Article 1 of 7: Finding Your Way Back
You know that feeling when you’re at a party – a good party, the kind with decent music and people you actually like – and somewhere around the second drink you realize you’re watching yourself at the party? Like there’s a you that’s laughing and nodding and reaching for the guacamole, and then there’s the real you, floating somewhere near the ceiling, mildly curious about the whole scene but not particularly invested in it.
That’s not a wine problem. That’s not an introverted problem. That’s not even necessarily a party problem.
That, if you’ve felt it more than once and, in more places, than just parties, might be the thing we’re here to talk about.
The Anthropologist at the Party
Temple Grandin – professor, animal behaviour scientist, and the person Oliver Sacks once called the most extraordinary autistic person he had ever met – once described her experience of navigating the social world as feeling like an anthropologist on Mars (Sacks, 1995). She meant it literally: studying human beings the way a scientist might study an alien species, cataloguing customs and rituals she could observe but not entirely feel from the inside. Fascinated, methodical, slightly bewildered.
Here is what is quietly remarkable about that image: most of us, if we are honest, have stood at that same remove. Not because of neurology, necessarily, but because of exhaustion, or grief, or the particular modern condition of being technically present everywhere while being genuinely present nowhere. The difference is that Grandin named it. The rest of us just keep reaching for the guacamole and hoping nobody notices.
What Grandin’s metaphor gives us – and what makes it so useful here – is permission to look at everyday human life as though we don’t entirely take it for granted. Because here’s the thing about feeling disconnected: it has a way of making the assumptions built into ordinary life visible. Suddenly you can see the performance of it, the choreography, the agreed-upon fictions everyone is maintaining simultaneously. The question is whether that clarity is useful – a lens – or whether it has become a wall.
For many people, it becomes a wall. And that’s what this series is about.
Let’s Call It What It Is (Without Making It Weird)
Psychologists have a few clinical terms for what we’re describing. Depersonalization – feeling detached from yourself, like you’re a character you’re watching rather than actually inhabiting. Derealization – the sense that the world around you has gone slightly flat, like someone turned down the saturation on reality without asking. There are diagnostic criteria and everything. Very official. (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
These are not rare experiences confined to clinical populations. Epidemiological research suggests that transient symptoms of depersonalization and derealization affect somewhere between 26 and 74 percent of people over the course of a lifetime, with rates climbing significantly higher during or following traumatic events. (Murphy, 2023; Yang et al., 2023)
Let that sink in for a moment. Up to three-quarters of people, at some point, have felt exactly this. Which raises an obvious question: if it’s so common, why does it feel so isolating? Probably because the experience itself resists language. Patients, as one clinical review noted, often have great difficulty putting their experiences into words – a kind of doubled disconnection, cut off from the feeling and then cut off from describing it (Murphy, 2023).
But here’s the thing: most people who feel disconnected from life don’t show up in a therapist’s office saying, “I believe I’m experiencing episodic depersonalization.” They show up saying things like “I don’t know, I just feel… off.” Or “Nothing feels real lately.” Or, most commonly, they don’t show up anywhere at all – they just quietly keep going through the motions, vaguely convinced that everyone else got some instruction manual they somehow missed.
You didn’t miss the manual. There isn’t one. We’re all just out here improvising, some of us more visibly than others.
The Spectrum Nobody Talks About
Disconnection isn’t a switch. It’s a dial. And most people spend their lives somewhere in the middle of it – not fully present, not completely checked out, just… partially tuned in. Functioning. Getting the kids to school, answering the emails, nodding in meetings about quarterly projections as though quarterly projections are a thing that matters to the deeper part of you that occasionally wakes up at 3am wondering what the point of all this is.
(The 3am part is important. We’ll come back to it.)
