This one problem. An old journal entry.

Intellectual Understanding vs. Actualized Integration. The process of normalization. Empathy as dissociation. Self awareness as dissociation. The ability to remove your conscious thoughts from the railroad tracks of your primary lifeline. Then jump back in with a fresh perspective.

I've spent too much of my time removed, dissociated. My challenge is to learn to engage again. To step back on the rails and go. It seems that the majority of people never learn to step off sometimes. They spiral towards the path the tracks reveal for them. Quite often this leads to scary negative places. Their challenge is to dissociate and glean.

My favorite variable to all this is how much you share with the world. How often you choose to be vulnerable. A mind inside itself will become whatever it chooses. A mind outside itself will become whatever falls upon them. These are extremes and painted in a binary approach. But this is a variable that reaches to the depths of every choice and every action. It is flexible enough to apply in a complex web of ideas and experiences, where some is over shared and some under shared. We often hide some things and display others.

--

And so I am stuck in a bout of dissociation. My actions serve the body in a cold, machine like way. I truly have severed my hold on me. I am lost to the whirlwind of faces.

Afterward

I know I over use the word dissociation. In the mental health complex it means something different than how I use it. The issues I wrote about on this day some two years ago are still relevant to me today. I suppose I would like to unpack some of it now.

Intellectual understanding vs Actualized integration

You might also be able to approach this issue from "practice what you preach". As in, many of us intellectually understand a concept, and can point out when others do not seem to live by that concept, but we often fail to actually integrate that understanding in to our lives.

For example, we may be able to point out sexism, intellectually understand sexism, but fail to not be sexist. Whether we be blind to the acts, or somehow unable to truly change our behaviors, there is often this gap between these two ideas.

I understood that most people were not judging me as harshly as I expected. However to actually live in that world, to actualize and integrate that understanding took me years of concerted practice.

Experiential Normalization

The process with which something new becomes part of every day life.

One of my favorite ideas. It is every where in our lives. A new thing enters and disrupts our lives, thoughts, behaviors, until we find a way to integrate it, normalize its presence.

The fact that advertising billboards are not seen as "strange" is an example. They have been around so long they appear "normal". Conversely when you acquire a new gadget you are focused on the toy for quite a while until you get "accustomed" to it.

This process can be slow or fast depending on how greatly this new thing disrupts your life. Sometimes it is a stressing thing, other times exciting, or banal.

What I find valuable about this idea is learning to recognize the phase you are in with a new thing. Are you still hyper excited by the new thing? Do you wish you could get to "normal" quicker? Is that hard thing ever going to get easier? Understanding this concept has allowed me to shift with the tides of life more readily. For I can recognize that what is stressing me will soon no longer be (as) stressful.

Empathy and Self Awareness as dissociation, the train tracks of everyday life

I think most of us can recognize those people who never seem to stop and think. Those who are always simply going with their default self, or on these railroad tracks I speak of. And also those who never seem to stop thinking, never doing, never going, often stuck in one place.

Should one never stop and step off the tracks, it may seem like life is one big roller coaster ride you have no control over. Never step on the tracks and it may seem like life never happens. It appears that self awareness and empathy are two very powerful tools to help manage stepping off those tracks.

Empathy, can serve to help you understand someone else's life, their tracks. Which in turn may expose new understandings for your own life. Empathy is precisely attempting to leave your own perspective to be with another's. Self awareness is a way of stepping back within your self. A tool to allow introspective thinking about yourself. Which is how many or most of us attempt to make conscious change within ourselves.

Maybe it is clear by now that when I say dissociation, I mean stepping off those tracks.

Finally

Know that I use these tools and descriptions as a way of describing a concept. Alone, these tools are not some "answer" to life or some "absolute". However they can serve as a guide to new ways of approaching or thinking.