Why the urge to leave, or disappear, is a meaningful part of the work
There are moments in therapy when something in you says: I have to get out of here. Your legs want to move, your chest tightens, and part of you is already planning the exit. It doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside, but internally the system is on full alert. That’s not you being difficult, or doing therapy wrong. It’s your body signalling something important, a memory held in tissue and nervous system rather than conscious thought.
What looks like an escape impulse is often a body memory, the system remembering what it once couldn’t flee. Therapy touches things, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident, and the body doesn’t need full context. It registers something familiar and responds accordingly.
We can work with that.
When the Body Needs to Move
One of the things I might do when I notice that quality of activation in a session is name it directly and offer to move with it. Literally walk. You and me, round the block, because sometimes the most useful thing isn’t staying in the room while the system is trying to leave it. It’s letting the body do what it’s been trying to do, move, with company this time, and with awareness rather than just impulse.
That’s not avoidance. It’s working with what’s present. Over time, the urge to flee can become something you notice and make a choice about, rather than something that simply happens to you. You might find you can stay. Or you might still need to move, and know you can do that without it rupturing the work.
Therapy isn’t about containment at any cost. It’s about building safety in whatever form that actually takes.
When You Go Quiet
Not everyone bolts under pressure. Some people disappear in place. The eyes lose focus, the muscles go still, the room goes distant. Sometimes you’re aware of it happening. Sometimes you only notice when the session ends and you can’t recall what was said.
This is often what’s called shutdown, and it’s a form of dissociation, a slipping away when things feel like too much. It’s your system doing what it learned to do, protect you from what would be too sharp to touch directly. It’s also communication. Your body is saying: I know this feeling. I’ve been here before. I’m doing the only thing I know.
When that happens in session, I don’t try to shake you out of it or urgently pull you back into the room. I stay close. I might say something like: you don’t have to talk. I’m here. If words come, I’ll hear them. If they don’t, that’s fine too.
There’s something significant about being met in dissociation without shame, noticed rather than corrected, present without pressure to perform recovery. That experience, repeated over time, begins to tell the part of you that learned to disappear: you’re allowed to be exactly like this, and someone still stays.
Gradually, that can create just enough space to notice what’s happening while it’s happening. And eventually to get curious about what it’s protecting.
Staying Present When You’re Not Quite Here
Whether your impulse is to leave the room or to vanish within it, the aim of this work isn’t to eliminate those responses. It’s to build enough safety that you can begin to notice them, to recognise what’s happening as something that belongs to your history rather than to the present moment, and to have a little more choice about what comes next.
Sometimes that means walking. Sometimes it means sitting in silence. Sometimes it means naming what’s happening and seeing what shifts. The goal isn’t to perform composure or hold yourself together for the sake of the session. It’s to be in a space where all of it, the quiet, the frozen, the furious, the wordless, is allowed to exist without you having to manage it alone.
My work with dissociation in the therapy room draws on relational psychodynamic practice and an understanding of how trauma is held in the body. If this post describes something you recognise in yourself, whether in therapy already or wondering whether to start, I’d be glad to talk it through. Get in touch at samanthamerry.co.uk/contacts.
Resources worth exploring:
- Dissociation Made Simple by Jamie Marich, a warm and clinically grounded guide to understanding dissociative experience without pathologising language, accessible for anyone exploring their own responses
- Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma by Janina Fisher, a workbook-style text that addresses the fragmented self and how different parts respond to threat, useful for general readers as well as clinicians
- Amongst Ourselves by Tracy Alderman and Karen Marshall, a practical, survivor-centred resource written without clinical distance for people living with dissociation
- First Person Plural (firstpersonplural.org.uk), the UK charity supporting people with dissociative conditions, with a helpline, resources, and guidance on finding specialist support. Whilst the charity is now closed the website has helpful resources.
- The CTAD Clinic YouTube channel, for clinically grounded, accessible explanations of dissociation, shutdown, and complex trauma responses from a specialist service
Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist in private practice in Bromley, South East London, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Chester. She works with adults across the dissociative spectrum and offers clinical supervision to therapists working with trauma and dissociation.