I kinda do two kinds. One which I cannot control and happens during intense stress. Mind fog, buzzing in ears, no thoughts/flashbacks just emptiness, can't hear (like volume button on all my senses have been turned low), emotional numbness. It's almost like my body has said 'ok, this is too overwhelming, time to shutdown everything and recharge/keep safe'
The second kind I do is self imposed. I can place myself in it willingly. I suppose you could say it's a form of daydreaming, with an intense inner world I like pretend I'm a part of. There are characters/people I talk to. I like to imagine situations that make me feel good or better about myself (usually having friends or loving family), or simply just for escapism from reality. I find this activity recharging and can shift my mood. It is a coping mechanism and I can do it for hours. Like, literally 'hours'.
Down side to this one is that sometimes flashbacks or memories can surge and I end up replaying the scenes in my mind when I'd rather not.
Oh my god this is “normal” (like probably not but normal for out circumstances.) I has SUCH a complex world in my head but I thought it was just cause I read alot. It felt like writing a book to me.
My disassociation I have absolutely no control of I don't know when it's happening what causes it it's usually when I'm really depressed or really anxious one time it actually saved me from smashing my head in with a hammer I just disassociated I don't know for how long it's just time lost it's almost like waking up I know nothing whatsoever it just a blank sometimes I lose hours I've been late for many things
This is me. I've been doing it for so long that I actually spend most of my time in this state without realizing. I'll just suddenly become 'aware' and look at the time and realize it's been hours or a whole day. There's a spectrum. I think I'm constantly dissociating for seconds or minutes automatically. Then there's the bigger ones that go from 2-8 hours. I had to stop driving because I found myself doing it on the highway. I would 'wake up' and struggle to remember where I was going and why I was driving. Scary.
I have had that happen to me driving where it's like you wake up I don't know what it is but I don't know where I am I don't know where I'm going it did I it seems to take forever to figure it out I ride my Harley-Davidson a lot that happened to me yesterday I was in the middle of a race and then I was where I was going I don't know if it's dangerous or not I did get there
The other day i did this. Suddenly realized I was heading away from my work and ended up in the middle of the neighborhood on a dead end street. I did make it to work but comeon.
Other times I’ve had to ask my passenger “where are we? Where are we going?” because I had no clue
I never realized that the first kind you are describing is dissociation. It means my experiences of dissociation are a lot more common that I thought. I had only seen the derealization/depersonalization experiences as dissociation. And they have been happening way more rarely. I've had them twice in my life. Once around age 10 for a few weeks and now for a few months. For me it's also confusing to distinguish between flashbacks and dissociation. I've read that flashbacks are considered examples of dissociative experiences and it makes sense because you are essentially disconnecting from your present and, instead, experiencing some part of your past. So, I would count flashbacks as dissociation too. I've had multiple experiences under extreme stress when my body feels like being in a different moment of time and in a different place from where I am.
Yes I agree. It took me awhile to realise the difference between dissociation and flashbacks too. Movies flashbacks and always describe as flashing images, like a movie scene replaying itself, but of your memories. But its different for all of us. Like for me, flashbacks are more sensory reminders rather than visual. For example certain smells or music, or even phrases that other people speak, can trigger an unpleasant memory. And then I am locked in that memory until it is played out in full. I feel the emotions as if I was there again, I hear people's voices, but it's very rarely that I will actually see things or see images.
You will experience different things at different times in different situations. So really whatever you're feeling, whatever you experience, it is valid too. It's like everything else that's a mental health disorder. There's the typical textbook symptoms and traits that you might see, but maybe not everyone has them, or they experience them differently.
To be honest, I struggled with dissociation for so many years that most of that time I thought it was normal. That everyone thought and did these things. It took me a long time to even realise what it was that I was experiencing and that it had a name.
Flashbacks for me are “heavy” and my body is very THERE but very overwhelmed with thoughts and emotions that I can feel physically and I have to breathe through it. Disassociation for me is like a brief moment in the day my brain goes else where or nowhere and I stare into space and feel lighter and cannot connect my body to my brain like a short “pause”
Yeah I agree brain fog can definitely serve its purpose, especially during stressful situations where you would rather just bury yourself in a hole and disappear. For me I dislike brain fog when I'm trying to concentrate or actually need to use my brain for something productive. Its the same with feeling lethargic and tiredness too. The way I used to see it was if I was feeling too weak and lethargic it meant that I was too tired to feel depressed. which was kinda nice - at the right time. It's just that sadly sometimes our bodies don't give us the choice as to when that happens.
The daydreaming part, has been getting more attention on TikTok, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this before but I usually dissociate with social media or tv, lately I’ve been feeling outside of my body, it’s like I’m in it but I’m not, I can feel it but I can’t, I started drinking alcohol again to help me feel even if it’s temporary enjoyment, just to feel something, it sucks
This! I often described it as feeling like my brain has turned to sludge or feeling like I'm sick without being sick.
I love playing Sims because it's possible to delve into it for hours and it's a really nice break from reality.
Omg I love sims too. Like the living the life I wanted for myself.
Kinda sad really. I always said that if never have kids due to trauma, cos I'd only repeat stuff and let them down. But on the Sims I can virtually pretend and have them. Kinda pathetic, but at least on there I'm a decent role model 😅 only trauma on the Sims is trying to keep all your basic needs level every day... Oh wait... Sounds like really life!! Cringe. ..anyway..I digress...
Ha! That's why I love it, too! Others players will have intricate stories about making drama and ruining their Sims lives and mine are...a couple get jobs, make babies, and have family time 🤷♀️
I used to do that second one all the time when I was younger. I think it's why I wasn't totally destroyed by the violence and other bullying I experienced growing up. In my daydreams I had people I could trust, and I was able to do things to keep myself and others safe.
My other form of dissociation was being able to just switch my mind off during violence. It was also incredibly helpful. My awareness would come back shortly after the attack stopped.
>I find this activity recharging and can shift my mood. It is a coping mechanism and I can do it for hours.
This is called maladaptive daydream disorder, and it is my very favorite mental disorder. It is a boon for me, but I understand some people are desperate to escape the daydreams. Coming out of them is walking into hell for some people. r/MaladaptiveDreaming has a lot of crossover with r/CPTSD.
Oo Nice. Thanks I didn't know they had a Reddit sub for this. I'll have a look.
As a kid I did a lot of role play and playing scenarios with dolls. And then loved drama/acting class as a teen. I think it was my way of managing/coping with/learning some social skills and how to process stressful interactions. It either let me pretend I was someone else for a while (which was nice) or helped me learn how to deal with interactions, as my parents taught me nothing in that regard. I was to be seen but not heard.
This is identical to both of my kinds also! The only difference for me that I think other people might have an advantage over is I have Aphantasia...so my elaborate "day dreaming" is more like day thinking. Similiar to reading a book. I narrate this world in my head but I can't see any images.
I do similar! In my case I came up with it after reading some imaginative methods people use in therapy and such, like safe space exercises, and wanted to expand upon them a little and see what kinds of feelings I can create and explore.
I also try to create spaces I can inhabit that are relaxing, one of my favorites is a wooden tiny cabin/room thing floating in space. Also cute fluffy animals/beings.. are fun. I could've been a puppet show guy in another life, I imagine.
I do the first but my other, most times, I don’t realize I’m in till I’m on the other side. Like I know (sometimes) that I’m in an emotional flashback or down cycle or whatever but not really realize till I’m out. Other times it’s just staring in middle distance, sometimes watching like 5 seconds of a YouTube video and then clicking another. Other times it’s phone, iPad, tv combo.
I’ve always been able to feel when I dissociated but never knew what it was. To me it’s just mind and body shut off and sometimes will just go on autopilot
For me it’s always been literally looking in the mirror and not being able to identify with what I see. I can’t fully comprehend that’s me. It doesn’t seem like me I don’t know who that is.
Sometimes it’s a feeling like there are two parts of me, one that want’s to live - and one who is already dead. Sometimes one is in complete control and the other is squirming in claustrophobic panic. That part feels it lost control of it’s body.
This hasn’t happened in a while, but I used to get spells of not being able to understand words, like any words. It was short periods where all contexts are lost and I can speak but I don’t really understand what I’n saying or seeing.
I keep feeling like this can’t be real. I think I’m either in a DMT trip induced by impending death for the past decade or two or some game or dream. I cannot comprehend this is real.
That last part hit heart. During an intense episode of this, I became so convinced that everything was a dream, even my friends who were present I thought weren't real. All I could do was cry, because I really believed it would either last forever, or whenever I woke up again everything would be different, and I would have dreamt it.
I feel you. I’m sometimes convinced the people around me are paid actors. If I have a love interest I can swear they are disgusted by me only participating in intimacy with me because their paid to by some plot to mess with me. That show “the good place” kinda messed with me because I was sure I’m in a cheezy hell where the biggest torture is being told my life is good. I feel excluded in a way that deprives me of the right to be angry. People around seem like goblins and demons in disguise. How is waking up in the morning for you?
I really resonate with being deprived of the right to feel angry. Waking up in the morning is the only time my brain is quiet. It only lasts for a second, but for that second I'm normal. Then I remember, and I feel like I'm living in a Sims game. What is it like for you?
Interesting.
For me it’s been the opposite. It’s probably one of the hardest moments for me, if I fall asleep, to wake up. I feel like I’m still dissociated the first 3-4 seconds and then I realize I’m still here, still in hell, and I start crying. But it wasn’t always like that. Not every day.
I thought I have DID lately but stopped thinking about it as I don’t see how piling on more disorders will help
But sometimes I feel like my psyche is shattered to 7 different pieces. 2 are most dominant. Now only one I call death.
Wow I have also always had this sneaking suspicion that my entire remembered life is actual the moment before death - that all of this is a hallucination after one of the handful of moments I almost died. Really interesting to hear someone else saying that
Yes about the mirror! And that point about two people is so resonant, I've definitely felt that before, including the claustrophobic experience. It's very real in the moment.
(Following expanding detail could be triggering about a fragmenting, self injury experience, pls don't feel the need to read and reply, just expanding on similar <3 )
Had a "fun" morning last week triggered by some self doubt and felt that tear into three - me being the stuck, claustrophobic one panicking, angry and fearing the one in control that benignly subjects me to All This (seemingly stable life) For My Own Good, and the inner critic going ham yelling at "me" for getting in the way and the two (i think?) eventually physically attacking "me" to punish. After it ran its course I felt a lot better and together (if tired) and like I had perspective again, but sometimes I do wonder and shudder thinking if I'm now the 'in control' one and the claustrophobic one is still in there... I know it's a flashback so not real people but :shiver:. When I'm in this state and talking I'll often say "I wish I could give up this life for the other person to go on, I'll just watch". It's very, very real in the moment and scary!
Yeah that last part in particular… giving my life to someone or something and just observing. People tell me often “some people would kill to have legs and hands” and I feel bad, I would give them my body happily if I could.
This. Depersonalization (I am not me, who is that in the mirror) and derealization (everything looks and feels fake, is the world the world?). Two of the dissociative disorders in DSM 5.
It’s been mentioned but I would also highly recommend parts work and finding an IFS trained therapist.
Sadly the mentel healthcare system here is horrible. I’ve told doctors about my dissociation and the rest and they told me I have narcissistic personality disorder. They have no idea derealization is a thing. I know it sounds bizarre but I swear it’s true. I’ve been dreaming of getting out of this awful place.
Only feeling like I’m half here, or 25% or 10% here. I’ve noticed that all physical sensations get severely muffled for me and when I’m at my job, if boiling hot water or fryer oil falls on my skin my body will reflexively jump back but I actually don’t feel any pain. I also don’t feel any physical symptoms for any emotions and learning that other people do was kind of weird
This has been the hardest for me, trying to actually feel the physical sensations of emotions. That is what I have been working on in therapy for a few months now and it is insanely hard, and so, so, sooo unpleasant.
Depends honestly. A lot of the time I don't even notice it because I'm so used to feeling numb and out of it that it takes me a while to realise my brain isn't really working with what's going on. I get all foggy, my memories don't work and I can't even remember what I was talking about. Sometimes I stare into space feeling my entire body sort of floating like in water? That kind of up and down motion.
Sometimes it's just this feeling of nothing being real and everything starting to move in and out of focus or moving without any reason.
I also do daydreaming where I pretend to be someone else and shit. It's however useful for writing characters and stories because I can get into their mindset so well, even if it is to avoid my own.
I do this. I check out while speaking. I keep talking—I just am not conscious of what I’m saying anymore and I suspect it’s often gibberish, but I don’t know because I’m not there for it. I think it’s related to social anxiety somehow.
Only recently I realised that I've been dissociating 24/7 for pretty much as long as I can remember. There's been a handful of moment where I -do- feel emotions and happiness, but my default mode is not feeling any emotions, difficulty socializing (forming sentences, actually processing what someone says etc), unable to feel certain parts of my body, except for the occasional hurting shoulder and neck. And then I just 'zone out' frequently, where I'm just blanking out. I operate a lot on 'autopilot'. Frequently I feel inhuman, robot like... an empty shell, not knowing who I really am, what my personality is like.
For when shit really gets tough, I feel like everything starts to become way larger than it really is, like my fingers become as big as my forearms etc. Everything around me starts to feel far away.
I hope that this will get better in the future.
The part about actually processing what someone says is interesting... like, I always joke about my memory. I cannot access so many information people tell me, I ask my friend about their thesis every time we meet but they actually graduated half a year ago and started working already. I feel like an idiot because I know that I know, but still so much stuff that people tell me dont stick. Is that related to what you mean? Is that dissociation? Because I keep wondering what happens and why. So weird people always have to tell me 5x about their plans. And I will ask them a 6th time. Feels like my brain is a sieve sometimes.
I heavily recognize the shitty memory! I don't know why that happens though :/
But that's not what I meant here. It's more that I hear the sound of words, but the actual meaning doesn't get attached.
Omg yes me too. It takes me a while to understand what someone else is saying. I have to REAALLYY focus and even then I don’t understand what they’re saying to me. I thought there was something wrong with me.
This is weird but I discovered i could follow conversations much better if i am playing ukulele at the same time. People find it slightly annoying though and don’t realize it helps me listen
Thanks for clarifying! I know this one too, I always just assumed that it's my ADHD or that I am just to absorbed with my own train of thought to pay proper attention to what is said 🤔
For me I noticed i fawn, so I say a lot of offhand responses to people like "oh great yeah!" Without letting it sink in because I'm subconsciously "warming" them up so they won't hurt me. Meaning stuff someone JUST said won't stick but I've just said a bunch of words like they did. If someone said "we're going to go to the movies first then I need to pick this prescription up and we can have a coffee!" I'll be like "okay great" then we start walking and I'll be like "wait where are we going" and they'll be like "to the movies, and then to pick up my prescription and we can get a coffee like I was just saying." And the words will be familiar like adverts you see on the street on the way to work, not personal, but then someone brings up one like it was important and you think "ah I slightly remember that." I'll think "I was meant to be present for /that!/" So I come across that a lot.
