Deal-Mode Dissociation. What Happens to a Woman’s Nervous System During a Live M&A Transaction
Danielle is deep into a cross-border M&A deal’s final hours, physically present but mentally gone. This article names what “deal-mode dissociation” means for a woman’s nervous system during a live transaction, translates the neurobiology behind that performance state, and names its hidden cost. Understanding the pattern is the first step for women who want their bodies back after years of dissociating their way through deals.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Danielle Has Left Her Body, and the Deal Signs at 4:47pm
- What “Deal-Mode Dissociation” Actually Is. A Trauma Therapist’s Working Definition
- The Neuroscience of Dissociation in a Live Transaction. Polyvagal Shutdown, Functional Freeze, and the Performance State That Looks Like Excellence
- The Five Tells of Deal-Mode Dissociation You Can Catch in Yourself by Tuesday
- The Specific Hazard of the Signing-Day-Plus-72-Hours Window (And Why Most Women Crash on Monday, Not Sunday)
- Both/And: The Dissociation Is What Got the Deal Done AND the Dissociation Can’t Be Your Operating System for Twenty More Years
- Systemic Lens: Why Live-Deal Architecture Is Built Around Bodies That Can Dissociate on Command
- What Re-Embodiment Looks Like for a Woman Who Has Been Dissociating Through Deals for Eight Years
- Frequently Asked Questions
Deal-mode dissociation is the functional freeze or performance state that women in finance enter during live M&A closings or high-stakes negotiations. It looks like flawless competence from the outside while, internally, it’s a partial disconnection from bodily cues, emotional signals, and relational awareness. The nervous system under extreme performance pressure narrows attention to task execution and suppresses almost everything else, which makes the performance possible in the short term and expensive in the long term. In my work with driven women in finance, the thing they most want, to feel present in their own lives, is exactly what years of deal-mode dissociation has quietly cost them.
In short: Deal-mode dissociation lets women in high-stakes financial roles execute flawlessly while disconnected from their own bodies. It’s a performance with a real physiological bill that comes due later.
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I’ve worked with women in finance and M&A environments who move through dissociative performance states for more than 15,000 clinical hours, and the pattern I describe below is a composite drawn from that work, not any single client’s story. Stephen Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and developer of Polyvagal Theory, is the researcher I keep coming back to on this. His work establishing that the dorsal vagal system produces functional freeze states under extreme demand, suppressing interoceptive awareness and genuine affective engagement, put language to something I’d been watching in session for years before I had a name for it (Porges 2011).
Danielle Has Left Her Body, and the Deal Signs at 4:47pm
Danielle sits in Heritage 4, a glass-walled conference room on the 32nd floor, at exactly 3:47 a.m. Friday morning. The fluorescent lights hum overhead as she stares at the 73-tab signing checklist glowing on the main monitor. Eleven items remain unchecked. The precedent transactions tab, the one everyone needs, is broken again. Her cursor hovers uselessly over it. The city below is muted, constant, indifferent.
Her eyes flick to the floor beside her chair, where a crumpled printout of the disclosure schedules lies under a coffee ring she doesn’t remember making. She steps over it without a second glance, heels clicking against polished concrete. In the corner, Octavia, the 27-year-old analyst, is curled on the carpet with her laptop balanced on her knees. Octavia’s face is pale, tight with the particular exhaustion of her eleventh all-nighter this month. She hasn’t blinked in at least ninety seconds. Danielle doesn’t see her. Not really.
Inside her own mind, an unyielding thought loops: I have left my body. I have left my body. I’m running this room from a spot about eight inches behind my own head. This isn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. The deal signs at 4:47pm. I’ll be back in my body sometime next Tuesday, probably.
What “Deal-Mode Dissociation” Actually Is. A Trauma Therapist’s Working Definition
“Deal-mode dissociation” is the name I’ve come to give the neurobiological state women like Danielle enter during live M&A transactions, when the nervous system shifts into a survival-driven performance mode. It’s a dissociative state where the body stays present but the self feels detached, often described as running the show “from behind the head.” It can look like focused excellence to everyone in the room. Internally, it’s a disconnection from bodily sensation and emotional signal.
