by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
How the Fragmentation of the Self May Lead to Issues in Later Life
What if dementia isn’t just a neurological condition but also the psyche’s last-ditch attempt to return to wholeness after a lifetime of fragmentation?
That might sound a little dramatic and I know it’s a sensitive topic but stay with me.
In my work as a coach, I serve people around the practical philosophy of REALNESS which can be summarised here as a process of shedding illusion and living in relationship with reality. It’s about being radically present, brutally honest, and deeply trusting.
Recently, after realising that a lot of older people (70s/80s/90s) start to feel like prisoners in their own bodies, I’ve been exploring a provocative theory: that dementia may be a final form of dissociation from a life – and body – that became too painful to stay present in.
If this could be a valid theory then what if the path to prevention isn’t just biomedical but something a little more holistic? What if it starts with embracing reality and consistently following the real path of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action?
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Psyche’s Escape Hatch
We already know and have a lot of evidence that dissociation is a psychological response to trauma: it’s a way for the mind to distance itself from unbearable reality.
But what if that same mechanism plays out over a lifetime and culminates – in some cases – as dementia?
Please note: this isn’t to say that dementia is only psychological or spiritual.
There are well-documented physiological causes: Alzheimer’s disease, vascular degeneration, plaques and tangles, etc. But research also shows that chronic stress, unresolved trauma, and emotional suppression correlate strongly with cognitive decline.
In one study published in Neurology, higher levels of midlife stress were associated with increased risk of dementia later in life (Johansson et al., 2010). Another study in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry found that individuals with a history of trauma were more likely to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms (Peavy et al., 2009).
On top of this evidence is the lived observations: for example, how many people with dementia seem to ‘revert’ to earlier versions of themselves – forgetting their current partner but remembering a previous one, for instance? It’s as if the psyche is retreating to the last place it felt safe and most REAL.
It seems to me that cases like this aren’t ‘random’ (i.e. the psyche isn’t just randomly choosing a point in time to return to):
What’s taking place is a regression – a return to the most stable self-concept (ego) before life became too painful to process and deal with. When we view this through the lens of realness, this looks a lot like a soul attempting to find home in its past, because it couldn’t find peace in its present (because the decline of the body and the inevitability of death as old age takes its toll are too much to bear).
When the Body Becomes a Prison
Many of us already live lives divorced from our bodies – even if they haven’t turned against us yet as we go through the stages of being born, ripening, decaying, and then dying:
We push through pain, suppress emotion, live in denial of death and do all kinds of conscious and unconscious mental gymnastics to keep the ego where it is (so we can avoid facing the shadow self and becoming whole).
The abridged version is that we construct egos to help us perform, achieve, and survive and, sometimes, those identities get so calcified that by the time we find that we’ve reached old age, we don’t know how to let them go.
That’s unfortunate because – more than most things – aging demands surrender (which means facing reality):
It demands we surrender youth, image, control, roles, bodily functions and mobility, and even memory but – if we never learned how to grieve – how to process loss – then aging feels like torture and the body, once a tool of expression, now becomes a prison.
In order to try and escape this prison (instead of accepting reality), the mind begins to break its own rules and starts to show us what we need to see rather than what’s actually there.
REALNESS teaches us that there’s a natural drive toward wholeness that’s literally always calling us into more wholeness. But if we’re too entrenched in ego, too identified with form, we can’t hear this call and life starts to slip between our fingers.
Eventually, the psyche may resort to dementia as its final act of self-liberation – an unconscious retreat into forgetfulness, because presence has become too painful for somebody locked in a body that doesn’t suit the self-concept or image that has traditionally been used to interact with the present and filter life through it.
The Real Risk: Refusing to Change
This brings us to a hard truth: dementia may not always be about physical decay as much as it is about our mental and emotional reactions to this decay.
Sometimes, dementia might be about disconnection from what’s most REAL about ourselves, the world, and reality itself.
If we go our entire lives without updating our identity and clinging to the unreal in order to avoid facing what’s real… if we keep rejecting change, denying grief, avoiding truth… then the self becomes more-and-more fragmented and our lives become more-and-more unreal.
