I went to see the naturopathic doctor a couple weeks ago, and as I lay on the table for some craniosacral manipulation, she said something interesting. I was, she said, holding her hand about four feet above my abdomen, hovering up there. Apparently not fully situated in my body at all, at that moment.
I had to think about that one. I do know that I wasn’t feeling my best that morning, and that the craniosacral therapy did relieve that, even though later I discovered that the problem was I was on the verge of a urinary tract infection.
At my next appointment, sans burgeoning infection, I was (she reported) firmly ensconced in my corpus. So, was my hovering (attributing what credence you are willing to the story,) a form of dissociation from a body in discomfort?
I am interested in the psychological concept of dissociation lately. On the Alzheimer’s Spouse forum, there are often members who report that the process of life with AD has driven them to depths of depression from which they can hardly cope with the need to get out of bed, let alone be the sole thinker and driver in a two-body operation.
I frequently wondered, as I traversed the emotional mine-fields of Alzheimer spousing, how I was able to cope with such relative equanimity as the person who was, in a very real sense, my other half disappeared from view in every way but the corporeal. Was I frozen, uncaring, wooden? How did the lightness I could sometimes maintain come across to others, whether or not they were dealing with the same? Did they imagine that my ability to approach the problems clinically were a sign I didn’t love Jeff? If so, they would have been very wrong.
This did not worry me much. I understood, from living within my own psyche, that I had constructed what emotional walls I needed in order to stay afloat. The structure, to me, was almost palpable.
I didn’t specifically identify the strategy as dissociation until later, when I came across the concept again, some years after studying psychology in college. But I recognized it this time, because I’d done it. And I recalled that prior trauma had triggered a similar protective mechanism in my brain.
And now I wonder...can anyone do this? What enables a person to bypass the immediate experience of a trauma through dissociation, while another is toppled, at least for a time, by similar circumstances? Is one way better? I can tell you that the dissociative route does leave a person with emotions to experience and reintegrate later. Maybe the person who is laid low by the immediate experience arrives at the other end more settled, less to resolve.
Floating, as Stephany the naturopath said, is neither good nor bad. You just don’t want to do it all the time.