This is a specific, well-documented form of dissociation: a psychological and physiological defense that lets a person function under extreme stress without fully feeling it. In the world of high-stakes mergers and acquisitions, that defense becomes a survival strategy, the thing that makes it possible to manage impossible deadlines, volatile negotiations, and relentless multitasking without falling apart in the room.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, defines dissociation as a disruption in the integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment, often triggered by overwhelming stress or trauma.
In plain terms: You feel like you’re watching yourself from the outside, disconnected from your own body and emotions. It’s a protective mental exit when things get too intense to feel in real time.
Deal-mode dissociation can shield a woman, temporarily, from the overwhelming demands of a live transaction. But it comes with a cost. The body’s disconnection from sensation and emotion disrupts the feedback loop that normally keeps us grounded and regulated. Over time, this state can become an unconscious default, especially for women who learned early that their worth was tied to flawless performance under pressure.
What makes deal-mode dissociation so hard to catch, even in yourself, is the mismatch. From the outside, it looks like laser focus, relentless productivity, calm composure. Underneath, a woman is disconnected from her own bodily sensations, her emotions, and sometimes from time itself. This isn’t rare among the women I see in my practice. It’s a survival mechanism doing exactly what it was built to do.
I want to be clear about something, because I hear this fear constantly in my own clients: deal-mode dissociation isn’t a sign of weakness or a failure of resilience. It’s an adaptation, often built years earlier, sometimes in childhood, when a woman first learned that her worth was tied to flawless execution under pressure. That adaptation is what lets her survive the live deal’s relentless demands, the deadlines, the volatile negotiations, the avalanche of split-second decisions. But it isn’t free. The body’s natural feedback loops, the ones that regulate stress and restore equilibrium, get bypassed or suppressed, and the nervous system settles into a persistent state of dysregulation. Over time, that becomes what Bruce McEwen, PhD, the neuroscientist whose research I return to again and again when I explain this to clients, named “allostatic load,” the cumulative wear and tear a body absorbs from chronic stress exposure.
Danielle, stepping over her own coffee ring without a second glance, managing the room from a place eight inches behind her own head, is deal-mode dissociation doing exactly what it evolved to do: letting a driven woman survive something that would otherwise be intolerable.
The Neuroscience of Dissociation in a Live Transaction. Polyvagal Shutdown, Functional Freeze, and the Performance State That Looks Like Excellence
Here’s what I keep coming back to when I explain the neurobiology of this to clients. At the level of the nervous system, deal-mode dissociation makes the most sense through Stephen Porges‘s Polyvagal Theory. The autonomic nervous system has three hierarchical subsystems: the ventral vagal complex (safe, social engagement), the sympathetic system (mobilization), and the dorsal vagal system (immobilization, or shutdown). During high-stress moments like a live deal, the nervous system can shift abruptly into functional freeze, a state of immobilization without loss of consciousness that allows performance while limiting full presence.
Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and originator of Polyvagal Theory, describes functional freeze as a parasympathetic nervous system response where the body becomes immobilized yet remains alert, often as a defense against overwhelming threat.
In plain terms: Your body is still, but your mind is racing. You’re “frozen” inside while still able to keep going, like an actor delivering lines while feeling numb underneath them.
Danielle’s brain is bundling every sensory detail, the flickering screen, the hum of the air conditioner, the coffee stain on the disclosure schedule, into a neuroceptive map of threat and safety. Her nervous system’s safety alarm stays on high alert even as her outward behavior looks calm and controlled. The “performance state” she’s inhabiting is a neurobiological adaptation, one that lets her meet the deal’s demands while her body stays partially shut down.
“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind. / As if my Brain had split. / I tried to match it. Seam by Seam. / But could not make them fit.”
Emily Dickinson, “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind”
I think of Dickinson’s line often in this context, long before anyone had language for polyvagal states, she was describing the felt experience of exactly this kind of split. It’s invisible to colleagues and clients, who see only Danielle’s steady voice and sharp intellect. The internal cost is real: disconnection from embodied experience, suppression of emotional signal, and an accumulation of physiological stress that doesn’t register until well after the deal closes.
Clinical working definition: depersonalization is a form of dissociation in which a person feels detached from their own body or self, as though observing themselves from outside.
In plain terms: Like watching a movie of yourself instead of living your own life. Your actions are happening, but you’re not fully “there” for them.
