Curious about the sensations of being spaced out, feeling foggy, or having difficulty focusing? At what point does daydreaming become a psychological condition? When should we seek help for our tendency to be hyper-focused, as we get “lost in our thoughts”?

Shortly after beginning the journey of healing trauma, we often hear about the self-explanatory “flight/fight/freeze” responses. Recently added to that alliterative list are “fawn” and “faint”. This is a introduction to the common reactive states and circumstances when traumatized. There are important nuances to these experiences.

Being fairly obsessed with trauma resolution since 2017, and beginning deeper psychological studies in 2023, there emerged a fascination with the freeze and faint phenomena. Clinically, the term is dissociation, which etymonline defines as “Attested from 1540s as a past-participle adjective meaning ‘separated.’ Dissociated in psychology (1890) was ’characterized by mental disjunction,’ hence dissociated personality (1905) ‘pathological state in which two or more distinct personalities exist in the same person’.”

Click here to read the academic paper Bo wrote on dissociation.