Why You Dissociate in Therapy and Feel Nothing About Your Trauma
Episode 119
By Sarah Herstich, LCSW | Somatic EMDR Therapist + Host of The Complex Trauma Podcast
After my episode with Dr. Janina Fisher on dissociation and parts work, your questions came flooding in.
Three of them kept showing up in different forms, and they build on each other in a way that I think will feel clarifying by the time you get to the end of this post.
The questions were: Why do I dissociate more in therapy than anywhere else? How do I know if it's dissociation or just zoning out? And why do I feel absolutely nothing when I talk about my trauma?
If you've been sitting with any version of those questions, this is for you.
Why You Dissociate More in Therapy Than Anywhere Else
Picture this. You finally found a therapist you actually like, which if you've been in the trauma therapy world for any amount of time, you know is not a small thing. You're showing up every week. You're trying. And then, within about ten minutes of getting into anything that actually matters, you go somewhere. You're still in the room, still nodding, still maybe even talking. But it's like the volume got turned down on your own life. Your therapist's voice sounds like it's coming from down a hallway. You're watching yourself from a slight distance, like a character in a movie about your own therapy session.
And then you drive home and wonder what is actually wrong with you.
Here's the thing that sounds counterintuitive but is one of the most important things I can tell you: dissociation in therapy doesn't mean therapy isn't working. It often means your nervous system knows that something real is happening.
When you're at work, at the grocery store, making dinner, your nervous system has a job to do. It keeps you functional and moving. It's not the moment for feeling things, so it doesn't offer them up. But when you walk into a therapy office with a therapist who's warm and consistent and feels even a little bit safe, something shifts. Your system gets a signal that says some version of: this might actually be okay. This might be a place where the things we've been carrying could come out.
For a nervous system that has been managing trauma for years, sometimes decades, that signal is a lot. The feelings and memories and everything you've kept at arm's length start to move toward the surface. And your system does what it has always done when things feel like too much. It protects you.
From a somatic standpoint, what we're looking at is a dorsal vagal or shutdown response. Your system learned that when things get emotionally big, the safest thing to do is dim it down, go somewhere else, get a little floaty. At some point in your life, probably early in your life, that was genuinely the safest option available to you.
What Actually Helps When You Dissociate in Therapy
The first thing is learning what dissociation feels like in your body before it fully takes over. It rarely happens all at once. There are usually early signals that most people haven't been taught to look for. Maybe it's a heaviness in your chest, fogginess behind your eyes, your hands going slightly numb or tingly, your voice starting to sound a little far away even to yourself. These are your nervous system's early warning signs. Getting curious about them, not in a hypervigilant way, but in a "there's that feeling, I think I know what that is now" way, gives you a lot more options. Catching dissociation at a level four instead of a level eight changes what's possible.
The second thing is orienting before you go anywhere deep. This is something we use a lot in somatic work and it sounds almost too simple, but it genuinely supports the system. Before starting into hard material in a session, take a minute to actually land in the room. Look around slowly. Notice what you can see, the color of the walls, the light through the windows, the texture of what you're sitting on. Let your eyes move. Let your body register: I'm here, I'm in a room, I'm okay enough right now in this moment. This isn't a relaxation exercise. Orienting activates the social engagement system, which is the part of your nervous system that supports presence and connection. It works as a counterweight to the shutdown response.
The third piece is understanding your window of tolerance and working inside it. The window of tolerance is the zone where your nervous system can process things without either shutting down or spinning out. For a lot of trauma survivors, that window is narrow, especially early in healing work. If you're regularly dissociating in sessions, it might mean you and your therapist are consistently going past the edge of that window. That's not failure. It's information. It might mean the work needs to slow down, which I know feels frustrating. It might mean more resourcing before diving into harder material.
It's worth saying directly to your therapist: I notice I check out when we get into this topic. Can we try approaching it differently, maybe more slowly, maybe more abstractly? A good trauma therapist will not only hear that, they'll be glad you said it.
Is It Dissociation or Just Zoning Out
This question makes a lot of sense because the two can look and feel really similar, both from the inside and the outside. Here's a simple way to think about it.
Zoning out is what happens when your brain wanders. You're reading and realize you've been staring at the same paragraph for three minutes thinking about what to make for dinner. You're in a meeting and mentally drift to your weekend plans. It's passive, pretty light, and you can come back easily without any big disruption.
Dissociation can feel different, though not always dramatically different, which is part of what makes it confusing. The real distinction is in the nervous system response underneath it. With dissociation, there's usually a trigger. Even if you can't identify it in the moment, something activated your system: a feeling, a memory, a sensation, a tone of voice, a specific word. Your nervous system responded by creating distance between you and that experience.