Unlike the pathological freeze that shows up as dissociative collapse, functional freeze lets a woman stay conscious, alert, and capable of performing. It’s a strange, paradoxical state, the body immobilized while the mind is hyper-focused, cutting off the sensory and interoceptive feedback that would otherwise ground her in the present moment.
Clinically, polyvagal shutdown shows up as narrowed peripheral vision, shallow breathing, reduced heart rate variability, and a sense of numbness or detachment from the body. Danielle noticing the disclosure-schedule printout on the floor without remembering the moment she set her coffee cup down is exactly this. Her nervous system is simultaneously hypervigilant, tracking every ping in the dataroom Slack channel, every new voice on the buy-side lawyers’ call, and shut down to the internal cues that would normally signal a need for rest. From the outside, this can look like excellence: calm, composed, efficient. Neurobiologically, it’s a high-stakes balancing act between survival and collapse, one that erodes the nervous system’s capacity to self-regulate the longer it runs. Most women in deal-mode dissociation don’t recognize the fragmentation while it’s happening. They interpret their own detachment as focus. As professionalism.
The Five Tells of Deal-Mode Dissociation You Can Catch in Yourself by Tuesday
After the deal signs, the body’s suppressed sensations and emotions tend to come back, often with intensity. In my work with women who’ve dissociated through live transactions, five signs show up again and again within days:
1. Persistent numbness or disconnection from bodily sensation, that “spaced out” or unreal feeling.
2. Trouble recalling details of key moments during the deal, as if certain hours are simply missing.
3. Sudden fatigue or crashing energy, often hitting hardest on the Monday morning after signing.
4. Heightened anxiety or irritability that doesn’t track to any immediate stressor.
5. A creeping sense of emptiness despite very real, very external success.
None of these signs mean you failed. They mean your nervous system is telling you it’s time for care and reintegration. Deal-mode dissociation is hard to recognize in yourself because it masquerades as flawless, driven competence, right up until the fog lifts and you can finally see it.
Third, somatic disconnection, a vague sense of unreality about your own body, muscle tightness, shallow breathing, trouble sensing hunger or thirst. Fourth, memory gaps or reduced recall of key deal moments, like Danielle’s not registering Octavia’s presence in the room at all. These are classic depersonalization symptoms, where experience itself feels unreal, “like a movie.” Fifth, an intense fatigue that runs deeper than physical exhaustion, a bone-deep depletion that rest alone doesn’t touch.
None of this is a sign of failure. These are neurobiological markers of a nervous system stretched past its window of tolerance, a concept Dan Siegel, MD, developed to describe the optimal zone of arousal where a person can engage with stress without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. Deal-mode dissociation happens when the nervous system falls outside that window and defensive adaptations kick in. Women accustomed to this state often normalize the signs as “deal fatigue” or “post-signing stress.” They’re not. They’re trauma responses embedded in the physiology of live deals.
Catching these tells matters. The disconnection you feel is a symptom, not a personal failing. Women who’ve dissociated through multiple deals over years describe an invisible residue, a neurobiological imprint that lingers long after the conference room lights go dim and the emails stop. Recognizing the signs in yourself by Tuesday can soften the crash that’s coming on Monday and open space for healing beyond the transaction cycle. For more on trauma-informed recovery, see the Therapy with Annie resource.
The Specific Hazard of the Signing-Day-Plus-72-Hours Window (And Why Most Women Crash on Monday, Not Sunday)
Danielle is in the break room at 6:13 p.m. on Sunday, two days after the deal closed. The room smells faintly of reheated coffee and antiseptic wipes. She presses her palms against the cool tabletop, trying to steady hands that won’t quite stop shaking. Her phone buzzes with a message from a colleague: “Congrats! You crushed it.” The words land strangely. Distant. Hollow, almost, like they’re meant for someone else.
“I don’t feel anything,” she types back, then deletes it. She writes “Thank you!! Team effort” instead, and hits send before she can second-guess it. Her hands are still shaking. She doesn’t know why the compliment feels like it’s landing on the wrong person.
After the adrenaline and hypervigilance of deal day subside, the nervous system often releases its pent-up stress in a delayed crash. This “signing-day-plus-72-hours window” is a genuinely hazardous stretch, one where dissociated women experience a flood of physical and emotional symptoms: exhaustion, overwhelm, insomnia, sometimes depressive episodes. The crash tends to land on Monday, once the external pressure eases just enough for the body to reclaim its own signals.
