One cannot expect to know everything about another’s life. Especially when one is just learning about a person. However, being aware of what the usual experience of life is, compared to a very privileged and financially-worry-free type of life, should be classed as common sense. That is not often the case, and these good people shared their own experiences.
When trying to find something to talk about in this article, when it comes to dissociation, Google came forth and delivered a lot of interesting bits and facts that I’ll be sharing with you today, because I love learning and you get to do that with me! Haha, let the malicious teaching of random things commence!
Let’s start with emotional detachment. According to Healthline, this is an inability or unwillingness to connect with other people on an emotional level. It helps protect some people from unwanted drama, anxiety, or stress, yet for others, it isn’t always voluntary. Emotional detachment or “numbing” is frequently a symptom of other conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, or others.
However, this is speaking more about an empathetic kind of emotional detachment, when one turns off their emotions, but there’s a different condition where one turns off reality as a whole. Depersonalization-derealization disorder manifests when one is disconnected from themselves to the point of having an out-of-body experience.
Feeling detached from your own feelings or surroundings, as though you’re watching yourself in a movie or from above, feeling time move in a distorted way, and feeling like you’re a robot with little control of your body or thoughts have been ways to describe depersonalization symptoms, whilst derealization manifests in objects looking foggy, artificial, cartoonish or dreamlike, distorted in size or distance, or even flat or two-dimensional, with sound going muted or heightened. According to PsychCentral, this affects 1-2% of the population.
Not every bit of disconnectivity stems from underlying conditions or disorders. Sometimes we’re stuck in situations that disagree with what our inner world needs because it’s what the outside world expects, and that leads us to disconnect from ourselves and our feelings. The problem is that those emotions never go away.
According to Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, society has a tendency to pressure us into pursuing or accepting certain things out of a sense of duty. We work a 9-to-5 job we hate because we’re expected to. We date because that is the norm. We dress a certain way because that is the norm.
But as the majority of people are doing so, it leads to a sort of safety bubble, which is incredibly difficult to burst. Reconnecting with those emotions that you’ve buried can be a long process, and one may not want to go through it alone. Seeing a psychologist or talking to your doctor may be a good way to start the healing journey, but it all starts with you wanting to take the first step.
Now we’ve reached the type of disconnection that this list is mostly tackling—privileged dissociation. According to Christena Cleveland, social psychologist, author, and professor, the privileged life is all about transcendence, living a life that lies beyond the limits of ordinary experience. It’s about avoiding or escaping systemic/societal pain. It is quite effective in that most privileged people are deeply disconnected from the ordinary experiences of many.
While it can be uncomfortable to recognize that one has unearned advantages over others, VeryWellMind advises working through that discomfort to utilize the privilege in a way that promotes more equitable outcomes for others in society. Privilege comes in many forms, such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and others.
Self-reflection is a great way to understand your privilege because it allows one to connect their individual experiences to larger systemic realities. By acknowledging your privilege, you limit the possibility of invalidating the other person’s life experiences or silencing them altogether. It shows self-awareness, empathy, and compassion for those who are marginalized.
Hope this was as interesting for you to read as it was for me to research. And if not, then I hope this list of hilarious comebacks we compiled made your day a bit better. As you continue scrolling, don’t forget to upvote your favorites and leave some comments detailing your own experiences. Until we meet again!
