How to make sense of the Aurora shooting and similar incidents? An answer lies in looking at them in terms of a universal human phenomenon, "dissociation." Dissociation explains how we simply don't mentally connect the dots of our inner and outer realities.

Look at us in context. America and much of the world in fact, includes disconnections that seem "crazy" or unreasonable: sometimes it's dramatic and clear, as with the shooting in Aurora or with schizophrenia. Other times, it's subtle and "normalized" but has even more severe repercussions over time. For instance, what is one of the most important things to Americans? Our children of course; and so why do we pay teachers poorly? Not to mention that we continue to trash the environment, thus ensuring the suffering of our offspring. We take terrible care of our health, overeating junk, boozing it up and not exercising. We are broke but spend a billion dollars on campaign funds.

This kind of disconnection, craziness and hypocrisy is nothing new or unique to Americans. Warring and killing for peace and in the name of God, for instance, has gone on for God knows how long. How to understand such strange and apparently human phenomena? My 38 years of psychology studies would point to the process called "dissociation." It means, in short, that we humans are perceptually in our own, disconnected worlds.

Dissociation is a natural psychological process involving alterations in personal identity or sense of self. With stress or trauma, these alterations can include: a sense that self or the world is unreal (derealization and depersonalization); a loss of memory (amnesia); and fragmentation of identity or self into separate streams of consciousness. Dissociation occurs on a continuum. At the "low" end of the continuum, dissociation describes common events such as daydreaming while driving a vehicle or forgetting our flaws while we're critical of others'. The midrange would be denial of our addictions or sketchy rationalizations for why they are good for us. In the extreme, it's multiple personality disorder. In each of the above, we don't realize that we are detached from reality and making up our own.

Dissociation refers to a disconnection from both parts of our selves -- addicts disconnect from the parts of themselves that says "don't do that, it's bad for you"--and from others. James Holmes was in some respects disconnected from others as well as from his own humane self. While electronic media have connected us in some ways, they have also put us in our own bubbles of sound, images, thoughts and feelings. Today we are quite dissociated or in our own worlds.

Some degree of dissociation is ubiquitous in humans and that explains how a great spiritual leader like Martin Luther King, Jr., could have affairs. Hypocritical? Yes, and it's like being under hypnosis: we experience different, detached realities in a vacuum. This is how soldiers do atrocities that, as civilians, they would not do.

So when you ask, "how could a James Holmes do such and such a thing?" consider dissociation. He is on the extreme, and we in minor ways in everyday life, mentally dissociate from reality. While average dissociation gives us an escape from stress, when dissociation gets extreme, the costs can be tragic.

Charles Horowitz, of Boulder, is a counselor with a doctorate in clinical psychology.