The Wisdom of Dissociation
By Yemaya Olokun, 20 April, 2021
Our subconscious psychophysiology, or shadow realms, hold imprinted memory and soul-parts that, due to emotional overload, trauma and conditioning, hide from our conscious awareness. In psychology this state is known as ‘dissociation’ (‘depersonalisation’ or ‘derealisation’, now too) and is considered a dysfunctional disorder, but like everything in His story, that is only one side of the story.
Remember when trauma was only considered a physical event? We've come a long way, but we have a lot further to go.
Because dissociation has been labeled 'bad', it is a mostly unchartered and therefore misunderstood phenomena, of course it is a natural psychic response to inescapable overwhelm, but it is far more than that. I define trauma as a separation from Self, full-stop, therefore I place all unnatural behavioural adaptation, cultural, familial, religious, social and institutional conditioning well within the definition, and I sense that not doing so is why so many of us are unaware of our trauma, and thus our hidden true identities.
No individual or group can have a monopoly on trauma.
The causes and effects of trauma are wide ranging and relative to many factors, our age, sensitivity, the type, degree of intensity and duration of a traumatic event, the environment, our mental-emotional capacity and the support, if any, that we had at the time of an event or thereafter, altogether inform the subjective experience and objective outcomes of traumatic experiencing. Anyone with memories or soul-parts missing from their conscious awareness, whether they are aware of it or not, is in a state of trauma, and regardless of whether our inner separation was caused by the suppression of our authentic expression (conditioning), or an experience that shook us to the core, what happens internally is the same.
Latent memory and soul-parts can exist just below the surface within the subconscious or be totally submerged in the deep unconscious, but regardless, the point is that they cannot cease to exist and therefore must be integrated.
The trauma response is a highly intelligent mechanism that separates and sends affected parts of us into our subconscious in order that our conscious and cognitive parts remain operational and in charge in order to increase the likelihood of survive. In infancy and childhood, survival includes doing what is necessary to maintain inclusion in our families and communities, whom without we would die. In extreme situations, our psyche can immobilise, snap-freeze and jettison a memory or natural expression into total obscurity, such highly charged, suppressed neural imprinting leads to psychological complexes including panic attacks and phobias, and wreaks havoc on our health and relationships.
It’s necessary to enter altered states of consciousness in order to access the subconscious and unconscious realms of our psyches, this is the foundation for clinical hypnotherapy, past life regression therapy, some forms of meditation and shamanic journeying etc, and dissociation is the point of access to ‘the passage back to the place we were before’. In case you didn’t realise, Pink Floyd’s Hotel California is about the trauma of cultural conditioning. Now, I’m all for the safe use of therapeutic substances to induce dissociation, but because psychoactive medicines have been practiced by humankind for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, inducing altered states is deeply programmed and present part of who we are. The fact of the matter is that with or without medicines, we are capable of intentionally achieving 'out of body' and 'no-breath' states of meditation, and for those that don't have a dedicated meditation practice, know that you enter these states of open-mindful-ness everyday without even realising; reading, listening to music, drifting in and out of sleep and daydreaming all induce altered states. The natural gateway to psycho-emotional and spiritual healing and wholeness, that is the extraordinary and curious human phenomena of dissociation, needs to be understood from a whole, holistic and holy perspective, one far beyond the prison, that ‘we can check out at anytime we like, but never leave’.
We’ve abandoned the innate, psychedelic and multi-dimension travelling parts of who we are into the deep unconscious, because expressing them within the last five hundred, has been met with violent persecution.
Dissociation is multifaceted, multi-functional and insanely complicated, there is not one section of Body or Brain that governs it, it’s an intuitive, autonomic, psychosomatic, collaborative process, that in a very basic sense, separates our objective and subjective experiences, but not all of them, not all at once and never permanently. Dissociation is how the psyche avoids melt-down, but gently lulled imagery, such as that which happens when reading or during guided meditation and hypnotherapy, also induces dissociation, and in safe and peaceful environments we can easily merge so completely with the subconscious, that parts of us are, in a very real way, elsewhere. Tools for therapeutic induction into alternate states of awareness can include music, chanting, drumming, a somnambulistic guiding voice, swaying objects like pendulums and finger tapping etc, anything that softens the focus of the conscious mind and brings intuitive imagery to the fore. The phenomena of our perception is such that it can effortlessly separate and emerge in alternate dimensions within which our experience can be subtle or deep...ever dreamt about a story or a film you watched before bed?
Are we ready to stretch our minds to accord with what trauma and dissociation is teaching us about who we really are?
Intense trauma, out of body experiences, near death experiences and plant medicine induced psychedelic trips are, shall we say, less subtle ways of accessing our innate ability to self-heal, however there are many accounts of people who have had their lives completely transformed for the better after experiencing such intense dissociative experiences, this is very well documented. By guiding the narratives around dissociation and trauma away from disempowerment and victimisation and instead towards awakening, re-sacralisation and re-empowerment, I believe we can heal ourselves and our world. When we re-establish the bonds within and between each other and re-member that our spirit is immutable and incorruptible, our regenerative and creative potential uncoils, and the more of our memory that we are able to awaken, heal and share, the more meaningful, beautiful and ecstatic the experience of being alive becomes.