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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3237 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

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Why is there a psychological/clinical concept or coping mechanism known as Dissociation, but as far as I can tell no 'opposite' concept? I guess hyperfocus is a thing but its not really what I'm talking about.

I ask because while I can't say that I've never dissociated in my life, the vast majority of my experience of life is basically the opposite of that. I've been present for and fully sensitive to most everything going on, perhaps overly so. If I'm feeling depressed, I'm still feeling it as 'myself.' Ditto fear, anxiety. Sometimes I have 'brain fog' but I still don't tend to feel like I'm "apart from myself" or just nonpresent, that's just viewing things through a blurry lens.

Seriously, what is the psychologically 'opposite' concept for when a person feels more 'present' and 'integrated' and 'aware' of themselves and their surroundings than usual?

Hypervigilance?

I think anxiety can cause both. Fear either grounds you strongly in the moment, or it makes you mentally escape to somewhere else. This is essentially the mental version of "fight or flight". When I was younger, anxiety always made me deeply immersed in whatever was going on, but as of about three years ago, it sometimes lead me to disconnect, despite my conscious self having no desire to run away (I'm not even afraid of the suffering that my brain is trying to protect me from). It's basically the ratio of thought going to the present moment rather than to a birds-eye view of the present moment. You could also call it "living in experience", "living in the moment","experiencing things directly", "immersion" and the opposite you could call "living in your head", "excessive reflection", "excessive self-awareness", "disillusionment".

Similar to hardware interrupts, certain things may trigger your brain to "take a step back" and rethink things. This step goes up a layer from the current one, and looks down on it to make sure that it seems alright. This can happen multiple times, so that you can meta-perspectives and meta-meta perspectives on things. If you try to anchor yourself in the moment while an upper layer isn't satisfied, it basically steals a chunk of your working memory by "running in the background". The set of things your brain is processing in the background might end up taking up more than half your mental resources, until you're ruminating, daydreaming and worrying, and until your focus in the present is repeatedly hijacked by the processing of unresolved problems. It helps to write things down, make plans, and to use a calender, for the more things you feel are in control, the less resources your brain will use on its background processing.

For some people, the brain prefers to stay in the moment, where it will panic, react strongly, cry for help, or other things, rather than making these mental retreats.

Source: Mostly introspection.

Hyperreality, I think. The opposite of derealization, which is part of a dissociative disorder. Though, hyperreality itself can figure as part of the disorder at some times.

Empirical psychology has little interest in characterizing phenomenological states in general, especially phenomenological states that have no relevance to any identifiable and treatable medical condition, so it's unsurprising that the vocabulary for describing these states remains underdeveloped. This is a task that has traditionally been left to philosophy.

Heidegger's Being and Time explores these themes in depth (both the experience of "everydayness" and the ways in which this experience is modified by anxiety), if you found the topic so interesting that you were inspired to approach such a mammoth tome.

I've recently been reflecting on this very topic for my own independent reasons. Although I've certainly never had anything as dramatic as a "disassociative episode", I can relate to a general feeling of being... never entirely present for things. Almost entirely present, at times. But rarely entirely so. And I'm curious about the extent to which this represents a real distinction between the experiences of different individuals, or if people might just be talking past each other (since we cannot directly become another person to verify the nature of their experience).

Just out of curiosity faceh, how vivid and comprehensive would you say that your memory (of personal events) is in general?

Flow state might be a term that describes the opposite of dissociation. In a flow state you feel focused attention and immersion in the activity you are doing.

Solid.

But even when I'm not, as the kids say, 'locked in', I feel pretty much immersed in my surroundings.

A couple things prompted this musing, but one of them was noticing how many people claim to just "dissociate" through unpleasant events (read: their daily job) and many seem to agree that they spend a lot of time in a dissociated state, only pulling themselves together when it is absolutely necessary.

And I just cannot relate to that.

But couldn't find a decent psychological concept to describe my experience.

"In the moment", probably, but that's far from clinical.

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