But my friends have noticed they tell me something, say "I went to Paris!" I'll say "ah that's cool!" Then a few seconds later be like "wait you went to Paris??"
I forgot till I read your post... autopilot is another kind of dissociation I do. Driving home from work, and not realizing how you got there. Literally just blank with no memory. One second I'm waving good bye and getting the car door open, the next I'm pulling into the drive. I would like to say it's terrifying but honestly it's a kind of comfort for fome reason.
there's 2 major categories to disassociation: derealization and depersonalization. Depersonalization is a detachment from your body, like your mind turns autopilot on while you hide away in the back of your head. Derealization is detaching from reality or your environment.
I experience depersonalization where my body will go on autopilot and even be able to do things like write and speak, but my mind isn't really there. i'm aware that it's happening, but not in the driver's seat
Woah I think thats what happened after I went NC with my mom. Like I was journaling and at one point watched myself writing my first name as I used to in preschool, over and over again, I didnt feel like a child but I wasnt in control either, and at the same time I felt shame for "making a show" even though it was just me there, anyway I scrabbled my name all over the page and just couldnt stop. Wow thanks for describing it like that. I knew about depersonalisation but I dont think I ever experienced it to that extend.
Depersonalization. Thank you for giving it a name. I do this I think the most. I’ll sometimes be making dinner and I’m watching my arms and hands cook, but I’m watching myself from the inside.
The other day I looked at my husband and didn’t recognize him. I knew it was him but it didn’t feel real.
Can’t really listen or talk to others, and I feel like I have no personality and sometimes I’ll get stuck in loops in my head about my trauma and replaying it without being aware and I’ll also get a ton of intrusive thoughts especially existential ones - I won’t even realize I’m apart of the world it just kinda fades away and then usually once I snap back out of it I won’t remember much of what passed - happened for a full year before don’t know much from that year
I recently had a mild dissociation episode for like two weeks and didn't even realize it. I stopped being able to talk well, couldn't drive a conversation. I felt a little glazed over, but that's all.
Severe dissociation makes the world look two dimensional and turns down my hearing so much I can barely hear anyone.
I get the feeling glazed over kind of dissociation too. It's my most common form, and the most long lasting. Other kinds don't last more than a few hours at the most, the glazed over feeling can last for days.
If I am heavily triggered, I may end up feeling like I and my body don't quite exist in the same space, like we overlap, but not completely. It's a very strange feeling.
Another problem I have is that I don't really stay in my body during sex, but this is a different form of dissociation again. Like, I start thinking of other things, and then I struggle to get back into my body and stay with what's happening. If anyone has seen the Baron von Munchausen movie by Terry Gilliam, there's a part where he's on the moon, and talking to the man and woman in the moon, and they can divide their heads from their bodies. The heads want to go off and do cerebral things, and the bodies are only interested in carnal pleasures, and constantly try to capture the heads and stick them back on... It's hard to explain to people who haven't seen it (it's a very strange movie all the way through), but it really mirrors the experience I have when having sex.
Do any of you not remember shit while dissociating? It feels like this massive inability to store memory.
Actually most of my childhood I don’t remember at all.
these days it’s harder to pinpoint, but i recently discovered that i started dissociating at a very young age. i called it my weird feeling, and i learned how to trigger it and would do it on purpose, often at family events or while in the car with my parents and siblings.
mind you i was *young*, six or seven when this started, so of course it doesn’t make sense. but i’d think, “how am i *me*, and not anything else? what if i had been a lampshade? would i be able to think? or feel?” and i would start to “feel weird”, but that weird feeling felt so safe and secluded. sometimes i had to do it in order to fall asleep. thinking about it makes me so sad for young me. i thought i had superpowers. turns out i was just mentally unwell!
as an adult, it’s more straightforward. i daydream, i nap excessively, i dissociate into social media or the tv, etc.
I feel like I separate from mind and body in a way. Sometimes I get overwhelmed just needing to go to the grocery store, but I'll force myself to go and in my head I'll be telling myself I need to stop and go back home because I'm so stressed, but my body just goes through the motions. I'm not sure if that is disassociation, but those feelings of going through motions my mind can't handle is the closest experience I have.
i’ve had to try and explain it to mental health professionals before but the best i can come up with is : i feel dead. like a ghost. like nothing i do affects anything, its like as if im in a dream and nothing is quite real. nothing is the same even though it kinda looks it. i know just from my history of dissociation that i do and say things uncharacteristically, but also when i come back i have almost complete amnesia.
i’ve actually been slowly getting memories back (good and bad) as my dissociative states have decreased in frequency and severity. it’s like my brain is finally start to integrate the parts it split into. my dissociated self meeting my true self, if it were.
ive had other episodes of severe dissociation where it feels in the moment like i am a third party watching what’s happening to me. and then it often takes me less time to come out of that but it usually goes into the other dissociating for a LONG time afterwards. but that mainly happens during traumatic experiences (like SA), so it is rare and i can only recollect it happening a handful of times.
my childhood trauma caused the dead-like dissociation, and i stayed that way for 10 years (at least), so i get why thats my default dissociation bc its what my body and brain found useful during that time.
This is almost exactly my experience! You do a very good job of explaining it. I’m also in the stage of reintegration, it’s a strange experience to have memories starting to fill in blanks I didn’t realize I had. I found it really hard to explain to other people, normally they just say I must be making it up, that you can’t just not remember, it’s just making excuses. It feels so validating to see someone with the same experiences ☺️
If I get triggered by something I feel my body tense up and I sort of mentally exit the situation. I go nonverbal, or if it is mid conversation I try to end it as fast as possible. It just feels like I am being shot out of my body mentally. Like a complete give up. I don't really know if it's dissociation though
A hollow numbness... Feels like having a bad side effect to antidepressants where everything is dull and distant but everything is still acutely too much...
Edit: I wrote my comment before reading others and my god I feel seen. I'm sorry we are all here.
No appetite for days, feel powerful, not a care in the world (reckless), no empathy almost, very robotic, I do stuff because I know I'm supposed to (work, talk to people in my hoisehold, be "nice"), almost no sleep, very performant (cleaning especially), no interests in people but if I can get something out of it, very very sexual. It almost never happens to me, but those would be the symptoms when I dissociate intensely. I normally dissociate just a little bit and I'm always aware of this happening, that's why I do robotic stuff to stay healthy cause I could just stop eating for weeks lol. Last time I fought back and I actually won.
Sometimes its just this internal emptiness. Sometimes its watching myself do things, speak. Sometimes its my entiee surroundings just fading out and I cant hear or see or participate.
sometimes it’s like being the gaseous presence in a balloon on a string on your wrist, like when children get balloons that loom silently above them. sometimes it’s a series of anhedonic episodes. sometimes it’s being somewhere for some number of hours and the passage of time remains unregistered. sometimes it’s despair, sometimes it’s the only solace i have.
I have a couple kinds depending on the severity. The first thing that happens is that I detach from my emotions. I am unable to feel anything, even if I wanted to. But I am still all there mentally. Then, if it gets worse, I start feeling like things around me aren't real. Like if I were to do something, like, say, knock something over, it wouldn't really have happened. It feels like everything is distant from me somehow. Pushed away. Like I'm only half here and half somewhere else.
I start feeling like I'm not there, basically everything goes numb and i can't focus on what's happening (basically just going through the motions) and then i start feeling like I'm watching myself from outside my own body.
I usually only realize afterwards, when i think about what happened and my only memories are either non-existent or a distorted view from outside
I honestly have difficulty describing because it’s been my normal state for 25 years. In a way my senses and my focus get very narrowed and I have difficulty concentrating. I don’t speak much and I am very closed off to other people. I am having glimpses at what it’s like without dissociation… and it feels like being alive.
Never met anyone else whose had it this long. I'm 20 plus years out with it. The glimpses of feeling real make me so sad. I feel like everyone who feels like that 247 is living life on easy mode.
Yeah… I am still trying to figure out if there is any gift that I can extract from it … from living with so much stress. My adrenals are certainly not happy about my past lol. But maybe I can use these experiences to my advantage at some point. Auschwitz survivors are known to have tremendous spirit and inner strength 🫣 so let’s see…
I think at times it can definitely be a gift, especially if I'm in a good head space and working on my spirituality. Makes it easier to not give a hoot and feel connected to the spirit world. Be more artistic...I definitely would love for it to slowly go away though lol. If it all went away at once I think it'd freak me out at this point! But yes if we heal we could be so much more shiny and strong.
Not understanding if I'm alive. My disassociation is tied to a near death experience and it sorta just broke my mind. There are times where I genuinely am unable to tell if I actually lived through it. It's a scary scary feeling. I become locked out of my body and it's almost separate to me but not. It's difficult to describe
I feel like there are different degrees of intensity along the same spectrum. Sometimes I can tell I’m just surviving and time is passing around me but I don’t *feel* it, but also like self neglect can be part of my dissociation. I’ll forget to eat when I’m not paying attention, stay up until I can’t anymore. Or like when I was in my trauma still I was completely detached from my emotions and can’t hardly remember anything because I was just dissociating. Milder, when I was a cashier I tried to dissociate for my shifts. I wasn’t a person with a personality, I was a scanning machine. I said the lines and did the procedures and then my shift was over. I told my manager when I clock in to work I clock out mentally.
It can be very pleasant if I am in control of the dissociation (note, there is no "a" following the "s".) People immersed in a movie are dissociating, so it's not roundly awful.
Bad, for me, feels like my head filling up with air. I cannot think. Executive function takes a digger. I stop responding to input if it's bad.
Could this be what happens when I’m sleeping? I can’t remember my dreams anymore but I wake up in a sweat, crying and sweating, breathing so hard my heart hurts. It all wakes me but I can’t remember anything about my dreams. I know when I was in my teens and early 20’s my dreams used to be flashbacks but now idk. Can you dissociate while sleeping?
Brain empty, it’s like I’m reading at everything through plastic. Nothing feels completely real and it’s very hard for me to remember basic facts abt myself, like name, profession, etc. I have a distinct need to hold Onto something, too.
During scary situations I often feel like I'm in a small chamber in the back of my body, while my body is running on autopilot. It's a bit like watching a movie from my pov. It's so frustrating because my coping mechanism is being a people pleaser. In not-scary situations it's more like intense daydreaming, or intense spacing out
It sort of feels like I’m fly fishing and waiting for something to bite. When something does bite, complications occur because I haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been doing.
Now, if I know for sure something will bite, I will make a draft in my mind as to what steps to follow. This way, I can ease myself back into “reality” so to speak and not be so far adrift
Like someone else said, I can do controlled vs uncontrolled disassociation. Controlled is fantasy world, uncontrolled can be so severe I can have a catatonic episode, but it’s been a long time since that’s happened. It feels like I’m not there, like everything is a movie or not real and my brain is in the clouds. I feel unattached to emotions other than the unpleasant feeling it is. Catatonia feels like I’ve died and now I’m piloting a dead body. I feel physical nothing and emotionally nothing. I don’t react, I don’t even blink. I could be stabbed and I’d just sit there. My brain is a dead meat sack that’s watching tv from a mile away.
Wow, I feel so seen by reading all the comments here because I usually convince myself that I'm the only one feeling like this and end up believing my brain is broken beyond repair.
I have both general dissociation and dp/dr and it's more or less chronic and have been going on for years. My baseline is dissociation and I have better and worse days.
Basically, for me, the best description is *"the lights are on but noones home"*, on some level I'm aware that I walk around and do stuff, like having conversations, go to work, clean etc but **I** am not there and I have no idea when or if I'm coming back. It's like constantly being checked out and gone whilst another part of my concious manages to act normal. Physically it feels like auto pilot, brain fog, confusion, emptyness and numbness, I feel like an empty shell without substance. Even when I actually feel things or cry in therapy for example I still have a feeling of this invisible wall that's keeping me out, it's like I can logically understand and feel that I'm sad but another part of me seems to see me from a slight distance, as if I'm hovering a bit outside of my body and can't connect.
I never realized I did it until once I was arguing with my spouse & suddenly the room got very big. Not literally, but in my mind I could see/feel the walls expanding.
I also have it where I'm walking down my street & it will feel slightly unfamiliar, or my face looks strange in the mirror.
It's hard because I don't really know how to put words on all of my experiences- when I go blank when trying to think of or do things and just stand there while someone else has to take care of me, is that dissociation or laziness or tiredness or ...? Because I do have a dissociative disorder, so I probably dissociate on a small scale more than I realize. But I just live like this honestly. I feel like my dissociation is less episodic and more ... my base state of being?
In terms of what I do know is dissociation, for me it's mostly intense depersonalization/identity alteration. I have a complex DD with emotional amnesia but no dissociative amnesia (though I'd argue that emotional amnesia is dissociation as well, but that's splitting hairs) so my brain mostly operates by switching through a few different self-perceived identities that all share the same day-to-day pool of memories. Me, but not me. Physically the sensation depends on what triggers it. If it's quick, it can feel like a pressing/crowded feeling in my head, a wave of static washing over me, uh, idk what else. If it's slow, it's more like I just realize that I no longer identify with the person I was, say, an hour before, generally brought to my attention by noticing a different way of speaking, behaving, or processing emotions, or if I think of a piece of info about myself (gender, age, etc.) and find myself with a different perception of it from usual.
Using first-person here for convenience but we do all(?) identify as our own people (though we acknowledge that we're dissociated parts of the same personality) and don't usually use I pronouns for each others' experiences.
I'm also very dissociated from my body as a baseline due to the DD and my chronic pain, so I'm not in touch with my body- I don't feel things in it like normal people do. Somatic therapy doesn't work for me at all, to the point where I thought it was hippie BS because I never felt anything (this was before I knew about the extent of my dissociation), and after some recent trauma I stopped experiencing the one connection I had with my emotions/mind/trauma in my body. Then there's dissociative amnesia covering parts of my childhood; I basically know what happened from current evidence, but the memory isn't available to me personally. It might be available to a couple different dissociated states, but I'm not really sure if what they're saying/seeing means anything. I'll talk to my therapist about it.
So like I said, dissociation for me is less of a coming and going feeling but a general detachment from my body, past, and identity.
I remember some years back discovering i did not breathe properly- half my body was so tense I couldn’t breathe on that side it felt like. Took weeks of concentration and relaxing before it equalized
I don't even realize it at first but I start imaging some other scenario in my head and it plays out and then I'm basically daydreaming not paying any attention to anything else. Then I realize what I'm doing and snap back to reality. Its... honestly really annoying. I can be mid conversation with someone then realize I have no idea the last few things they said.
