The Dissociation Machine

The internet as trauma response.

I was 13 years old and in 8th grade and three blocks away from the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. I was in school when the first plane hit. It shook the building and my Spanish notebook dropped from the desk to the floor and we ran to the window and saw the large hole with the flames shooting out and that’s when the separation from my own reality began. 

Then, a mother coming in, in tears, in panic, pulling her daughter out of class. 

Then, the cafeteria, where I attempted to call my parents only to discover cell phones did not work. I thought my dad might have had a meeting downtown that day, which terrified me. I later learned my parents thought I might be dead for several hours. 

Then, fast forward to on the street, walking with friends and one of their parents, when the first tower collapsed, watching an impossibly large slab of building and bodies contained within slide down 110 stories like an avalanche. 

Then in a friend’s apartment, watching Charlie Brown at the insistence of one of the parents who wanted to “calm us down” (I felt too old for this). 

Then my parents were finally there. Me seeing the fear in their bloodshot eyes almost scarier than everything preceding it. 

“It felt like a movie.” 

That’s what everyone, including me, said afterward. That’s what I told the therapist my parents had procured for me in the months after. That’s what we said in the processing circles back at school months later (after the school building had been repaired and cleaned—though the area was still a mess; dump trucks filled with debris would drive by on our lunch break and wind would kick up the dust and deliver it to our faces and nostrils and we’d laugh like it was funny). 

This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve written about what happened that day. It’s taken me until now to feel comfortable. Not because I was unaware of its impact on my brain and body and life, but because I was very aware, and so, until recently, kept it behind a screen. Like a movie. 

The anniversary of September 11th has always been hard, less because of the memories (those exist no matter the date), and more because of the constant deluge of content—the patriotic grifters on one side imploring us to be More American Than Ever, and the meme-ers on the other side, making light of what was a real tragedy. 

I understand the impulse—to meme-ify this thing that has become a symbol for the cynical, trauma-mining jingoism of American life. But I also think it’s a way to do what I did, what all my friends did, after 9/11—to minimize its impact on us. Because whether you were there or not; whether you were born before or after, that event has deeply and tragically affected our lives—taken away your personal freedoms in the form of the Patriot Act; put blood on your hands and guilt in your hearts in the form of endless war on foreign soils. We’re all trying to put it behind a screen; to make it a movie. 

And 9/11 is just the most obvious example of this thing I think we do all the damn time. 

Recently and thankfully I have been in a period of life in which I do not feel addicted to the internet, and so, when I use it, I can see what it is with a bit of perspective. And I think that that’s a large part of what it is: a dissociation machine. As the world gets worse, we have our constant companion—our movie maker—right in our pockets. It’s too hard to touch the real reality—the conditions that breed constant trauma—directly. So we make it a simulacrum. Filter it. Put it behind a screen. 

Unfortunately, as anyone diagnosed with PTSD can tell you, dissociation can only work as a coping mechanism for so long. And then it turns into something much worse. 

***

Dissociation is a near-universal trauma response. It’s a sign that we, to summarize therapist Peter Levine’s work, have not completed processing what has happened to us. We get stuck. Instead of feeling the pain and eventually releasing it, we keep it at a safe distance. This is, for a time, effective. It protects us from discomfort. But it also dehumanizes us. Makes us into unfeeling beings unable to truly experience life to its fullest. It makes us feel safe at great cost. 

I am often reluctant to write about trauma because the word feels so overused. It’s almost become cringe. But to state it plainly and cringe-ily, I think to be born into this world is to be traumatized to some degree. If trauma is an overwhelm of our sensory systems by things too large to comprehend, then we are being constantly traumatized—by wildfires on scales we cannot fathom, by the destruction of nature on a scale never seen by humans, by the low-grade (and often high-grade) combined pressure and drudgery of labor.

Trauma is inherent to our existence. But perhaps, at one point, we had more opportunities to discharge it. To prevent it from turning into things like dissociation. We worked fewer hours because rent and food and everything else was cheaper. And so we could focus on things that helped heal the constant wounding—activism, art, sports, chilling, whatever. Yes, capitalism still sucked, but there was more of a balance. For every inflow of badness, an outlet. 

Now, things are all out of whack. Too much work. Not enough play. Not enough release. And so we find unhealthy coping mechanisms in the form of drugs (which are killing more and more of us) or death (which, I guess, is the ultimate trauma coping mechanism). Or, we dissociate. And what better tool to do so than the little dissociation machine that stays with us wherever we go. It’s probably trite to call the internet a drug, but in this way it really is: it helps us cope with the stress of the world by removing us from it. 

Which is why the endless cycle of argumentation about whether the internet is at fault in the mental health crisis of young people today feels too myopic. It’s TikTok! No, it’s the fact that people can’t walk out of their suburban lives and find community! No it’s the fact that we’re all forced to sit still for most of our days until our souls feel crushed! 

