descriptions of dissociation

themostradicalthing:

theneurotypicals:

Depersonalisation

Common: ‘I felt strange / weird’, ‘I felt as if I was floating away’, ‘I felt disembodied / disconnected / detached / far away from myself’, ‘apart from everything’, ‘in a place of my own / alone’, ‘like I was there but not there’, ’I could see and hear everything but couldn’t respond’

Less Common: ‘puppet-like’, ‘robot-like’, ‘acting a part’, ‘I couldn’t feel any pain’ ‘like I was made of cardboard’,  ‘I felt like I was just a head stuck on a body’, ‘like a spectator looking at myself on TV’, ‘an out of body experience’, ‘my hands or feet felt smaller / bigger’. ‘when I touched things it didn’t feel like me touching them’

Derealisation

‘My surroundings seemed unreal / far away’, ‘I felt spaced out’, ‘It was like looking at the world through a veil or glass’, ‘I felt cut off or distant from the immediate surroundings’, ‘objects appeared diminished in size /  flat / dream-like / cartoon like / artificial / unsolid’

Other dissociative symptoms 

Memory: “I drove the car home/got dressed/had dinner but can’t remember
anything about it”, “I don’t know who I am or how I got here” (fugue state), “I
remember things but it doesn’t feel like it was me that was there”. 

Identity: “I feel like I’m two separate people/someone else”. 

Other: “I felt like time was passing incredibly slowly/quickly”, “I get so absorbed
in fantasy/a TV programme that it seems real”, “I felt an emptiness in my head
as if I was not having any thoughts at all”. 

Source: Jon Ston. Dissociation: What Is It and Why Is It Important? Practical Neurology, 2006; 6: 308-313.

This is seriously something all psychiatric students/professionals/diagnosticians need to read.

There are not enough dissociation-specific “layman’s” words and phrases to highlight what folks with dissociative disorders (or other conditions with marked dissociation) go through.

All we have are these vague sounding terms like the above. So often they’re ignored/belittled, when instead they should be taken seriously and taken as indications to investigate the possibility of dissociation further.

If I had this sort of vocabulary I wouldn’t have spent 8 mystified years referring to how I spent a huge chunk of my waking life as “that feeling that there isn’t a word for” or  “the water running out of the bathtub feeling”

Sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the biological to the cultural is posed and reposed, where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly speaking, be answered. Understood as a border concept, sexual difference has psychic, somatic, and social dimensions that are never quite collapsible into one another but are not for that reason ultimately distinct. Does sexual difference vacillate there, as a vacillating border, demanding a rearticulation of those terms without any sense of finality? Is it, therefore, not a thing, not a fact, not a presupposition but rather a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes – but also never quite appears?

Judith Butler, from Undoing Gender

hello! I was just wondering where that quote you added to the reblog of the mountain goats was from (I tried google and it didn’t turn anything up)

It’s John! Being his goshdarnit-sweet-as-can-be-angel-self and reminding us all that life is rich with textured sadnesses that will eventually transform into the source of wry, self-deprecating fits of laughter. It’s part of a longer speech at the beginning of that live version of the track. 

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