Dissociative disorders  ยท  Gold Coast

When parts of the self
don’t speak
to each other.

Therapy for dissociation, depersonalisation, derealisation, and the experience of a self that sometimes goes somewhere you can’t follow. In-person in Miami, Gold Coast. Telehealth available Australia-wide.

Book a session Medicare rebates →
Quick answer

Therapy for dissociative disorders on the Gold Coast at Jackson Hill Psychology uses a slow, relational psychodynamic approach: working with the whole self, including the parts that have learned not to be known. Sessions are $250, or $105 out of pocket with a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP.

What this kind of experience looks like

There are gaps in your experience that are hard to explain. You find yourself somewhere and don’t quite know how you got there. You come back to yourself mid-conversation, mid-task, mid-day, and realise that something was happening but you were not quite in it. Sometimes it is small: a few minutes, a mild sense of unreality, the feeling of watching yourself from a slight distance. For some people it is larger: hours, whole episodes that belong to an inner world with its own logic that the rest of you cannot access.

Depersonalisation is the sense of being outside your own experience: watching yourself act, speak, feel, without being fully inside it. Derealisation is the sense that the world outside is not quite real, that it has a quality of flatness or dream. Both are ways the self has learned to create distance between itself and something it could not process while being fully present to it.

For many people in this territory, there is not one unified experience of the self. There are different states: moods, voices, ways of being, that do not quite know about each other. Not a dramatic fracture, usually. More like a self that holds multiple registers that rarely meet, that learned very early to keep certain things in separate rooms so that the person could continue functioning.

Depersonalisation Derealisation Time gaps Fragmented memory Multiple self-states Feeling unreal Coming back to yourself

How dissociation forms, and why it persists

Dissociation is one of the most elegant responses the self has available to overwhelming experience. When what is happening is too much to hold while remaining present, the self can leave: put part of itself somewhere safer, continue functioning with what remains, and return only when it is safe to do so. This is not a malfunction. It is a form of intelligence.

The difficulty is that the conditions that originally required this response are usually long past, but the response itself has become a reflex. The self learned to disappear under certain conditions. Now it disappears under conditions that carry even a faint resemblance to the originals: certain kinds of closeness, certain emotional registers, certain pressures that the body recognises before the mind does.

What was harmed in relationship cannot fully heal in isolation. The parts of the self that learned to disappear did so because being present in contact with another person was too costly. The repair of that requires a different kind of relational experience: one where presence is possible without it costing what it once cost.

How the work approaches it

Therapy with dissociation is slow by necessity, not by convention. The parts of the self that have learned to stay separate did so for reasons that were once very good ones. They will not come forward because a technique asks them to. They come forward when the conditions are safe enough, when there is enough of a sustained relational experience to trust that what is brought into the room will be met rather than overwhelmed.

The relational psychodynamic approach does not try to merge or integrate parts of the self by force. It works with whatever is present in the room. It pays attention to what appears and disappears, to when a person goes somewhere and comes back, to what the shifts signal about what is close to the surface. The aim is not to eliminate the capacity for dissociation but to make the full self more available: more able to stay present, more able to experience the present moment without the past flooding it.

This is not fast work. It is the kind of work that tends to produce changes that hold.

Jackson Hill, Clinical Psychologist, Gold Coast
The psychologist

A practice that can hold complexity without needing to simplify it.

MPsych Clinical  ·  AHPRA Registered  ·  Provider No. 5666808K

I’m Jackson Hill, a Clinical Psychologist in Miami, Gold Coast. I work with people whose experience of themselves is fragmented, discontinuous, or internally divided in ways that are difficult to explain. I am interested in the whole self: including the parts that have learned not to be known, and what becomes possible when they begin to be.

My orientation is relational and psychodynamic. I keep a small caseload and work under ongoing individual supervision. Accessible from Burleigh Heads, Varsity Lakes, Mermaid Beach, and across the southern Gold Coast.

Fees, format and what to expect

Session fee

$250Per session
$105With MHCP rebate

Medicare rebates apply with a valid Mental Health Care Plan. How to get a referral →

Format & location

50–60 minute individual sessions.
In-person at Suite 11, 2098 Gold Coast Highway, Miami QLD 4220.
Telehealth available Australia-wide.
Street parking nearby.

Questions

Frequently asked

Dissociative disorders involve a disruption in the normal continuity of consciousness, identity, or memory. For many people this looks like gaps in time, feeling detached from your own body or experience, or a sense that different parts of yourself don’t quite know about each other. These experiences usually formed as ways of surviving something that was too much to process all at once.

Often, yes. Dissociation is one of the more common ways the self responds to overwhelming experience, particularly when that experience was relational. The self learned to be in more than one place at once: present enough to function, absent enough to survive. That learned capacity does not simply switch off once the original conditions no longer apply.

The work is slow and relational. It does not try to force parts of the self together before there is enough safety for that to happen. It works with whatever is present in the room, building the kind of sustained relational experience in which previously disconnected parts can begin to make contact. The pace is always led by the client.

Yes. With a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP, Medicare rebates apply. Sessions are $250 and your out-of-pocket cost with a valid plan is $105 per session.

Jackson Hill Psychology is at Suite 11, 2098 Gold Coast Highway, Miami QLD 4220, between Burleigh Heads and Mermaid Beach. Telehealth is available anywhere in Australia.