Good day. This is Doctor Jana Price-Sharp's from Mind Pilot. Today we're going to talk about an interesting phenomena that affects a lot of people. It's called dissociation. And dissociation can be minor, or it can be very profound. In psychology, if somebody is severely dissociated, they could have something called did used to be called multiple personality disorder. It's now called dissociative identity disorder, where somebody might have several different personalities. They're losing a lot of time. They don't remember what's happening in their lives. That isn't what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is kind of checking out. Your mind just checks out of reality for whatever reason. Maybe you're stressed, maybe something else is going on. But the decision making changes when you're dissociative or in a dissociative state, I should say. So right now, my wonderful husband, who you've heard before, Doctor Matthew Sharps, is currently writing a book on dissociation. I'm writing a chapter for that particular book, and it's something that he and I've been talking about for, probably 25 years, because it is such a huge issue in so many areas of life. But particularly today, we're going to be talking about how does dissociation impact the normal population, the individual person? So welcome again, Doctor Sharps. Thank you. Could you help us define dissociation? I'll chime in but help people to understand what we're talking about. You know, we can I've written quite a few papers on this subject. And as I say, we're working on the book now. And, you'd think I'd be able to define dissociation pretty easily. And the problem is, I really can't. And that's I'm not too ashamed of that because nobody really can. All right. But in the dissociative state, reality seems somewhat diffuse to you. You wouldn't be very surprised if things happened that didn't really seem to make any sense to you. Okay, if you're walking down the street and you're thinking or daydreaming about something and you realize, oh my gosh, I missed my eye. Mister Rogers supposed to turn left. Are you driving? And you miss your exit that day? Maybe you just didn't notice it, but it can also be this normal dissociation. For decades, dissociation in psychiatry and in psychology, the focus has been on things like Didion's terrifically painful that were really, really dangerous US syndromes that associations involved in. But we're now seeing more and more that dissociation is not only normal people have, they're not going to develop additional personalities, but associations. Reality becomes diffused. I'm sort of beginning to live in my own mind for a few minutes, a few seconds, a few hours. Okay, this is absolutely normal and it invades every area of life. Absolutely. And the problem is, I call it being checked out of life a little bit. And when we check it out for long periods of time, then we tend to make bad decisions. So we were talking in a different podcast about seeing maybe your best friend making really bad decisions and wondering how could he or she be making these decisions because can't they see that these decisions are problematic? And the answer to that question is often, no, they can't. And if you ask them, why are you doing this? They may get angry. Then they may start avoiding you because they're in a dissociative response about it. They're like, everything will be fine. Everything. Just leave me alone. Everything's fine. Or some version of that. Maybe you have a significant other that asks you, why are you doing this? Just leave me alone. Just leave me alone. I'm fine. Even though you're not fine. And there's a part of you know that knows you're not fine. And there's a part of you that knows that you really aren't functioning very well. So why is it that when people are in these states, they don't stop and go, hey, wait a minute, maybe I should do something about this? So doctor chirps, could you talk a little bit about dissociative processes in general? Yeah, it's quite interesting, really. What happens cognitively under dissociative circumstances? We've talked a lot about the continuum of, cognition between Gestalt and feature intensive processing and feature transfer processing. You're looking at all the details, right? You start processing, you're not you're processing kind of as a a whole, a configuration. Okay. And sometimes that's absolutely right. Right. Now suppose you're working in a restaurant. You got to set the table. Well, you've got to be feature intensive about it. Every every placement place has to have, you know, two kinds of forks and two kinds of knives. And so on and so forth. Right. Well, if you're a diner at the same restaurant, you don't focus on that at all. You just see the table and it's set. Okay. So there's times when the processing is exactly what you want. There's times for feature intensive processing is and there's a there's a continuum between the two. Well, what we've seen in a lot of research and it's in a lot of different areas ranging from religious and supernatural thinking right into the sciences, where you wouldn't expect dissociation to be a big deal, right into criminal justice, where it's a disaster. When it's a big deal, people will start to do this gestalt processing without seeing the details of what's going on around them. And that's where we really start to see this. You don't you don't have to. I'm not a clinical psychologist, as you know, but I know if people were that the significant other was doing all kinds of unbelievably horrible things, okay. And if you looked at them point by point by point, it's obvious that they're, they're, they're, they're cheating on you romantically or they're treating honey financially, etc., etc., but you don't notice it. It's just, oh, that's so and so. Well, you know, she or she, he or she has problems. Again, we focus in that vague way that attenuates that reduces our ability to focus on the features. And again we conducted research found this to be the case in fields ranging from from the criminal justice to paranormal observation, even to climate science. That's remarkable dissociation. It's kind of the unsung core of psychology in a way. It's an unsung core that allows us to make bad decisions. There's a lot of other reasons to make bad decisions. Sometimes you're some people just aren't all that swift, okay? They're not the sharpest Levins or whatever, whatever the clinical term is, sometimes they don't have the necessary information. Okay. Imagine George Washington trying to understand paleontology. George