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Disconnected

  • Writer: Deric Hollings
    Deric Hollings
  • 1 day ago
  • 10 min read

 

When listening to an electronic dance music (EDM) DJ set by Sara Collado, I heard her spin the track “Sleepy (DP-6 Dub)” (2025) by PTTY, LR, and DP-6. In the version spun by Collado, a woman’s voice can be heard saying “disconnected.” This reminds me of a personal anecdote.

 

Given my appeal to rigor when attending graduate schools for counseling (2009-2011) and social work (2012-2014), as I maintain that the words people use matter, I was generally disconnected (not connected—joined or linked together) from most of my peers when they misused words.

 

For example, it seemed to me that my peers and others within the field of care for mental, emotional, and behavioral health (collectively “mental health”) tended to come up with new and arguably trivial terms for emotions. I then disagreed with this subjectively unhelpful practice.

 

For context, one source thusly defines disconnection, “Feeling a lack of empathy or association with something.” Regarding the term “feeling,” which I mostly use synonymously with “emotion,” I stated in Nobody and Nothing Can Make You Feel Happy, or Otherwise:

 

[T]he American Psychological Association (APA) thusly defines feeling:

 

1. a self-contained phenomenal experience. Feelings are subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them. They are inevitably evaluated as pleasant or unpleasant, but they can have more specific intrapsychic qualities, so that, for example, the affective tone of fear is experienced as different from that of anger.

 

The core characteristic that differentiates feelings from cognitive, sensory, or perceptual intrapsychic experiences is the link of affect to appraisal. Feelings differ from emotions in being purely mental, whereas emotions are designed to engage with the world.

 

2. any experienced sensation, particularly a tactile or temperature sensation (e.g., pain, coldness).

 

One of the most difficult aspects of my approach to mental health care is convincing people that their feelings relate either to emotions (e.g., disgust), or sensations (e.g., tightness in the jaw). After all, even the APA maintains that “feelings differ from emotions,” making my job difficult.

 

Specifically, it isn’t uncommon for the clients with whom I work to conflate intuitions with feelings. As an example, client X may say, “I feel like you’re not listening to me.” However, in this context, the so-called feeling isn’t an emotion or sensation. It’s an intuition.

 

To be clear, the APA defines intuition as “immediate insight or perception, as contrasted with conscious reasoning or reflection,” and defines insight as “the clear and often sudden discernment of a solution to a problem by means that are not obvious and may never become so, even after one has tried hard to work out how one has arrived at the solution.”

 

Now, consider which sentence sounds more appropriate: “I feel like you’re not listening to me,” or, “It seems like you’re not listening to me.” For clarity, to “seem” is to appear to the observation or understanding. This correlates with intuition and insight, not an actual feeling.

 

When attending both graduate school programs, I often heard my peers misusing feelings-based terms (e.g., I feel like the mental health field is the right fit for me), as well as claiming that disconnection was a feeling. However, one either is or isn’t disconnected. It isn’t a feeling.

 

As an example, I’m intentionally disconnected from many of my professional peers in the field of mental health. For clarity, to “disconnect” merely means to sever the connection of or between. I want little to do with most of my peers. Therefore, I remain disconnected from them.

 

This matter has nothing to do with feelings, emotions, or sensations. I simply am disconnected. Of course, my counseling and social work peers aren’t the only bunch misusing feelings-based language when addressing supposed disconnection. For a pragmatic example, one source states:

 

Feeling disconnected from the people we rely on for help and support puts us on high alert, triggering the body’s stress response. Studies show that lonely people, like most people under stress, have less restful sleep, higher blood pressure, and increased levels of the hormones cortisol and epinephrine; these, in turn, contribute to inflammation and weakened immunity.

 

I have two rigorous points of contention with the claims of this source. First, the APA defines loneliness as “affective and cognitive discomfort or uneasiness from being or perceiving oneself to be alone or otherwise solitary.” Loneliness is primarily associated with sadness.

 

Do you want to take a guess as to what’s not in the APA dictionary? Disconnection. Yet, the APA defines disconnection syndrome as “any neurological disorder resulting from a separation or isolation of cortical areas that usually work together.” This involves the physical brain.

 

It doesn’t involve feelings, emotions, or sensations concerning the abstract mind. Second, so-called “feeling disconnected from the people we rely on for help and support” doesn’t “put us on high alert, triggering the body’s stress response.” There’s no feeling-trigger effect in this regard.

 

Yet, the psychotherapeutic modality that I practice, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), better explains what causes such an effect. Rather than disconnecting from this blogpost at this point, I invite you to consider what actually causes unwanted outcomes.

 

REBT uses the ABC model to illustrate that when an undesirable Action occurs and you Believe an unhelpful narrative about the event, it’s your unfavorable assumption, not the occurrence itself, that causes an unpleasant Consequence. This is known as distress or disturbance.

 

In particular, there are four predominate irrational beliefs which people often use to distress or disturb themselves: global evaluations, low frustration tolerance, awfulizing, and demandingness. When contemplating these unproductive scripts, think of the acronym GLAD.

 

Addressing how people upset themselves with unhelpful attitudes, the ABC model incorporates Disputation of unproductive philosophies of life in order to explore Effective new beliefs. Whereas rigid beliefs cause self-disturbance, flexible beliefs result in an un-disturbed condition.

 

Given the ABC model explanation of causality regarding “the body’s stress response,” when one is disconnected (i.e., a state of being), then one cannot possibly feel so-called disconnection (i.e., an arguably trivial term for emotion). So, if you feel sadness, your beliefs caused this outcome.

 

If you’re looking for a provider who tries to work to help you understand how thinking impacts physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral elements of your life, I invite you to reach out today by using the contact widget on my website.

 

As the world’s foremost EDM-influenced REBT psychotherapist—promoting content related to EDM, I’m pleased to try to help people with an assortment of issues from anger (hostility, rage, and aggression) to relational issues, adjustment matters, trauma experience, justice involvement, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression, and other mood or personality-related matters. 

 

At Hollings Therapy, LLC, serving all of Texas, I aim to treat clients with dignity and respect while offering a multi-lensed approach to the practice of psychotherapy and life coaching. My mission includes: Prioritizing the cognitive and emotive needs of clients, an overall reduction in client suffering, and supporting sustainable growth for the clients I serve. Rather than simply trying to help you to feel better, I want to try to help you get better!

 

 

Deric Hollings, LPC, LCSW


 

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