Hey all,

Below is an excerpt from a longform piece I wrote called, The Body Remembers: A Layman’s Guide to Somatic Healing. If you are interested, you can read the full thing over on Substack.

This section was interesting enough, I thought I'd share it here. Cheers!

Dissociation: The Lights Are On, but Nobody’s Home

Somatic work is, at its core, about getting out of the mind and into the body. That’s where the deeper work begins.

When we engage the body, we access deeper layers of memory and unconscious patterning that the mind alone can’t reach. That’s because the body has built-in mechanisms to protect us from overwhelm.

Here’s the paradox: your system wants to remember and process what happened, while simultaneously trying to protect you from it. It’s like a game of hide and seek where the hider wants to be found, but not too easily and especially not before it feels safe to do so. The work is about creating enough safety for what’s hidden to step into the light.

Our nervous system has an emergency exit: dissociation. When fight, flight, or fawn don’t work, the body disconnects. We go numb, floaty, foggy, like life is happening behind glass or as if we are watching our life be lived from distance.

You’ve probably experienced this. Have you ever driven home and suddenly realized you don’t remember the last ten miles? You’re turning into your driveway and you can’t remember a single turn, stoplight, or landmark. That is dissociation. It’s a normal and adaptive response, but when it becomes chronic, it quietly erodes our vitality and aliveness.

Talk therapy has a hard time touching dissociation because it lives in the body, not the mind. To make matters worse, the person who’s dissociated is usually the last to know it. It’s like the perfect invisibility cloak, so effective that you don’t even realize it’s there.

If this feels familiar, take a breath. Everyone dissociates. It’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.

Many people who live in chronic dissociation go to therapy for years, make plans, feel hopeful, and then forget everything as soon as they walk out the door. It’s like a memory wipe. They don’t know why nothing changes, and neither does their therapist.

That’s because the material that needs to be processed, the fear, grief, or terror that caused the dissociation, lives inside the dissociation itself. It’s tucked away, protected, sealed off. Your body keeps it hidden because it believes you can’t handle it yet.

Here’s the conflict. It costs an enormous amount of energy to keep all that locked away. You don’t get to repress for free. Your body pays the bill, through fatigue, illness, tension, anxiety. It compounds with interest until you face it. The body turns unfelt pain into physical pain.

Remember the paradox I stated above? The good news is your body wants to find these pockets of dissociated material, process them, and integrate the experience. Again, it is biologically very expensive to manage the repression of these experiences. Some part of you is dying to reclaim all of that energy. The body is always seeking integration, it just has to trust that it’s safe enough to release.

With love,

Christian

PS: We’ve got a live Q&A coming up on Tuesday, October 14th @ 6 PM MST inside Attunement Collective. If you’re interested in this kind of work and want to dive deeper, I’d love to have you join us.

It’s totally free, and honestly, just my way of getting more connected with you all. I want to build real, meaningful relationships, and this is one small step toward that. Click the link above to join if you haven't already. I'll see you in there!