Technology has made us more interconnected than ever in some ways, and yet so many of us are now feeling even more disconnected. We plug our ears with music, cover our eyes with videos, and harvest followers instead of making friends. There are so many ways we can avoid intimacy. In a world full of disconnection, it is no surprise that this theme would leak into our intimate lives.
The sexual revolution was now multiple generations ago, and the echoes of feminism that we have seen since then have evolved to embrace sexuality in a way that we may now be ready to question. In response to a great suppression of sexuality, we swung the other way towards thinking of sex as something that can be experienced in the absence of marriage or committed relationships. Often between complete strangers. The Tinder generation.
Now that we’ve had the relative freedom to experience casual sex, a growing need for connection is emerging. We’ve learned to have physical closeness with one another, and now we’re ready for something more.
What do we mean by disconnection and dissociation?
Dissociation is a diagnosable response to trauma where you become disconnected from your body, your self, time, or some other layer of reality. It can be really disorienting and can last a very long time. This typically happens when your system is overwhelmed to such a strong degree that your body adapts by reducing the activation and signalling in your system. Your emotional processing gets paused, and your stress hormones get a bit scrambled.
Disconnection, on the other hand, can be thought of as a milder form of dissociation. Zoning out, thinking about something that isn’t what’s actually happening in the moment. This is what it means to disconnect. It’s when you’re no longer present. This happens all the time to most people. Very few people, if any, are fully present all of the time.
The causes of disconnection are many, and sometimes, disconnection can be a beautiful experience. Daydreaming and fantasising are forms of disconnection that can ultimately lead to more connection in the future. However, when you’re trying to build a loving relationship, learning to set disconnection aside and tune into the moment is so valuable.
Trauma
Disconnecting from yourself, the physical world, or just each other often stems from some sort of harm or trauma. There’s a lot of variation in intensity with this as well. Maybe you disconnect a lot because you grew up in an environment that didn’t allow you to grow as fast as you needed, so you learned to zone out. Or maybe you had parents who didn’t listen to you, so you learned to daydream. Or maybe you really did experience deep violence, sexual or otherwise, that led you to completely separate from your body, and maybe even from reality.
It doesn’t have to be “the worst trauma ever to exist” for you to have been deeply affected. Whatever you are going through is valid. Yes, with more violence, there is often deeper wounding, but not always. Some can be deeply wounded by something that others are barely bothered by. This is the beauty and wonder of individuality.
Disconnecting and dissociating is a learned response that was useful at one time. It may still be useful to you, or perhaps will become useful in the future. However, it can also present big
challenges, particularly when it comes to connecting with yourself and others.
Hypersexuality
A common pattern that emerges after going through the trauma of rape is to, at some point, go through a period of hypersexuality. During this time, the person whose bodily autonomy was violated will reclaim their sexuality through consciously choosing to have sex. Sometimes this can be done in a very cavalier way. It takes time to recover one’s sensitivity when it’s lost. The body is the key, and if you aren’t able to connect with it, you might need a stronger signal to break through the walls.
We’ve got hook-up apps that have transformed the dating space for a good decade or more. This has normalised casual sexual encounters, without requiring much accountability. It has made sex easy and convenient in some ways, but it has also gotten us out of the habit of building connection gradually. For those of us who haven’t developed the self-awareness or communication skills to negotiate for intimacy within the grey zone between no touch and full-on penetration, we may get pushed farther into sexual waters than we really want.
Hypersexuality can bring so much agency and power back. It can be a really great experience! However, it does seem to be unsustainable into the long term, particularly once that step in healing has succeeded. Culturally, hypersexuality seems like it has played its part, and we may now be ready for something else.
The deep disconnection of men
Men are taught from a very young age that their emotions aren’t allowed to be felt and expressed. This adds even more stress to challenging emotional situations, often overloading the system. Many of us who have been assigned male at birth learn to separate themselves so profoundly from their own bodies and emotions that they don’t know what they actually want in intimate settings.
Porn offers a strong sexual signal that may reach men more easily than other, more subtle, sources of sexual energy. The trouble with that is that most porn that is freely available to young boys is an act. Performers are behaving in a way that is “sexy”, rather than tuning into the genuine desire for sexual touch. Then, the film is cut and edited in a way that omits a lot of build-up. What you’re left with is an intense arousal without accurate depictions of how you got there.
Many men grow up believing that porn is instructive. They parrot the moves and styles that aren’t genuine, out of a desire to create an enjoyable experience for the others involved. By prioritising the other, they actually end up causing a situation that potentially harms them.
The deep violence women hold
It’s no secret that women experience monumental levels of sexual abuse. One in 3 women experience it in their lives, though this figure is likely even higher when we consider how common it is for victims to stay silent. Socialisation for those assigned female at birth involves a lot of self-suppression for the sake of satisfying the needs or desires of others. This creates a deep disconnection from self very young, and that tear rips even further when sexuality enters the picture.
Similar to men, women try to satisfy their partners without first being clear on what they themselves actually desire. This deepens the disconnection and dissociation from self. It also ensures that connection to a partner can’t happen, just as it does in men.
There are many ways in which women are systematically denied opportunities, rights, and freedom in this world. Yet women are encouraged to remain connected to their emotions and their
communities. In this way, women have more opportunity to remain connected, and thus are often more able to lead the way back to it.
Kink as a way out of disconnection
Kink can be useful here. Harder touch and emotionally volatile play scenes can really help to reconnect you to your body when you’re disconnected. If you’re in a deep freeze, you might need some flogging to get a strong enough sensation for you to feel it.
A lot of healing can happen when you revisit trauma in a safe context. This is largely how MDMA has been able to work so effectively in psychological treatment. It disconnects you from feeling fear, so that you can revisit the trauma while still feeling good, or at least safe. If you are in intimate contact with someone, or several someones, whom you feel deeply safe with, exploring traumas through sexual play together can give you the opportunity to feel and express the pain that your body is still holding onto, so that it can be released.
If you, your partner(s), or both are good at noticing when each other has disconnected, it might be a fun game to have a consensual kinky behaviour every time you notice each other disconnecting. When disconnection or dissociation is a habit, you don’t always notice when that shift happens. Having someone inform you when it happens can be super helpful in developing your own awareness around it.
A collective struggle to face together
Learning to stay connected to the present, to one’s body and to one’s partner can be a big journey. This isn’t a men’s problem, and it isn’t a women’s problem. It isn’t even a binary problem. This is a collective reckoning of deep intergenerational trauma, exacerbated by tech. We finally have the space and levity to heal this.
Mindfulness is a great practice to cultivate that can develop your awareness and ability to stay present. Kink can reach us when we’re operating at greater depths. Other embodiment practices like contact improv, flow arts, and dancing can all help us to stay in our bodies.
No matter how, the moment is calling you to bring your whole self to love.
Doing so just might change the world.