What if it’s all of it? The internet is not necessarily the cause of the trauma, but it is the cause of the continuation and exacerbation of the trauma, because it is an unhealthy, dissociative coping mechanism. As the world feels ever-worse, we need more and more hours in our safe, dissociated state of unreality; and as we spend more time in that unreality, we become ever-more dehumanized; we lose touch of ourselves and our empathy and our humanity to degrees we never thought possible. Who hasn’t had the experience of taking stock of your online life and thinking “how the fuck did I get here?” 

In the same way my therapist would say things like, “the dissociation isn’t your fault, but it is your responsibility to find ways to end it,” we can maybe look at our unhealthy relationship with the internet as not our fault (we were just protecting ourselves from feeling the traumas of the real world!), but as our responsibility to move beyond. We’ve used this coping mechanism for too long.

Seeing the internet through the lens of dissociation makes a lot of it make a lot more sense. Why record your ever-waking moment for a TikTok? Why make meme after meme about a world historical event until any sincere mention of that event feels cringe? The internet itself is, to borrow a phrase from the internet, copium. 

It’s very relatable, very understandable, to need this form of coping mechanism to deal with the everyday horrors of this life; but as is true in recovery from PTSD, eventually, you must move on, and find better ways to deal, or else you will fall ever-deeper into unreality, grow into an evermore fractured person, and need more and more care to become whole again.

***

Our inability to move past the dissociative coping stage of trauma explains why the internet itself is feeling so fractured and insane these days. We’ve collectively spent too long living in movie land to the point that our lives are more simulacra than not. 

No wonder social media is breaking (perhaps an alternate way of viewing the destruction of Twitter is that it simply could no longer hold the weight of our collective trauma-escapism in a fun or useful way, and thus became something more toxic and fractured and unreal than before, in the form of “X”). No wonder people feel exhausted by their online lives; no wonder influencers have begun to quit their work with proclamations that social media was eating them alive. No wonder the next frontier of the internet is complete detachment: the “metaverse,” virtual avatars of ourselves with no basis in the real world, and with no legs. No wonder we complain of not having the attention span to read books anymore—maybe it’s not that the internet has ruined our attention spans (though that too), but that trauma, a proven destroyer of the ability to sit still and think deeply, has. No wonder right-wingers are pushing to have kids “educated” completely virtually, with kids wearing cumbersome headsets and never seeing each other in the real world—no need to confront the traumatizing inadequacy and violence of our schooling system if we can simply make it not real.

Once we become this detached from reality, our lives become halls of mirrors, different versions of unreality playing back off each other and mutating into unrecognizable presents and futures. And then we grow accustomed to this, and begin to mistake it for real life. Like a game of telephone. Who knows what the original thought was? 

The solution to this, in trauma recovery, is to get back in touch with the real reality, the one based in your body and your surroundings. Workbooks on dissociation tell you to name five things around you—lamp, couch, cat, pen, mug—so that you can re-ground yourself. In somatic therapy sessions, I would replay the dissociation-causing events over and over again in my mind as my therapist asked me to associate each memory with feelings in my body, until I began to feel grounded, embodied, real again.  

This stuff works. It worked for me. It took a long time, but it worked. After years of living as what felt like a ghost—not in my life but floating above it—I began to feel like I was part of the material again. I began to feel again. 

September 11th no longer appears as a movie in my mind because I have done years of work to make it un-unreal. And it is probably no coincidence that the more I worked through my traumas and the more I felt back in my own life, the less I wanted to use social media; the less need I had for coping. 

But how to do this on a collective level is trickier. It is easy to say “log off” and “touch grass.” These are admirable goals, But I think they’re no more realistic than telling habitual drug users to simply stop using drugs. People use drugs, and people use the internet, for a reason: to protect themselves from feelings of pain. And in a world in which we are constantly being traumatized, it’s difficult to find the space to stop coping and start processing.

If we have any chance of actual healing, we must not simply ask ourselves to stop using the internet, or any dissociative coping mechanism; we must ask ourselves what brought us here in the first place. Can we locate a time before life became an endlessly refracted version of itself? And can we aspire to return life to that state, even if we know that perfectly achieving that state is an impossibility?

As I healed from my various dissociation-causing traumas, one of the hardest things was accepting that there was no going back—that the events had changed me for good, that I could work to get back in my body, and back in my self, but that that self would be different now.

That, I think, is one of the scariest parts of unplugging—we know when we do, we will not suddenly be returned to a pure form, untainted by the traumas that brought us to our plugged-in unrealities; instead, we will have to actually confront our brokenness, take stock of how this world has fractured and changed us. And that can feel terribly overwhelming. 

But the biggest lesson of trauma recovery was realizing that I had, and that we have, no choice. Or, really, that our choices are to stay within the protective movie versions of our lives in which nothing feels real, or to accept that we are broken by what has occurred in our lives, and, eventually, put the pieces back together again in a new, unfamiliar, but workable shape. 

Logging off, returning ourselves to the real, may be the end goal, but it is not the process. The process is to begin to explore why we need to be plugged in in the first place, and then begin to work through those things through our minds and bodies. So the next time you scroll, maybe just take a second before to notice—lamp, couch, cat, pen, mug—and see what comes next.