In other words, the more we cling and refuse to let go, the harder it gets to integrate reality and actually work with it. Later in life, when the present becomes too unfamiliar to hold, the mind might regress to the last stable identity it remembers as a way of dissociating and not being completely overwhelmed.
This, of course, begs a question or two:
What if we never let it get to that point?
What if we lived in a way that made change sacred instead of something to be feared?
This brings us back to our REALNESS and using it as a preventative measure:
REALNESS as Preventative Soul Care
REALNESS is more than just a mindset – it’s a process of continuous integration, rooted in three stages:
1. Awareness
Learning to become conscious of your assumptions, patterns, stories, identities, and the emotional ‘stuff’ that guides your thoughts (without you knowing, usually).
This means training to notice when you’re living in resistance – i.e. when you’re clinging to a version of yourself that no longer fits what’s actually real. It’s about seeing reality without distortion and then acting from a place of wholeness instead of mental fragmentation projected out into the world.
2. Acceptance
Getting to a place where you can feel what’s actually there, let go of what’s passing or passed, and stop pretending things are okay when they’re not. This is the core of emotional health – it’s how we process loss instead of suppressing it.
Without acceptance, we also avoid the TRUTH about things with the cost of our emotions getting buried instead of faced. The longer we go without facing the truth, the more our emotional ‘stuff’ becomes the very fragmentation that fuels dissociation and separates us from our realness.
3. Action
Taking aligned steps based on truth, not F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”):
This includes adapting your self-concept to fit the current season of our life and evolving consciously rather than waiting for crisis to force your hand.
When you live from these three pillars, you’re doing more than managing stress – you’re creating spiritual resilience. You’re strengthening the muscle that lets you stay here, no matter what changes.
Practical Ways to Stay Whole and Avoid Unnecessary Fragmentation
Here are some practical steps you can take now to build a life that resists dissociation and supports cognitive and emotional wholeness:
1. Practice Daily Reality Check-Ins
Take 5 minutes each day to ask yourself questions that raise awareness and increase acceptance:
- What am I resisting right now?
- What feels true that I don’t want to accept?
- Where am I pretending?
Write it down and let your answers guide your realignment into wholeness and then REAL ACTION.
2. Process Grief Regularly
You don’t need a funeral to grieve – you just need to learn the art of LETTING GO (read my new book Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace to go deep into this):
Grieve the job you left, the body that’s changing, the relationships that shifted, and anything else that’s been and gone.
Unprocessed grief is one of the biggest contributors to emotional fragmentation and refusing to face emotions is what makes us more fragmented than anything else (because it increases dissociation and causes a wider gulf between our ego and our realness).
3. Ritualise Changes in Your Life
One of the reasons so many of us cling on to outdated images of ourselves and then get a massive shock in old age is because our culture has lost its traditions and rites of passage.
This being the case, you can start to create your own:
Mark birthdays not just with parties, but with reflection. Celebrate endings and beginnings.
Aging shouldn’t be a shock – it should be a sacred unfolding into more truth and wholeness (with death being the ultimate release when the time comes).
4. Stretch the Trust Muscle
Trust doesn’t mean blind hope – it means surrendering to what is, and taking action in flow rather than force.
Meditation, breathwork, and somatic practices help regulate your nervous system and build trust in the now.
If your nervous system feels safe you will fear reality less and become less dissociated overall.
5. Update Your Identity Often
Every season of life asks you to become someone new and to let go of what’s unreal:
Don’t cling to who you were at 25 – let your self-image evolve and let go of outdated pride.
Grow into the ‘You’ that reality is asking you to be now.
The Bigger Picture: Living and Dying Whole
If, in some cases, dementia is the soul’s retreat from a life it couldn’t bear to stay in, then REALNESS is about creating a life worth staying present for and reducing the risk (plus, it just feels good to be real and to flow with life instead of forcing everything).
Of course, we can’t control everything about our biology but we can control how we relate to the truth:
We can choose to meet reality with grace instead of resistance.
REALNESS isn’t just how you live. It’s how you die.
Fragmented or whole?
There’s a difference between ego memory and real memory:
Ego memory says, “This is who I used to be”.
Real memory says, “This is who I’ve always been beneath the form life takes”.
Stay real out there,
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