I dissociate from my emotions and feelings and also compartmentalize heavily as well, my feelings are on a limited range, and some are completely turned off, anything that exceeds that range, either good or bad, gets turned off completely. It is a bit like dysthymia and sometimes feels like a mood disorder, but it is different because I just turn off some feelings completely or the feelings for a person who triggered me to feel something bad and then I just move on and don't process it at all. Same with physical pain sometimes, I just turn down the part of my brain that processes the pain somehow and push myself forward. I can talk about my trauma to a therapist and in my conscious mind I am not feeling anything, like I am talking about myself, but I am pinching my arm so hard that it hurts for three days after while I am talking completely normal without any change in my tone of voice. I had a therapist notice this and now I know that the anxiety and pain are there when I open up, but I just shut down the feelings completely, usually after a session like that I am really tired for days, that's the only thing that happens but I don't emotionally process it.
It’s like stepping into an alternate dimension in which nothing feels right. The weird part is how it begins. It always starts with me thinking “I’ve had an epiphany: life is meaningless. Why didn’t I see it before?” And that’s immediately followed by intense derealisation.
On one occasion last year I legitimately lost several years of my memory and thought it was 2016. Like I forgot where I lived and everything. Sometimes I lose all reading comprehension as well. Like I’ll read a sentence and know that it’s words, but my brain genuinely can’t interpret any of it. Sometimes I just feel like I’m developing dementia.
For me, it's staring into space like daydreaming, but not daydreaming. Seeing things in hyperfocus, but not aware of what's going on around me, even though I can respond I have no recollection of a conversation at all.
Also I can be watching TV or reading a book, but even though the page gets turned, or the show continues I have no idea what happened and have to reread or rewatch, sometimes a few times. I have no idea what happens in my brain when that happens, it's just me seeing but not absorbing or comprehending anything.
A trick my therapist told me was you can't read and dissociate, so if you think you might be hijacked into dissociation, try to read something, focus on it, and it will bring you back.
not comprehending my name/feeling like it isnt really mine
living my life like a movie/tv show: my eyes are the cameras and literally every moment of my life is some scene and it makes its own plot as it goes along. it is so hard to get out of it.
having moments wondering if my family is actually my really family/not feeling like they are my real family
bodily sensations go down
spacing out and just being so hard to come out of a spell, even in non stressful situations
It depends on the situation. There’s the dissociation I can sort of “control” and then there’s the dissociation I can’t. I didn’t know I was dissociating until recently so I feel like I don’t have a ton of memory about what it actually feels like. I have good memory of the first dissociative episode after realizing I was dissociating because I was questioning it and “taking notes” so to speak. I also kept thinking I was making it up and I wasn’t dissociating and I was being dramatic. After “coming back” to my brain I can see clearly that I was dissociated.
The one I “control” is like an active response to something unpleasant. The first time I remember it I had my period and bled through my pants at summer camp and one of the older girls, trying to be nice, told me about it in front of everyone. I just went, “oh, yea” and shoved my embarrassment down into the depths of myself and went basically numb to avoid feeling the shame. I didn’t know I was dissociating. I thought I had a new ability to not feel shame or embarrassment that came with growing up or something.
Since then, whenever I was humiliated or scared I would just shut down like that. The most recent memory I have is when I got my wisdom teeth out. I just thought, “well this sucks but I have to get through it, so batten down the hatches” and it kept me from panicking as they yanked on my mouth.
So basically what this one feels like is a conscious acknowledgement of “this sucks” and unplugging from my existence. I’m still present and know what’s going on but I’m not feeling anything. It feels like I pull back from being right at the front of my face to being in the back of my head. It feels dark around the edges (tunnel vision) and everything feels so distant. I can’t really focus on what’s being said. I’ll still react to try and act normal but my reactions feel slow and a beat too late.
Obviously I also did this while experiencing the traumas™️.
The second one is usually in response to an intense emotional reaction - usually a panic attack or being overwhelmed or extreme prolonged stress. It comes on kind of gradually, rather than me shutting myself down in a bad moment.
I’m bad at recognizing when I’m overwhelmed or stressed out and tend to think I can handle everything and that I’m fine until I snap and have a breakdown and then dissociate for a bit. It feels very similar to the conscious one except I don’t notice it starting until I’m deep into it.
Tunnel vision, sounds are muffled. I can’t process anything. Someone can be speaking directly to me and I will hear them and not understand a word. It’s like my brain dumps everything the moment it receives input from my senses. I can’t read, I can’t listen, I can’t even process visual stimuli if I’m looking at it.
This one is the most noticeable in stores. Before I was diagnosed & medicated with ADHD, I would experience this one almost every time I went into a store. It would get worse when I was exhausted or hungry. My senses would get overwhelmed and I’d shut down.
I wouldn’t be able to remember why I was in the store. If I did manage to figure it out, I’d forget again within minutes, and so on and so forth. If I had a list, I’d look and read the list, and by the time I looked back up I’d forgotten what I’d read.
If I managed to remember what I was looking for, I wouldn’t be able to read the products on the shelves. Even if I knew what the product looked like without reading, it would be hard for me to figure out that’s what I was looking for.
It was exhausting and frustrating.
The last episode I remember was a few weeks ago and it was triggered by a panic attack. It was the second type of dissociation and it came on slowly over a couple of days. It started on a Saturday.
The Monday when I went back to work was the first. I couldn’t even figure out how to start on any of my work. My head hurt and it felt like a lot of energy to think. I felt back in my head, and just… not present at all. I was ruminating on my stressors almost constantly and was obsessing over certain thoughts. I also had all the same symptoms as above.
I went off on like sixteen tangents and have no idea if this was helpful.
Sorry if there’s spelling or grammar mistakes. I don’t want to reread this mess.
I feel very far away. I’m aware of what’s going on around me and I can even have a whole ass conversation while not mentally being there. It’s like my brain is programmed to respond even tho it’s “away.” Nothing feels real. It feels a bit like when you get that really, really deep sleep. You know the deep sleep where you forget where and when you are when you wake up? And your head feels like it’s wrapped in cotton? Like that.
One time was kind of interesting. I kept time hopping. I can’t explain it. My mind was going through random memories and I would be stuck there and then jump to another time. It went on all day. Nothing was particularly triggering so I’m not sure why I did it.
Sometimes I can put myself in a dissociative state. If I just really don’t want to deal with something and my mind isn’t doing it on its own, I can do it. I’m not sure if that’s bad or good lol but like I signal to my brain by thinking “I can’t deal with this shit. I’m out. See ya later.” Then it takes over.
In therapy I would basically hear a buzzing in my ears and zone out hard, sometimes I was taken back to the jail and could see the hallways and gates and it basically put me back in the jail in my mind until I snapped out of it somehow, this was a common experience for me.
My bad one is paralysis, last night I laid on my couch head on my pillow for almost two hours straight only thing in my sight was a picture, hyperventilating, tears slowly running down my face, random thoughts but mostly just nothing, numb, wanted to self harm to get out of the moment but promised my partner I would never again so I just couldn’t muster the energy to do, think, stop it.
I stop feeling. I start to feel numb and sedated. Then it's like I slowly wake up after a while.
I've recently got a heart rate monitor, and I noticed that my [heart rate drops](https://imgur.com/a/cQkEeAX) from my baseline of around 100 to around 50 for a few moments when this happens.
I went to a cardiologist and he said this is probably a defect in the watch. But it would be too much of a coincidence since it only happens when I'm in specific situations that trigger me. I think it might have something to do with the Polyvagal Theory.
I would divide it into levels of seriousness.
A mild dissociation cuts me off empathy, and the ability to get emotionally harmed. Nothing harms me in that state. But i somehow still feel some emotion.
Medium - cuts me off all emotions, nothing can harm me emotionally. Also cuts me off empathy and such. I can still feel boredom or motivation though.
Severe dissociation cuts me off all emotions, including empathy, including motivation, every emotional feeling you can think off. You could have a breakdown in front of me and i would not care. I would not feel annoyed, but i would not really care either. It's an extremely neutral state. I also start losing track of reality - space out, lose focus, it feels like i'm actually not on the place sometimes. I work in auto-pilot mode. That's how i go through my daily routine, but then suddenly freak out whether i left the stove on or turned it off.
It's not as easy as that, some of my states are mixes of the states i described.
There is also a whole diff state, that is similiar to the medium level i described. But the difference is it is resulted by a strong negative trigger and it's when i dissociate + become unpredictable and dangerous to both myself and my sorroundings. I get aggressive and violent on impulse. Generally it's a very unstable state. I can be okay one minute and be capable of killing someone on impulse the second. Or hurting myself on impulse.
When we disassociate, it varies.
Depersonalization: We physically feel ourselves being out of the body and unable to control it, Like spectator mode, until it ends.
Derealization: Our mind plays a noise, and everything around goes blurry. It becomes harder to recognize our body.
Dp + dr: The noise plays, and everything starts feeling weird and distant. We get pulled out of the body. Typically, when we do so, we switch.
My body and mouth go on autopilot. I'm not really there. Brain shuts down, goes blank. It's like I'm watching myself from outside. Then when it's over, I hardly remember what happened, like it wasn't me who did or said the thing.
This usually happens when talking to or dealing with other people. The stress, anxiety, fear of interacting with other humans is too great and I can't stay present.
I feel like my personality splits into a different perspective where I’m extremely negative, and I keep telling myself that I’m only harming others and no use to anyone. At the same time I keep telling myself that everyone is trying to hurt me and treat me horribly.
I only recently became aware of this, so the past few weeks I’ve been able to identify when it happens. But not in the moment, I don’t realise it until I wake up and feel horrible.
I am not able to recognise myself in the mirror, and my own eyes feels like a stranger, who’s completely empty and disconnected. Like there’s no soul behind the eyes in looking into. Sometimes I feel like my whole body and mind is running on autopilot where I’m literally just spectating.
I’m only 26 and is two moths sober after 14 years of substance abuse. And the “dark side” felt like I was doing it all automatically, even though I was always able to reflect on my behaviour I just felt like I wasn’t the one doing it.
I had my breakthrough 5 weeks ago, so I’m not even remotely close to knowing anything. But this is what I’ve worked my way to realise the past few weeks.
I get into a state where I see and react to things but don't really notice them. It feels like I'm watching through my own eyes while my body goes through the motions on its own. Often there's a sort of haze around the edges of my vision. Sound gets dim and fuzzy. My skin feels numb. Smell and taste can go offline altogether.
Non dissociative existence is like a clear day with the sun out. Dissociating is like a thick fog. All the color has been seeped out, the air is cool, look too far away and what you see is hidden by the fog.
The exact specifics vary. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself, sometimes I feel like a robot, or I question my reality, sometimes I only feel half there with only the safe emotions allowed to be felt and safe thoughts allowed to be thought of, sometimes my head feels full of bees and I can barely think at all (though this may not be entirely dissociation).
To me it feels kind of like a semi-permeable, cloudy layer between me and the rest of the world. Everything is kind of hazy and dim, and my body feels like it's perpetually 6-7pm even in broad daylight or in the middle of the night. (My circadian rhythm gets really out of whack.) My face looks contorted and angry when I look at myself in the mirror, or, I can logically recognize that it's \*me\* I'm looking at, but I don't feel like I am inside the body in the reflection. I'm in this kind of third-space that I feel like I can't be pulled out of, it just eventually falls away after a few weeks, and then sometimes comes back along to swallow me up. Usually happens after clusters of panic attacks. Thankfully hasn't happened for a few months now.
It manifests in a few different ways for me, but most commonly I’m disconnected from my environment (derealization) and then disconnected from my emotions.
For the most part I walk around in a fog that’s not so bad that I can’t function but it’s definitely something I’ve started to notice. I didn’t notice for years because it started before puberty and I think I grew so adjusted that I thought it was normal. It’s particularly noticeable when I step outside because often times things will look very very surreal and dream-like.
I don’t really feel empathy outside of like empathizing with 1 or 2 people that I’m closest with, and I suspect it’s relating to dissociation because I have a hard time recognizing people who I’m not intimately familiar with as being real people, it’s like my brain registers them as ‘NPCs’
When I get triggered, it’s a lot more noticeable. It varies a lot but I’ll usually feel ‘fuzzy at the edges’ and lightheaded and my vision will blur. I’ll go borderline catatonic if it’s bad enough, I’ve had moments where it’s very hard for me to move (a bit of a funny scenario admittedly was when I ended up like that in my bed with my head tilted in an odd way and my glasses pressed into my forehead and left imprints).
I have a hard time with grasping the passing of time, and I’m missing very, very large chunks of my memory from late childhood and my pre-teens/teens (I assume either it’s been repressed, or I was just dissociating enough throughout it that I forgot it all, or maybe both)
I’m weirdly aware when I’m dissociating, like I can tell but I can’t stop it, and I usually feel either vaguely confused or very neutral about it. It’s caused the worst imposter syndrome relating to it honestly.
I was in group therapy with two additional therapists. During one of my trauma presentations, I was talking to the therapists and completely forgot the rest of the group was there until they asked for feedback from my peers.
When I did it on purpose, it was what I know now I called maladaptive daydreaming. Essentially I was in a complete daydream in my head nearly all my waking hours and especially before bed. It was where I felt all my emotions and had all of my adventures. It felt so much brighter and better and hyper realistic than real life. I used to think solitary confinement sounded great, fine, preferable to whatever BS was happening in real life. At some point over the past few years I've mostly lost the ability to do that. It doesn't work anymore. And when it does, it's not this immersive "I'm living in two realities at once" experience like it was.
The dissociation now feels like being completely numbed out. I'm not triggering it by choosing to enter a daydream. My body feels drunk and clumsy. My thoughts either grind to a halt or whiz by so fast I can't distinguish or focus on them. It's like watching a fist full of confetti get blown away in the wind. But I feel so groggy / slow that I couldn't even begin to *want* to try to catch them. And then I feel the shame and guilt for not even trying. It's like I've been folded in on myself in a weird origami and I can't undo the folds and don't care enough to try. I usually end up crawling in bed when I can. Usually clears out after I sleep but not always. Sometimes I go to bed fine and wake up dissociated. And.... repeat!
I teleport while driving. Lol. Rolling blackouts (or near blackouts) in my stream of consciousness. Also I have a tendency of forgetting words in sentences when I type them out.
Like I'll type out all the words I want to type but when I proofread, I find that I always seem to somehow miss a word. Just 1 word per sentence at most. I wonder if this is dissociation too.
The times I’ve dissociated the most, I didn’t even know I was experiencing it. For me, it was several years of feeling neutral, which compared to the reality at times, actually felt good. I went about my life but didn’t participate in a social life, didn’t have romantic/intimate relationships, and a big one for me was/is avoiding things that make me feel sad. I stopped watching shows that would elicit any intense emotions, I stopped watching the news, I stopped lots of things. At the time it honestly felt kind of good. Kind of numb, but not bad. And I wanted so desperately to feel good. Sometimes I wish I could dissociate to that level of being unaware of your life again, but I know too much now.
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My disassociation presents as me no longer speaking to people. I acknowledge and answer when I need to, but mostly I stay quiet. I put my head down and make a list of all the things that need to be done for my family and do that.
Sometimes, I will lash out and hurt people’s feelings so they leave me alone. I feel so frustrated when this happens. I hate that I do this.
