What Is Dissociation?

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The same test that screens for psychosis also captures something one in four people feel.

It's not always the experience that predicts distress; it's whether anyone helped the person make sense of it.

Distress is more likely when the experience is intense, poorly understood, or interpreted as illness.

Last year, a woman told me about a tree she'd grown drawn to on her morning walks, episodes of merging with it, her sense of self dissolving into overwhelming love and tears, then eventually a full sense of leaving her body. She began hearing a guiding inner voice, distinct from her own thoughts, that once pushed her to approach a homeless man near the tree. She started reading meaning into small coincidences, as if the world were sending her messages. At her lowest point, she considered checking herself into a psychiatric hospital, hoping medication would let her feel "normal" again.

Her experience touched several things at once—a felt merging with nature, a guiding inner voice, meaning seen in coincidence—but it was the last part, the sense of leaving her body, that eventually became the center of her fear. That's also where this piece will focus: the disembodiment feeling, and the question of what it means, clinically, when the "self" seems to leave the body.

I share her story because she is far from alone in asking the question that sits at the center of so many of these encounters: "Am I crazy?"

A question that's more common than you'd think

A disembodiment feeling—often called an out-of-body experience, and the term I'll use interchangeably here—is the sense that one's center of awareness has left the physical body. It isn't rare; it occurs in roughly 10-25 percent of the population. Yet when it happens, especially on an ongoing basis, many people quietly wonder if something has gone wrong with their mind. One of the few studies to look directly at this found, for instance, that 4 percent of experiencers felt they were going crazy during or immediately after the experience, 26 percent felt confused, 23 percent kept it a secret, and 24 percent felt upset or frightened........

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