My therapist asked me a question today that has me scratching my head.
"Where do you go when you dissociate?" I told her no where and she said that is not possible. I'm still intrigued by the question and yet completely baffled as to what my answer is.
So, I thought it would be interesting to post it here and see if anyone knows where they go when they dissociate?
Just for clarity, there are different levels and I am sure everyone experiences dissociation differently. But I'm talking higher up on the dissociation scale when it is more severe and takes time to get back to normal.
Oh, boy! My favorite topic! In fact, my T and I have decided that 2015 is MY YEAR to tackle this beast, so this is almost all we talk about.
I have my greatest dissociation and anxiety in therapy...it takes very little for me to pull away from feeling my body. It's tough for me to have the focus on me, I spent my life trying to hide, which is a Catch-22 because that is the antithesis of what therapy is! Argh!!!
Anyway, I don't go too far away. She has a huge set of french doors in her office that look out on a garden, and I spend over half of my time staring out there, or at the sheers over the door, or the window frame panels in the doors, or the cat that walks by or the occasional deer that shows up, sometimes a few feet away, sometimes up toward the ceiling - anywhere but focused on or IN my body.
I've often thought, and do need to put this into practice, that I need to turn so I am facing in the other direction, looking more at her and away from that damned door. She'll ask me a question, a not very intrusive one at that, and *shoop* I am gone. I hate it.
She gave me an assignment yesterday that you may want to try - using a scale from 1-10, 10 being highest, rate different situations of "ease" and "freeze". Alone, I am always a 10 on the ease scale, in therapy, I'm a freeze queen.
I sure hope this really is my year to break through this defense mechanism. It's a tough habit to break. And that is exactly what it is - it's no longer a necessary tool. Isn't it amazing how quickly and easily we can land there?
Yes! The more I ponder it, the more I realize just how amazing we are to be able to do this.
Part of my problem is, I am not at a place of wanting to stop. I like it. I like the fact that when I start to feel pain, I can go somewhere 'safe.'
Also, it's the same with me. My T can ask me a fairly innocuous question and I'm gone. She ends up repeating herself alot. LOL
I wonder if anyone else feels like I do--I'm not wanting or ready to stop using it. It almost feels like when my kids wanted me to stop smoking so badly and I didn't want to. When the time came, I was done. I quit. Instantly. But before that, I had no desire to stop.
Maybe one day I'll be ready to let it go...but not now; not yet.
I understand. It's addicting. It actually does release opioids and dopamine so that's why it feels.good.
but until we are fully present we can't heal. Therein lies the rub.
Exactly Wingnut.
Anamiame, would you mind sharing what kind of work you and your therapist are doing to hammer on this topic? :-)
Wingnut:
We've been working heavily on my dissociation. I've always known I dissociate. In 3rd grade the teacher would walk around and tap me on the shoulder when I was 'zoned.' It must have been put in my records because all through elementary school that's what the teachers would do, just walk by and gently touch my shoulder so that the other students didn't see and enough to brake the stare.
The dissociation started to get worse since I went back to therapy in October. T would ask me a question and instantly, I had no IDEA what the question was--it was instant.
Monday was bad after the memory. The memory was more than traumatic and I went into a pretty severe dissociative state and I couldn't snap out of it. So that's why she was asking the question, you have to go somewhere, where do you go?
It may be that my dissociation is more severe than others, so this might not make sense? But even this weekend, I've learned it's alot more of an issue than what I could accept before. Make sense?
I thought about this question a lot. Not sure how severe my dissociation was, probably not very - just zoning out a lot. But people who are traumatized often instinctively regress to an earlier state of things where they still felt safe. Curling up into an embryonic position, rocking, or even just the way vanilla is such a popular taste (apparently it's because it's the taste that's closest to mother's milk).
Do you think dissociation could send us back into a state of mind we last had when we were very small?
I've got two kids, and when they were babies, I often wondered what it was like for them, what the world felt like, what was going on in their heads. They had no ability yet to perceive their surroundings. No frame of reference for anything. Not even that much of awareness - babies are born aware, but then the sheer physical stress of breathing and digestion catches up with them, and they pretty much faceplant and become very woozy. It's probably very peaceful, very dreamlike. So maybe dissociation has some echoes of that time?
This smacks so familiar. I spent hours gazing out the window in elementary school.
All my t does is ask me what I feel in my body and I get spaced out. It pisses me off because it takes so little and happens week after week. I'm on a mission tho.
It does make perfect sense to me An..I figured we're masking some pretty serious *!
Such an interesting topic! When I was a kid, my Dad used to refer to me as "Walter Mitty", and I had no idea what that meant at the time....apparently I zoned out quite often. My memories of playing my violin sometimes are just that it gave me a chance to escape from everything and I wasn't always even thinking about or feeling the music...just kind of making to-do lists in my head. So I was essentially escaping within my own escape from reality- anything to avoid my feelings. Other times, I did genuinely feel something in the music but that was not my "go to" as a kid.
I guess maybe my love of running (the physical kind) is a more honest and direct application of my "flight" typology. On good days, I do feel connected to myself while running and have made some improvements in that direction - it's not always about running from something. Anyways- glad to read what others have to say about their dissociation.
I just seem to go to a place that's distant and kind of cottony, like all the rough edges are rounded and loud noises and bright lights are turned down. It's very comfortable.
Kizzie, that's alot like mine. It's sort of nowhere? Peaceful...distant.
