Dissociation Symptoms: The Binding Factors That Keep You Stuck

Written by Roland Bal

What Dissociation Symptoms Actually Are

Having complex trauma means that you can't hold and process the surplus of emotional charge, and therefore you are not healing. What goes with that is dissociation through what I have named "binding factors". It is those binding factors that bring the energy of trauma into the headspace, and thereby also further stimulate the very emotion that is overwhelming to you.

It is a Catch-22.

Dissociation shows up as feeling disconnected from bodily sensations or the body in general. It often goes with excessive thinking and pressure in the head. Being disconnected from feelings and being in the head is perceived to be safe. To reconnect with the body and its sensations is likely to be perceived as unsafe. On top of that sit the familiar symptoms most people recognise: numbness, fatigue, racing thoughts, hypervigilance, gaps in memory, a delayed emotional response, feeling as though you are watching your own life from a distance.

These are not isolated problems. They are expressions of the same underlying process — the nervous system diverting energy away from what is too much to hold, and parking it somewhere more manageable. The head is where most of that energy ends up.

The Role of Binding Factors

Binding factors are the glue between your overwhelming emotions and the stories your mind builds around them. They show up as thought patterns — blame, shame, guilt, self-reproach, self-righteousness, fault-finding, embarrassment, comparison, pride. Each one channels raw emotional charge out of the body and up into the head, where it can be "managed" by thinking rather than felt.

At first glance this looks like a relief. Thinking about what happened, who was wrong, what should have been done — all of it feels productive. But the thinking doesn't resolve anything. It holds the emotion in place. Every round of self-reproach or blame feeds the underlying fear, anger, or sadness. The loop strengthens itself.

It is these binding factors that make it so hard to move out of a traumatic state. They act as a buffer to help you deal with feeling overwhelmed; at the same time, they keep the whole wheel of suffering ongoing. They are the lube that oils the wheel, for better and for worse.

Binding Factors in Action: Anger as an Example

In this video, I explain what that looks like using the example of anger and its binding factors of blame, self-righteousness, faultfinding, and self-reproach. When uncontained anger moves up into the head, it will stimulate thoughts of blame, self-reproach, or self-righteousness. Those thoughts, in turn, will stimulate the underlying emotion. This process — and the continuation of dissociation symptoms — will start to loop on itself.

How the Dissociation Loop Feeds Itself

The essence of trauma is that you feel emotionally overwhelmed and you can't contain the energy charge of that. At that point, you dissociate from it. The energy moves from being in the body into going into the head, and that happens through binding factors.

When anger acts inward on the self, it will go with self-reproach. When it acts outward toward others, it will go with blame, self-righteousness, or fault-finding. And this, in turn, feeds the emotion you feel inside. It feeds the anger, and therefore it starts to loop on itself. It starts to grow and expand.

Why Binding Factors Are Hard to Spot

The tricky thing about binding factors is that they do not feel like symptoms. They feel like you having a legitimate reaction to something. The blame feels justified. The self-reproach feels like taking responsibility. The self-righteousness feels like standing up for what's right. You do not catch yourself thinking, "this is a binding factor" — you catch yourself thinking, "this person was wrong" or "I should have done better."

Self-righteousness and pride are the toughest ones to work through because of their tendency towards self-indulgence and disconnection from others, though all of these are tough to sit with in their own right. There is always a binding factor present within each symptom of dissociation, and it has to be negated through awareness without feeding it with more energy. Negation is being aware, first of all, of what is occurring. Then it is feeling into the movement underlying the thought process that stimulates your personal story, the emotions within it, and its binding factors.

Reversing the Loop: Containment Over Thought

To curb that, can you give containment to your anger by negating going into the thoughts that relate to that anger? It is by starting to contain the anger and negating going into your thoughts that you can reverse the dissociation symptoms of anger and work towards resolution.

What we have to do here is to contain that dissociation process by not allowing oneself to go too much into the thoughts, not stimulating those thoughts, and bringing the attention back into the body — back to the emotion, back into feeling the anger, and starting to give containment to that.

To be clear: we're talking about healing complex trauma and reversing the dissociation processes. I'm not suggesting not to act, not to do something, to become apathetic, or to overextend yourself. The point is to catch yourself when your emotions move into those binding factors, and — with the example of anger — when they move into blame, self-righteousness, self-reproach, and fault-finding. From there, see if you can not stimulate those thoughts and bring that back into the body.

Meditate with what you feel in the body, even if it's uncomfortable, even if it gives you pressure. If you feel the anger, stay with that and see how that transforms. How that starts to move. Once you start to contain that, it starts to be processed.

Reversing and negotiating dissociation is a process. You will find that you will have to move back and forth between connecting and disconnecting repeatedly until you can feel more of yourself and can successfully manage your boundaries. It is through the holding of your emotional activation that you create more resilience. Slowly on, you will start to contain the whole of your wound and process the emotional residue within.