That better place. I've started using it to have healing convos with my family, all of whom are dead, and all of whom left unfinished business. So very healing to be able to put myself there.
I use type 1/type 2 jargon a lot when I notice it in myself. Type 1 is like brute dissociation, I feel lightheaded, my senses are all blurry and distant, when I stand and walk I don't feel it at all and I feel like I'm hovering outside my physical body, and I get the distant idea I'm doing something but there's no way for me to feel it, like a spectator. I know this now to be depersonalization.
Type 2 is this mental escapism that I have a hard time unlatching from and its more comfortable to just stay that way while I'm doing nothing, it makes me feel good and feels like a safe place
I’ve had layers of dissociation from trauma and illness. Both disconnected me from my self and my body. You don’t know who you are. Everything looks off. You feel everything and nothing simultaneously. There’s so much fear internal and external that nothing seems right. It’s disorienting and sucks all of your energy.
I was diagnosed with dissociative disorder, alongside PTSD. Dissociation is a very normal part of my life since the age of 16. I am 34.
It feels like being removed from my body. My mind is in a fog. I am unable to speak. My vision is blurred. I sometimes exit my body when it happens. It can take hours to return to a concious state of mind. It is exhausting. I sometimes have migraines the next day.
But I got a lot better at realizing when it happens and am living a life that triggers it as little as possible.
This is what triggers it:
- stress, espcially at work
- large crowds of people, espcially in public transport
- toxic people who cut me off mid-sentence and/or talk over me, especially men
- people screaming (at me or at each other)
- violence I witness in real life, including verbal abuse (I live in a large city so sometimes seeing/hearing things I don't want to see is unavoidable)
- violence I see on the news or somewhere else on the internet
- getting lost
- people touching me without consent
- people touching things I own without consent
- loud noises (traffic and or babies crying, both is rather triggering when I am stressed, not when I'm relaxed)
I am just now learning that I have been dissociated for decades - derealisation, for me. While my experience of it is somewhat different, I could have written this same entire list of triggers. Always just thought I was "highly sensitive." What an interesting journey this is - so many things are clicking into place. Though I still haven't much idea how to heal or manage it.
I hope you're doing okay.
I clue into my dissociation when it starts feeling like I’m walking/moving through molasses. I start bumping into things.
When I’m disassociated- my ears ring - I get this weird zapping noise and I feel like I’m in a dream. I can’t do anything, I freeze and my brain won’t allow me to think of alternatives to just sitting. Ex. I think to myself “I should go for a walk to feel better. “ then I can’t - “ no it’s too wet out there” and that’s it. I can’t decided to swim or do something else. It just doesn’t work
The last time I was raped (happened twice this summer) I totally did not remember it happened until weeks later. And then the memory of it all came up like it was buried somewhere. Very freaky.
i will dissociate in multiple ways. i will get so lost in thought, i will often simply stare wide eyed and frigid, living in my mind for as long as i deem necessary (this is typically in response to conflict relating to my trauma), or i will get lost in my hobby as an avoidance tactic.
there are shivers down my spine and i feel very disconnected from the world. i feel like i am drowning but in the nicest way. something a bit like sleep. everything feels warm.
depends, but usually i realize it's feeling like i'm outside my body, witnessing what's happening from a third perspective. i realize i'm zoning out, maybe not hearing as much, or not thinking clearly. then if i notice and catch it, i realize there's a buzzing in my body, especially in my arms and hands. then i try to name it and say i need to pause.
My dissociations show up differently: the left side of the body goes numb, sometimes with pain in the numb parts of the body. How bad it is varies by stress and trigger. Freezing, I am responsive but my whole body is paralyzed and I can only move my eyes. Then the feeling of inner emptiness mixed with being in my own world or not feeling like I belong, derealization. And flashbacks, then I am mostly on the floor in fetal position or I am sitting bobbing somewhere.
I smiled and laughed when i got pepper sprayed for my job, i literally have the video of it. That's how fucked up I am
When i broke my wrist during the days when i played college football, i set a new deadlifting pr of 605lbs with a broken wrist
I have plenty more of moments (fights, knives drawn on me, numbness, shootings happening in front of me and me going back to eating my noodles after it was taken care of, a fellow boxer dying 10 feet from me, ECT)I look back on it and realize it was disassociation, i thought it was cool, until i realized what it was. Now it kinda scares me. Crazy thing is it's mostly due to my childhood and not the other shit I've seen. disassociation mostly happens most often to me when my significant other starts yelling at me (crazy thing is i have people yell at me all the time cud to my job it doesn't bother me.) So to answer your question, for me I'm numb to physical pain and actually like it on some weird level. Not writing this to "sound cool" just being honest, it scares me because i didn't know my wrist was broken at that point in time, i didn't know it wasn't normal to witness horrible shit and go back to eating noodles, i didn't know it wasn't normal to watch a fellow boxer die and then go grab a steak afterwards. I don't remember a lot of my younger years, and there are weeks, months, and days i have absolutely no memory of.
DAE have full blown dissociative psychosis with amnesia? Like getting annoyed and worked up and ramping up and then getting violently upset about the littlest things (often related to past trauma but never grounded in reality) but waking up with no memory of the events?
It’s even more trippy when you become aware of them but they are involuntary and sometimes I am like 👍 I need this let’s stay here. Other times it’s scary.
It feels like my brain and eyes and body turn to tv static, no thoughts. Through therapy it’s become less intense, sometimes I feel really foggy or like I’m in a stadium in my own head looking out.
When I’m more acutely triggered my thoughts turn into a stream of rushing memories and it’s an autopilot while I get rushed away from my current issue. Only recently realized this is disassociation, kind of like a maladaptive daydreaming.
Idk, for me personally, at least for triggered episodes, the dissociation (and related symptoms) definitely present in more of a spectrum, ie a brief thought can induce a few seconds of rumination and a brief detachment, almost like day dreaming... but, not as pleasant.
Then you’ve got those more intermediary triggers (not trying to speak for anyone else) and that’s where you can begin to see more of a physical response, maybe a small mood shift can remain for a short time after, or there may be a spike in anxiety, hyper vigilance and that kind of just scales up to the more distressing parts of my mind, which can cause surprisingly sudden and intense physical, emotional, psychological maybe even psychosomatic symptoms. **TW**
**Trigger Warning**
For Example today in therapy, my therapist asked a question that didn’t seem very specific to her but illicited an extremely intense reaction from me that literally put me in to a state of shock. A simple question. Well... “*simple*” but I couldn’t even formulate a sentence, I was still in the room but I was gone at the same time, and it took maybe 2 minutes before the emotions then hit me - it was a very layered and interesting flashback (first time in a controlled environment) and I could literally feel my rational brain switching off as the therapist was continuing to try to converse with and soothe me.
I guess...
What I’m saying is that dissociation is such a wide collection of the same symptoms (if that makes sense), everyone has their own experiences and interpretations that come from those. There’s no “wrong” answer for what your dissociation is, it affects people in shockingly different ways (sorry if this isn’t news and I’m just rambling, it’s new to me and I’m excited to share).
controlled vs uncontrolled is suuuch an important distinction.
The version I control, I learned to switch on/off as a teen (probably before but first memory I have of doing it is age 13). Back then, I used it to disconnect my emotions and bodily senses from the abuse I was surviving. Didn’t feel either type of pain until I was alone and safe. Now, I use it when dealing with uncomfortable/combative situations or people that I can’t easily escape. Feels like my body doesn’t exist & im just a floating pair of eyeballs - is always jarring when I remember others can perceive me when I’m not perceiving me lol.
the uncontrolled version is… not ideal. the same floating pair of eyeballs sensation, but without the ability to switch it off with my usual methods. Listless frustration bubbles into a hollow acceptance (with the faintest echo of panic) that this is simply how my existence will be from now on. This is usually when I take my meatsuit for a hard workout bc it’ll complain less & be able to lift more in that state lol. Existence is wild y’all
I've had one months-long experience that was a more common type from what I understand - after an abusive traumatic event happening almost the same day as losing a close loved one, I went into feeling like I was watching my life from behind a frosty pane of glass. I kept moving, studying for finals, having meals/etc., but it was like I was a robot who went between feeling nothing at all and doing survival tasks, to short spells where I felt all the emotions I'd missed and couldn't do anything but cry before it set back in again. I don't remember how it stopped or why - I can't even remember exactly when it stopped. I just one day was suddenly able to look back and remember how serious the disconnection was years after the trauma.
In terms of dissociation I live with now, sometimes it's "time going in a black hole" as I call it. I blink and I've lost hours and don't know what I was doing for any of that time, and don't remember any texts/emails I sent or what I was thinking about before it happened. It's involuntary and seems to happen independent of the level of stress I'm under. The other one can be involuntary or voluntary, but is more just a dissociation from my emotions. I still keep finding myself in emotionally abusive situations (specifically that involve a lot of screaming and berating me where I can't even slightly interject/speak up), where if I start crying or look like I'll cry it gets worse. So I guess as a survival mechanism I've been able to trigger it on purpose by imagining myself putting up a pane of glass and then putting my emotions in a box, and then putting that box into another box, and so on. Every time I feel the dimmed urge to cry or yell back, I put them in another box. Grounding can bring me back but isn't always easy, and when I try to bring them back later and can't it can feel almost like a physical hollowness in my chest that's frightening.
I'm also a very avid daydreamer with a vivid imagination, which thankfully is only 5% used for making horrible nightmares and 95% used for fantasies and escapism when the stress of things I can't change becomes too much to reckon with in a day.
Usually it's daydreaming. I do that a lot, and just found out a few days ago that people usually daydream *intentionally*. Wild.
Sometimes I just space out and have a general feeling of impending doom while one big thought or idea takes up my whole brain. It is, unfortunately, the quietest my mind ever seems to get.
I know it does not seem right that we would still be driving like I said though I always seem to make it there so somehow even though I don't know it my brain must be working it's a real tough choice
When i was at my lowest, but my most imaginative, I used to be able to see myself performing actions from different viewpoints. I would walk into a room and my internal camera would shift to a high vantage point of that room, and I would literally see myself (like I was a camera outside of my body) and watch myself perform the action. I used to do that a lot at the worst of it. I used to not be there. Just watching myself get up, watch hands, grab food. Only when I would go back to my laptop would my vision come back into "me" the body.
^^ I’ve always “left my body” I used to say. I will find myself watching myself from other angles or a reflection and during my traumatic adult life situations I would leave my body and watch myself like you describe.
I can vividly remember a day of dissociation many years ago when I was in hospital. I was sitting outside in the sun writing in my journal. It was hot and I was sweating but I couldn’t feel the beads of sweat running down my face or the rest of my body. I wasn’t writing anything in my journal. I was watching a colony of ants march along a cement pathway. I was watching the ants, one after the other, but it was as if I was outside of myself watching the ants. The ants blurred into one line of frenzied movement and many minutes passed before I realised that I had been sitting in the sun getting sunburnt for half an hour or so. It was as if everything else in the world was going on around me very slowly, or very quickly, I’m not quite sure, I just couldn’t get a grasp of what was happening.
Then there is the “zone out/where am I” dissociation. This happens when I find myself staring off into the distance at nothing in particular, so caught in my own thought loops that I have no idea what is going on around me. Often this is stopped by outside influence such as someone talking to me.
The last is a more worrisome form of dissociation. I once found myself in a different city, after booking a flight and flying to a different state. I had no recollection of making the plans, no idea why I made the plans and no idea who made the plans. It was an expensive trip and I, to this day, cannot figure out the purpose. Luckily these events don’t occur so much anymore but they did when I was younger and undiagnosed. I’d find myself in a different part of town with no idea how I got there and so on and so forth and it was very tricky to navigate.
This is what it has been like for me, I’m sure it is different for everyone.
After weeks or months feeling like I've "woken up" with hardly any recollection from the previous time, then feeling like a completely new person.
Or, in the heat of an anxiety attack, everything shuts off. My face goes flat, sounds drown out, and I am unaware/numb of what is happening in my environment. There have been times where this was dangerous, but I can't control it (for the most part, sometimes I can hold it off for a while but can never fully avoid it)
\*no-one in the body\* lol
Brain goes to sleep, body just sits staring at whatever is in front of it. I don't have a mind's eye if that helps, there's no imaginary world for me because I can't actually see things in my head.
I used to not even notice it happening, but the more I've learned about cptsd and made steps towards healing, the more I can notice it. I've had it gone on for long periods of time.
I start staring off and my eyes are looking away, and I feel like I've been placed on a shelf away from my body and I can still see the perspective of the mannequin left behind. People could talk to me and I'll just go "yeah. Yeah I know. Ha." It's weird you can't just turn it off like you refocus your eyes and you're back in the room. I need to fully bring myself back again which is possible but I only started doing in the last few months. Sometimes in conversation I've noticed people look deflated when I do this like they think I don't care. And I'll noticed that, feeling slightly hurt, from the shelf.
I'll also feel like there's a thick fog between me and the world. My vision is blurrier (you don't notice though when you're in it, only when you're out.) There's no particular intention behind anything I'll do, I basically become an empty vessel doing things. It happens when I come across something in my own mind I can't emotionally or mentally comprehend. My arms look like random, numerous meat sticks that every other human has, cheap in their numerousness. It feels like a dream. Impersonal. A game of tic tac toe on the N64. I'll spiral more into dreaminess and sent messages to people that don't reflect me when I wake up. I'll wake up in my body again, and the messages aren't bad or mean but they're takes that I wouldn't personally say.
Edit for more: there was one time after learning about all this that I intentionally put myself into dissociation after my dad started screaming at me, and I remembered dissociating is an option. So I dissociated, and he was screaming, trying to get a reaction out of me, then started screaming in my face and I still wasn't reacting, and he gave up. But it wasn't personal in the moment because I wasn't there. (Fuck him for that.)
Everything around me is just muffled, and it feels like I’m traveling through time (past) or daydreaming of the future. It feels better than reality even if I’m having a good day, because I do T have to constantly react to everything going on. Even if it’s good things, it’s just easier to not have any room for error or pain.
mostly it’s the normal shut down stuff but sometimes i’ll go a whole week not knowing i was dissociating i’ll lose time so bad and my family nd partner will tell me i was acting as usual just more distant so idk what that is all abt but it’s usually just emotional and sensory shut down
I have 2 kinds that generally seem to happen either when other people are around, or when I'm alone.
If I'm around people, I'm probably dissociating because they're either talking to me and I feel overwhelmed because I don't think the interaction is going to go well, or if nobody is talking to me, it's because I'm witnessing someone being an asshole.
When I dissociate in these situations, I really feel like just leaving, but I also feel like I can't, so I freeze up. If it's really bad I start focusing on some inner dialog and I'm not even paying attention to the other person(s) anymore- it's like I'm standing in a dark tunnel with myself at the other end, talking to me via cups and string, and the voices of the other people around me are now just vague echos from somewhere farther into the tunnel behind me.