Washington died before the first dinosaur had ever been discovered. So you can't say, oh, George Washington's inability, you know, fossils was dissociation. It's not ignorance. And quite frankly, stupidity. Not that thought that it's stupid not to prevent discovery yet. Right. Nobody's saying Washington was stupid, but there are other reasons to make bad decisions. But what happens with a smart person in a situation where they really all the data are right there? Okay. We found, for example, that often people blame the innocent for crimes against themselves. We find that people will see that the innocent should be more penalized. They won't. They won't be inclined to see the guilty as as guilty as they are, unless they've done something horrendous. And the facts are there is high levels of dissociation on the part of that juror or that potential juror. That's just one example. We have many others from the social sciences, the natural sciences. Again, even from this, the, the, our current obsession with, with climate change, it's remarkable how powerful the effects of dissociation are in all these realms. And they're not supposed to be there. They can very much show up. They can. Dissociation can show up in relationships very profoundly, causing massive problems in communication and the ability to articulate what you're feeling if you're kind of checked out, there's no way to talk about how you're doing. And I often will have first responders or veterans, tell me that they don't share how they're feeling with their spouses or significant others or family members. And then when they start thinking, thinking about it, they'll say, but, you know, I don't really know how I was feeling. I don't know what was going on. I just knew I didn't feel good. And this often I see is, sometimes can be a precursor to suicidal thoughts because people are so checked out from life and then they start feeling pretty hopeless. They just feel like they're in kind of a black hole and they can't get back out of it. And so thinking about dissociation and where it comes from, doctor Sharps, can you talk a little bit about what might be the reason that dissociation even is possible with the brain? Well, it's a very interesting question. Dissociative processes, if you think about them, ultimately involve taking your consciousness out of immediate physical reality and applying it elsewhere. And that's the focus of everything that's creative. Okay. And I think about the Wright brothers, right? Nobody had an airplane yet, but they finally had metal that was light enough to make an engine that would work. And they had sticks of wood, which is good. And they had a kind of cloth used for making women's underwear. And I really did just say that. Okay. So you look at sticks, light metal and women's underwear and they combine those three to create the Wright Flier. Okay. Now looking at those realities, you're very unlikely to say, hey, we've got us an airplane, but you have to take your mind out of physical reality to do that. That's probably why we have the ability to do that. It also allows us to develop all sorts of interesting ideas about the supernatural. If you think that if the enemy kills me, I'm just dead and that's it. Well, you may be inclined to try to make a deal, okay. If it's my ancestors. Did you believe that if you're killed in battle. Extremely women. Beautiful women, probably wearing metal bikinis. We're not quite sure we're going to fly down from heaven. And if you think about what you're flying down from hell, holler at the hull of the slain. If you think about it, flying women wearing armored bathing suits is not very likely, is it? You could start doing your your drag ratios and other factors of aeronautical engineering. You realize, son of a gun, the Valkyries. Really? I mean, maybe they had jetpacks. We don't know. But you can't do it in a feature intensive way. But you can if you think, oh, the Valkyrie will come, they'll take me to all. Father Odin. Where? Apparently our heaven was basically a physics class that never ends with really good, a really good cafeteria. I'm not quite sure where you go with that, but the point is, to believe in this requires you to get away from a how can you know a six foot Norwegian woman be flying through the air no matter what wing she has? You can't do that. But if you believe that you're going to fight like hell and your group's going to win the war, especially over the group that can't do that. The problem comes about, though, when we start doing this in everyday life, you know, they talk about, about where do this what's the source of dissociation? One place we see it more is when people are highly aroused, when they're physiologically in a state. We've talked about this in some of your podcasts before where you can't really get to your prefrontal cortex as well as you should be able to. Okay. Another is to have a faulty prior framework for understanding. I remember an old movie called Camelot where the actor Richard Harris is playing, King Arthur. Okay. And he's singing this long song that basically would be seen as wholly sexist today. Okay. But his solution, he finds that he's seen as this. If I was a child and I saw this movie, so he seems to sing it for several hours, it could have been that long. But he's. And by the way, the fact that we are memory changes. Our memories are static. That can have to do with dissociation too. But anyway, he discovers that his solution to everything, and he sings this on and on, is simply to love her. Love her, love her. He's talking about Guinevere. She runs off with Lancelot, destroys his entire kingdom, winds up being a nun. He winds up dead. Okay, this is a bit of a problem because this quest called love. Love her or love him? I mean, if you're in love with Adolf Hitler, this is not really a good solution, is it? Okay, but you have to get out of the dissociation to say, wait a minute, he's killing millions of people. Maybe I should, you know, call mom and pack a suitcase. Okay? The association will keep you from doing that. It'll keep you inside the false or or inadequate, inaccurate or inadequate prayer framework. And there you are. You're stuck with whoever it is until you wind up giving them your house and half of your pension. Absolutely. Or you stay stuck in a job that you hate, or you stay stuck in a community you don't like, or you're uncomfortable with, or a million other things that can happen. I see dissociation a lot also with injuries, and I can't tell you how many hundreds literally of first