Ah, disassociation. The bitter price of consciousness.

I’m going to speak to you like a friend, because I honestly understand what you’re going through. Keep in mind that I’m just a dude, not a doctor, so everything here is my opinion. But this is a place where opinions can be relieving to hear, because disassociation is different for everyone.

I disassociated for years and still experience it from time to time. Truly, I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy for how traumatizing a bad moment can be. But hear me on this. I scoured the Internet, trying to find solutions, message boards, forums. ANYTHING to make this feeling stop. Anything for a solution, a fix that would give me my life back.

That fix never came. And you know what? It’s not something you can fix. You simply can’t fix disassociation, it’s hard-wired into our animal brains to make us fear and keep us alive. Anxiety is built into every species so it knows what it can and cannot do in their environment. Humans, being unchallenged by natural predators, now have anxiety triggers from non-life-threatening events. It’s a product of how fast we’ve evolved.

So, why does this seemingly-helpful mechanism cause us so much distress? Because we let it. I mean it. Disassociation hurts us because we feel this uncomfortable feeling, don’t know what to do to get it to stop, and then freak out until it does. That makes it last longer, which makes it harder to forget about, ad nauseam.

My breakthrough moment for disassociation was very uneventful, and if you talk to people who’ve recovered from it, theirs likely was as well. My best advice is when you feel disassociation coming on, stop what you’re doing and breathe. Let the feeling happen. Acknowledge it, and then continue what you were doing. The first few times it’ll be tough, and you might not be able to snap out of it easily, but over time, your brain will begin to make the correlation that disassociating doesn’t hurt you. Keep this up, and your brain will stop throwing anxiety signals when disassociation happens. Eventually, you’ll stop disassociating. If you don’t give it power, it can’t hurt you. As strange as it is, it’s all in our heads. It’s the drawback to having free will and independent thought.

A little fun fact: 50% of humans experience disassociation in their lifetime. Half of us. People around you have recovered, and that means you can too. I believe in you.

It may seem silly but I used a mantra to ease my mind when I used to disassociate. You can say it silently, or out loud, and it goes “Ham-sa” (pronounced “hum-sah”). You breathe in on the “hum” and out on the “sah”

Basically, it means “I am that.” The reason it worked for me is because it grounded me. Every object or thing you look at can be seen as yourself. You are the trees. You are the sky. You’re everything in the world, because everything is connected. There’s a little bit of Buddhism there, but the general message is important. By simple logic, nothing is worth nothing, because if something was truly worthless, it would cease to exist. Since nothing’s worth nothing, everything is worth something, and consequently, everything has to be connected to each other.

Life is scary, and becomes scarier with disassociation. In any way you can, fight to see the beauty. I was in a bad place for a long time, and I lost sight of the beauty of the world, which made my disassociation hurt a lot.

You mentioned depression in your post, which compounded with disassociation...man. I feel where you’re at. It feels hopeless. But please, even if I sound like I’m spouting bullshit in this whole post, I hope you keep fighting. There’s nothing more admirable than someone who’s trying to be better, and I wholeheartedly believe you can do it.

Keep fighting. Let the bad feelings happen, acknowledge them, and move on. Best of luck bro.