Hey, so you ever meet someone who you ask them what’s going on and they quite literally cannot feel any emotions in their body? Or maybe you ask them a bit about their childhood and for some reason or another they can’t tell you anything about it? Welcome to the wonderful world of dissociation.
Hi, my name is David Archer. I’m an EMDR therapy trainer, the developer of the Rhythm and Processing Strategies. I’m here for your next weekly consult, so strap yourself in. It’s going to be a wild and interesting ride talking about dissociation. Stay tuned.
A Case Example of Dissociation and Complex Racial Trauma
We’re going to talk a bit about Charles. So Charles is a person that I met who he was suffering from what we would call complex racial trauma. What does that mean? It means that in his childhood he went through some challenges because he was an immigrant from an African country and he came to our country.
So he had some differences in terms of the food that he would eat at lunchtime. Kids would pick on him because there was too much seasoning in it. He would have a different dialect and a different accent and it was different from the accents that people in Quebec had. So they gave him a problem about it.
But he noticed that when he was working in the workplace, that’s when the consequences were a bit more drastic. So he was just not getting promoted. He was just encountering challenges and stresses and people that he was training, because he is older, people that he was training and welcoming into the company would end up getting promoted above him. This is very common with many of the clients that I meet who experience racism in the workplace. We needed to help this guy out.
So he was coming to me because he had these anxiety symptoms. But I needed to ask a little bit more about it to understand where this thing was coming from. When I asked about his childhood, he would say he didn’t remember everything that was going on.
And some people you might have heard of things like this. You ask a person about their childhood, maybe they have some things that they forget or don’t remember. But in his case, there was a period of his preteen and adolescence years where there was no memory whatsoever. Or he said he couldn’t remember.
What was interesting is when I lined it up with the intake and asked him more questions, I found out that the period of time he did not remember actually coincided with the years that the perverted uncle moved into the home. And that’s when some of the abuse started. So he found a way of being able to block this out of consciousness. So he would talk about some symptoms relating to numbness, he would talk about some symptoms relating to amnesia.
Assessing Dissociative Symptoms
And so this is why I start before I have any of my client sessions, we’re going to be using the MID-60, the multidimensional inventory for dissociation, the 60 question version of it. It’s the abbreviated form of the multidimensional inventory for dissociation.
And I do this because it presents information like this. If you look on the screen now, you’re going to see what we’re talking about when we say dissociation, you’re going to see that there are persecutory intrusions. So these could be like bad thoughts that are coming in saying, I’m not good enough, I’m a bad person.
You’re going to see some body symptoms that are there, which can relate to just what we would call psychosomatic stresses that a person is going through, you’re going to see like epileptic seizures, trance, flashbacks, you name it, guess what, all of these are within the realms of dissociation. And this is why it is important to have an understanding with rhythm and processing strategies so we can help people who experience these things.
Reframing Dissociation: A Feature, Not a Bug
I let my clients know that this isn’t a defect. You have these types of symptoms because when you were young, you did everything that you could to protect your consciousness, to keep going to school, to keep being a brother, to keep being a sister, to keep being a citizen in our dysfunctional society, you needed to find a way of blocking these things out of consciousness, whether it was making it so that you would forget, making it so that you could escape your body, making it so that time would distort itself.
Your mind was actually doing everything it could to get through an unbearable present moment. It’s just that some of these things that were previously adaptive have now outlived their usefulness. So I want my clients to know that dissociation is not a bug. It’s a feature.
It’s something that allows you to be able to keep going. It’s just that we need to be in the therapy that’s going to help to make it so that it’s an option instead of a necessity to be outside of your body or to forget that things are taking place or to create these splits in consciousness.
The Three-Phase Approach
And so, what did we do with Charles? Three phases to proceed with when we’re talking about complex trauma. You can check out my other videos. I explain what that is.
We needed to start with stabilization, then we got to trauma processing, and then we would get to integration. Before getting to trauma processing though, there was a little bit of a dilemma. Charles was saying that there’s some events that he felt really afraid to deal with.
So I taught him as many techniques, taught him the RAP technique, taught him resource integration. We were using music, we were using video, things to make him feel calmer and better about himself and his body. He practiced it in between sessions. Things were all good.