Dan Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of The Developing Mind, defines the window of tolerance as the optimal zone of arousal in which a person can effectively manage emotions and stress without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.
In plain terms: It’s the sweet spot where you feel calm, alert, and able to handle life’s ups and downs. Outside that window, stress feels unbearable, or you shut down entirely.
Without intentional support, this window tends to narrow after deals, leaving a woman more vulnerable to nervous system dysregulation and burnout the next time around. The cycle of dissociation and crash can become a repeating pattern that wears down resilience year over year.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light / Sister Outsider
It would seem logical to expect the crash right after signing. Instead, for most women, the nervous system holds its hypervigilant, dissociated state through Sunday night, only giving way Monday morning. That delay traces to the neuroendocrine shifts that happen post-event: cortisol and adrenaline surge during the live transaction to keep the system mobilized, suppressing fatigue and pain along the way, and once the deal signs, those stress hormones plummet, letting the depletion underneath finally surface. The Monday crash often shows up as overwhelming exhaustion, emotional flooding, sometimes panic or depressive episodes. This delayed response is a hallmark of allostatic load, where the cumulative burden of chronic stress outpaces the body’s capacity to hold homeostasis.
What I hear from clients, again and again, is that the Monday crash isn’t only a physical letdown. It’s a psychic unraveling: grief for the loss of the deal’s adrenaline, second-guessing of decisions made at 4 a.m., a vulnerability that feels almost unbearable after weeks of feeling nothing. This window calls for real attention to nervous system regulation and paced re-engagement with the body, somatic work, mindfulness, and social support all matter here, rather than judgment for finally feeling something. For more on managing post-deal recovery, see Post-Deal Grief.
Bruce McEwen, PhD, neuroscientist, defines allostatic load as the cumulative physiological wear and tear on the body’s systems from chronic exposure to stress hormones and repeated activation of the stress response.
In plain terms: Your body can only absorb so much stress before it starts to break down internally, even if you don’t feel it right away. That slow damage is what leads to exhaustion and illness after long stretches of intense pressure.
Both/And: The Dissociation Is What Got the Deal Done AND the Dissociation Can’t Be Your Operating System for Twenty More Years
Octavia is crouched in the corner of Heritage 4 at 4:02 a.m., fingers flying over her laptop keys. Her face is drawn, but she’s typing faster than anyone else in the room. She hasn’t blinked in minutes. Her body is running on pure cortisol and glucose depletion. The deal’s success depends on the model she’s building, and her nervous system is quietly screaming for rest underneath it. This is the both/and tension of deal-mode dissociation, in one small, unremarkable, 4 a.m. moment.
On one hand, dissociation is a genuinely brilliant survival mechanism. It lets women endure and excel in situations that would otherwise be intolerable. It’s the engine behind the long hours, the laser focus, the uncanny calm under fire. Without it, plenty of deals would never close.
On the other hand, when dissociation becomes the habitual way of operating, it erodes the connection to self and body. It perpetuates exhaustion and emotional numbing. Eventually, it makes it hard to sustain a fulfilling career, let alone a fulfilling life. The nervous system pays a steep price for a strategy that was never designed to run for decades.
I think about this both/and constantly with clients who’ve built entire careers on this skill. On one hand, it’s precisely this dissociative state that lets a woman like Danielle function at a level that looks superhuman during live transactions. The dissociation is what gets the deal done. It’s a neurobiological adaptation that allows sustained focus, rapid multitasking, and emotional numbing in the face of relentless demand. Without it, most people couldn’t withstand the intensity of a live deal, especially in a culture that rewards perfectionism and emotional suppression.
On the other hand, this state can’t become a woman’s default operating system for decades. Chronic dissociation fractures the connection between mind and body, and that fracture shows up as chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and emotional dysregulation, eroding the capacity for authentic presence and joy. Women describe feeling “not fully alive,” running on autopilot outside themselves, even when the deal went perfectly.