At one end of the dial, there’s genuine, alive-in-your-body presence – the kind children have naturally and adults accidentally rediscover on really good vacations or during moments of crisis or, occasionally, while eating an extraordinary piece of cheese. On the other end, there’s the clinical stuff: persistent depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD), which researchers estimate affects roughly 1 percent of the population as a diagnosable, chronic condition requiring professional support. (Yang et al., 2023; Hunter et al., 2023)
Most people reading this are somewhere between those two points. Close enough to presence to remember what it felt like. Far enough from it to notice the gap.
What It Actually Feels Like (In Case You’re Nodding)
Since we’re all friends here, let’s be specific. Disconnection from life tends to show up looking like one or more of the following – and no, you don’t get extra points for recognizing yourself in all of them.
Going through the motions. Days blur into weeks and blur into seasons, and you’re doing all the right things – working, socializing, maintaining basic personal hygiene – but there’s a quality of performance to it. Like you’re playing a role that happens to share your name and your face and your strong opinions about how other people load dishwashers.
Emotional flatness. Not sadness, exactly. Not depression in the way movies portray it – no weeping into pillows, no inability to leave the house. Just a kind of muting. Joy feels smaller than it should. This is what researchers call anhedonia – the diminished capacity to anticipate or experience pleasure – and it is increasingly understood not as a mood problem but as a disruption in the brain’s reward circuitry, specifically in the frontostriatal systems that link motivation to feeling. (Gupta et al., 2024; Basso et al., 2024)
Watching yourself from a slight distance. Conversations happen and you’re technically in them. Laughter comes out and it sounds genuine – it might even be genuine – but part of you is noting the laughter rather than just laughing. This is the floating-near-the-ceiling thing. It is deeply strange. It is also, as we’ve established, remarkably common.
A persistent sense that something is missing. Not grief, not exactly. More like the nagging feeling you get when you’ve left the house and can’t remember if you locked the door – except the door is your life and you’ve been standing outside it for years.
Grandin, in her characteristically unsentimental way, would probably say that what’s happening is a failure of translation – that the usual conversion of experience into felt meaning has short-circuited. She spent decades developing her own systems for bridging that gap: detailed visual thinking, concrete categories, careful observation. Most of us haven’t done that work. We’ve just assumed the translation was happening on its own, and quietly wondered why the output felt wrong.
Why This Matters (And Why You’re Not Just Being Dramatic)
Here is what the research suggests – and by research, we mean the kind done by actual scientists in actual institutions, not the kind circulated on wellness accounts between ads for adaptogenic mushroom coffee.
Disconnection is the psyche’s most elegant survival mechanism. When experience becomes too much – too painful, too chaotic, too relentless – the mind creates distance. Neuroimaging studies show that when individuals prone to dissociation encounter emotionally charged stimuli, activity in limbic areas like the amygdala is suppressed while executive regions in the prefrontal cortex ramp up, as though the brain is literally overriding feeling with cognition. (Basso et al., 2024)
The mind does this automatically, without asking permission, the same way your hand pulls back from a hot stove before your brain has consciously registered that the stove is hot.
The problem is that distance, once installed as a default setting, tends to stay. The threat passes. The overwhelming thing becomes a memory. But the glass wall between you and your own experience? That stays up. This is compounded by the fact that chronic stress actively disrupts the neurochemical systems – particularly the HPA axis and dopaminergic reward pathways – that allow us to feel reward, motivation, and connection in the first place. (Murphy, 2023; Wilkhoo et al., 2024)
This is not weakness. This is not drama. This is your brain doing exactly what brains do when the world has been, at some point, a bit much. The question – and this is what the rest of this series is going to dig into – is what to do when the protection becomes the problem.
A Note on Who Ends Up Here
There is a particular irony buried in the research that deserves its own paragraph, or possibly its own afternoon of quiet reflection. The professions most associated with helping people feel more connected – counselling, therapy, leadership, caregiving – appear to attract, and then systematically produce, people who are quietly expert at feeling less so.
Consider counsellors and therapists first, since they make the most obvious case. The empathy that makes a therapist effective – that genuine investment in a client’s pain – is also, research consistently shows, the mechanism by which therapists drive themselves toward emotional exhaustion. The clinical term for what happens next is, with a certain grim neatness, depersonalization: the professional learns to create distance as a form of self-protection.
