, not an initial strategy.
Okay. Now, if you feel those, like if you can identify those, Those things that occur.
And listen, it could take you three hours or five hours to sit through the last time you dissociated and say, what led up to it?
And what did I think? And what did I feel?
It can be really, really tough, right?
But it's really important to do.
Because what happens is, as you become more adept at noticing these initial defenses, then you can prevent the dissociation with one of two simple, though not easy, strategies.
The first strategy is leave.
Right?
So you say, and you can leave in any number of ways, right?
Let's say you're talking with someone and that's someone just out of the blue, some shop clerk.
You know, you don't even know them from Adam.
She starts to become aggressive and you notice that your anxiety level is heightened, your defenses are kicking in.
If you stay, you're going to dissociate, right?
So you say, I have to go and you leave, right?
Because you know that it's going to lead inevitably to dissociation.
You won't be able to control that because it's an autonomic nervous system response at this point, right?
Now the second is if you are talking with someone you're friendly with, And you begin to see these defenses, you feel your anxiety, your defenses begin to kick in.
Then you say, I need to take a break because I feel myself becoming defensive and I don't want to do anything unjust.
So I need to sort of stop and figure out the situation.
I will get back to you, right?
Okay. And what are your thoughts on actually just talking it out?
Well, I think that's better.
I mean, it's better to be able to talk it out.
But I think first and foremost, I think you want to disengage and figure out how you got there, right?
Because fundamentally, you can only talk things out in a relationship when those things aren't completely taking you by surprise.
Oh, okay. Do you understand?
Yeah, you have to know yourself enough to...
Yeah, otherwise it'd be like me trying to debate in Arabic.
I just, I don't know what's going on, right?
I'd be able to make some noises, but it wouldn't mean anything, right?
So you have to know what's going on in order to be able to talk about it, because the first RTR is with yourself, right?
So if you don't know what's going on with yourself, you won't be able to work it out with anyone else.
Now, once you do have a sense of what's going on with yourself, the second simple, though not easy, strategy is this.
You say to the person, I feel X and I don't know Y. See, because if you know why, then you, either it's because they're being a jerk, in which case you don't try and work it out with them, you just take a break, at least for that time being, or whatever, right?
Unless you, you know, if you're really advanced, you can try and work it out with them at that point, but early on or whatever.
Or if you're completely sure about it, it's not actually going to interfere with your interaction with the other person because you've processed it, you've absorbed it, you can tell them, you know, well, I'm feeling this and this is why and, you know, this is what happened and so on.
It'll all be about your internal processes.
But you say, you know what, I'm feeling really, I feel defensive, I feel angry, I feel anxious, and I don't know why.
And it's, thinking back, it started at this point.
And what were you feeling? And, you know, you start to do that RTR thing with the person, right?
But you have to do that before you become dissociated, because you can't RTR when you're dissociated any more than you can yodel in opera when you've been anesthetized, right?
Yeah. So you end up with dissociation.
Look at the steps that lead up to it, and it will be half a dozen or a dozen emotional steps, and they can be very quick, that lead up to dissociation.
Recognize that once you get to dissociation, there's nothing you can do, right?
I mean, you just have to wait for it to pass, you have to get yourself to a safe environment, but you probably won't even be thinking along those lines, because you'll be dissociated, right?
So, when it wears off...
I have to have a memo to myself.
Yeah, no, seriously, I mean, you write this stuff on a computer screen, put it on your phone, get a tattoo on the back of your neck, like, whatever, right?
But you have to, I mean, it's hard to remember these things.
It's hard for me, it's hard for everyone, right?
Waking up is difficult, otherwise everyone would already have done it, right?
And we'd have a different conversation completely.
But you can't do anything when you're dissociated, right?
Like, once the boxer gets knocked out, there's no point in him saying what he's going to swing next with, right?
Because he's already knocked out, right?
So, yeah, work back.
Figure out the steps that lead up to the dissociation.
Figure out the environment.
When did you first start to feel insecure or anxious or angry or whatever, right?
What was it? And then, why didn't I leave?
And why didn't I interrupt?
And if you're in the kind of relationship where you can interrupt whatever's going on and say, I feel X is Y or Z and I don't know why, and the other person responds in a sensitive and caring way, fantastic.
If they don't, then you need to not be in that situation.
And if it happens repetitively, in my opinion, that's just not a productive relationship.
Because if you can't be honest, I mean, you've already had enough of your life of not being able to do that.
So you want to be able to do that, right?
Yeah, that's right. Oh, that's really good.
Does that help? I mean, I went through a huge amount of stuff relatively quickly, but I mean, I know what your bandwidth is like.
You are a ferociously intelligent woman, so I didn't feel any need to slow down and pace myself.
I have the notes in my head, and I can listen to the story, too.
You bet. Is that enough for you to start with, and will you let me know how it goes?
Yeah. I can shoot you an email and let you know how...
How I'm doing with it. Please do.
And do you feel...
We didn't use any names here.
How do you feel about this? I know I've got a lot of requests for thoughts on dissociation.
How do you feel about other people listening to this?
Yeah. I'd be good with that.
It would help a lot of people, I think.
Oh, I really do think so.
And thank you so much. I'm sorry that it took me a little while to get the call set up.
I do apologize for that.
But I'm glad that we did get a chance to talk.
Oh, me too. All right. Thanks.
All the best. All right.
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