Feeling like a passenger in your own life?
Whenever I hear a client say this, I remember being 15 years old - I lived in a rural area and my school was 45 minutes from my house. I caught a ride home with a boy that I liked one time and as we were pulling into my driveway, he asked how I liked a certain band. I said I'd never heard them before. He looked at me funny and said "we've been listening to them for the last 45 minutes."
In that moment, I realized I had completely blanked out the entire drive. Not only was a I passenger in my own life, I wasn't even there for the ride.
Another word for "blanking out" is dissociation.
Dissociation is a protective strategy. When life is too much to handle, our brain instinctively protects us by cushioning our awareness or removing it entirely. Dissociation is not an on/off switch - it's a continuum. We might feel a little spaced out, or we might feel fully numb with no access to our feelings or bodily sensations.
In the past, our common culture would have helped us move through dissociation. Sitting around making food together, watching children, tending animals, making tools, building houses - these every day, physical activities allow us to discharge big feelings in a healthy way and keep us grounded and in relationship with each other and our environment.
Today, modern culture actively assaults our mind and senses. Rather than helping us stay grounded, it actually keeps us dissociated. So while dissociation can be a result of individual trauma in a person's life, it may also simply come from living in a time and place where we feel chronically disconnected from each other and from the natural world.
The point is - you're not alone. We're all a little bit dissociated and some of us (hello!) have spent decades of our life chronically dissociated. It's not a disorder. It's a symptom of a culture that's gone off the rails and is no longer supporting our mental health.
The good news is, this is within our power to fix. We can learn the skill of coming back into the present and begin to build a protective community around us
In resilience,
Caitlin