Show Notes:

We are continuing in a new series around what to look for and be aware of as professionals more exposed and more likely to suffer from things like PTSD and related occupational stress injuries. This comes after so much feedback that I hear about first responders and front line workers getting a lot of lip service advising to be on the lookout and conscientious about the risks for stress-related impacts of the job – but then aren’t given any information or tools to help know what the hell to actually be looking for that would let them know they aren’t ok…until they are SO not ok that the wheels have completely come off and course correcting is WAY more work than it needed to be.

Our goal in this is to help equip you with the warning signs. I want you to know the things to be noticing and on the lookout for. I also want you to have this resource to offer to your people – your spouse, close friends or family members – so they can know what to be on the lookout for – because they are often to ones who will see it first. And along with all that, I want you to be equipped to be an ambassador for change within your workplace, and to have what you need to help notice warning signs in others you work alongside to give them feedback and support them in seeking what they need before it is so much further down the rabbit hole.

We want to catch things early. Like any disease, the earlier we catch it, the more options we have to treat it and the less invasive the treatment needs to be. When we don’t know what to look for and let it persist way longer unchecked, the consequences can be so much more catastrophic and working back from it is so much more difficult. It doesn’t have to be that way. If we can help to catch it early and intervene when it’s not too far gone, the process is not so difficult. This is exactly why I built tools like the free downloadable Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide – which if you haven’t gotten it yet, go to our website (link above) and grab it. The checklist helps you to self-assess early indicators for things like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and occupational stress injuries. It is a really powerful tool if you use it on a semi-regular basis to track where you’re at and notice early on any changes in your wellness.

Among the indicators that the checklist tracks, one of the key symptoms associated with stress-related injuries is a phenomenon called dissociation. 

If you are not familiar with the term dissociation, let’s take a minute to break down what it means. Dissociation is a neurophysiological tool your brain uses to distance itself from stress and overwhelm. It is adjacent to numbing – it’s our brain checking out for chunks of time or to varying degrees all of the time. The dictionary definition of dissociation is, “the disconnection or separation of something from something else or the state of being disconnected.” 

Now, it’s important to know that everyone dissociates. Everyone has experiences where they check out mentally. Whether or not you dissociate is not in and of itself an indicator of a problem – it is a human mechanism to manage a world that can be inundating and it’s our brains way of managing the flow of energy it’s expected to dedicate to interpreting and interacting with it all. When we talk about dissociation we talk about it on a spectrum, from mild to severe and complex. On the mild end of the spectrum, and what is in keeping with normal human experience, is things like watching TV and zoning out to the point that you don’t know what’s happening in the plot and have to back track a bit to catch up with what’s going on. Another example is “highway hypnosis” and that feeling of getting to a destination but not really remembering the choice-points involved in doing the drive. 

So, what are we looking for when dissociation is going beyond normal coping into problematic? What should we be looking for?

Well, one of the markers may be less about whether you miss the plot line in a show, and more about the frequency with which these normal level dissociative experiences are happening. To disconnect and zone out once in a while is one thing, but when it’s happening on a daily basis – that’s a sign of a problem. So one of the things to be looking for is normal, mild level dissociation happening at a frequency that is increased. Do you find yourself reading and re-reading, and re-reading again the same 3 sentences of a book when you used to be an avid reader? Do you have difficulty keeping track of steps in a process? Do you walk into a room and forget what you were there to do? 

…Now some of these things can be associated with distractibility – like having a lot on our minds – as well as with aging, and true story, those can be legit reasons.  But sometimes people mistakenly chalk up some of these early indicators as “getting older” when in actual fact they are symbols of stress taking up more space in our minds and our brains trying to quash the impact of that by tuning us out a bit, because we aren’t doing the shit to help make it better more actively.

If you used to be a decently present person and you are noticing, or getting feedback from others that you seem more checked out than you used to be, that’s some solid feedback to listen to. 

More moderate-level indicators are struggling to be present in conversations with loved ones, needing to ask for people to repeat themselves multiple times to get what they are saying. Having people repeat your name multiple times to get your attention. Excessive mindless scrolling. Feeling like you lose time – minutes or hours where you can’t account for what you were doing or thinking. Some have difficulty FEELING present in moments – like they are there in body and can see their kids joy on Christmas morning, but can’t bring themselves to FEEL a part of it. 

And on the severe end of the spectrum people will lose significant chunks of time that they can’t account for. Often people who end up in this end of the spectrum have experienced such severe trauma over such a prolonged period of time in their lives, that their brains have taught themselves to segment off into parts and this shows up as something called dissociative identity disorder, which is the terminology used to refer to what was once known as multiple personality disorder. A very real experience that I work with in my office on a regular basis, this degree of dissociation is virtually always in response to very early experiences of incredibly significant trauma that is frequent and unsupported. It is the brains only way to cope and function, to parse itself into segments that can exist in and face demands from different parts of life. 

Now, DID is a bit beyond the scope of what we’re going to try to tackle today, but I bring up this end of the spectrum because I don’t think it gets enough attention, AND, because I think it is more prevalent in helping professionals than anyone actually knows about. While I can’t speak to this from a quantitative research perspective, anecdotally I will say that so far every single client I have ever worked with who has dissociative identity disorder works within first response and front line work. And it’s not that first response and front line work makes someone more at risk for DID, I actually theorize that the relationship goes the other way around. I tend to believe that people who experienced significant wounding in childhood develop into adults who want to make a difference and help to make the world a better, safer place. I also tend to think that...