North Star Conversations Transcript: The Cost of Dissociation—Tovah Means, LMFT

Brandon Gimbel

So we have all these defenses. Dissociation, like many others, is unconscious, generally. It's not something we're in control of. It happens. And yet we lay down these tracks in our mind so that the same behaviors, unconscious or otherwise, continue to happen again and again and again. And the dissociation becomes bigger and bigger and more automatic.

Tovah Means

You actually start masking into new ways of being within yourself that are more tolerable or more acceptable to the people in your relational field. In dissociation, if it's chronic, you start developing sides of yourself and stop developing other sides of yourself.