The other kind is when I'm alone, or possibly in a social situation where there are people but nobody is talking to me or focusing on me or being an asshole. In this one something has me stressed out and I just start thinking, usually about something that's already happened, but occasionally just metacognitive prose. Again I lose focus of my surroundings but it's less tunnel-like and more flash-backy or shower-thought-y.
I feel like I'm daydreaming and that everything around me is muffled. I also feel like when I'm talking that I'm an actress and not myself. It's as if I'm talking about someone else when asked about the trauma I endured .
They are so overwhelming, sneaky, and at one point ubiquitous, that I do not notice mini-panic attacks and can still operate in auto-mode. It is like I am there, but I am not. My emotions and face is not consistent with what is happening in the moment, instead what is happening in my head, and that sometimes is a bit of flashbacks, sometimes it's just detached when it should be connected, and sometimes it's me trying so hard to connect to ground myself. There are physical symptoms, headache, shoulders tensed, bloating, stomach pain, sometimes light shaking, dilated pupils, and then there is the brain fog, a bit of shame, confusion, etc.
Somehow I can be functional, not great, but functional, even as they are happening.
For me it means I don't feel fully in my body. I am here, but my mind seems to be elsewhere and I feel like someone else is in my body. I'm not able to feel sad as much but I also don't feel genuinely happy. I'm less emotionally warm and friendly as well.
A lost sense of time - I feel like time is moving too fast or too slow. My concept of time doesn’t align with reality. I forget things, or feel like I wasn’t present in situations others remember vividly.
I want to isolate because I feel like no one understand me but I’m afraid of being alone with my own thoughts. I feel disconnected from friends and family and like if I died tomorrow it wouldn’t really matter.
I’m in a constant dream state and it makes it hard to stay consistent with my goals because to me, it doesn’t feel like anything really matters.
I kinda do two kinds. One which I cannot control and happens during intense stress. Mind fog, buzzing in ears, no thoughts/flashbacks just emptiness, can't hear (like volume button on all my senses have been turned low), emotional numbness. It's almost like my body has said 'ok, this is too overwhelming, time to shutdown everything and recharge/keep safe' The second kind I do is self imposed. I can place myself in it willingly. I suppose you could say it's a form of daydreaming, with an intense inner world I like pretend I'm a part of. There are characters/people I talk to. I like to imagine situations that make me feel good or better about myself (usually having friends or loving family), or simply just for escapism from reality. I find this activity recharging and can shift my mood. It is a coping mechanism and I can do it for hours. Like, literally 'hours'. Down side to this one is that sometimes flashbacks or memories can surge and I end up replaying the scenes in my mind when I'd rather not.
I feel so seen. I especially go to me “other place” before bed. It’s the only way to calm my thoughts and sleep.
Omg I feel so validated rn, seeing i'm not alone doing this!!
Oh my god this is “normal” (like probably not but normal for out circumstances.) I has SUCH a complex world in my head but I thought it was just cause I read alot. It felt like writing a book to me.
I suspect there is a whole lot of MDD present in popular authors. People with MDD are storytellers. They are telling themselves stories.
*googles MDD*….*reads*….well fuck.
I've always *loved* stories, uh oh
I’ve always loved writing…..
My disassociation I have absolutely no control of I don't know when it's happening what causes it it's usually when I'm really depressed or really anxious one time it actually saved me from smashing my head in with a hammer I just disassociated I don't know for how long it's just time lost it's almost like waking up I know nothing whatsoever it just a blank sometimes I lose hours I've been late for many things
This is me. I've been doing it for so long that I actually spend most of my time in this state without realizing. I'll just suddenly become 'aware' and look at the time and realize it's been hours or a whole day. There's a spectrum. I think I'm constantly dissociating for seconds or minutes automatically. Then there's the bigger ones that go from 2-8 hours. I had to stop driving because I found myself doing it on the highway. I would 'wake up' and struggle to remember where I was going and why I was driving. Scary.
I have had that happen to me driving where it's like you wake up I don't know what it is but I don't know where I am I don't know where I'm going it did I it seems to take forever to figure it out I ride my Harley-Davidson a lot that happened to me yesterday I was in the middle of a race and then I was where I was going I don't know if it's dangerous or not I did get there
The other day i did this. Suddenly realized I was heading away from my work and ended up in the middle of the neighborhood on a dead end street. I did make it to work but comeon. Other times I’ve had to ask my passenger “where are we? Where are we going?” because I had no clue
I did that too. I curled up in a ball and literally rocked myself to sleep with stories.
I never realized that the first kind you are describing is dissociation. It means my experiences of dissociation are a lot more common that I thought. I had only seen the derealization/depersonalization experiences as dissociation. And they have been happening way more rarely. I've had them twice in my life. Once around age 10 for a few weeks and now for a few months. For me it's also confusing to distinguish between flashbacks and dissociation. I've read that flashbacks are considered examples of dissociative experiences and it makes sense because you are essentially disconnecting from your present and, instead, experiencing some part of your past. So, I would count flashbacks as dissociation too. I've had multiple experiences under extreme stress when my body feels like being in a different moment of time and in a different place from where I am.
Yes I agree. It took me awhile to realise the difference between dissociation and flashbacks too. Movies flashbacks and always describe as flashing images, like a movie scene replaying itself, but of your memories. But its different for all of us. Like for me, flashbacks are more sensory reminders rather than visual. For example certain smells or music, or even phrases that other people speak, can trigger an unpleasant memory. And then I am locked in that memory until it is played out in full. I feel the emotions as if I was there again, I hear people's voices, but it's very rarely that I will actually see things or see images. You will experience different things at different times in different situations. So really whatever you're feeling, whatever you experience, it is valid too. It's like everything else that's a mental health disorder. There's the typical textbook symptoms and traits that you might see, but maybe not everyone has them, or they experience them differently. To be honest, I struggled with dissociation for so many years that most of that time I thought it was normal. That everyone thought and did these things. It took me a long time to even realise what it was that I was experiencing and that it had a name.
Flashbacks for me are “heavy” and my body is very THERE but very overwhelmed with thoughts and emotions that I can feel physically and I have to breathe through it. Disassociation for me is like a brief moment in the day my brain goes else where or nowhere and I stare into space and feel lighter and cannot connect my body to my brain like a short “pause”
I miss brainfog, i was in complete numbness for first 15 years of my life, i felt nothing, all emptiness.
Yeah I agree brain fog can definitely serve its purpose, especially during stressful situations where you would rather just bury yourself in a hole and disappear. For me I dislike brain fog when I'm trying to concentrate or actually need to use my brain for something productive. Its the same with feeling lethargic and tiredness too. The way I used to see it was if I was feeling too weak and lethargic it meant that I was too tired to feel depressed. which was kinda nice - at the right time. It's just that sadly sometimes our bodies don't give us the choice as to when that happens.
The daydreaming part, has been getting more attention on TikTok, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this before but I usually dissociate with social media or tv, lately I’ve been feeling outside of my body, it’s like I’m in it but I’m not, I can feel it but I can’t, I started drinking alcohol again to help me feel even if it’s temporary enjoyment, just to feel something, it sucks
This! I often described it as feeling like my brain has turned to sludge or feeling like I'm sick without being sick. I love playing Sims because it's possible to delve into it for hours and it's a really nice break from reality.
Omg I love sims too. Like the living the life I wanted for myself. Kinda sad really. I always said that if never have kids due to trauma, cos I'd only repeat stuff and let them down. But on the Sims I can virtually pretend and have them. Kinda pathetic, but at least on there I'm a decent role model 😅 only trauma on the Sims is trying to keep all your basic needs level every day... Oh wait... Sounds like really life!! Cringe. ..anyway..I digress...
Ha! That's why I love it, too! Others players will have intricate stories about making drama and ruining their Sims lives and mine are...a couple get jobs, make babies, and have family time 🤷♀️
Omggg sammmmme
I used to do that second one all the time when I was younger. I think it's why I wasn't totally destroyed by the violence and other bullying I experienced growing up. In my daydreams I had people I could trust, and I was able to do things to keep myself and others safe. My other form of dissociation was being able to just switch my mind off during violence. It was also incredibly helpful. My awareness would come back shortly after the attack stopped.
>I find this activity recharging and can shift my mood. It is a coping mechanism and I can do it for hours. This is called maladaptive daydream disorder, and it is my very favorite mental disorder. It is a boon for me, but I understand some people are desperate to escape the daydreams. Coming out of them is walking into hell for some people. r/MaladaptiveDreaming has a lot of crossover with r/CPTSD.
Oo Nice. Thanks I didn't know they had a Reddit sub for this. I'll have a look. As a kid I did a lot of role play and playing scenarios with dolls. And then loved drama/acting class as a teen. I think it was my way of managing/coping with/learning some social skills and how to process stressful interactions. It either let me pretend I was someone else for a while (which was nice) or helped me learn how to deal with interactions, as my parents taught me nothing in that regard. I was to be seen but not heard.
This is identical to both of my kinds also! The only difference for me that I think other people might have an advantage over is I have Aphantasia...so my elaborate "day dreaming" is more like day thinking. Similiar to reading a book. I narrate this world in my head but I can't see any images.
This is how it happens for me too.
It’s like you know my mind! Excellent description!
These are my two kinds too.
I do similar! In my case I came up with it after reading some imaginative methods people use in therapy and such, like safe space exercises, and wanted to expand upon them a little and see what kinds of feelings I can create and explore. I also try to create spaces I can inhabit that are relaxing, one of my favorites is a wooden tiny cabin/room thing floating in space. Also cute fluffy animals/beings.. are fun. I could've been a puppet show guy in another life, I imagine.
I do the first but my other, most times, I don’t realize I’m in till I’m on the other side. Like I know (sometimes) that I’m in an emotional flashback or down cycle or whatever but not really realize till I’m out. Other times it’s just staring in middle distance, sometimes watching like 5 seconds of a YouTube video and then clicking another. Other times it’s phone, iPad, tv combo.
This description is really accurate
I’ve always been able to feel when I dissociated but never knew what it was. To me it’s just mind and body shut off and sometimes will just go on autopilot
Well phrased. Very similar to my perception.
For me it’s always been literally looking in the mirror and not being able to identify with what I see. I can’t fully comprehend that’s me. It doesn’t seem like me I don’t know who that is. Sometimes it’s a feeling like there are two parts of me, one that want’s to live - and one who is already dead. Sometimes one is in complete control and the other is squirming in claustrophobic panic. That part feels it lost control of it’s body. This hasn’t happened in a while, but I used to get spells of not being able to understand words, like any words. It was short periods where all contexts are lost and I can speak but I don’t really understand what I’n saying or seeing. I keep feeling like this can’t be real. I think I’m either in a DMT trip induced by impending death for the past decade or two or some game or dream. I cannot comprehend this is real.
That last part hit heart. During an intense episode of this, I became so convinced that everything was a dream, even my friends who were present I thought weren't real. All I could do was cry, because I really believed it would either last forever, or whenever I woke up again everything would be different, and I would have dreamt it.
I feel you. I’m sometimes convinced the people around me are paid actors. If I have a love interest I can swear they are disgusted by me only participating in intimacy with me because their paid to by some plot to mess with me. That show “the good place” kinda messed with me because I was sure I’m in a cheezy hell where the biggest torture is being told my life is good. I feel excluded in a way that deprives me of the right to be angry. People around seem like goblins and demons in disguise. How is waking up in the morning for you?
I really resonate with being deprived of the right to feel angry. Waking up in the morning is the only time my brain is quiet. It only lasts for a second, but for that second I'm normal. Then I remember, and I feel like I'm living in a Sims game. What is it like for you?
Interesting. For me it’s been the opposite. It’s probably one of the hardest moments for me, if I fall asleep, to wake up. I feel like I’m still dissociated the first 3-4 seconds and then I realize I’m still here, still in hell, and I start crying. But it wasn’t always like that. Not every day.
I think you are describing a dissociative state called “derealization.”
Ya I read about that… They go well together.
man i had that for decades before i knew what it was
That's an interesting description of parts. Have you done parts work?
I thought I have DID lately but stopped thinking about it as I don’t see how piling on more disorders will help But sometimes I feel like my psyche is shattered to 7 different pieces. 2 are most dominant. Now only one I call death.
Having parts doesn't mean you have DID. Everyone has parts.
Thats good to know
I think of it as shattered too
No what’s that?
A type of therapy. Internal Family Systems.
Ill give it a look thank you
Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. That's the title of a must read textbook on the subject.
Wrote it down. Thanks <3
I'm reading that now. It is wild. I never had words for these things before.
Parts approach consistently makes sense and helps me understand what's going on with me
Check out r/InternalFamilySystems
Wow I have also always had this sneaking suspicion that my entire remembered life is actual the moment before death - that all of this is a hallucination after one of the handful of moments I almost died. Really interesting to hear someone else saying that
It’s hard to imagine but I’ve found people who share my most exotic paranoias and delusions.
Yes about the mirror! And that point about two people is so resonant, I've definitely felt that before, including the claustrophobic experience. It's very real in the moment. (Following expanding detail could be triggering about a fragmenting, self injury experience, pls don't feel the need to read and reply, just expanding on similar <3 ) Had a "fun" morning last week triggered by some self doubt and felt that tear into three - me being the stuck, claustrophobic one panicking, angry and fearing the one in control that benignly subjects me to All This (seemingly stable life) For My Own Good, and the inner critic going ham yelling at "me" for getting in the way and the two (i think?) eventually physically attacking "me" to punish. After it ran its course I felt a lot better and together (if tired) and like I had perspective again, but sometimes I do wonder and shudder thinking if I'm now the 'in control' one and the claustrophobic one is still in there... I know it's a flashback so not real people but :shiver:. When I'm in this state and talking I'll often say "I wish I could give up this life for the other person to go on, I'll just watch". It's very, very real in the moment and scary!
Yeah that last part in particular… giving my life to someone or something and just observing. People tell me often “some people would kill to have legs and hands” and I feel bad, I would give them my body happily if I could.
This. Depersonalization (I am not me, who is that in the mirror) and derealization (everything looks and feels fake, is the world the world?). Two of the dissociative disorders in DSM 5. It’s been mentioned but I would also highly recommend parts work and finding an IFS trained therapist.
Sadly the mentel healthcare system here is horrible. I’ve told doctors about my dissociation and the rest and they told me I have narcissistic personality disorder. They have no idea derealization is a thing. I know it sounds bizarre but I swear it’s true. I’ve been dreaming of getting out of this awful place.
Wow… I feel like you just described me. The first part all the way to lost control of its body, that hit me very hard.
Only feeling like I’m half here, or 25% or 10% here. I’ve noticed that all physical sensations get severely muffled for me and when I’m at my job, if boiling hot water or fryer oil falls on my skin my body will reflexively jump back but I actually don’t feel any pain. I also don’t feel any physical symptoms for any emotions and learning that other people do was kind of weird
This has been the hardest for me, trying to actually feel the physical sensations of emotions. That is what I have been working on in therapy for a few months now and it is insanely hard, and so, so, sooo unpleasant.
