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Dissociation is the Root of War

Dissociation is the Root of War

Last updated on: March 1, 2026 at 12:24 am by Jeff Hood

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Dissociation is the Root of War 2026-03-01T00:24:09-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Dissociation and the Root of War

Dissociation and The Geography of the Chest

There is a geography of the chest. A ribcage that arches like a vaulted ceiling. Lungs that open and close like uncertain wings. A heart the size of a fist…always a fist. When a bomb falls on a city you have never visited, in a country your leaders call an enemy, something in this geography shifts. We are trained not to notice it. We are trained to call that distance objectivity, to call it security, to call it national interest. But the body knows before the mind consents. The body tightens. The breath shortens. The heart braces. The body is never not at war when war is being waged in its name.

Pause for a moment and feel your breath. Imagine a distant skyline ruptured by fire. Notice whether your chest remains open. The body does not understand geopolitics. It understands impact.

We have learned to watch war with a strange, dissociated calm…clean footage, pixelated maps, coordinates sliding across screens. The dead are reduced to a count. Targets instead of people. Collateral damage instead of children. Neutralized instead of killed. Theater of operations instead of someone’s kitchen table. Every abstraction is a small severing. Every euphemism is a managed distance. Over time…repeated across news cycles, speeches, briefings…that distance becomes the ambient dissociated condition of citizenship in a militarized world.

Dissociation: The First Technology of War

Dissociation is the first technology of war. Before any bomb is engineered, a more fundamental engineering occurs: the separation of self from other, of feeling from fact, of the body watching from the body being struck. War cannot be sustained among people who remain fully present to what is being done. If we truly felt the concussion…through soil and ocean floor, through the soles of our own feet…something in us would refuse to consent.

The dissociation I am naming here is not the protective reflex of a wounded nervous system, but the cultivated numbness of power. I include myself in this. I have changed the channel. I have let abstraction comfort me. I have told myself that distance is maturity. It took time…and the slow work of returning to my own body…to understand what that distance was costing me. Dissociation is not only political…it is a trauma response. It is how a psyche survives what it cannot bear. A culture organized around war becomes a culture in chronic trauma. We leave the body. We live in concept. We manage rather than mourn. And then we wonder at the numbness, the loneliness, the sense that life is happening behind glass.

The war industrializers depend on one idea above all others: That the enemy is other in kind. Other in feeling. Other in the texture of daily life. Propaganda is not primarily about lies…it is about distance. Keep them abstract. Keep them threatening. Do not let them become human in your imagination. Because once you see them setting bread on a table, once you see them watching their child sleep, you cannot bomb them without bombing something inside yourself.

I do not believe war is ever justified. Not defensive war. Not preemptive war. Not humanitarian war. The language changes…the rupture does not. Even when violence is framed as necessary, it still requires this severing. It still demands that we override the body’s recognition of shared humanity. The claim of necessity does not erase the spiritual cost. It only conceals it.

There is evil in the world. There is cruelty. There are governments capable of repression and harm. Naming that is not difficult. What is difficult is refusing the logic that violence is the only answer to violence. What is difficult is holding the grief without reaching for the weapon. But difficulty does not make war sacred. It makes nonviolence costly.

Spirituality Requires Presence

Spirituality, if it means anything, requires presence. It requires the capacity to remain inside one’s own body while facing what is unbearable. Dissociation is therefore not only the root of war…it is the end of spirituality. When we cannot feel what is done in our name: Prayer becomes performance. Worship becomes abstraction. Moral language becomes hollow. The first thing war kills is not truth but tenderness…the fragile, stubborn capacity to recognize ourselves in those we are told to erase.

The people who have done the deepest work on their own trauma often understand this intuitively. They know the cost of fragmentation. They know what it takes to come back into the body after leaving it. The movement required to sustain a bombing campaign and the movement that fractures a traumatized self are not merely similar…they are the same gesture at different scales. To heal oneself is a political act. To refuse numbness is to become ungovernable by those whose power depends upon it.

I am still learning how to refuse numbness. Some days I fail. Some days comfort wins. But each time I return to the breath…to the geography of the chest…I find that separation becomes harder to maintain. The distance collapses. The enemy acquires a face.

The Opposite of War/Dissociation Is Recognition

The opposite of war is not simply peace treaties signed in marble rooms. The opposite of war is recognition. It is embodiment. It is the daily decision to feel the full weight of what we cause and to refuse participation in it. To mourn strangers. To allow grief to cross borders. To say: I am not separate from this.

Every bomb dropped in our name lands somewhere in us as well. The refusal to feel it does not protect us. It ensures the bombs continue to fall.

To feel the bombs is to associate. To come back into the body…your body, their body, the body of the world. The moment you see yourself in the face of the designated enemy… The war loses one more soldier. Not a soldier with a gun. A soldier in the quieter army of complicity.
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*If you would like to support the Execution Intervention Project (the organization that financially supports Dr. Hood’s work), click here.

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About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a theologian, writer and activist who has spent years ministering to people on death row. As a spiritual advisor and witness to executions, he speaks out against state violence and calls for a society rooted in justice, mercy and the sacredness of life. You can read more about the author here.

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