Dissociative Effect is a visceral and introspective poetic journey through trauma, embodiment, and healing, revealing how returning to the body becomes an act of truth and transformation. What inspires you to write poetry?

It is said that there is almost nowhere on earth where you can stand more than six feet away from a spider. Poems too can also be found everywhere if they’re looked for – addressing every realm of what in our lives can feel broken: injuries of the heart, in love, in friend­ship, in family, grief, fear, anger, injustice, powerlessness, loneliness, and so many other places. Bringing words together in lyrical form helps us deal with some of the emotional intensity of living.

Amidst the trauma and the suffering of our lives, most of us can appreciate that powerlessness and invis­ibility are not minimal things. Poetry is the language that bridges our interior and exterior worlds. A person who asks words to do things with their feelings and emotions is not powerless. A person who makes phrases that connect people, that tell the truth, and expand reality is countering despair and depression. Anyone who has written a poem has felt this. I think this is the healing alchemy of poetry.

How did your work in medicine shape the way you approached writing about trauma and the body?

Practicing medicine for nearly two decades has taught me about the link between our personal stories and the universal or collective human narrative. Stories of health, trauma, and the body often rely on specific, intimate, and sensory-driven experiences which reflect broader shared human truths. I don’t want to minimize the personal effects of trauma, but to acknowledge that we are not alone in our experiences and our search for meaning.

The book moves from pathology to reclamation across its three sections. Did you always envision this structure, or did it emerge as you wrote?

I can’t speak to the process for all poets, but when I started writing poetry, I had no expectation that I would ever publish a book. I wrote poetry because I wanted to, because I needed to. After a couple of years, I realized that I had written several hundred poems. When I looked for themes in the content, I could see that there was a trajectory, a healing arc, which I had been living and writing about. As a physician, we are trained to see problems with a lens that matches the three sections of this book; namely, disease (pathos), diagnosis (diagnoses), and treatment (ad sanadum).

You write about dissociation with such clarity. What helped you reconnect with your own body enough to translate that experience into language?

In the process of writing the book, I was engaging regularly with several embodied or somatic practices (yoga, meditation, sauna with cold water immersion), which helped me to reflect on the ways in which we are present and not present in our lives. Sometimes, disembodiment involves distraction or a lack of mindful attention as we are going about our lives. Sometimes, disembodiment and dissociation are more than that when they serve as elaborate protective mechanisms against trauma, which might otherwise be unbearable in a moment.

I had mostly finished the book and chosen the title, Dissociative Effect, when ketamine became widely available as a mental health treatment. Before writing the intro and publishing the book, I researched therapeutic ketamine in an effort to understand if and how this might help my patients. Along the way, I received a ketamine treatment and experienced “the dissociative effect.” Through my own journey, I understood more deeply how dissociation can shift perspective, just as narrative voice shifts perspective in writing and storytelling. Therein lies our capacity for healing.

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