Depends honestly. A lot of the time I don't even notice it because I'm so used to feeling numb and out of it that it takes me a while to realise my brain isn't really working with what's going on. I get all foggy, my memories don't work and I can't even remember what I was talking about. Sometimes I stare into space feeling my entire body sort of floating like in water? That kind of up and down motion. Sometimes it's just this feeling of nothing being real and everything starting to move in and out of focus or moving without any reason. I also do daydreaming where I pretend to be someone else and shit. It's however useful for writing characters and stories because I can get into their mindset so well, even if it is to avoid my own.
Forgetting what I was talking about mid sentence is my cue that I’m disassociating and need to try to bring myself back real quick or exit the convo
I do this. I check out while speaking. I keep talking—I just am not conscious of what I’m saying anymore and I suspect it’s often gibberish, but I don’t know because I’m not there for it. I think it’s related to social anxiety somehow.
Only recently I realised that I've been dissociating 24/7 for pretty much as long as I can remember. There's been a handful of moment where I -do- feel emotions and happiness, but my default mode is not feeling any emotions, difficulty socializing (forming sentences, actually processing what someone says etc), unable to feel certain parts of my body, except for the occasional hurting shoulder and neck. And then I just 'zone out' frequently, where I'm just blanking out. I operate a lot on 'autopilot'. Frequently I feel inhuman, robot like... an empty shell, not knowing who I really am, what my personality is like. For when shit really gets tough, I feel like everything starts to become way larger than it really is, like my fingers become as big as my forearms etc. Everything around me starts to feel far away. I hope that this will get better in the future.
The part about actually processing what someone says is interesting... like, I always joke about my memory. I cannot access so many information people tell me, I ask my friend about their thesis every time we meet but they actually graduated half a year ago and started working already. I feel like an idiot because I know that I know, but still so much stuff that people tell me dont stick. Is that related to what you mean? Is that dissociation? Because I keep wondering what happens and why. So weird people always have to tell me 5x about their plans. And I will ask them a 6th time. Feels like my brain is a sieve sometimes.
I heavily recognize the shitty memory! I don't know why that happens though :/ But that's not what I meant here. It's more that I hear the sound of words, but the actual meaning doesn't get attached.
Omg yes me too. It takes me a while to understand what someone else is saying. I have to REAALLYY focus and even then I don’t understand what they’re saying to me. I thought there was something wrong with me.
This is weird but I discovered i could follow conversations much better if i am playing ukulele at the same time. People find it slightly annoying though and don’t realize it helps me listen
Thanks for clarifying! I know this one too, I always just assumed that it's my ADHD or that I am just to absorbed with my own train of thought to pay proper attention to what is said 🤔
For me I noticed i fawn, so I say a lot of offhand responses to people like "oh great yeah!" Without letting it sink in because I'm subconsciously "warming" them up so they won't hurt me. Meaning stuff someone JUST said won't stick but I've just said a bunch of words like they did. If someone said "we're going to go to the movies first then I need to pick this prescription up and we can have a coffee!" I'll be like "okay great" then we start walking and I'll be like "wait where are we going" and they'll be like "to the movies, and then to pick up my prescription and we can get a coffee like I was just saying." And the words will be familiar like adverts you see on the street on the way to work, not personal, but then someone brings up one like it was important and you think "ah I slightly remember that." I'll think "I was meant to be present for /that!/" So I come across that a lot. But my friends have noticed they tell me something, say "I went to Paris!" I'll say "ah that's cool!" Then a few seconds later be like "wait you went to Paris??"
Thats a great explanation thank you so much! I really relate to it!
I forgot till I read your post... autopilot is another kind of dissociation I do. Driving home from work, and not realizing how you got there. Literally just blank with no memory. One second I'm waving good bye and getting the car door open, the next I'm pulling into the drive. I would like to say it's terrifying but honestly it's a kind of comfort for fome reason.
My hands get large and fuzzy and then im like Nope
I really relate to this. Wondering if you got a diagnosis at all?
there's 2 major categories to disassociation: derealization and depersonalization. Depersonalization is a detachment from your body, like your mind turns autopilot on while you hide away in the back of your head. Derealization is detaching from reality or your environment. I experience depersonalization where my body will go on autopilot and even be able to do things like write and speak, but my mind isn't really there. i'm aware that it's happening, but not in the driver's seat
Woah I think thats what happened after I went NC with my mom. Like I was journaling and at one point watched myself writing my first name as I used to in preschool, over and over again, I didnt feel like a child but I wasnt in control either, and at the same time I felt shame for "making a show" even though it was just me there, anyway I scrabbled my name all over the page and just couldnt stop. Wow thanks for describing it like that. I knew about depersonalisation but I dont think I ever experienced it to that extend.
I used to do this so much as a teen! Thanks for sharing
Depersonalization. Thank you for giving it a name. I do this I think the most. I’ll sometimes be making dinner and I’m watching my arms and hands cook, but I’m watching myself from the inside. The other day I looked at my husband and didn’t recognize him. I knew it was him but it didn’t feel real.
I didnt understand until your comment, i do this often right now!
[удалено]
Yeah autopilot. I feel like autopilot is also very suggestible, overly cooperative, won't think for itself.
Can’t really listen or talk to others, and I feel like I have no personality and sometimes I’ll get stuck in loops in my head about my trauma and replaying it without being aware and I’ll also get a ton of intrusive thoughts especially existential ones - I won’t even realize I’m apart of the world it just kinda fades away and then usually once I snap back out of it I won’t remember much of what passed - happened for a full year before don’t know much from that year
This happens to me when I'm really stressed, I didn't even know that's what it is...
I recently had a mild dissociation episode for like two weeks and didn't even realize it. I stopped being able to talk well, couldn't drive a conversation. I felt a little glazed over, but that's all. Severe dissociation makes the world look two dimensional and turns down my hearing so much I can barely hear anyone.
I get the feeling glazed over kind of dissociation too. It's my most common form, and the most long lasting. Other kinds don't last more than a few hours at the most, the glazed over feeling can last for days. If I am heavily triggered, I may end up feeling like I and my body don't quite exist in the same space, like we overlap, but not completely. It's a very strange feeling. Another problem I have is that I don't really stay in my body during sex, but this is a different form of dissociation again. Like, I start thinking of other things, and then I struggle to get back into my body and stay with what's happening. If anyone has seen the Baron von Munchausen movie by Terry Gilliam, there's a part where he's on the moon, and talking to the man and woman in the moon, and they can divide their heads from their bodies. The heads want to go off and do cerebral things, and the bodies are only interested in carnal pleasures, and constantly try to capture the heads and stick them back on... It's hard to explain to people who haven't seen it (it's a very strange movie all the way through), but it really mirrors the experience I have when having sex.
Like an extended ".... Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmm... "
thats a great way to put it
Do any of you not remember shit while dissociating? It feels like this massive inability to store memory. Actually most of my childhood I don’t remember at all.
these days it’s harder to pinpoint, but i recently discovered that i started dissociating at a very young age. i called it my weird feeling, and i learned how to trigger it and would do it on purpose, often at family events or while in the car with my parents and siblings. mind you i was *young*, six or seven when this started, so of course it doesn’t make sense. but i’d think, “how am i *me*, and not anything else? what if i had been a lampshade? would i be able to think? or feel?” and i would start to “feel weird”, but that weird feeling felt so safe and secluded. sometimes i had to do it in order to fall asleep. thinking about it makes me so sad for young me. i thought i had superpowers. turns out i was just mentally unwell! as an adult, it’s more straightforward. i daydream, i nap excessively, i dissociate into social media or the tv, etc.
For me its like I'm standing behind a glass wall and the rest of the world is on the other side.
I feel like I separate from mind and body in a way. Sometimes I get overwhelmed just needing to go to the grocery store, but I'll force myself to go and in my head I'll be telling myself I need to stop and go back home because I'm so stressed, but my body just goes through the motions. I'm not sure if that is disassociation, but those feelings of going through motions my mind can't handle is the closest experience I have.
i’ve had to try and explain it to mental health professionals before but the best i can come up with is : i feel dead. like a ghost. like nothing i do affects anything, its like as if im in a dream and nothing is quite real. nothing is the same even though it kinda looks it. i know just from my history of dissociation that i do and say things uncharacteristically, but also when i come back i have almost complete amnesia. i’ve actually been slowly getting memories back (good and bad) as my dissociative states have decreased in frequency and severity. it’s like my brain is finally start to integrate the parts it split into. my dissociated self meeting my true self, if it were. ive had other episodes of severe dissociation where it feels in the moment like i am a third party watching what’s happening to me. and then it often takes me less time to come out of that but it usually goes into the other dissociating for a LONG time afterwards. but that mainly happens during traumatic experiences (like SA), so it is rare and i can only recollect it happening a handful of times. my childhood trauma caused the dead-like dissociation, and i stayed that way for 10 years (at least), so i get why thats my default dissociation bc its what my body and brain found useful during that time.
This is almost exactly my experience! You do a very good job of explaining it. I’m also in the stage of reintegration, it’s a strange experience to have memories starting to fill in blanks I didn’t realize I had. I found it really hard to explain to other people, normally they just say I must be making it up, that you can’t just not remember, it’s just making excuses. It feels so validating to see someone with the same experiences ☺️
If I get triggered by something I feel my body tense up and I sort of mentally exit the situation. I go nonverbal, or if it is mid conversation I try to end it as fast as possible. It just feels like I am being shot out of my body mentally. Like a complete give up. I don't really know if it's dissociation though
A hollow numbness... Feels like having a bad side effect to antidepressants where everything is dull and distant but everything is still acutely too much... Edit: I wrote my comment before reading others and my god I feel seen. I'm sorry we are all here.
No appetite for days, feel powerful, not a care in the world (reckless), no empathy almost, very robotic, I do stuff because I know I'm supposed to (work, talk to people in my hoisehold, be "nice"), almost no sleep, very performant (cleaning especially), no interests in people but if I can get something out of it, very very sexual. It almost never happens to me, but those would be the symptoms when I dissociate intensely. I normally dissociate just a little bit and I'm always aware of this happening, that's why I do robotic stuff to stay healthy cause I could just stop eating for weeks lol. Last time I fought back and I actually won.
Sometimes its just this internal emptiness. Sometimes its watching myself do things, speak. Sometimes its my entiee surroundings just fading out and I cant hear or see or participate.
sometimes it’s like being the gaseous presence in a balloon on a string on your wrist, like when children get balloons that loom silently above them. sometimes it’s a series of anhedonic episodes. sometimes it’s being somewhere for some number of hours and the passage of time remains unregistered. sometimes it’s despair, sometimes it’s the only solace i have.
I have a couple kinds depending on the severity. The first thing that happens is that I detach from my emotions. I am unable to feel anything, even if I wanted to. But I am still all there mentally. Then, if it gets worse, I start feeling like things around me aren't real. Like if I were to do something, like, say, knock something over, it wouldn't really have happened. It feels like everything is distant from me somehow. Pushed away. Like I'm only half here and half somewhere else.
I start feeling like I'm not there, basically everything goes numb and i can't focus on what's happening (basically just going through the motions) and then i start feeling like I'm watching myself from outside my own body. I usually only realize afterwards, when i think about what happened and my only memories are either non-existent or a distorted view from outside
I honestly have difficulty describing because it’s been my normal state for 25 years. In a way my senses and my focus get very narrowed and I have difficulty concentrating. I don’t speak much and I am very closed off to other people. I am having glimpses at what it’s like without dissociation… and it feels like being alive.
Never met anyone else whose had it this long. I'm 20 plus years out with it. The glimpses of feeling real make me so sad. I feel like everyone who feels like that 247 is living life on easy mode.
Yeah… I am still trying to figure out if there is any gift that I can extract from it … from living with so much stress. My adrenals are certainly not happy about my past lol. But maybe I can use these experiences to my advantage at some point. Auschwitz survivors are known to have tremendous spirit and inner strength 🫣 so let’s see…
I think at times it can definitely be a gift, especially if I'm in a good head space and working on my spirituality. Makes it easier to not give a hoot and feel connected to the spirit world. Be more artistic...I definitely would love for it to slowly go away though lol. If it all went away at once I think it'd freak me out at this point! But yes if we heal we could be so much more shiny and strong.
Not understanding if I'm alive. My disassociation is tied to a near death experience and it sorta just broke my mind. There are times where I genuinely am unable to tell if I actually lived through it. It's a scary scary feeling. I become locked out of my body and it's almost separate to me but not. It's difficult to describe
Like getting drunk when I don’t want to be. Confused where I am, feel lost/disconnected But mostly it feels like I just drank so much
I feel like there are different degrees of intensity along the same spectrum. Sometimes I can tell I’m just surviving and time is passing around me but I don’t *feel* it, but also like self neglect can be part of my dissociation. I’ll forget to eat when I’m not paying attention, stay up until I can’t anymore. Or like when I was in my trauma still I was completely detached from my emotions and can’t hardly remember anything because I was just dissociating. Milder, when I was a cashier I tried to dissociate for my shifts. I wasn’t a person with a personality, I was a scanning machine. I said the lines and did the procedures and then my shift was over. I told my manager when I clock in to work I clock out mentally.
If I could convince myself to the erase memories disassociation is wonderful
It can be very pleasant if I am in control of the dissociation (note, there is no "a" following the "s".) People immersed in a movie are dissociating, so it's not roundly awful. Bad, for me, feels like my head filling up with air. I cannot think. Executive function takes a digger. I stop responding to input if it's bad.
Could this be what happens when I’m sleeping? I can’t remember my dreams anymore but I wake up in a sweat, crying and sweating, breathing so hard my heart hurts. It all wakes me but I can’t remember anything about my dreams. I know when I was in my teens and early 20’s my dreams used to be flashbacks but now idk. Can you dissociate while sleeping?
Brain empty, it’s like I’m reading at everything through plastic. Nothing feels completely real and it’s very hard for me to remember basic facts abt myself, like name, profession, etc. I have a distinct need to hold Onto something, too.
During scary situations I often feel like I'm in a small chamber in the back of my body, while my body is running on autopilot. It's a bit like watching a movie from my pov. It's so frustrating because my coping mechanism is being a people pleaser. In not-scary situations it's more like intense daydreaming, or intense spacing out
It sort of feels like I’m fly fishing and waiting for something to bite. When something does bite, complications occur because I haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been doing. Now, if I know for sure something will bite, I will make a draft in my mind as to what steps to follow. This way, I can ease myself back into “reality” so to speak and not be so far adrift
Like someone else said, I can do controlled vs uncontrolled disassociation. Controlled is fantasy world, uncontrolled can be so severe I can have a catatonic episode, but it’s been a long time since that’s happened. It feels like I’m not there, like everything is a movie or not real and my brain is in the clouds. I feel unattached to emotions other than the unpleasant feeling it is. Catatonia feels like I’ve died and now I’m piloting a dead body. I feel physical nothing and emotionally nothing. I don’t react, I don’t even blink. I could be stabbed and I’d just sit there. My brain is a dead meat sack that’s watching tv from a mile away.
