The body, mind, and personality can be thought of as a kind of a system - the system of the self. When observing the system of the self, you can be endlessly fascinated by what it's doing, what it's thinking, and what it's feeling. There's an "it" you can witness doing "its" thing. So, for your first pronoun-disrupting experiment, you tried replacing "I" with "it" in your internal monologue.

If there's you over here, observing the system of the self over there, we've created a separation. We're suggesting that there's a body, a mind, and a personality (or ego) all interacting. And somehow, separate from all that, "you" are observing "it".

Most people, most of the time, are identified with their bodies, their minds, and their egos. If you're identified, you consider yourself to be identical with those phenomena. You consider them to be what you are.

If you described the "it" exercise to a therapist, they might frown and express concern. They would say that, by disidentifying from those aspects of personhood, and calling them an "it", you're dissociating. They would be right. You are dissociating. But they would also be missing the point.

The psychological phenomenon of dissociation is troubling, because it is a common result of unhealed trauma. Some people, in the midst of a physical or emotional trauma, experience a dramatic form of dissociation. During the experience, they are somehow able to spontaneously distance themselves from the body to which the trauma is happening. They find themselves floating, or watching from a third-person perspective, or otherwise not sharing the experiences of the body that's being hurt or violated.

It's a brilliant response to an overwhelming and unmanageable situation - quite an impressive feat, really. You've probably been identified with your physical body for your entire life. Then, at a key moment, you discover that you don't need to be. Either you can disconnect from the scene entirely, or perhaps look in and feel bad for the person being traumatized, without imagining that person is you. When this happens, it's probably not due to some philosophical assertion that you are not really your body. It's just a spontaneous reaction mechanism with no thought behind it. Nonetheless, it constitutes a discovery of something about your true nature. You are not that body, and perhaps you never were.

The problems of dissociation come from the aftereffects of trauma. Some people, lacking the resources needed to resolve the traumatic memory, find themselves dissociating in a wide range of circumstances later. Things feel even a little overwhelming, and suddenly they're totally checked out. This kind of dissociation is characterized by a lack of awareness, and it happens at times and ways people don't wish it to. Rather than transcending ego when this occurs, they suffer from a disorganized and chaotic ego structure. That kind of ego is far more challenging to transcend.

Of course, life as a human is at least somewhat traumatic for everyone. So everyone dissociates to some extent - in this unaware way we're talking about. We check out and numb out and blank out and drift away.

The trauma healing process involves reorganizing your stimulus management system, so you can feel more stable and "embodied", basically resuming the normal operating system of being identified with your body, your mind, and your personality. This may be a necessary step, but it misses out on a rare opportunity for a further step.

There's a body having a set of experiences. You can direct awareness to the body without imagining you are the body. You can direct awareness to the personality, the one that's reacting habitually to the body's drives and affects and hormonal flushes, without imagining you are the personality. To the extent you can direct your awareness to something without identifying with it, you're dissociating from it. But you're accomplishing the dissociation by paying attention - checking in, not checking out.

As problematic as out-of-control dissociation may be, it's nothing compared to the problems of out-of-control "missociation". Most of us, most of the time, are misidentifying with the body. We rarely, if ever, have the option to break the association.

It is telling that ketamine, a dissociative drug, can be effective at alleviating depression. Ketamine can, temporarily, loosen your identification with a depressed body. As you watch the body from a distance, you can think, "Wow! That poor body is really going through it. That body is really dealing with a serious challenge." As you observe the body with empathy and compassion, you also feel great relief. Thank goodness I don't need to go through all that just because the body is.

You're starting to pry apart the missociation you've been reinforcing your entire life. I am not the body. A body is something I have. I am not the mind. The mind is something I have. I am not the ego. The ego is something I have.

By deliberately practicing dissociation, and by studying it, you can stop habitually imagining that you're a body. Or at least you can stop conflating your true nature with the body (or the mind or the personality) that you have learned to think of as you.

Dissociation, along with its cousins depersonalization and derealization, exposes something important about the constructed nature of our realities. Repeatedly associating things with each other makes them seem to be one and the same. Questioning those associations can be destabilizing, which is why these states get a bad rap. But they are not problematic by nature. The difference comes with the addition of conscious awareness.

Most forms of suffering are maladies of missociation. When you believe you are something you're not, dysfunction is inevitable. Dissociating from the person-system is a step up from missociating with it.

To facilitate dissociation, we made "it" into a first-person pronoun. This was a necessarily dualistic maneuver. There's the system of mind, body, and personality - the "it". And there's you, separate, watching that system do "its" thing. Our next pronoun experiment will resolve that duality by inviting you to identify with something much vaster than the system of the self.