Why We Disassociate From Our Bodies When We’ve Lived With Stress or Chronic Pain

Before I begin, a small but important note.

I’m Laura. I’m not a medical professional or therapist. What I’m sharing here comes from my own explorations, reflections, and lived experience as someone who lives with acute daily stress and who has navigated chronic pain and migraines for the past six years. This is not advice or diagnosis, just a gentle inquiry into something many of us experience but rarely talk about openly. Or maybe something you’ve experienced but never had a word for?

When being in your body doesn’t feel like home

There is a lot of conversation in the wellbeing world about “coming back into the body”. About embodiment, presence, and learning to feel again. And while that can be beautiful and supportive for some, it can also quietly miss an important truth.

For many people (myself included at many points), being in the body does not feel safe, comforting, or neutral. It can feel overwhelming, unpredictable, or even threatening.

Disassociation is often framed as something that needs fixing. A problem. A sign that we are disconnected or not doing our inner work properly. But what if disassociation is not a failure at all. What if it is a deeply intelligent response to what the body has lived through.

What do we mean by disassociation?

Disassociation is often imagined as something extreme or dramatic, but for most people it shows up quietly.

It might look like feeling numb or distant from physical sensation. Living mostly in your head. Not noticing hunger, fatigue, or pain until it is intense. Feeling slightly removed from your own body, as if you are observing it rather than inhabiting it.

For many people, especially those who function well outwardly, disassociation is subtle and habitual. It is not something chosen consciously. It develops slowly, often as a way of coping. It’s not something that announces itself with a fanfare or shows up with an acute and immediate pain. For me it was a framing… I stopped wanting to see my back as a part of me, it was a source of pain and frustration, it didn’t belong to me. It was a realisation that I spoke about myself internally in very negative ways. That my body would be exhausted but my mind was in overdrive. Disrupted sleep. Racing thoughts. Actually even hard now to explain… just a general feeling that this body of mine wasn’t a happy place to live in, and not wanting to face that, so I’d just ignore it even more. A feeling of both obsession with the dissatisfaction, and a strange distance, running concurrently.

When the body becomes a place of threat

If you have lived with prolonged stress, your nervous system learns that the world, and sometimes your own body, requires constant vigilance.

If you have lived with chronic pain or migraines, sensation itself can become associated with danger. Pain arrives without warning. It lingers. It disrupts plans, sleep, work, and identity. Over time, the body stops feeling like a safe place to rest.

In these conditions, pulling attention away from the body can be protective. It reduces how much you have to feel. It allows you to function, to work, to show up, to survive the day.

Disassociation is not the body shutting down randomly. It is the body adapting.

The nervous system’s priority is survival, not presence

Our nervous systems are not designed to optimise calm or self-awareness. They are designed to keep us alive.

When stress or pain is ongoing, the nervous system may move away from fight or flight and into freeze or shutdown. In these states, awareness narrows. Sensation dulls. Attention lifts out of the body and into thought, distraction, or numbness.

This is not a malfunction. It is a survival strategy.

This is also why being asked to “just feel into your body” can feel deeply uncomfortable or even alarming. Presence requires safety. If safety has not been established, the nervous system will resist awareness for very good reasons.

Chronic pain and the complicated relationship with sensation

Chronic pain changes how we relate to our bodies.

When sensation has been consistently overwhelming, the brain may attempt to turn the volume down. Numbness, distance, or disconnection can be a form of relief. Not because the pain is gone, but because awareness of it has softened.

Many people living with chronic pain describe feeling as though they live from the neck up. Thought becomes safer than sensation. Planning becomes safer than feeling. This is not avoidance. It is endurance.

Disassociation, in this context, is not about rejecting the body. It is about finding a way to coexist with something that has been very hard to inhabit.

Stress, productivity, and living in our heads

Disassociation is not only about trauma or pain. It is also shaped by culture.

We are rewarded for pushing through fatigue, ignoring discomfort, overriding bodily signals, and prioritising output over rest. Many of us learn early that listening to the body slows us down. So we stop listening.

Over time, this becomes automatic. The body becomes background noise. Thought becomes the driver. Disconnection is not always a dramatic response to crisis. Sometimes it is simply what modern life trains us to do.

Why reconnection is not always the answer, at least not straight away

There is a quiet assumption that reconnection with the body is always the goal. That more sensation, more awareness, more presence is inherently better.

But if the body has been a place of pain, unpredictability, or threat, immediate reconnection can feel destabilising. It can flood the system with sensation it is not ready to process.

For some people, disassociation is still doing important work. It may be maintaining function. It may be keeping things manageable. It may be buying time.

Honouring that does not mean staying disconnected forever. It simply means recognising that safety and trust cannot be forced.

Curiosity instead of fixing

Perhaps the most compassionate shift is moving from judgement to curiosity.

Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?” we might ask, “What has my body needed to do to cope?”

Disassociation is not a sign that you have failed at embodiment or mindfulness. It is evidence of intelligence, adaptation, and resilience. It shows that your nervous system has been paying attention.

There is no rush to change it. No requirement to feel more. No prize for being fully present if presence does not feel safe.

Sometimes the most healing thing is simply understanding why the body has chosen distance, and allowing that choice to be respected.

Nothing has gone wrong. Your body has been doing its best.