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Dissociation runs from spacing out to lasting detachment. Trauma is one pathway, not the only one.

For people with autism or ADHD, sensory overload is an under-recognized route into dissociative fog.

Dissociative support works best when matched to the pathway: trauma, sensory, or absorption.

As a child, I'd often have an unpleasant feeling sweep over me, where all of a sudden I'd feel as if I was in a dream. I'd tug on my mom's arm and ask her if this was real life, or sometimes I'd pinch myself to test it. It happened most often in busy places, like grocery stores or crowded rooms, anywhere the lights were bright and 100 things were making noise at once.

I didn't have a word for it until adulthood. The word is dissociation. Even after studying dissociation in graduate school, it took me a while to connect it to the experience I'd been having. Once I did, I spent several years in therapy trying to work out why it happened to me so often, and whether it meant I had repressed trauma.

What I was having, it turns out, was a fairly ordinary version of it for an AuDHD human.

Dissociation isn't good or bad

Most people dissociate to some degree. Dissociation can be neutral, like numbing out on the drive home. It can even be positive, like when we get absorbed into a song, a good book, or an interesting project. It can also be an unpleasant experience. It is often protective, and a response to the world around us being too much.

Most conversations about dissociation start at the severe end (trauma, losing time) and work backward. So when we fog out in the middle of an ordinary conversation, it's easy to conclude something is wrong with us. But dissociation is more nuanced than this, especially when we look at autistic and ADHD experiences.

Dissociation is often talked about as a spectrum. It covers a range of experiences from........

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