The Uncomfortable Comfort of Dissociation

I started smoking weed in my early 20s because it shifted me out of big feelings I wasn’t ready to handle yet. Trauma, dysphoria, grief, rage — it allowed me to put off feeling those feelings for a while. But, eventually, it all broke through like a dam breaking, and I found myself drowning in a flood of painful memories and difficult realizations about who I am as a human being.

I started dissociating naturally from a young age to distance myself from my physical experience. Growing up, I faced a lot of abuse and emotional chaos being raised by very emotionally immature parents. They raised me to be educated, intelligent, religious, and focused on developing in my career — but also to be extremely separated from my emotions. Both of my parents were erratic at times, often suddenly devolving into wild screaming matches that would go on for hours, often to be rapidly deescalated by one of my brothers. My brain developed around chaos, and as I grew up, I learned to accept a certain kind of chaos and toxicity into my own life and relationships. I understood difficult emotions as something to repress until they built up and overflowed extravagantly. I didn’t learn to regulate my emotions well into adulthood.

The early abuse I experienced was too constant for me to process. While I wanted for little in the material sense, I also experienced a kind of…