Gordon Barclay is an NHS consultant psychiatrist who worked in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland until 2019, now practises privately in Glasgow, and has spent years developing a specialisation in psychological trauma and dissociation.
This conversation is one of the richest in the podcast’s history — I listened to it twice before it went out, and I was still getting new things from it. What Gordon shares here is both clinically precise and genuinely accessible — a clear map through a territory that most of us are navigating without being aware of it.
1. What Is Dissociation?
Gordon’s starting point is clear: dissociation is becoming disconnected from aspects of our experience.
The word itself is the opposite of association — which is about connection. We become disconnected from aspects of our experience, often to the extent that we may not be aware of them at all, or to the extent that we have some awareness but push it away — consciously or unconsciously.
And what we push away doesn’t disappear. We often experience it indirectly: as background anxiety, as body tension, or in the way we project those pushed-away feelings onto other people.
2. How Do We Know If We’re Dissociating?
This is one of the central challenges — because by its very nature, dissociation hides. Gordon offers a reframe that changes this: many of our symptoms — our patterns of reaction, the behaviours we can’t shift, the loops we keep finding ourselves in — are not the problem itself, but responses and reactions to feelings we have unconsciously pushed away.
He gives a striking example: a patient who, in the middle of an ordinary conversation with his partner about buying something for their child, became enraged and destroyed her phone. For a split second, the man had been aware of feeling shamed. The shame — too much to feel — gave rise to the anger, which took over.
Those basic affects, as described by neurophysiologist Jack Panksepp — shame, terror, rage, aloneness, anxiety, pain, and disgust — can be so intolerable that they are felt only for a split second before giving rise to the reactions we recognise as our patterns of behaviour (or sometimes believe are part of our personality).
3. Starting To Relate To What We Have Pushed Away
The challenge, Gordon explains, is not just becoming aware that we are dissociating, but beginning to relate to what has been pushed away. He describes a continuum of connection.
The first step is simply being aware of and acknowledging — because sometimes connecting more closely, in a feeling way, is too much to do initially. A patient described it as taking a wee step — a small movement from disconnecting toward connecting.
From awareness and acknowledgement, the next movement is toward being understanding of, which then leads naturally to understanding towards. Trying to understand where those patterns came from, rather than being caught in loops of reaction to reaction — angry that we get angry, ashamed of our shame — begins to create something genuinely different.
4. ‘Separating To Connect’ — Responding Rather Than Reacting
One of Gordon’s central phrases is separate to connect — as distinct from separating to disconnect.
The challenge is to neither be identified with our patterns of reaction, nor to disconnect from them entirely. He calls the alternative the reaction against the reaction: ashamed of our anger, we deny it, blame someone else, push the whole thing away — which is itself a dissociation.
The task is to relate: to separate in order to look at and be aware of what’s happening, and then to connect with what’s underneath it. He tells the story of a patient — a big, tough man — who had a deeply vulnerable younger part that he had been angry and frustrated with for years. The turning point was being invited to relate to that part with the same understanding he would spontaneously and naturally offer a vulnerable child he encountered in the world. The insight that that part of him deserved that, and needed it from him, was, in Gordon’s word, dramatic.
From this, he draws an important distinction: being understanding of is cognitive — stepping back and thinking about something. Being understanding towards is something that happens in the heart. If someone is an understanding person, it doesn’t mean they have a clever brain that can do crosswords. It means they have an understanding heart.
5. Low Arousal Dissociation And High Arousal Dissociation
Gordon distinguishes two distinct expressions of dissociation.
High arousal dissociation is the spaced-out, ungrounded feeling — neurochemically related to cannabinoid activity in the nervous system, correlating with sympathetic hypo-arousal.
Low arousal dissociation is different: a sleepier, numbed-out experience — the kind where whole areas of relational life, or work, or inner experience simply go flat. A zone where we just tune out and there’s nothing there, just a blank space. Numbness is particularly hard to identify, as Melanie notes in the conversation, precisely because it’s numbness.
Both are there for a reason. And the first step toward relating to either is to be understanding of the phenomenology of that — of why it’s happening, of how it’s happening — rather than being frustrated with or disconnected from it.
6. Why Dissociation Is There For A Reason
This is one of the most important reframes in the entire conversation. Dissociation is not a malfunction. It is an adaptive, protective response — one that actually prevents a person from being totally overwhelmed. Gordon describes patients with dissociative identity disorder who have raised families, maintained full professional lives, and functioned highly for decades — not despite their dissociation, but because of it. The compartmentalisation allowed them to function in certain areas of life while the pushed-away feelings remained contained.