responders and veterans that I've talked to that now have really, really bad injuries. And I'm like, Flint, when did this start? Oh, about 15 years ago. Right. But they kept telling themselves, it'll be okay, it'll be okay, it'll be okay. And now they're going to have to have back surgery. Right. And could something have been done sooner? I don't know. You know, I'm not I'm not a medical doctor. But I do know that people are taught to check out and ignore and for short periods of time, that's probably a good idea if you're in the middle of a major firefight or fighting a major fire, or you're in an officer involved shooting. Yeah, you probably shouldn't spend a lot of time thinking about how your physical body is feeling. You just have to go take care of business. But afterwards you have to reconnect. And I think that's the part that sometimes is missing. People just say is stay disconnected from their own body, their own lives, their own relationships, their own finances, to the point that they really get in to deeper and deeper problems. They get more and more injured. They become, you know, very in debt. And but they're like, it'll be okay, it'll be okay, it'll be okay. Rather than going, is this going to be okay? Are we going to be all right? Maybe I need to sit down and think about this. So that's why dissociation is so important. But everybody has really busy lives now. And I think when people have really busy lives, they're more likely to dissociate. What are your thoughts, doctor sharply. To think about the very ancient world. Okay. Think about being a warrior in that world. Well, you didn't do 20 and retire. There was no retirement, and the chances of living 20 years as an ancient warrior weren't very high in the first place. You had to just keep going, okay? It'll be fine. It'll be okay. And. Oh, father, Odin will take care of me. It'll be fine. It'll be okay. You had to keep doing that because whether you want to say that you were part of the team or, frankly, part of the equipment, okay, you had to keep going. Well, the modern world doesn't work that way. You do your 20 and you get you get to do something else, or you can there's a variety of ways you can actually mediate injuries that simply didn't used to exist. Okay. But it's a funny thing is we really need to keep in mind in psychology is that we're not just living in our lifetime. We're living with pretty much everything that our ancestors lived with and didn't kill them before they reproduced. And that tendency to divorce yourself from, you know, the physical body, so to speak, so you can say, oh, I'll be fine, I'll be fine. I'll just remember when being in athletics myself many, many years ago, the oh, just walk it off. There are lots of things you can't just walk off. Okay. I remember once breaking my arm playing football. They just told me to go take a shower. It didn't help. Okay, but there's this idea that no, it will all be fine. Fine, fine. And that requires you and everybody around you to dissociate. Everybody's doing it the same way. Well, you know, maybe the Vikings have invaded or we have to fight them until we're either way, they're winning. We're all dead under those circumstances. No, you don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about your rehabilitation, but that's not happening for most people in the modern world. And the modern world is very good to take a feature intensive analysis. You know, as you were fighting a fire or in a criminal investigation, you don't do a criminal investigation by going, gosh, I wonder who done it. I bet it's you that doesn't work. I mean, it works on TV, but it doesn't work in the real world. You have to go feature intensive and you have to do the same damn thing with your own life. Otherwise you end up going well. The solution is to simply love her, love him, whatever. And then they take you for everything you've got. Okay? Oh, it'll be fine. I'll just take this extra duty. Yeah. Doc says I'm having heart trouble, but, you know, I'm sure it'll be fine. It was always used to be fine. Yeah, I did when you were 25, now 60. And so there's all these things you really need. You talk about the busyness of modern life. Yeah. Ancient warriors never had to get on the computer and deal with three insurance companies to find out if the procedure would be paid for. If they have it from Doctor Extra. Doctor, why nobody ever had to do that before. And now we do. And there's simply no way to get around that sort of thing. With dissociation not successfully, it has to be fought and won. What we talked about in our book, one of the way of fighting it is to create a proper, feature intensive analysis of what you're doing. It's absolutely explicit and it's based in accurate prior information. And that may mean challenging ideas that you or your ancestors or your incision may alter. Absolutely. So how do you know if you're dissociated? Well, there's a number of different ways. But if you find yourself saying things kind of repetitively, it'll be fine. Yeah, I'll be okay. Yeah, I yeah, it hurts a little bit, but I don't worry about it. I remember a dear man that I truly loved. He's long since passed. He was not a first responder. He was a farmer, but he had all kinds of medical conditions. And I said, are you taking care of yourselves? Yes, I worry about none. And that's kind of at the core of dissociation. I don't worry about it. None. And then it bites you. Right. So I guess what the message of this is, is think about how often you say, it'll be fine. It'll be okay. I'm not worried about it. I'll take care of it later. I'll sleep when I die. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. Rain yourself in. Spend ten minutes, maybe 15 minutes on a Saturday or on a day off and go, okay, what's going on in my life that I could maybe change a little bit? So a I surviving to retirement age me, I have a good family life and see I have a successful career. Are there some things that I can begin to change a lot of times of small shifts add up. It could be get a little more sleep, drink a few less energy drinks, maybe take your spouse out on date night, make small shifts, but stay engaged in your life because it's your life and you get to be happy and you get to wake up in the morning and feel good. So stay out of the dissociative responses after the fire, after the bad calls, after the hard missions, come back inside and evaluate and take care of you. God bless. I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you for joining Mind Pilot. This is Dr. Jana Price-Sharps.