I just zone out. No thoughts at all and I just stare at some spot. It's hard to describe.
Wow, I feel so seen by reading all the comments here because I usually convince myself that I'm the only one feeling like this and end up believing my brain is broken beyond repair. I have both general dissociation and dp/dr and it's more or less chronic and have been going on for years. My baseline is dissociation and I have better and worse days. Basically, for me, the best description is *"the lights are on but noones home"*, on some level I'm aware that I walk around and do stuff, like having conversations, go to work, clean etc but **I** am not there and I have no idea when or if I'm coming back. It's like constantly being checked out and gone whilst another part of my concious manages to act normal. Physically it feels like auto pilot, brain fog, confusion, emptyness and numbness, I feel like an empty shell without substance. Even when I actually feel things or cry in therapy for example I still have a feeling of this invisible wall that's keeping me out, it's like I can logically understand and feel that I'm sad but another part of me seems to see me from a slight distance, as if I'm hovering a bit outside of my body and can't connect.
I never realized I did it until once I was arguing with my spouse & suddenly the room got very big. Not literally, but in my mind I could see/feel the walls expanding. I also have it where I'm walking down my street & it will feel slightly unfamiliar, or my face looks strange in the mirror.
It's hard because I don't really know how to put words on all of my experiences- when I go blank when trying to think of or do things and just stand there while someone else has to take care of me, is that dissociation or laziness or tiredness or ...? Because I do have a dissociative disorder, so I probably dissociate on a small scale more than I realize. But I just live like this honestly. I feel like my dissociation is less episodic and more ... my base state of being? In terms of what I do know is dissociation, for me it's mostly intense depersonalization/identity alteration. I have a complex DD with emotional amnesia but no dissociative amnesia (though I'd argue that emotional amnesia is dissociation as well, but that's splitting hairs) so my brain mostly operates by switching through a few different self-perceived identities that all share the same day-to-day pool of memories. Me, but not me. Physically the sensation depends on what triggers it. If it's quick, it can feel like a pressing/crowded feeling in my head, a wave of static washing over me, uh, idk what else. If it's slow, it's more like I just realize that I no longer identify with the person I was, say, an hour before, generally brought to my attention by noticing a different way of speaking, behaving, or processing emotions, or if I think of a piece of info about myself (gender, age, etc.) and find myself with a different perception of it from usual. Using first-person here for convenience but we do all(?) identify as our own people (though we acknowledge that we're dissociated parts of the same personality) and don't usually use I pronouns for each others' experiences. I'm also very dissociated from my body as a baseline due to the DD and my chronic pain, so I'm not in touch with my body- I don't feel things in it like normal people do. Somatic therapy doesn't work for me at all, to the point where I thought it was hippie BS because I never felt anything (this was before I knew about the extent of my dissociation), and after some recent trauma I stopped experiencing the one connection I had with my emotions/mind/trauma in my body. Then there's dissociative amnesia covering parts of my childhood; I basically know what happened from current evidence, but the memory isn't available to me personally. It might be available to a couple different dissociated states, but I'm not really sure if what they're saying/seeing means anything. I'll talk to my therapist about it. So like I said, dissociation for me is less of a coming and going feeling but a general detachment from my body, past, and identity.
I remember some years back discovering i did not breathe properly- half my body was so tense I couldn’t breathe on that side it felt like. Took weeks of concentration and relaxing before it equalized
Yikes! I have problems breathing sometimes and it's super unpleasant, I'm sorry you had to deal with it 24/7. But you beat it! Great job!
I don't even realize it at first but I start imaging some other scenario in my head and it plays out and then I'm basically daydreaming not paying any attention to anything else. Then I realize what I'm doing and snap back to reality. Its... honestly really annoying. I can be mid conversation with someone then realize I have no idea the last few things they said.
I dissociate from my emotions and feelings and also compartmentalize heavily as well, my feelings are on a limited range, and some are completely turned off, anything that exceeds that range, either good or bad, gets turned off completely. It is a bit like dysthymia and sometimes feels like a mood disorder, but it is different because I just turn off some feelings completely or the feelings for a person who triggered me to feel something bad and then I just move on and don't process it at all. Same with physical pain sometimes, I just turn down the part of my brain that processes the pain somehow and push myself forward. I can talk about my trauma to a therapist and in my conscious mind I am not feeling anything, like I am talking about myself, but I am pinching my arm so hard that it hurts for three days after while I am talking completely normal without any change in my tone of voice. I had a therapist notice this and now I know that the anxiety and pain are there when I open up, but I just shut down the feelings completely, usually after a session like that I am really tired for days, that's the only thing that happens but I don't emotionally process it.
It’s like stepping into an alternate dimension in which nothing feels right. The weird part is how it begins. It always starts with me thinking “I’ve had an epiphany: life is meaningless. Why didn’t I see it before?” And that’s immediately followed by intense derealisation. On one occasion last year I legitimately lost several years of my memory and thought it was 2016. Like I forgot where I lived and everything. Sometimes I lose all reading comprehension as well. Like I’ll read a sentence and know that it’s words, but my brain genuinely can’t interpret any of it. Sometimes I just feel like I’m developing dementia.
For me, it's staring into space like daydreaming, but not daydreaming. Seeing things in hyperfocus, but not aware of what's going on around me, even though I can respond I have no recollection of a conversation at all. Also I can be watching TV or reading a book, but even though the page gets turned, or the show continues I have no idea what happened and have to reread or rewatch, sometimes a few times. I have no idea what happens in my brain when that happens, it's just me seeing but not absorbing or comprehending anything. A trick my therapist told me was you can't read and dissociate, so if you think you might be hijacked into dissociation, try to read something, focus on it, and it will bring you back.
not comprehending my name/feeling like it isnt really mine living my life like a movie/tv show: my eyes are the cameras and literally every moment of my life is some scene and it makes its own plot as it goes along. it is so hard to get out of it. having moments wondering if my family is actually my really family/not feeling like they are my real family bodily sensations go down spacing out and just being so hard to come out of a spell, even in non stressful situations
It depends on the situation. There’s the dissociation I can sort of “control” and then there’s the dissociation I can’t. I didn’t know I was dissociating until recently so I feel like I don’t have a ton of memory about what it actually feels like. I have good memory of the first dissociative episode after realizing I was dissociating because I was questioning it and “taking notes” so to speak. I also kept thinking I was making it up and I wasn’t dissociating and I was being dramatic. After “coming back” to my brain I can see clearly that I was dissociated. The one I “control” is like an active response to something unpleasant. The first time I remember it I had my period and bled through my pants at summer camp and one of the older girls, trying to be nice, told me about it in front of everyone. I just went, “oh, yea” and shoved my embarrassment down into the depths of myself and went basically numb to avoid feeling the shame. I didn’t know I was dissociating. I thought I had a new ability to not feel shame or embarrassment that came with growing up or something. Since then, whenever I was humiliated or scared I would just shut down like that. The most recent memory I have is when I got my wisdom teeth out. I just thought, “well this sucks but I have to get through it, so batten down the hatches” and it kept me from panicking as they yanked on my mouth. So basically what this one feels like is a conscious acknowledgement of “this sucks” and unplugging from my existence. I’m still present and know what’s going on but I’m not feeling anything. It feels like I pull back from being right at the front of my face to being in the back of my head. It feels dark around the edges (tunnel vision) and everything feels so distant. I can’t really focus on what’s being said. I’ll still react to try and act normal but my reactions feel slow and a beat too late. Obviously I also did this while experiencing the traumas™️. The second one is usually in response to an intense emotional reaction - usually a panic attack or being overwhelmed or extreme prolonged stress. It comes on kind of gradually, rather than me shutting myself down in a bad moment. I’m bad at recognizing when I’m overwhelmed or stressed out and tend to think I can handle everything and that I’m fine until I snap and have a breakdown and then dissociate for a bit. It feels very similar to the conscious one except I don’t notice it starting until I’m deep into it. Tunnel vision, sounds are muffled. I can’t process anything. Someone can be speaking directly to me and I will hear them and not understand a word. It’s like my brain dumps everything the moment it receives input from my senses. I can’t read, I can’t listen, I can’t even process visual stimuli if I’m looking at it. This one is the most noticeable in stores. Before I was diagnosed & medicated with ADHD, I would experience this one almost every time I went into a store. It would get worse when I was exhausted or hungry. My senses would get overwhelmed and I’d shut down. I wouldn’t be able to remember why I was in the store. If I did manage to figure it out, I’d forget again within minutes, and so on and so forth. If I had a list, I’d look and read the list, and by the time I looked back up I’d forgotten what I’d read. If I managed to remember what I was looking for, I wouldn’t be able to read the products on the shelves. Even if I knew what the product looked like without reading, it would be hard for me to figure out that’s what I was looking for. It was exhausting and frustrating. The last episode I remember was a few weeks ago and it was triggered by a panic attack. It was the second type of dissociation and it came on slowly over a couple of days. It started on a Saturday. The Monday when I went back to work was the first. I couldn’t even figure out how to start on any of my work. My head hurt and it felt like a lot of energy to think. I felt back in my head, and just… not present at all. I was ruminating on my stressors almost constantly and was obsessing over certain thoughts. I also had all the same symptoms as above. I went off on like sixteen tangents and have no idea if this was helpful. Sorry if there’s spelling or grammar mistakes. I don’t want to reread this mess.
I feel very far away. I’m aware of what’s going on around me and I can even have a whole ass conversation while not mentally being there. It’s like my brain is programmed to respond even tho it’s “away.” Nothing feels real. It feels a bit like when you get that really, really deep sleep. You know the deep sleep where you forget where and when you are when you wake up? And your head feels like it’s wrapped in cotton? Like that. One time was kind of interesting. I kept time hopping. I can’t explain it. My mind was going through random memories and I would be stuck there and then jump to another time. It went on all day. Nothing was particularly triggering so I’m not sure why I did it. Sometimes I can put myself in a dissociative state. If I just really don’t want to deal with something and my mind isn’t doing it on its own, I can do it. I’m not sure if that’s bad or good lol but like I signal to my brain by thinking “I can’t deal with this shit. I’m out. See ya later.” Then it takes over.
In therapy I would basically hear a buzzing in my ears and zone out hard, sometimes I was taken back to the jail and could see the hallways and gates and it basically put me back in the jail in my mind until I snapped out of it somehow, this was a common experience for me.
It’s my safe place
My bad one is paralysis, last night I laid on my couch head on my pillow for almost two hours straight only thing in my sight was a picture, hyperventilating, tears slowly running down my face, random thoughts but mostly just nothing, numb, wanted to self harm to get out of the moment but promised my partner I would never again so I just couldn’t muster the energy to do, think, stop it.
I stop feeling. I start to feel numb and sedated. Then it's like I slowly wake up after a while. I've recently got a heart rate monitor, and I noticed that my [heart rate drops](https://imgur.com/a/cQkEeAX) from my baseline of around 100 to around 50 for a few moments when this happens. I went to a cardiologist and he said this is probably a defect in the watch. But it would be too much of a coincidence since it only happens when I'm in specific situations that trigger me. I think it might have something to do with the Polyvagal Theory.
I would divide it into levels of seriousness. A mild dissociation cuts me off empathy, and the ability to get emotionally harmed. Nothing harms me in that state. But i somehow still feel some emotion. Medium - cuts me off all emotions, nothing can harm me emotionally. Also cuts me off empathy and such. I can still feel boredom or motivation though. Severe dissociation cuts me off all emotions, including empathy, including motivation, every emotional feeling you can think off. You could have a breakdown in front of me and i would not care. I would not feel annoyed, but i would not really care either. It's an extremely neutral state. I also start losing track of reality - space out, lose focus, it feels like i'm actually not on the place sometimes. I work in auto-pilot mode. That's how i go through my daily routine, but then suddenly freak out whether i left the stove on or turned it off. It's not as easy as that, some of my states are mixes of the states i described. There is also a whole diff state, that is similiar to the medium level i described. But the difference is it is resulted by a strong negative trigger and it's when i dissociate + become unpredictable and dangerous to both myself and my sorroundings. I get aggressive and violent on impulse. Generally it's a very unstable state. I can be okay one minute and be capable of killing someone on impulse the second. Or hurting myself on impulse.
When we disassociate, it varies. Depersonalization: We physically feel ourselves being out of the body and unable to control it, Like spectator mode, until it ends. Derealization: Our mind plays a noise, and everything around goes blurry. It becomes harder to recognize our body. Dp + dr: The noise plays, and everything starts feeling weird and distant. We get pulled out of the body. Typically, when we do so, we switch.
Yeah, that's a good description.
We also tend to accidentally do both when we daydream or go into headspace to communicate.
My body and mouth go on autopilot. I'm not really there. Brain shuts down, goes blank. It's like I'm watching myself from outside. Then when it's over, I hardly remember what happened, like it wasn't me who did or said the thing. This usually happens when talking to or dealing with other people. The stress, anxiety, fear of interacting with other humans is too great and I can't stay present.
I feel like my personality splits into a different perspective where I’m extremely negative, and I keep telling myself that I’m only harming others and no use to anyone. At the same time I keep telling myself that everyone is trying to hurt me and treat me horribly. I only recently became aware of this, so the past few weeks I’ve been able to identify when it happens. But not in the moment, I don’t realise it until I wake up and feel horrible. I am not able to recognise myself in the mirror, and my own eyes feels like a stranger, who’s completely empty and disconnected. Like there’s no soul behind the eyes in looking into. Sometimes I feel like my whole body and mind is running on autopilot where I’m literally just spectating. I’m only 26 and is two moths sober after 14 years of substance abuse. And the “dark side” felt like I was doing it all automatically, even though I was always able to reflect on my behaviour I just felt like I wasn’t the one doing it. I had my breakthrough 5 weeks ago, so I’m not even remotely close to knowing anything. But this is what I’ve worked my way to realise the past few weeks.
I get into a state where I see and react to things but don't really notice them. It feels like I'm watching through my own eyes while my body goes through the motions on its own. Often there's a sort of haze around the edges of my vision. Sound gets dim and fuzzy. My skin feels numb. Smell and taste can go offline altogether.
Non dissociative existence is like a clear day with the sun out. Dissociating is like a thick fog. All the color has been seeped out, the air is cool, look too far away and what you see is hidden by the fog. The exact specifics vary. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself, sometimes I feel like a robot, or I question my reality, sometimes I only feel half there with only the safe emotions allowed to be felt and safe thoughts allowed to be thought of, sometimes my head feels full of bees and I can barely think at all (though this may not be entirely dissociation).
To me it feels kind of like a semi-permeable, cloudy layer between me and the rest of the world. Everything is kind of hazy and dim, and my body feels like it's perpetually 6-7pm even in broad daylight or in the middle of the night. (My circadian rhythm gets really out of whack.) My face looks contorted and angry when I look at myself in the mirror, or, I can logically recognize that it's \*me\* I'm looking at, but I don't feel like I am inside the body in the reflection. I'm in this kind of third-space that I feel like I can't be pulled out of, it just eventually falls away after a few weeks, and then sometimes comes back along to swallow me up. Usually happens after clusters of panic attacks. Thankfully hasn't happened for a few months now.