The wisdom of dissociation, Gordon says, is extraordinary. The mind has done that not through conscious agency, but through an intelligence of its own. For most of us — not at the severe end of the spectrum — some version of this is simply what it means to be human. Most of us have some aspects of our experience that have been deeply buried, deeply pushed away.
And as Gordon makes clear, understanding that cognitively is not mutative — the understanding itself doesn’t change it. It has to correlate with experiential work.
7. Creating A Sense Of Safety Before Connecting To What Was Previously Too Much To Feel — The Mismatch
Gordon is explicit that what takes the time in this work is the preparation — not the moment of connection itself. Before connecting to the root of what was too much to feel, the nervous system needs to be in a genuine state of safety. The technical term he uses is mismatch: the state-dependent memory is activated — we feel what we felt at the time — but we are feeling it in the context of feeling safe and not alone.
That context changes everything. The remembering stays a remembering, rather than becoming a re-experience. We stay present as we feel the previously too-much-to-feel feelings from the past, and we are not pulled into a flashback.
Crucially, Gordon notes that creating that initial relational experience of feeling safe and not alone — before even stepping into the past trauma of not having that — is often more than half the work.
8. When And How Dissociation Dismantles
When feelings that were too much to feel can be fully felt — in the remembering, in the safe present — the responses and reactions that have constituted symptoms dismantle. They are no longer needed.
Gordon describes this as a simple but profound equation: the dissociation and the symptoms arising from it exist in service of the too-much-to-feel feelings. When those feelings are metabolised — fully felt, processed, digested into what Gordon calls a cool memory— the protection is no longer required. A cool memory means we can remember something as having been traumatic, without it being traumatic to remember it.
The experience is in the past, rather than rushing into the present as something unmetabolised and undigested. And when the preparation is complete and someone is genuinely resourced — that moment of shift can take just a few minutes.
People describe feeling lighter, something having shifted. There are often metaphors about something happening physically in the body.
9. A Scale Of Dissociation And How It Can Manifest In Daily Life
Dissociation is not a single thing — it is, as Gordon puts it, protean in its manifestations. Proteus was the Greek god who had many forms. What looks like an occasional depression, a rage that comes out of nowhere, a sudden feeling of emptiness in a social situation, fibromyalgia, or background anxiety — these may all be different expressions of the same pushed-away experience. People who carry significant dissociation often function highly in many areas of life.
There are layers and layers of very adequate functioning laid on top of what Gordon calls what got left behind. The eight-year-old got left behind, and the adult became competent, capable, relational — until something sweeps in from what was buried, seemingly out of nowhere.
This is why it is so hard to get to cognitively, and why understanding alone is not enough.
10. The Difference Between Re-Membering Whilst Present And Becoming Lost In The Experience
Gordon quotes Blake: to be in a passion, you good may do, but no good if a passion is in you.
This distinction is at the heart of good trauma work. Someone can be in a chair, connecting to overwhelming feelings, wailing, genuinely in it — and still be present, grounded, safe. It can look identical, from the outside, to someone who has been swept into a flashback experience and become lost in it. As a therapist, Gordon says, you can feel the difference. The explicit check-in — are you okay? are you still here? are you with this or lost in it? — is part of the work.
Making sure someone is present as they feel that feeling, rather than lost in the feeling, is always primary. And staying with what is there, going right down to the root of it, when someone is not overwhelmed — that is what is deeply healing.
11. Normalising Dissociation And How We Can Start Thinking About It In Our Mental Health Systems
Gordon closes with an observation that carries its own kind of shadow-level reflection: as Melanie puts it, we are generally dissociated from dissociation. And dissociated, Gordon adds, from the causes of dissociation — the underbelly of society, the shadow of the way we behave with each other.
Within psychiatry itself, there is a real split between clinicians who are open to working with dissociation and those who believe it doesn’t exist. He traces this historically, noting that even Freud seemed to retract from his own findings about the aetiology of hysteria, perhaps because what he was pointing to was too confronting for his time.
Evidence-based therapies like EMDR and CBT are valuable — Gordon trained in EMDR and holds it in high regard — but their evidence base refers to specific patient groups. Applied without nuance to patients carrying significant dissociation, they can be re-traumatising.
The core challenge, for psychiatry and for therapy both, is simpler and harder than it sounds: just listen to the patient. If we listen to the patient, Gordon says, we will gradually begin to understand dissociation.
ABOUT GORDON BARCLAY
Gordon Barclay was an NHS consultant psychiatrist in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland until 2019, now works privately in Glasgow and is has a special interest in the treatment of psychological trauma and dissociation.
Gordon can be contacted at dr@gordonbconsulting.com
