The Split — Protective Detachment

I got back home earlier than expected from Goose Island. A day was all I needed after all. The EMDR session I conducted felt successful. I was able to bring myself up to around a 7 or 8 out of 10. But since being home, I can feel myself drifting again — maybe back to a 5 or 6. I’m sliding toward where I started.

I’ve been riding that scale.

Earlier today, while I was in the grocery store, I felt like I wasn’t fully there. I had gone to pick up medication — loratadine, dextromethorphan, and guaifenesin — for a slight throat irritation, cough, mucus, drainage, and a runny nose. Nothing dramatic, just enough to wear the body down.

I grabbed orange juice. Soups. Teas. Warm things.

Warmth helps. It signals safety. It supports the parasympathetic system. So in a way, I was addressing two things at once — the physical symptoms and the nervous system.

But the drifting was still there.

I was moving. Functioning. Walking aisles. Searching for items.

But my mind kept slipping. I’d forget what I came for. Lose my place mid-thought. My memory felt worse. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t hysteria.

It was distance.

Dissociation is the nervous system creating distance from an experience that feels overwhelming. It can feel like watching yourself from outside, like the world isn’t fully real, or like you’re moving through fog. It isn’t weakness. It’s protection.

That’s when I remembered one of the tools in my arsenal: vagus nerve reset.

The vagus nerve is a large nerve that connects to the heart, digestive system, and brain. When it’s regulated, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the part responsible for rest and calm. When trauma is activated, the body can flip into fight, flight, or freeze. Dissociation lives in that freeze state.

When I got home, I laid on my back. Hands resting between my chest and stomach. I tried to relax.

The eye exercise is simple.

Look downward and to the left. Hold for about a minute.
Reset — look straight ahead or at the ceiling.
Then look downward and to the right. Hold for about a minute.
Reset.

Repeat for several rounds. I did about five sets.

Somewhere around the second or third set, I felt it — that subtle shift. Almost like I wanted to yawn. Like I wanted to go to sleep. That heaviness isn’t fatigue. It means the parasympathetic system is activating and the vagus nerve is relaxing.

If you feel that, you’re doing it right.

There are other stimulation points that help:

Light pressure behind the ear along the base of the skull.
About three finger-widths below the wrist, gentle massage.
The notch just above the sternum — small circles, then hold.
Right below the jawline — slow back-and-forth massage for a minute or two.

Nothing aggressive. Soft. Intentional.

And breathing.

Inhale deeply.
Longer exhale.

The exhale is what tells the body it can stand down.

Another strong tool is grounding.

Go outside. Let your feet touch the ground. Stand barefoot if you can. Lay on the ground. Connect with it. Nature regulates the nervous system whether we acknowledge it or not. While grounding, combine the breathing. If you’re lying down, you can repeat the eye exercise. 

My new hammock just arrived today so I'll be taking it out to the park soon to be in nature.

Stack the tools.

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about interrupting the loop.

Now that I completed my vagus nerve reset session, I’m going to jump into another EMDR session to see if that brings me a little more back into awareness and present.

I’m doing better momentarily. But I want to stabilize further.

I use an app called Heal EMDR. I don’t get paid to plug it. It’s just something that’s helped me — three times already.

It helped me when my mom passed.

I had a breakdown. I was stuck in fight-or-flight mode. Very hypervigilant. The only thing that helped at the time was staying alone in a dark room in the cold. I couldn’t tolerate loud noises. I couldn’t tolerate even soft noise. I was like a scared deer ready to dart. Like a war vet shell-shocked.

I experienced that.

I was scared I was going to stay like that.

But I stabilized.

I regulated.

I didn’t heal in the sense that I was cured. Grief doesn’t disappear. Trauma doesn’t evaporate. But my nervous system stopped living in constant alarm. I could function again.

And I owe that to God first. I can’t deny that. We can’t have tools without a base. Everything I do, I owe to God.

EMDR is one of those tools.

With the Heal app, you put your headphones on and listen to a sound that pans left to right consistently. While it moves back and forth, you focus on the issue — grief, trauma, loss, whatever pushed you into hypervigilance.

It processes it. Almost like metabolism.

After that session, you do another session focusing on the positive opposites of those negative beliefs. The sound continues left to right, and you concentrate on strength, safety, stability. The first part breaks down the bad information. The second part installs the good information.

That’s been my experience.

I recently had my father try the Heal EMDR app as well. This was yesterday.

He’s been very hurt. Very upset. He’s going through the same grief I am — just processing it differently.

I recommended he try the app because it helped me in the tent before coming home from Goose Island, and it helped me after Mom died when I was struggling heavily. I told him to give it a shot.

Going into it, he was nervous. Shaking. Very sad. There were a lot of negative beliefs and a lot of stored trauma connected to the events around my mother’s passing and her being gone.

I checked on him midway through. Then again when I thought it might be finished. Later, a couple hours after he completed it, I asked him how he was feeling.

He said, “Confident.”

I wasn’t expecting that word.

I expected “better” or “okay.”

But he had a different demeanor. He was watching a movie in the living room. He wasn’t withdrawn. He wasn’t visibly crushed in that moment.

He said he felt confident.

I left it there.

So yes — I swear by EMDR. It’s worked for me. And so far, it’s worked for my dad.

Another tool to create new neural pathways is language learning.

The Pimsleur Method is excellent. You listen and repeat.

“Est-ce que vous comprenez le français?”
You listen. You repeat.
“Écoutez et répétez.”

By the third lesson, you’re speaking and understanding. It forces presence. It builds new wiring.

Michel Thomas’ method is also strong. His voice is pretty soothing as well.

The NIV Audio Bible narrated by Max McLean helps regulate me. I like Max McLean’s voice. It’s very comforting. Audiobooks help. Audio lessons help. Even digging out a real book and reading it — holding it, turning pages — that direct neural processing helps.

Another audiobook and read I recommend that helped me during a difficult point in my life was 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. I recommend the audiobook specifically because he narrates it himself, and his voice is also comforting. But the content is what really connects. It really does something to how you view things.

It’s interesting how the voices behind these works — different authors, different narrators — all ended up being calming in their own way. That wasn’t intentional. It just happened that way.

These are tools.

Some days I need them heavily. Some days I don’t need them at all.

Lately, I’ve needed them a lot.

There’s been stress. Pressure. Strain. Grief. Loss. Trauma. Hurt.

I’m using what I have. I’m stacking tools. I’m looking forward to my counseling session Monday.

Trauma responses aren’t moral failures. They’re adaptive mechanisms.

The split happens because at some point, leaving was safer than staying.

Protective detachment did its job.

But awareness changes the equation.

When you recognize the disconnect, you’re no longer trapped inside it. You have tools. You can breathe. You can regulate. You can create new neural pathways instead of replaying old ones.

You can return.

The split isn’t the enemy.

Unawareness is.

If you’re looking to create new input instead of recycling old loops —

If spirituality interests you, or you’re open to hearing someone’s journey told through a biblical narrative lens, The Book of Carlos was just released on Audible.

It’s a testimony of growth — not perfection. Of missteps, correction, and spiritual recalibration. Of learning, adjusting, and building new patterns instead of repeating old ones.

Sometimes creating new neural pathways isn’t just about language drills. Sometimes it’s exposing your mind to a different framework entirely.

If that resonates, you can listen here:

Listen on Audible