Tag: dissociation

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”

From The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease by Robert C Scaer

When people develop PTSD, the replaying of the trauma leads to sensitization: with every replay of the trauma there is an increasing level of distress. In those individuals, the traumatic event, which started out as a social and interpersonal process, develops secondary biological consequences that are hard to reverse once they become entrenched. Because these patients have intolerable sensations and feelings, their tendency is to actively avoid them. Mentally, they split off or “dissociate” these feelings; physically, their bodies tighten and brace against them. They seem to live under the assumption that if they feel those sensations and feelings, they will overwhelm them forever. These are patients who rely on medications, drugs, and alcohol  to make these feelings go away, because they have lost confidence that they can learn to tolerate them without outside help. The fear of being consumed by these “terrible” feelings leads them to believe that only not feeling them will make them go away.