Pickle juice – and other pungent foods – as a grounding strategy for managing episodes of dissociative shutdown

Dissociative shutdown states occur when the individual encounters inescapable stress or trauma – or memories of inescapable stress or trauma. In the therapeutic space – occupational therapy, psychotherapy, or family therapy – working with shutdown states poses a clinical challenge. The individual’s loss of full awareness of what they are doing, or their loss of capacity to feel their body, to think, or to move or act, can bring the therapeutic process to a halt. Over the last half-century, body-oriented therapists working with the felt sense of the body, therapists working with patients presenting with complex trauma, and therapists working with patients with functional/dissociative seizures have introduced the use of grounding strategies to help patients maintain their connection with the body, self, close others, and the environment. This article explores the use of pickle juice (and other pungent foods) as a useful grounding strategy for managing dissociative shutdown states. Clinical examples are provided via vignettes. Also provided are a hypothesis and neurobiological model – the homeostatic sensory-reset hypothesis – as to why pickle juice and other pungent foods, which activate special sensory receptors in the gastrointestinal tract called transient receptor potential channels, help to disrupt and alleviate dissociation shutdown states.