Do you get this sense of timelessness, like you're floating? And everything's far away and nothing matters. Sometimes it reminds me of this moment between sleep and waking up: you're conscious, but not very. You hear noises and you perceive some things, but they don't concern you. You just are.
...when I put it like this, it sounds like the kind of thing other people pay gurus to be able to learn. :blink: Or like a trance.
S Cat:
Yes! Now, scratching my head, T said, "You have to go somewhere." How do you describe 'where' that is? It .... isn't?
I've been doing that alot this weekend. I think it's a combination of seeing my brother and learning that my situation psychologically is alot more serious than I thought. Kinda crushing and freeing all at the same time.
But I don't 'go' anywhere. I just sort of 'take a break' from it all. Hmmm.
Yes, I think of it like that, too. Like putting the gear shift into neutral and letting my mental motor idle a bit, just puttering about without much of a goal. But that's the milder dissociation I get nowadays. The ones I had before were very unsettling. It was like being a robot. No one at home. Or maybe that feeling was the result of the depersonalization and derealization? Not sure, I usually had everything at once, so I've no idea which was which. But like I said, it was unsettling. Oh hey, apparently I haven 'off' switch. :blink:
I really appreciate this discussion. If I do go somewhere I am unaware of where it is. I had a massage therapist that asked me often, but gently, "hey, where did you just go?" The question would bring me back, but I never questioned where I had been, just away. She's the one that clued me in that I was dissociating. I might bring this up with my T. Never heard that people are aware of where they go. :blink:
I do a kind of dissociation that I thought was more catastrophisizing/day dreaming. That's when I think about all the worst possible things that could happen. There are actual thoughts then, but when I come back to reality they get hazy and stop making sense, kinda like dreams sometimes make no sense when you wake up, but you know they were perfectly logical when you were dreaming.
I relate to the feeling of going somewhere but not knowing where, sort of floating. I dont get the feeling now but did quite a few times to escape unpleasant things in the past. Id kind of just go, then decide to come back to see if it was safe, if it was id stay if it wasnt id go again. It was a peaceful place. In T I feel a bit vague and find once I walk out I have trouble remembering much of what was discussed. Id just thought it was my poor memory but I guess im still leaving to a degree. Lol more to work on! Seriously though it is just fantastic reading all your experiences. Thankyou. :hug:
As someone who's experienced it since early childhood, your therapist's characterization feels off the mark, at least as a description of what happens to me. I've certainly tried "going somewhere" in my head voluntarily, shutting down, de-focusing, distancing myself for protection. I will even picture myself somewhere safe and away.
But those intentional attempts to disengage are completely different from the sudden, overwhelming, amnesia-like quality I call disassociating. I don't choose it, I don't control it, and it's more like my real self enters suspended animation, a holding pattern watching me move through situations...and that's just when I am actually aware it's happening. When it's especially severe, I only become aware later, when I'm "back". It's closer to sleepwalking or lucid dreaming than any comforting escape. The moments before a panic attack are the worst, when I begin to be overwhelmed and sense a loss of control. Not sure if that too is a form of it, but if someone asked me "where I went", I'd be stumped. *, maybe.
Coda,
I love your description, because that's it for me too. I have different 'levels' I think of dissociation. It's almost like I go into a trance that I can't get out of till someone 'snaps' their fingers three times. LOL
I had to do an MRI recently and I'm severely claustrophobic. I have to have Atavan to be able to do it. Well, it got messed up and I didn't have the Atavan. It took about 45 minutes trying to calm me down before they could put me in the machine--I wasn't able to just 'dissociate' on demand, but I was trying hard and finally, I did...I think from the panic.
But I agree with you, she's off the mark. I think I told her that, but I don't remember.
Hmmmm, different levels of dissociating - great food for thought Coda. I just posted about something I did not remember from my teens that some friends who were visiting yesterday told me about. I had absolutely no memory of doing what they recounted (but pretended I did).
I have a lot of blank spots in my life - it's like amnesia and perhaps it's a heavier duty dissociation, the kind that would have been needed when I was truly frightened or overwhelmed in my childhood.
Does anyone else have gaps or fuzzy recollections of entire periods of time?
Yes. As a matter of fact, I wrote a post on here and I have no memory whatsoever of writing that post or even reading the thread.
I do think that there are different depths of dissociative behavior; I can 'zone' out when someone is talking to me and need them to repeat what they've said or I can go into the more extreme states like the MRI machine or what happened a couple weeks ago after a recovered a very bad memory. I can 'catch' the lighter ones...and even attempt to use them to minimize pain...but absolutely no control over the severe ones.
As stated in another post, I am reading "The Body Keeps The Score" by Van Der Kolk which has photos of MRIs.
What was very interesting was the MRI of someone dissociating - it was completely blank. The brain totally shut down. Very weird - 'splains a lot.
Wingnut, THAT'S INTERESTING!!! Really interesting!
Brain needs a break; brain takes a break!
Quote from: Kizzie on March 18, 2015, 07:12:53 PM
Does anyone else have gaps or fuzzy recollections of entire periods of time?
Too many. I call it Swiss cheese brain. I told someone that I'd never been to a certain city. Several years later I remembered that we had taken a family vacation there. I had totally blanked it out. I asked my siblings for details and it turns out that my m was hyper stressed on that trip, so probably things did not go well. So I blanked it. Still have hardly any memories of the events. That's a big one, but there are a ton of small ones. Sometimes makes me wonder what else is in my head that I don't currently have access to.