This paradox sits at the center of why so many women in finance struggle with burnout, identity confusion, and disconnection from their own bodies despite outward success. The dissociation that once served as a lifeline can become a kind of prison if it goes unaddressed. Healing starts with recognizing that excellence and dissociation aren’t the same thing, and that reclaiming bodily presence is part of what makes performance sustainable rather than temporary. For women ready to work on that balance, Fixing the Foundations™ offers a trauma-informed framework for that kind of repair.
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Systemic Lens: Why Live-Deal Architecture Is Built Around Bodies That Can Dissociate on Command
Danielle’s experience isn’t an accident of individual resilience. It’s a direct outcome of how the live-deal system is built. The architectural rhythm of M&A transactions demands bodies that can dissociate on command, silencing internal alarms to meet impossible deadlines. That selection pressure rewards women who can hold dissociation as a performance strategy, and quietly sidelines the ones who can’t.
This creates a systemic pattern I see again and again: the women who make VP have often survived by mastering dissociation, at the cost of long-term nervous system wear. The culture prizes this survival skill while ignoring its human toll. Women get selected for their ability to “leave their body” during a deal and receive almost no support for coming back into it afterward.
Clinical working definition: depersonalization is a form of dissociation in which a person feels detached from their own body or self, as if observing themselves from outside.
In plain terms: Like watching a movie of yourself instead of living your own life. Your actions are happening, but you’re not fully “there” for them.
This systemic lens matters because it reframes the question. It’s not “why can’t this particular woman stay present,” it’s “what does an industry built this way select for, and what does it cost the women it rewards.” The fast-paced, high-stakes deal environment selects for people who can compartmentalize and emotionally detach from the chaos around them, and that selection pressure shapes who makes it to Vice President and beyond. Naming the architecture is part of how women reclaim agency, instead of quietly blaming themselves for a design problem that predates them.
What that means is that most women who reach senior roles have undergone years of neurobiological conditioning to meet these demands. Judith Herman, MD, describes something close to this in trauma survivors more broadly, and it’s a finding I think about often in my work with women in finance: a perfectionist zeal and premature competence that masks real internal fragmentation. That survival strategy works. It also exacts a toll, including a higher risk of mental health struggles and stress-related physical illness over time.
This isn’t only an individual issue. It’s a systemic outcome of an industry that values relentless output over embodied wellbeing, reflecting broader patterns around gender, power, and trauma in finance. Naming it opens the door to real organizational change: different deal timelines, real support structures, definitions of leadership that account for the whole person and not just the deal closer. For more, see the Finance Hub.
“The cleaving in my mind, the splitting of the self to survive unbearable pressure, is a witness to both vulnerability and resilience.”
Emily Dickinson, Poet (F.5)
What Re-Embodiment Looks Like for a Woman Who Has Been Dissociating Through Deals for Eight Years
At 7:16 p.m. on a Thursday, months after the M&A deal that opened this piece, Danielle sits in her living room, the city skyline glowing behind her. Her hands rest on her knees. For the first time in years, she’s practicing a grounding exercise she learned in therapy, feeling the actual weight of her body in the chair, noticing the cool air on her skin. It’s a small thing. She isn’t sure yet whether it’s working.
Re-embodiment is the process of reconnecting to the sensations, emotions, and rhythms that dissociation suppressed. It takes patience, safety, and skilled support. For women who’ve spent years dissociating through deals, this work often starts small: breathing into the body, naming a feeling out loud, slowing the pace down by a degree that feels almost uncomfortably slow at first.
Re-embodiment isn’t quick and it isn’t linear, but it restores a foundation of presence that supports sustainable leadership and a life that actually feels like hers. It’s the beginning of reclaiming a nervous system that’s been on high alert for far too long.
The path forward means learning to recognize the body’s signals, setting boundaries around the deal cycle, and building an operating system that values presence over performance at any cost.
Women in finance deserve to lead with their whole selves. Nervous system intact. Emotions honored. Bodies returned from the edge of shutdown, not left there indefinitely because the next deal is always coming.
For a woman like Danielle, this might begin with small moments of grounding during or after a deal, breath awareness, gentle movement, sensory noticing, that interrupt the automatic dissociative cycle before it fully takes over. Over time, these practices build the capacity to stay present with discomfort, regulate autonomic arousal, and integrate experience that’s been fragmented for years. Part of this process is grieving what chronic dissociation actually cost: presence, spontaneity, authentic connection with the people around her.
