Have you ever sat down and really thought about listening to your body? For many people, especially those who struggle with trauma, depression, or anxiety, feeling disconnected from their body is a difficult but common experience.
It can show up in subtle ways, like hours spent scrolling social media or daydreaming the day away, or in jarring ways like not remembering what happened after a huge emotional reaction or being startled (and possibly even uncomfortable) when you finally do start to sense your body after prolonged disconnect. Dissociation can become so pervasive and can start so subtly that you may not even realize just how frequently you aren’t fully connected to what’s happening in your body!
As you consider your mind’s connection to your body, you may be wondering, why do you feel so disconnected? And is there anything you can do about it?
What happens when your mind and body aren’t fully connecting?
The experience of feeling disconnected from your body when you’re experiencing strong emotions is sometimes called emotional numbness or dissociation. You might feel like you aren’t fully aware of what’s happening within or around you, you may not fully connect to feeling like a person, like your experiences are happening to someone else (depersonalization), or you may struggle to feel like what you’re experiencing is real, like you’re in a dream (derealization).
While dissociation or emotional numbness can be helpful to make it through occasional difficult experiences, without proper emotional support, it can escalate over time, resulting in small triggers creating long, disruptive periods of disconnect from your body.
What can cause your mind and body to feel disconnected?
In moments of emotional stress, it’s common for your mind to almost fully disconnect from actively sensing what’s happening in your body. Dissociation is a particularly common experience after trauma. Reminders in the present day pull your mind, and then your body, back into how you felt during the trauma. This stressful experience can cause your mind to try to avoid paying attention to what’s happening in your body, to protect you from being retraumatized. Unfortunately, when your trauma is unhealed, reminders can pop up frequently in life and emotionally derail you repeatedly, leading to chronic dissociation.
Anxiety can lead to dissociation through the extreme physical and mental stress of your sympathetic nervous system and your mind being overly active nearly all the time. Depression can also disconnect you from sensing your body. Up to half of the people who struggle with depression experience dissociation, and it’s thought this may be linked to childhood trauma.
Listening to your body using DBT skills (and why it matters!)
To live your life to the fullest, without being heavily impacted by symptoms from trauma or depression, you need to connect to your body. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) interventions for depression offer multiple tools to help you reconnect to yourself, even when you’re emotionally overwhelmed.
Mindfulness in DBT reconnects you to yourself, so you can better connect to others.
Dissociation is highly disruptive to interpersonal relationships, but focusing on your body can help you reconnect to what you are doing, thinking, and feeling. A main pillar of DBT is mindfulness, and through basic mindfulness practices, you can start to rebuild your connection to your body.
By being more in-the-moment in relationships, you reduce your emotional reactivity; focusing on now helps you worry less about the “what-ifs” or past events. You can also release judgment of what’s happening within your body, making it easier for you to be willing to experience it. Instead of feeling guilty, ashamed, or like you’re experiencing the “wrong” feelings, sensations, and thoughts, you can approach sensing what’s happening in your body without criticism. It’s just happening. All you have to do is notice, and let it happen.
By reconnecting to your body through mindfulness, you can rebuild trust in yourself, listening to your body so you can follow your “gut feelings” and approach relationships with more discernment, helping you avoid toxic connections.
The STOP DBT skill helps you slow down enough to listen to your body in tense moments.
Emotional numbness can make it hard for you to understand your feelings, which is crucial for emotional regulation. Our emotions play out in our bodies, and a lack of mind-body connection makes it hard to feel our feelings.
The STOP DBT skill gives you a chance for your mind to catch up with what’s happening in your body. During moments of emotional distress (or if you can’t yet tell when you’re distressed, try it in moments of dissociation), stop what you’re doing; no reacting to thoughts, no talking, no moving. Take a step back (literally, or just mentally). Observe what’s happening; scan your body for sensation, notice what’s going through your mind, and look at what is happening around you. Finally, proceed mindfully. Choose your next steps based on what your body is telling you.
By connecting to your body, you can better understand your response to thoughts and feelings, letting you choose your next steps instead of dissociating and letting reactions lead the way through a situation.
The PLEASE skill provides multiple DBT interventions for depression and dissociation by keeping you in touch with your body’s needs
You will have an easier time connecting to your body if you work on listening to and taking care of your body all the time, instead of just focusing on moments of distress. The PLEASE DBT skill outlines how to take care of yourself to reduce your vulnerability to emotional overwhelm. By asking you to pay attention to your body’s needs for rest, movement, and nutrition, PLEASE shows you how your body influences your mind; stability in the body helps you re-regulate mentally when emotions threaten to overwhelm you.
- Take care of physical illness and take medications as instructed.
- Eat a balanced diet.
- Avoid mood- and mind-altering substances like alcohol or drugs
- Prioritize high-quality sleep
- Exercise in ways that best match your ability and personality.
Self-soothing helps you recognize and ease your distress by listening to your body
Dissociation makes it harder to understand or moderate your responses to triggers, overwhelming you with distress and leading to numbed-out or explosive reactions that may surprise or confuse you.
Self-soothing in DBT asks you to connect directly to your senses to calm yourself when distressed. To self-soothe, consider the five senses: vision, hearing, sight, smell, and taste. Provide yourself with pleasant experiences for all of those senses, taking time to connect to your body in ways that soothe you. Even if you’re prone to dissociation, through deliberate connection to what’s happening to your body when you provide yourself with pleasant sensations, you make a distressing moment easier to get through, showing you just how powerful a strong mind-body connection can be.
WHAT helps you pay attention to what you’re doing, both mentally and physically
WHAT is a mindfulness DBT skill that helps you connect to your body by observing what thoughts, bodily sensations, and emotions you’re experiencing, observing your surroundings and the situation, then describing all of these things to yourself. From there, you focus as one-mindfully as possible on what you’re doing in the moment, and throw all your attention and effort into that activity.
Dissociation disrupts pathways of progress in your life, holding you back from achieving your goals. If you’re not connected to yourself, it’s hard to know what you want and what steps to take to progress toward life goals, making it difficult to build a life worth living. The WHAT skill can help you reconnect to your body and understand yourself better, giving you time to sense what your body is telling you and putting words to your feelings, thoughts, and motivations. You can then choose what you do next, instead of being pushed into a reaction or being blocked from any forward movement by emotional numbness.
Suffolk DBT’s interventions for depression can help you reconnect to yourself, letting your body and mind work together to build a life worth living
Suffolk DBT’s expert therapists know the value of a strong mind-body connection for emotional regulation, and they can combine both compassion and proficiency in providing DBT therapy practiced with fidelity, to help people who struggle to connect with their bodies. Dissociation doesn’t need to stand between you and a life worth living, so connect to Suffolk DBT today to get started on a process that will reconnect you to yourself in the most rewarding ways.
Suffolk DBT provides dialectical behavior therapy at their offices in Manhattan and Long Island, and online throughout New York. Schedule a free screening call today, so you can get started right away.