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Definition: Dissociation

In traditional psychology dissociation is the unconscious process of separating certain thoughts or behaviours from a person's identity or belief system.

In other schools of thought, such as NLP, dissociation describes the separation of various components of our experience from one another, for example separating the unpleasant feelings from a memory from the visual stimulus that triggered those feelings.

Dissociation may be contrasted with association; a person is associated into their feelings when on recalling an event they still get some of the feelings associated with the event, as if they were reliving the episode. When a person is dissociated they do relive the feelings that they had at the time, they are as it were at one remove from the emotions.

Further information

* Dissociation in the NLP Encyclopedia