But then, one of the traumas, this is a final boss dungeon and dragon trauma at the bottom of the dungeon. This was one that was making him a bit afraid to even deal with. We needed to use resources, which I’ll get into, to help him to build up the confidence to deal with this target.
Confronting Numbness with Resource Integration
Once we had the confidence, we started using the EMDR therapy approach. We started to just notice, okay, he’s getting the image in his mind of the worst event. He’s getting the negative belief. He’s getting the positive belief that he wants to believe in. He’s realizing he doesn’t fully believe it. He’s noticing that there are emotions. He’s noticing that there are intensities. He’s noticing that there’s a body location.
When I asked about the body location, what happens? He says, I don’t feel anything. Also, for the subjective unit of disturbance, he was like, like a two. In my head, I was like, that’s a little low, considering this is a final boss dungeon and dragon thing. I asked about the body location. He was like, I don’t feel nothing. I actually feel numb.
That was when my spidey sense kicked in. That’s when I was like, because we feel that numbness thing, we got to do something about it. The numbness isn’t the client lying. It’s not them saying they don’t feel something. It’s actually dissociation revealing itself. They needed to block this event out of their mind.
It was too intense. Now we’re going to confront this. That system’s going to come in and want to shut down again. Here’s the solution, resource integration. We then were able to develop a resource to deal with the numb feeling so that he could feel accompanied. The trauma made him feel so isolated. No one had his back. No one was there to protect him. Now’s an opportunity to make it so that he feels well supported.
Building the Resource
I asked him, okay, we’re going to use a resource. We develop the resource or we’re in the process of developing it. In his mind, he’s like, well, there’s nothing that can help. I don’t know anything that can help.
I asked him, okay, well, could you describe what is the numbness feeling? I asked him to describe what are the thoughts that are coming up? He talks about these discouraging thoughts he has. Where do you feel that? He feels it in the chest.
What’s the direction it’s moving in? He’s like, the direction was moving inwards. Okay, well, what’s an opposite movement that you can use? Then he thinks, well, I guess like going out, being up. What is it that comes to your mind when you think about going up?
Then he starts to think about pool toys. He starts to think about toys that you put in your pool, like big inflatable balloons and all of these kinds of things. He’s smiling about it. He’s like, is this really going to work? We use the resource, and that is exactly what he needed.
At the end, we realized that he needed to feel support. He felt that the dissociation, the numbness was pulling him down like quicksand. We needed something that can rise above the quicksand. We needed something that also represented joy, which is an antidote to the hopelessness that was there. We needed to make it so that instead of the default response of dissociation, of numbness, of shutting down, he would then be able to use a response that also involves feeling supported and feeling joy.
Healing is a Journey
Of course, it was still a challenging target. It’s not that the resource made all the thing go away. The numbness was there because there was a lot of emotions that were there underlying it. But in this case, he could feel supported. In this case, he knew that there’s something that can be done, kind of like a lifesaver to make it so he’s floating above the ocean instead of getting swallowed by it.
As we healed different memories, other memories from that point in time that were prevented from being accessed by the amnesic barriers started to reveal themselves. In a similar way, we made sure that he was sufficiently resourced before we engaged with any more of those dragon traumas.
The basic idea is that there is no enemy that is within you. Dissociation is a way of coping with trauma, but we need to find ways of making it so that a person is appropriately resourced, that all parts of them have enough fuel for this journey. Sometimes it involves using an inflatable lifesaver. Sometimes it involves being able to use your favorite pet. Sometimes it involves being able to call upon your ancestors. But we are trying to make people know that all parts of them are resources in this therapy.
Ultimately, they are the resource. Ultimately, you are the resource. That is the way how we help people who are experiencing this numbness, this dissociation, the challenges that come with surviving complex trauma, complex PTSD, and complex racial trauma, and dissociative symptoms.
So, thank you very much. If you like the content of this video, and I hope you do if you got this far, you know what to do. Like, share, subscribe, do all of those things. Let the world know that this is how we’re healing in 2026 and beyond. All right? Stay blessed. Take care.
Peace. Yes. Have a great rest of the day and take good care of yourself. And I’ll see you in the next video. All right? Peace. Take care.
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