About the Author
Laura Wells (she/her) is a certified Brainspotting therapist and relational counsellor specialising in complex trauma and working with neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ adults. She offers therapy online and in person in Salisbury through The Diversity Therapist, supporting individuals to explore their inner worlds with compassion, agency, and respect for difference.
When the world becomes too much, some of us don’t run — we vanish.
Dissociation isn’t detachment; it’s the body’s oldest form of love, the nervous system’s way of saying, “Let me keep you safe.”
This essay explores that hidden wisdom — and how returning to ourselves begins not with force, but with gentleness.
The Instinct to Vanish
If I can’t leave the danger, I’ll leave myself instead.
There’s a place inside many of us that feels like home — sourced from instinct — an inner cave, dimly lit, quiet, restrictive,
yet familiar.
When reality becomes inescapable, the mind pulls away, retreating to a place of safety.
When connection feels cutting and empty, when the absence of unmet needs deafens, touch burns instead of soothes, light blinds, sound assaults,
and the disowned feelings of others seep in, violating the deepest core of you.
The Body That Feels Too Much
For many neurodivergent people, this isn’t just metaphor — the world itself can be too loud, too bright, too fast. The body registers life at full volume.
Sensory systems built to perceive detail and nuance can, under strain, become flooded.
What others call “over reactivity” is often simply unfiltered aliveness — and when it overwhelms, dissociation can become a natural way to soften the edges of the world.
To outsiders, it might look like coldness or attention seeking — but to the one inside, dissociation is a remarkable act of protection.
It is the nervous system’s way of enduring the unbearable, of keeping the self intact when everything else falls away.
The Earliest Lessons in Safety
Even in the earliest stages of life, the body knows how to protect itself.
Before words, even before birth, stress and overwhelm leave traces in the developing nervous system.
Research shows that the fetal and infant stress response can already adapt to threat —heart rate slows, energy folds inward, movement stills.
And beneath that stillness, the body hums with electricity. The tiny hairs at the nape rise as if pulled by invisible strings, and a charge gathers in the gut, surging upward through the spine.
The head fills with pressure — a crowded, dizzying pulse where the body meets its own feared counterpart.
Even in a being too small to name fear, the nervous system already knows the choreography: contract, contain, disappear.
This early shutdown is not failure, but instinct —
the body’s quiet wisdom saying, “If I can’t get help, I’ll conserve myself.”
Adaptation, Not Defect
For those born with heightened sensory wiring — as many neurodivergent people are —
this protective instinct can remain close to the surface.
The nervous system stays alert, scanning for too much light, sound, motion, or demand.
In this context, withdrawal and disconnection are not malfunctions but adaptations —rhythmic retreats that help the self-endure a world that rarely slows down enough to meet it.
In infancy, when cries for attuned care go unanswered or the world becomes too much, a baby may stop moving, stop meeting the caregiver’s gaze, stop seeking.
It looks like behavioural stillness, but it’s the smallest person’s way of surviving the largest feelings.
What begins as a biological reflex becomes, over time, a way of being —the nervous system’s language for no more. In that muffled darkness, where time distorts and pain hovers just beyond reach, not feeling becomes — for a moment — the only way to keep existing.
Control After Loss of Agency
Over time, the curling and caving in become not only instinctive but also a way to reclaim agency.
If I can hold my suffering close, then I am not purely harm’s victim —here, at least, I control the terms of my hurt.
What began as necessity becomes a well-worn strategy for surviving the environment.
Every corner of the world, every relationship, every daily demand can become a trigger, stirring implicit sensory memories of the too much,
the loss, and the unmet longings — a complex grief too often recognised only as symptoms, or bad behaviour.
In neurodivergent lives, this can also include the exhaustion of constant sensory negotiation —
the masking, camouflaging, over-compensating, the endless calibrations to fit into spaces that were never designed with one’s sensitivities in mind.
The grief of difference, and perpetual misunderstanding too, lives in the body.
The Familiar Cave
Inside the cave, at the back and along the edges, there may echo the sounds of the unheard through the ages—
from the ringing of stifled cries, the intrusive chatter of silenced protests, the swell of unmet embraces; the constant ache of tension, a closing in—
their circling a known companion. Yet the cave within does not betray or surprise. It is consistent. Predictable.
