Structural dissociation: Understanding your personality's survival parts

Savvy Psychologist

Macmillan Holdings, LLC

Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Education, Mental Health, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

539. Dissociation is a normal human experience, but when it's outside of normal limits, it can be dysregulating. In this episode, Dr. Monica Johnson and Alexandra Mejia look at the signs of structural dissociation, the importance of building a baseline of coping skills, and the need for trauma-informed, integrated therapy (like DBT and somatic work) for long-term healing.

Learn more about Sasha at her practice, MindfulInsightsMHC.

Find a transcript here.

Savvy Psychologist is hosted by Dr. Monica Johnson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm sure you've heard about dissociation around social media, but I'm pretty confident that you've never heard of structural dissociation.
0:12.4	Today, I have a guest speaker who's going to give us the lowdown on dissociation and ways to structure interventions that can be helpful.
0:23.9	Welcome back to savvy psychologist. I'm your host, Dr. Monica Johnson. Every week on this show, I'll help you face life challenges with evidence-based
0:29.8	approaches, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment. I am so happy to have Sasha with us today
0:37.4	to talk about structural dissociation.
0:40.9	This may be a topic that you haven't heard about before, but I'm sure you've heard about
0:46.3	dissociation because it's been something that I've been seeing more and more in the mental
0:51.7	health community. So I am so pleased to present our guest today.
0:57.6	Sasha, can you please give people an introduction to who you are? Absolutely. Thank you so much,
1:03.7	Monica. Alexandra Mejia. Everybody calls me Sasha. I run a private practice. It's a teaching private practice that specializes working with complex trauma, dissociation, and personality disorders, which, believe it or not, that whole group really does kind of go together hand in hand.
1:25.5	I specialize working with structural dissociation as a model to help
1:30.8	reintegrate pieces of my client's personality back into a whole. Yeah. And before we get into the
1:39.7	structural dissociation part, can you just give us a general kind of working definition of dissociation
1:45.3	as a starting point? Absolutely. Dissociation is actually a biological tool that we all have,
1:54.5	and we all use it depending on the situation. And it can span from something as mundane as daydreaming or highway hypnosis
2:04.4	to dissociative identity disorder where you have these very strong dissociative parts that
2:12.7	create memory loss when they're activated. So there's a great spectrum.
2:18.2	And in the middle of that spectrum
2:20.5	is where a lot of the trauma is, right?
2:23.6	Where we might feel like we can't connect with our own bodies,
2:28.2	or we feel like things are foggy around us and unreal,
2:32.6	or possibly even have pieces of memory missing from our day to day.
	...

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