Therapeutically, modalities that center the body’s own wisdom, somatic experiencing, trauma-sensitive yoga, tend to be the ones that move the needle. They help a dysregulated nervous system learn patterns beyond fight, flight, or freeze. Social connection and attuned relationships matter here too. Dan Siegel, MD, has written about interpersonal safety as foundational to nervous system healing, and it’s a point I make often with clients who assume this work is purely internal. Women who’ve dissociated through deals often do better with peer support and coaching environments that actually understand the embodied cost of live transactions.
This path isn’t a rejection of ambition or excellence. It’s a reclamation of the whole person underneath the deal-mode survival strategy. Audre Lorde’s reminder that self-preservation is an act of warfare feels exactly right here. Choosing to feel, to be embodied, to heal, is a genuinely countercultural act inside finance’s current architecture. It’s worth naming clearly: none of this is a diagnosis, and deal-mode dissociation as described here is an educational framework, not a clinical assessment of any individual reader. If what you’re reading sounds like more than a performance pattern, that’s worth bringing to a licensed clinician directly. For more on healing and embodiment, see Therapy with Annie and Executive Coaching.
Dan Siegel, MD, psychiatrist and interpersonal neurobiologist, describes the window of tolerance as the optimal zone of arousal where a person can effectively manage and respond to stress without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.
In plain terms: It’s the sweet spot where your nervous system stays balanced. You can handle stress and stay grounded without flipping into panic or freeze.
“Self-preservation is an act of warfare when the battlefield is your own nervous system.”
Audre Lorde, Poet and Activist (F.7)
If you recognized yourself in Danielle or Octavia today, that recognition is worth sitting with, not rushing past. Your body has been doing something remarkable to get you through. It’s allowed to want something different for what comes next.
Warmly, Annie.
Q: Is “dissociation” really the right clinical word for what I do during a live deal, or am I overdramatizing?
A: Dissociation is the precise clinical term for feeling mentally detached or disconnected from your body during overwhelming stress. In live M&A deals, intense pressure can trigger this survival mechanism, letting you perform while your nervous system protects you from the full weight of the moment. You’re not overdramatizing. It’s a well-documented neurobiological response, not a character flaw.
Q: Why do I crash on the Monday after signing, not the night of signing?
A: Your nervous system suppresses stress signals during the deal’s critical hours. After signing, adrenaline fades and your body releases the tension it’s been holding. This delayed reaction, sometimes called the “signing-day-plus-72-hours window,” causes the exhaustion and emotional overwhelm that typically hits Monday, once external pressure finally lets up.
Q: Is deal-mode dissociation the same thing as PTSD?
A: They share neurobiological mechanisms, but they’re distinct. PTSD involves trauma-related symptoms triggered by past events. Deal-mode dissociation is a functional survival state engaged during acute stress in a live-transaction environment. That said, repeated dissociation over years can increase vulnerability to trauma-related disorders, which is part of why the pattern is worth taking seriously early.
Q: Can I still do deals if I’m no longer willing to dissociate through them?
A: Yes. Dissociation can feel like a necessary tool during deals, but with nervous system regulation work and therapeutic support, you can build the kind of presence and resilience that lets you engage fully without disconnecting. The shift takes time, but it supports success that’s actually sustainable.
Q: Why does my body remember the disclosure-schedule paper on the floor years later?
A: Extreme stress imprints sensory detail deeply in the body’s memory. A coffee ring on a disclosure schedule can become a somatic anchor, a detail your nervous system holds onto as part of the lived experience even when your conscious mind never fully registered the moment.
Q: How long does it take to come back into your body after a closing?
A: It varies widely. Some women feel fully present again within days or weeks. Others take months. It depends on nervous system health, support systems, and whether there’s intentional therapeutic work aimed at re-embodiment and regulation, rather than just waiting it out.
Q: Does somatic therapy actually help with deal-mode dissociation?
A: Yes. Somatic therapy works by reconnecting body and mind, tuning into bodily sensation and nervous system state directly rather than only talking about it. It helps build the awareness and regulation skills that reduce dissociative episodes over time and support a real return to embodied presence.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Penguin Classics, 1984.
- Dickinson, Emily. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown, 1960.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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