When the nervous system becomes overwhelmed by repeated exposure to others’ trauma, emotional detachment kicks in as a kind of freeze response – a numbness, a cynicism, an inability to care in the way you once did. Studies examining the relationship between empathy, vicarious trauma, and burnout among mental health professionals find that the same capacity for empathic engagement that defines therapeutic skill is also a significant predictor of burnout and emotional withdrawal. (Kounenou et al., 2023)
The healer, in other words, develops the wound they were trained to treat. Nobody puts that in the brochure for graduate school.
The numbers, once you see them, are difficult to unsee. Between 20 and 40 percent of psychotherapists report experiencing burnout at some point in their careers, and the depersonalization component – that specific disconnection from clients and from the felt meaning of the work – is among the most commonly reported symptoms. (Sangganjanavanich & Balkin, as cited in Sangganjanavanich & Balkin, 2013; Kounenou et al., 2023)
These are not outliers. These are not people who simply weren’t resilient enough. These are the baseline occupational conditions of an entire field built on the premise of human connection – and the irony is almost too neat to bear.
Now consider leadership, which makes a different but equally interesting case. Leaders are not, typically, absorbing other people’s trauma directly. What they are doing is something subtler and in its own way just as corrosive: performing emotions they may not feel, making high-stakes decisions in chronic isolation, and sustaining a version of themselves for public consumption that may have very little to do with the private person who occasionally wonders, at 3am, what any of it is actually for.
Research on emotional dissonance in leadership – the gap between the emotions a leader displays and the emotions they actually experience – shows it to be a significant driver of exhaustion and depersonalization. When the emotional labour of leadership is chronic and unsupported, the result is a progressive numbing: the performance of connection in place of the experience of it. (Lee et al., 2024)
A 2024 Deloitte survey of over 14,000 business and HR leaders across 95 countries found that worker stress had hit record levels, with more than half of managers reporting burnout – yet most organizations remain in early stages of meaningfully addressing it. Most leaders feel they cannot express this openly, not to their teams, not to their peers, and often not even to themselves. (Deloitte, 2024)
Here is the part that doesn’t appear in the research papers but probably should: there is reason to think these professions don’t just create disconnection – they may selectively attract people who were already, at some level, predisposed to it. People who learned early to observe carefully and feel at a slight remove. People for whom the anthropologist’s perch felt natural, even comfortable, long before they had a job title to attach to it. The child who became the family therapist long before they knew what a therapist was. The one who watched the room rather than simply being in it. The one who, when asked how they were doing, reflexively assessed the questioner’s emotional needs before answering.
If any of that lands, it’s worth sitting with. Not because it means something is wrong with you – it very likely means the opposite – but because understanding why you ended up in a role that asks you to be present for everyone else while staying carefully managed yourself is probably useful information. Grandin would call it data. The rest of us might call it the beginning of something.
The Anthropologist’s Advantage
Here is where Grandin’s metaphor flips into something genuinely useful.
The anthropologist on Mars doesn’t just suffer the strangeness of the planet. The anthropologist also sees things the locals can’t – precisely because she hasn’t normalized them. She notices that the natives say “fine” when they don’t mean it. She notices that they fill silences with noise to avoid sitting with anything. She notices that they have built extraordinary systems for staying busy enough to never have to be still.
Disconnection, for all its costs, carries a residue of this kind of perception. People who feel like outsiders to their own lives often see the machinery of everyday existence with unusual clarity. The question is whether that clarity can become a tool rather than a symptom – whether you can use the anthropologist’s detachment as a starting point for actual inquiry rather than permanent exile.
That is, in essence, what reconnecting to life requires: not returning to the same unexamined busyness, but building something more intentional in its place. Something you actually chose, rather than fell into. Something that could bear the weight of a 3am question or two.
The 3am Part
Right. We said we’d come back to it.