The Two Main Flavors of Dissociation
Depersonalization is when you feel disconnected from yourself. Like you're watching yourself from outside your own body. Your hands don't feel quite like your hands. You're performing your own life rather than living it.
Derealization is when the world around you feels off. Dreamlike or flat, like there's a thin sheet of glass between you and everything else.
Neither of these requires a blackout or any dramatic episode. A lot of dissociation is quiet and subtle. It looks like going through the motions. Laughing at something and not really feeling the laugh. Talking about something awful in a completely flat tone and then wondering if that means you're over it or something is wrong with you.
For people who grew up in environments where their emotions were chronically dismissed, ignored, or punished, dissociation can start so early and become so automatic that it just feels like your baseline. A little checked out, a little outside of things, not quite fully there. That's not your personality. That's your nervous system adapted. And that can change.
How to Tell the Difference in Real Time
Pay attention to context. Did something happen right before you checked out? A specific topic came up, someone said something that landed weird, you were about to do something uncomfortable. Zoning out tends to happen when things are neutral or boring. Dissociation tends to happen when something activates you, even subtly.
Pay attention to what coming back feels like. After zoning out, you're mostly fine. You reorient pretty quickly. After dissociation, coming back can feel disorienting, like you have to piece yourself back together a little. Some people feel tired afterward. Some feel oddly emotional without knowing why, or strangely blank. That transition back is worth noticing.
Pay attention to what happens in your body. Zoning out doesn't usually come with physical sensations. Dissociation often does, before, during, or after. Tingling, heaviness, a cottony feeling in your head, heart rate shifting, breathing going shallow, going very still.
And if you're someone who has spent years second-guessing your own experience: you don't need to be certain. You don't need to diagnose yourself perfectly. You just need to get curious. When you notice yourself drifting, instead of brushing past it, try asking: was there a moment before this? What was happening in my body? That kind of gentle noticing over time is how you start to rebuild trust in your own internal experience, which for a lot of trauma survivors is one of the most important parts of healing.
Why You Feel Nothing When You Talk About Your Trauma
This one gets me every time.
I've sat across from so many people who have shared the most heartbreaking things in the most measured, steady, neutral tone, and then looked at me and said some version of: is there something wrong with me? I've been through all of this and I can't even cry about it. I can tell you the story and I don't feel an ounce of it. Does that mean I'm over it? Does that mean I'm broken?
Some people go somewhere darker with it. Some wonder if they made the whole thing up. If there were real feelings, wouldn't they be able to access them?
So let me say this clearly: the absence of emotion when you talk about trauma is never evidence that the trauma wasn't real. It is actually one of the most common responses to trauma. Your nervous system doesn't withhold feelings from you because nothing happened. It withholds them because something did.
Why Trauma Memories Get Stored Without Feelings Attached
When something happens that is too much, too fast, or too soon for your system to process, your brain doesn't file that experience the way it would file a normal memory. It gets stored in fragments. Pieces of sensation, images, body responses. And it often gets stored behind a kind of protective wall.
This is connected to state-dependent memory. Memories get stored in the same physiological state we were in when the experience happened. So if you were shut down and numb when the trauma occurred, which many people are, the emotional content of that memory gets stored in that same shutdown state. You can access the facts. You can tell the story. But the feelings are locked behind a door that only opens when your nervous system feels safe enough to go there.
That wall exists for a reason. It keeps you functional. It let you go to school, do your job, show up for your kids, move through your life. Without it, the weight of what you've been through might be genuinely incapacitating. When you sit down to tell the story of your trauma with zero emotional access, that's not you being fine. That's a shutdown sequence. Your nervous system saying: I can let you tell the words, but I'm not ready to let you feel them yet. It's not safe enough. I don't trust it yet.
This is why in trauma therapy we don't push for feeling. We don't try to plow through the wall. We build safety. We build capacity in the nervous system to tolerate more. We work with the body, and with the parts that built that protection in the first place, and help them understand they don't have to work quite so hard anymore.
What Actually Helps When You Can't Feel Your Trauma
Shift your attention from the story you're telling to your body while you're telling it. Instead of trying to feel something about what happened, try noticing what's happening physically as you speak. Is your jaw tight? Are your shoulders creeping up? Is there a heaviness in your chest or a bracing in your belly? You don't have to do anything with it. Just notice it, and if you're comfortable, say it out loud to your therapist, or just to yourself. That small act of tracking sensation builds a bridge between your narrative and your nervous system.
Slow way down. Emotional numbness often happens because we're moving through the story too fast for the body to catch up. Try telling just one small piece, not the whole thing. One moment, one image, one detail, and then pause. Breathe. Notice what happens in your body in that pause. That's where the feeling lives, not in the telling of the whole story, but in the space between.
