Words people use

A disconnection between things that are usually joined up — awareness, memory, identity, emotion, perception or the sense of having a body.

Almost everyone dissociates a little: missing a motorway junction, losing an hour in a book. It becomes clinically relevant when it happens often, without warning, or interferes with daily life. It is a protective process, not a character flaw, and it has many possible causes.

Being unable to recall information that would normally be remembered, beyond ordinary forgetfulness.

This can be for a period of time, for specific events, or for personal information. Ordinary forgetfulness — where you put your keys, someone's name — is not the same thing. Memory problems also have many non-dissociative causes, including sleep deprivation, medication, alcohol, head injury, seizures, thyroid problems and depression, which is exactly why assessment matters.

Feeling detached from yourself — as if watching from outside, or as if your body or thoughts aren't quite yours.

People often describe feeling robotic, foggy, or like their hands belong to someone else. It is frightening but not dangerous in itself, and it does not mean someone is 'going mad' or losing touch with reality — people experiencing it usually know it isn't literally true.

The world feeling unreal, flat, dreamlike, distant, or as if seen through glass.

Colours can seem muted, sounds far away, familiar places subtly wrong. It commonly occurs with anxiety, panic, exhaustion, migraine and trauma responses, and it very often passes with grounding and rest.

Clinical terms for a disturbance in the sense of self, sometimes including distinct states with their own patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

In diagnostic manuals this is one criterion among several for DID, and it must be assessed alongside amnesia, distress and impairment, with other causes ruled out. Experiencing shifts in mood, preference or self-image is extremely common and is not, on its own, evidence of anything.

A community term for being aware of what another part or state is doing or feeling, at the same time.

It is widely used in DID communities and increasingly in clinical writing, though its meaning varies from person to person. There's no test for it and no correct amount of it.

Anything that reconnects attention to the present moment and the physical world.

Sensory input, movement, orientation to time and place, naming objects, temperature. Grounding is a skill, which means it gets easier with practice and it works better when practised before a crisis rather than only during one.

Re-experiencing something from the past as if it is happening now — visually, emotionally, or in the body.

Not all flashbacks include images. Emotional flashbacks are sudden overwhelming feelings without a clear memory attached; body flashbacks are physical sensations. Grounding aims to add present-day information ('this is 2026, I'm in my kitchen') rather than to analyse the content.

A cue — a sound, smell, phrase, place, date, tone of voice — that sets off a strong reaction.

Triggers are frequently ordinary and sometimes untraceable. You do not need to identify the origin of a trigger to respond to it well. What helps afterwards is usually more useful to know than why it happened.

An experience that overwhelmed a person's capacity to cope at the time, and the lasting effects of that.

Trauma describes an impact, not an event ranking. Two people can go through the same thing and be affected very differently. Foglight will never tell you that trauma happened to you — that is not something a website can know.

A clinical theory describing how parts of the personality can stay separated after overwhelming experiences.

It is an influential model, not a proven fact about every person, and clinicians disagree about parts of it. It is useful mainly as a way of thinking about treatment, not as a self-diagnosis tool.

A shift between identity states, described by many people with DID.

In real life it is often subtle or invisible to others — a pause, a change in posture, a shift in tone. Dramatic on-camera switching is largely a media invention.