The reason disconnection often surfaces at 3am is not mystical, though we understand if you’ve occasionally wondered whether the universe is specifically conspiring to keep you awake with existential dread. What’s actually happening is that the daytime – with its tasks and notifications and the ongoing project of being a functional person in the world – provides enough stimulation to keep the quieter questions at bay.
At 3am, the noise stops. And in the silence, the part of you that knows something is off gets a word in edgewise.
That part isn’t your anxiety talking. It’s not catastrophizing. It’s something closer to an internal compass that hasn’t been consulted in a while, tapping on the glass, saying: hey. Hey. We should talk.
This series is, in some sense, that conversation.
What’s Coming Next
Over the next six articles, we’re going to do something slightly unusual: we’re going to take the experience of feeling disconnected seriously without turning it into a crisis, and we’re going to look at it from every angle that matters – the psychological, the neurological, the cultural, the deeply personal.
We’ll get into why your mind does this (Article 2), why modern life has essentially built a perfect machine for making it worse (Article 3), what it has to do with not knowing who you are (Article 4), why it lives in your body and not just your head (Article 5), and what actually helps – not in a “have you tried gratitude journaling” way, but in a real, evidence-adjacent, honest-about-the-complexity way (Articles 6 and 7).
You don’t have to read them in order. You don’t have to take notes. You don’t have to do anything except, perhaps, recognize that the quiet emptiness you’ve been carrying around has a name, a reason, and – this is the part worth staying for – a way through.
That’s enough for now. The rest can wait until morning.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596
Basso, J. C., Satyal, M. K., McKee, K. L., Lynn, S., Gyamfi, D., & Bickel, W. K. (2024). Dissociation and other trauma symptomatology are linked to imbalance in the competing neurobehavioral decision systems. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1317088. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1317088
Deloitte. (2024). 2024 global human capital trends: Thriving beyond boundaries. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2024.html
Grandin, T. (2006). Thinking in pictures: My life with autism (expanded ed.). Vintage Books.
Gupta, T., Eckstrand, K. L., & Forbes, E. E. (2024). Annual research review: Puberty and the development of anhedonia.
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 65(4), 459-478. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13955
Hunter, E. C. M., Wong, C. L. M., Gafoor, R., Lewis, G., & David, A. S. (2023). Cognitive behaviour therapy for depersonalization derealization disorder: A self-controlled cross-over study of waiting list vs. active treatment. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 51(6), 672–685. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352465823000425
Kounenou, K., Kalamatianos, A., Nikoltsiou, P., & Kourmousi, N. (2023). The interplay among empathy, vicarious trauma, and burnout in Greek mental health practitioners. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(4), Article 3503. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20043503
Lee, M. C. C., Sim, B. Y. H., & Tuckey, M. R. (2024). Emotional labour, emotional dissonance, and leader burnout: A longitudinal examination. Work and Stress, 38(1), 45-63. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2023.2223451
Murphy, R. J. (2023). Depersonalization/derealization disorder and neural correlates of trauma-related pathology: A critical review. Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 20(1-3), 53-59. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10132272/
Sacks, O. (1995). An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales. Alfred A. Knopf.
Wilkhoo, H. S., Islam, A. W., Reji, F., Sanghvi, L., Potdar, R., & Solanki, S. (2024).
Depersonalization-derealization disorder: Etiological mechanism, diagnosis and management. Discoveries, 12(2), e190. https://doi.org/10.15190/d.2024.9
Yang, J., Millman, L. S. M., David, A. S., & Hunter, E. C. M. (2023). The prevalence of depersonalization-derealization disorder: A systematic review. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 24(1), 8-41. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2022.2079796
THE AUTHORS:
Dr. Truman Spring, Adjunct/Associate
Faculty, Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Heather Henderson, Adjunct/Associate
Faculty, Postdoctoral Researcher
City University of Seattle (Canada)
Next: Article 2 – “Why Your Mind Checks Out: The Psychology Behind Disconnection”