And stop waiting for sadness or grief specifically. A lot of people assume emotional access means crying. But for a lot of trauma survivors, the first feelings that come back are much smaller than that. A sense of irritation. Something feeling slightly wrong. Mild discomfort. Those things count. They're your system starting to come back online. Don't dismiss them because they don't feel dramatic or significant enough.
Emotional access does come back. Not all at once, not on any particular schedule, but gradually as your nervous system learns that it's safe to feel, the feelings start to return. Often it starts with small things. A song that catches you off guard. A moment of unexpected tenderness that breaks through. That's not random. That's your nervous system beginning to trust again.
The Thing I Want You to Take From All of This
Dissociation is not a character flaw. It's not you being weak, dramatic, broken, or difficult. It's your nervous system doing the most sophisticated and adaptive thing it knows how to do. It is protection. It has always been protection.
Healing doesn't mean that protection disappears. It means you start to build enough safety in your body, in your relationships, in your therapy that your system doesn't have to work quite as hard to keep you okay.
If you're sitting in your car after therapy wondering why you can't stay present, or staring at the ceiling wondering why you feel nothing at all, there is nothing about you that is broken. Protection isn't the enemy. It never was. It's just that at some point, you get to decide you don't need quite as much of it anymore. And that is the work.
FAQ: Dissociation in Therapy and Emotional Numbness After Trauma
Why do I dissociate more in therapy than in other situations?
Because therapy is one of the few places your nervous system receives a signal that it might actually be safe enough to let things surface. When you're moving through daily life, your system stays in functional mode. When you sit across from a warm, consistent therapist, something shifts. The protective mechanisms that have been keeping difficult material at arm's length start to respond, and dissociation is what your system does when that material starts to move toward awareness and it isn't sure yet if it can handle it. Dissociating in therapy is often a sign the work is real, not a sign that it isn't working.
What is the difference between dissociation and zoning out?
Zoning out is passive and tends to happen when things are neutral or boring. Your mind wanders and you come back easily. Dissociation involves a nervous system trigger, even a subtle one, and the response is your system creating distance between you and your experience as a protective mechanism. Coming back from dissociation often feels more disorienting than coming back from a simple zone-out. The physical sensations are also different: tingling, heaviness, shallow breathing, going very still are more common with dissociation than with ordinary mind-wandering.
What is depersonalization versus derealization?
Depersonalization is when you feel disconnected from yourself, like you're watching yourself from outside your own body, or performing your life rather than living it. Derealization is when the world around you feels unreal or dreamlike, like there's a layer of glass between you and everything else. Both are forms of dissociation and can happen separately or together.
Why do I feel nothing when I talk about my trauma?
Because your nervous system is protecting you. Traumatic memories often get stored in a shutdown physiological state, which means the emotional content is locked behind a protective wall that only opens when your system feels safe enough. You can access the facts and tell the story, but the feelings stay stored in the same numb state they were in when the trauma happened. This is not evidence that the trauma wasn't real. It's one of the most common responses to trauma, especially developmental trauma and emotional neglect.
Does feeling nothing about trauma mean I'm healed or over it?
No. Emotional numbness around trauma is a shutdown response, not resolution. Your nervous system isn't withholding feelings because nothing happened. It's withholding them because something did, and it doesn't yet feel safe enough to let you feel it fully. Healing involves slowly building enough safety and capacity in the nervous system that the feelings can come back, not pushing through the wall but widening the window of tolerance over time.
What is the window of tolerance and how does it relate to dissociation?
The window of tolerance is the zone where your nervous system can process difficult material without shutting down or spinning into overwhelm. For trauma survivors, especially early in healing, that window tends to be narrow. Regularly dissociating in therapy sessions can be a sign that the work is consistently pushing past the edge of that window. The goal of trauma therapy is to gradually widen that window, not to barrel through material faster than the system can tolerate.
How do I stop dissociating in therapy sessions?
Start by learning your early warning signals, the physical sensations that show up before full dissociation sets in. Catching it early gives you more options. Practice orienting at the start of sessions by slowly taking in the room with your eyes before going into hard material. Talk to your therapist directly about what you notice, when you tend to check out, and ask to approach difficult topics more slowly or more abstractly. A good trauma therapist will work with you on this rather than pushing through it.
Have more questions about dissociation? You can send them to Sarah at yourcomplextrauma.com/contact, on Instagram, or record a voice message to be featured on the podcast. Sarah Herstich is a licensed clinical social worker and somatic EMDR therapist specializing in complex trauma.
Learn more at sarahherstichlcsw.com.