Dissociation, Journeying, and Finding Our Way Back Through Art
Many of the people I work with — and myself too — live with dissociation. Sometimes it’s described clinically as “checking out” or “disconnecting” from thoughts, feelings, or even the body. But in my experience, dissociation is more layered than that.
I often imagine it as walking into a forest. Dissociation can feel like being lost among the trees, disoriented, unsure where the path is. Yet the forest is also alive with possibilities — sensory richness, imagination, and stories waiting to be discovered. A sound, colour, or texture might feel overwhelming, or it might become a portal into another way of being.
Dissociation as doorway
Rather than only treating dissociation as a problem to “fix,” I see it as a doorway. It takes us into liminal space — sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes deeply creative. For many neurodivergent people, this kind of sensory and imaginative journeying is part of how we survive, and also how we create.
Beyond alexithymia
Psychology often gives us terms like alexithymia (difficulty identifying or describing emotions). These words can be useful as descriptors, but they don’t necessarily offer pathways for healing or connection. Naming something doesn’t automatically bring us closer to feeling it.
What does help are practices that allow us to engage feelings indirectly, symbolically, or aesthetically:
Archetypes: tapping into collective images that hold emotions bigger than we can name individually.
Dreams: entering the unconscious, where feelings take shape as landscapes, stories, or beings.
Tarot and oracles: drawing cards as mirrors for our inner states, helping us speak through symbol rather than direct description.
The magical and the ritual: creating spaces where we can externalise what’s inside us — through candle, breath, movement, or offering.
Artmaking: painting, drawing, or sculpting as ways of expressing what words can’t hold.
Art therapy as re-connection
Art therapy is not just about making a product. It’s about creating an encounter: between body and material, between feeling and image, between self and symbol. Through mark-making, colour, shape, and form, we find language for what dissociation obscures.
Often, what we cannot say, we can draw. What feels numb can reappear in a line of charcoal or a splash of paint. What feels fragmented can find coherence in symbol.
Re-meeting our creative selves
The forest offers an invitation: to wander, to re-meet the creative selves we may have lost along the way, or left behind in environments where they weren’t safe. Sometimes we find selves that no longer serve us and gently set them down among the leaves. Other times, we rediscover forgotten companions — playful, powerful, or tender selves who are ready to walk with us again.
How I work
In my therapy and coaching practice, I invite dissociation not as a failure of presence, but as a starting point. We explore:
The sensory experiences that arise in dissociative states.
The symbols, archetypes, or dream-images that appear in liminal spaces.
Creative and ritual practices that provide grounding, containment, and meaning.
The goal isn’t to “get rid” of dissociation, but to understand its messages and work with it as part of a person’s multiplicity. Sometimes dissociation takes us far away into the forest. Art, symbol, and ritual help us find ways back — and sometimes, help us bring back new companions, images, and selves from the journey.
Elinor. (2025). Dissociation, journeying, and finding our way back through art. Retrieved from [this weblink]