You think your political ideology is the result of careful reasoning. Evidence considered, positions evaluated, and rational conclusions reached.
What if it’s actually a dissociative response to a system that demands you abandon your body?
Research shows a tough truth: rigid thinking is linked to emotional issues and dissociative symptoms.
People aren’t flawed for having strong beliefs. Today’s systems make them disconnect to survive.
Authoritarian systems cut off people from their own experiences.
They want you to ignore your feelings, like exhaustion, hunger, pain, or satisfaction, and keep going.
Keep working. Keep consuming. Your body’s signals become noise. Abstract systems become truth.
In those situations, rigid beliefs provide something useful: a structure that swaps real feelings for intellectual certainty.
You cannot trust what you feel, so you trust the doctrine. The theory. The political position.
Researchers document this as layers of disembodiment at individual and community levels.
Dominant stories, racist systems, and authoritarian ideas all influence how people live in or leave their bodies.
Not everyone responds in the same way. Some turn to rigid ideology. Some normalise dissociative states. Some go numb.
This isn’t about whether your beliefs are right or wrong. It’s important to realise that being lost in your thoughts, ignoring your senses, doesn’t mean you’re thinking deeply.
It’s a symptom of systems designed to separate you from physical reality.
You can keep treating your body as an inconvenience to your ideology. Or you can notice what happens when you let felt experience inform your thinking.
It’s up to you.
References
Jiménez, T., & Lee, G. (2022). Radicalizing Psychology; Embodying Decoloniality. Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice. https://doi.org/10.17161/gjcpp.v13i1.20632
Zmigrod, L. (2020). A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17, 1072 – 1092. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211044140
Vancappel, A., Kerbage, H., Réveillère, C., & Hage, E. (2023). Validation of the French version of the Emotion and Regulation Beliefs Scale (ERBS) and Dissociation Belief Scale (DBS). Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 51, 335 – 348. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1352465823000097
Seligman, R., & Kirmayer, L. (2008). Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 32, 31-64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-007-9077-8