Where love once carried danger, suffering at least plays by its rules. To lean into pain can feel safer than leaning into connection—whether with our own body, another, or even the natural world.
Over time, this relationship with suffering can turn into an identity. We begin to belong to our wounds.
The wounded and protective parts of the self-start to move in rhythm — a sequence of defence and ache, looping through familiar cycles, unaware of a self in the present that could hold them, hear them and compassionately mediate, negotiate and understand.
These patterns begin to dictate our choices, whispering that healing or change is not meant for us —
that torment is a safer guest than despair or emptiness. The world beyond that cave — connection without hypervigilance, presence without performance —feels foreign.
For some, even hope and joy can be triggering, because they ask us to risk disappointment again.
Loyalty to Pain
Yet this self-bonding with pain isn’t weakness. It’s the body’s most loyal attempt to protect us.
The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between emotional and physical danger;
it only knows that when the edges are violated, disconnection feels like safety.
So we curl inward, wrapping ourselves in familiar hurt, mistaking endurance for peace.
And when that disconnection extends inward — toward the body’s own sensations —
survival demands another cost.
The numbness that shields us from pain also dulls our awareness of emotional and physical hungers,
and our divine right to feel at peace.
Interoception — the sense of what happens inside the body — can grow quiet. For many, especially those whose sensory systems are tuned to register extremes,
this muted inner awareness becomes a way to cope.
Over time, with compassion and grounded presence, this connection can be relearned —
the body’s cues not as symptoms to manage, but as a beautiful, rich language waiting to be understood.
Lighting Lamps in the Cave
Real healing begins not by ripping away the armour, but by gently acknowledging why it exists.
The retreat was never failure — it was wisdom born of necessity. The goal is not to discard the cave, but to light small lamps within it.
To breathe there. To notice when you’ve retreated and remind yourself that you have autonomy —
that you can ask for what you need: considerations, accommodations, boundaries, pauses, and even no-thank-yous.
To remember that the same instincts that taught us to hide
can also teach us to stay present, once safety returns.
There is a quiet difference between noticing when things begin to feel too much and reclaiming agency —
and slipping into the old rhythm of retreat and endurance. One is an act of care; the other, of disappearance.
Knowing this difference takes practice. It begins with pausing long enough to ask:
where am I, and did I choose this for myself? If I could choose rest rather than vanishing, what might that feel like?
The same pause that once signalled collapse can, over time, become a doorway back to choice —
a moment where self-protection transforms into self-presence.
When Protection Becomes Isolation
But over time, disconnection asks for its own reckoning. What once softened pain can begin to sharpen it in other ways.
The more we withdraw from the body, the heavier its silence grows —
numbing gives way to ache, tension and fatigue.
Needs and longings do not disappear in absence; they linger, unanswered, pressing at the edges of awareness.
The very act of survival that once kept us safe can start to keep us apart —
from nourishment, from feeling, from the possibility of being met.
Protection continues doing its job, just in the wrong context.
For when we retreat to the back — literally and metaphorically — no one, not even ourselves, has our back.
We lose connection with the fullness of our spine, and the further we retreat, the bigger the cave becomes,
first in our head, then our body, until even our home becomes a place to hide rather than reside.
Healing as Coherence
For some, healing doesn’t mean silence in the nervous system or full sensory ease.
The goal is not to erase the wiring, but to work with it —to create gentler environments, slower rhythms, and sensory refuges that honour the body’s original design.
Disconnection may still visit, not as pathology, but as a familiar language of regulation in a world that often speaks too loudly.
Self-soothing through pain is a story of survival that longs to become a story of renewal.
When we can notice the patterns — the quiet curling in, the comfort in discomfort —we can begin to ask a softer question:
What if I could feel without pain?
What if I could connect with agency?
What if I did not have to keep pushing through and endure?
Maybe healing begins here — in these small, tender what-ifs,
where the body starts to trust that aliveness doesn’t mean danger, and where the self, once hidden,
learns to return — not as defence, but as home.
And for those whose senses will always live near the surface whose systems feel the world in high-definition home might never be silence, but coherence.
Healing, then, is not about becoming less sensitive,
but about being less alone in that sensitivity
If this resonates with you whether only in part and you are curious, please get in touch.