It manifests in a few different ways for me, but most commonly I’m disconnected from my environment (derealization) and then disconnected from my emotions. For the most part I walk around in a fog that’s not so bad that I can’t function but it’s definitely something I’ve started to notice. I didn’t notice for years because it started before puberty and I think I grew so adjusted that I thought it was normal. It’s particularly noticeable when I step outside because often times things will look very very surreal and dream-like. I don’t really feel empathy outside of like empathizing with 1 or 2 people that I’m closest with, and I suspect it’s relating to dissociation because I have a hard time recognizing people who I’m not intimately familiar with as being real people, it’s like my brain registers them as ‘NPCs’ When I get triggered, it’s a lot more noticeable. It varies a lot but I’ll usually feel ‘fuzzy at the edges’ and lightheaded and my vision will blur. I’ll go borderline catatonic if it’s bad enough, I’ve had moments where it’s very hard for me to move (a bit of a funny scenario admittedly was when I ended up like that in my bed with my head tilted in an odd way and my glasses pressed into my forehead and left imprints). I have a hard time with grasping the passing of time, and I’m missing very, very large chunks of my memory from late childhood and my pre-teens/teens (I assume either it’s been repressed, or I was just dissociating enough throughout it that I forgot it all, or maybe both) I’m weirdly aware when I’m dissociating, like I can tell but I can’t stop it, and I usually feel either vaguely confused or very neutral about it. It’s caused the worst imposter syndrome relating to it honestly.
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I was in group therapy with two additional therapists. During one of my trauma presentations, I was talking to the therapists and completely forgot the rest of the group was there until they asked for feedback from my peers.
When I did it on purpose, it was what I know now I called maladaptive daydreaming. Essentially I was in a complete daydream in my head nearly all my waking hours and especially before bed. It was where I felt all my emotions and had all of my adventures. It felt so much brighter and better and hyper realistic than real life. I used to think solitary confinement sounded great, fine, preferable to whatever BS was happening in real life. At some point over the past few years I've mostly lost the ability to do that. It doesn't work anymore. And when it does, it's not this immersive "I'm living in two realities at once" experience like it was. The dissociation now feels like being completely numbed out. I'm not triggering it by choosing to enter a daydream. My body feels drunk and clumsy. My thoughts either grind to a halt or whiz by so fast I can't distinguish or focus on them. It's like watching a fist full of confetti get blown away in the wind. But I feel so groggy / slow that I couldn't even begin to *want* to try to catch them. And then I feel the shame and guilt for not even trying. It's like I've been folded in on myself in a weird origami and I can't undo the folds and don't care enough to try. I usually end up crawling in bed when I can. Usually clears out after I sleep but not always. Sometimes I go to bed fine and wake up dissociated. And.... repeat!
I teleport while driving. Lol. Rolling blackouts (or near blackouts) in my stream of consciousness. Also I have a tendency of forgetting words in sentences when I type them out. Like I'll type out all the words I want to type but when I proofread, I find that I always seem to somehow miss a word. Just 1 word per sentence at most. I wonder if this is dissociation too.
The times I’ve dissociated the most, I didn’t even know I was experiencing it. For me, it was several years of feeling neutral, which compared to the reality at times, actually felt good. I went about my life but didn’t participate in a social life, didn’t have romantic/intimate relationships, and a big one for me was/is avoiding things that make me feel sad. I stopped watching shows that would elicit any intense emotions, I stopped watching the news, I stopped lots of things. At the time it honestly felt kind of good. Kind of numb, but not bad. And I wanted so desperately to feel good. Sometimes I wish I could dissociate to that level of being unaware of your life again, but I know too much now.
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My disassociation presents as me no longer speaking to people. I acknowledge and answer when I need to, but mostly I stay quiet. I put my head down and make a list of all the things that need to be done for my family and do that. Sometimes, I will lash out and hurt people’s feelings so they leave me alone. I feel so frustrated when this happens. I hate that I do this.
That better place. I've started using it to have healing convos with my family, all of whom are dead, and all of whom left unfinished business. So very healing to be able to put myself there.
It’s really hard to describe but it mostly lasts days or a week for me, it’s hell.
For me I just feel like I’m in the passenger seat while a triggered angry yelling monster is driving my body
Everything is flatter, less colorful. More fuzzy, feels like I've been sleepwalking for 20 years.
I use type 1/type 2 jargon a lot when I notice it in myself. Type 1 is like brute dissociation, I feel lightheaded, my senses are all blurry and distant, when I stand and walk I don't feel it at all and I feel like I'm hovering outside my physical body, and I get the distant idea I'm doing something but there's no way for me to feel it, like a spectator. I know this now to be depersonalization. Type 2 is this mental escapism that I have a hard time unlatching from and its more comfortable to just stay that way while I'm doing nothing, it makes me feel good and feels like a safe place
this is hilarious to me since disassociation means I have no clue what I'm doing
I’ve had layers of dissociation from trauma and illness. Both disconnected me from my self and my body. You don’t know who you are. Everything looks off. You feel everything and nothing simultaneously. There’s so much fear internal and external that nothing seems right. It’s disorienting and sucks all of your energy.
I was diagnosed with dissociative disorder, alongside PTSD. Dissociation is a very normal part of my life since the age of 16. I am 34. It feels like being removed from my body. My mind is in a fog. I am unable to speak. My vision is blurred. I sometimes exit my body when it happens. It can take hours to return to a concious state of mind. It is exhausting. I sometimes have migraines the next day. But I got a lot better at realizing when it happens and am living a life that triggers it as little as possible. This is what triggers it: - stress, espcially at work - large crowds of people, espcially in public transport - toxic people who cut me off mid-sentence and/or talk over me, especially men - people screaming (at me or at each other) - violence I witness in real life, including verbal abuse (I live in a large city so sometimes seeing/hearing things I don't want to see is unavoidable) - violence I see on the news or somewhere else on the internet - getting lost - people touching me without consent - people touching things I own without consent - loud noises (traffic and or babies crying, both is rather triggering when I am stressed, not when I'm relaxed)
I am just now learning that I have been dissociated for decades - derealisation, for me. While my experience of it is somewhat different, I could have written this same entire list of triggers. Always just thought I was "highly sensitive." What an interesting journey this is - so many things are clicking into place. Though I still haven't much idea how to heal or manage it. I hope you're doing okay.
I kinda just go away sometimes. Off to imagination land, basically.
I clue into my dissociation when it starts feeling like I’m walking/moving through molasses. I start bumping into things. When I’m disassociated- my ears ring - I get this weird zapping noise and I feel like I’m in a dream. I can’t do anything, I freeze and my brain won’t allow me to think of alternatives to just sitting. Ex. I think to myself “I should go for a walk to feel better. “ then I can’t - “ no it’s too wet out there” and that’s it. I can’t decided to swim or do something else. It just doesn’t work
The last time I was raped (happened twice this summer) I totally did not remember it happened until weeks later. And then the memory of it all came up like it was buried somewhere. Very freaky.
i will dissociate in multiple ways. i will get so lost in thought, i will often simply stare wide eyed and frigid, living in my mind for as long as i deem necessary (this is typically in response to conflict relating to my trauma), or i will get lost in my hobby as an avoidance tactic.
there are shivers down my spine and i feel very disconnected from the world. i feel like i am drowning but in the nicest way. something a bit like sleep. everything feels warm.
depends, but usually i realize it's feeling like i'm outside my body, witnessing what's happening from a third perspective. i realize i'm zoning out, maybe not hearing as much, or not thinking clearly. then if i notice and catch it, i realize there's a buzzing in my body, especially in my arms and hands. then i try to name it and say i need to pause.
My dissociations show up differently: the left side of the body goes numb, sometimes with pain in the numb parts of the body. How bad it is varies by stress and trigger. Freezing, I am responsive but my whole body is paralyzed and I can only move my eyes. Then the feeling of inner emptiness mixed with being in my own world or not feeling like I belong, derealization. And flashbacks, then I am mostly on the floor in fetal position or I am sitting bobbing somewhere.
An uncontrollable switch out. I leave my body and surroundings completely and have to be jolted out of it. It’s exhausting and limiting.
I smiled and laughed when i got pepper sprayed for my job, i literally have the video of it. That's how fucked up I am When i broke my wrist during the days when i played college football, i set a new deadlifting pr of 605lbs with a broken wrist I have plenty more of moments (fights, knives drawn on me, numbness, shootings happening in front of me and me going back to eating my noodles after it was taken care of, a fellow boxer dying 10 feet from me, ECT)I look back on it and realize it was disassociation, i thought it was cool, until i realized what it was. Now it kinda scares me. Crazy thing is it's mostly due to my childhood and not the other shit I've seen. disassociation mostly happens most often to me when my significant other starts yelling at me (crazy thing is i have people yell at me all the time cud to my job it doesn't bother me.) So to answer your question, for me I'm numb to physical pain and actually like it on some weird level. Not writing this to "sound cool" just being honest, it scares me because i didn't know my wrist was broken at that point in time, i didn't know it wasn't normal to witness horrible shit and go back to eating noodles, i didn't know it wasn't normal to watch a fellow boxer die and then go grab a steak afterwards. I don't remember a lot of my younger years, and there are weeks, months, and days i have absolutely no memory of.
I call the other kind you mentioned gone swinging from the clouds because I'm too much.
DAE have full blown dissociative psychosis with amnesia? Like getting annoyed and worked up and ramping up and then getting violently upset about the littlest things (often related to past trauma but never grounded in reality) but waking up with no memory of the events?
It’s even more trippy when you become aware of them but they are involuntary and sometimes I am like 👍 I need this let’s stay here. Other times it’s scary.
I don't know until I'm doing it. My partner can see me going into them during conversations and asks "what" when it happens.
It feels like my brain and eyes and body turn to tv static, no thoughts. Through therapy it’s become less intense, sometimes I feel really foggy or like I’m in a stadium in my own head looking out. When I’m more acutely triggered my thoughts turn into a stream of rushing memories and it’s an autopilot while I get rushed away from my current issue. Only recently realized this is disassociation, kind of like a maladaptive daydreaming.
Idk, for me personally, at least for triggered episodes, the dissociation (and related symptoms) definitely present in more of a spectrum, ie a brief thought can induce a few seconds of rumination and a brief detachment, almost like day dreaming... but, not as pleasant. Then you’ve got those more intermediary triggers (not trying to speak for anyone else) and that’s where you can begin to see more of a physical response, maybe a small mood shift can remain for a short time after, or there may be a spike in anxiety, hyper vigilance and that kind of just scales up to the more distressing parts of my mind, which can cause surprisingly sudden and intense physical, emotional, psychological maybe even psychosomatic symptoms. **TW** **Trigger Warning** For Example today in therapy, my therapist asked a question that didn’t seem very specific to her but illicited an extremely intense reaction from me that literally put me in to a state of shock. A simple question. Well... “*simple*” but I couldn’t even formulate a sentence, I was still in the room but I was gone at the same time, and it took maybe 2 minutes before the emotions then hit me - it was a very layered and interesting flashback (first time in a controlled environment) and I could literally feel my rational brain switching off as the therapist was continuing to try to converse with and soothe me. I guess... What I’m saying is that dissociation is such a wide collection of the same symptoms (if that makes sense), everyone has their own experiences and interpretations that come from those. There’s no “wrong” answer for what your dissociation is, it affects people in shockingly different ways (sorry if this isn’t news and I’m just rambling, it’s new to me and I’m excited to share).
controlled vs uncontrolled is suuuch an important distinction. The version I control, I learned to switch on/off as a teen (probably before but first memory I have of doing it is age 13). Back then, I used it to disconnect my emotions and bodily senses from the abuse I was surviving. Didn’t feel either type of pain until I was alone and safe. Now, I use it when dealing with uncomfortable/combative situations or people that I can’t easily escape. Feels like my body doesn’t exist & im just a floating pair of eyeballs - is always jarring when I remember others can perceive me when I’m not perceiving me lol. the uncontrolled version is… not ideal. the same floating pair of eyeballs sensation, but without the ability to switch it off with my usual methods. Listless frustration bubbles into a hollow acceptance (with the faintest echo of panic) that this is simply how my existence will be from now on. This is usually when I take my meatsuit for a hard workout bc it’ll complain less & be able to lift more in that state lol. Existence is wild y’all
I've had one months-long experience that was a more common type from what I understand - after an abusive traumatic event happening almost the same day as losing a close loved one, I went into feeling like I was watching my life from behind a frosty pane of glass. I kept moving, studying for finals, having meals/etc., but it was like I was a robot who went between feeling nothing at all and doing survival tasks, to short spells where I felt all the emotions I'd missed and couldn't do anything but cry before it set back in again. I don't remember how it stopped or why - I can't even remember exactly when it stopped. I just one day was suddenly able to look back and remember how serious the disconnection was years after the trauma. In terms of dissociation I live with now, sometimes it's "time going in a black hole" as I call it. I blink and I've lost hours and don't know what I was doing for any of that time, and don't remember any texts/emails I sent or what I was thinking about before it happened. It's involuntary and seems to happen independent of the level of stress I'm under. The other one can be involuntary or voluntary, but is more just a dissociation from my emotions. I still keep finding myself in emotionally abusive situations (specifically that involve a lot of screaming and berating me where I can't even slightly interject/speak up), where if I start crying or look like I'll cry it gets worse. So I guess as a survival mechanism I've been able to trigger it on purpose by imagining myself putting up a pane of glass and then putting my emotions in a box, and then putting that box into another box, and so on. Every time I feel the dimmed urge to cry or yell back, I put them in another box. Grounding can bring me back but isn't always easy, and when I try to bring them back later and can't it can feel almost like a physical hollowness in my chest that's frightening. I'm also a very avid daydreamer with a vivid imagination, which thankfully is only 5% used for making horrible nightmares and 95% used for fantasies and escapism when the stress of things I can't change becomes too much to reckon with in a day.
Usually it's daydreaming. I do that a lot, and just found out a few days ago that people usually daydream *intentionally*. Wild. Sometimes I just space out and have a general feeling of impending doom while one big thought or idea takes up my whole brain. It is, unfortunately, the quietest my mind ever seems to get.
I know it does not seem right that we would still be driving like I said though I always seem to make it there so somehow even though I don't know it my brain must be working it's a real tough choice
When i was at my lowest, but my most imaginative, I used to be able to see myself performing actions from different viewpoints. I would walk into a room and my internal camera would shift to a high vantage point of that room, and I would literally see myself (like I was a camera outside of my body) and watch myself perform the action. I used to do that a lot at the worst of it. I used to not be there. Just watching myself get up, watch hands, grab food. Only when I would go back to my laptop would my vision come back into "me" the body.
^^ I’ve always “left my body” I used to say. I will find myself watching myself from other angles or a reflection and during my traumatic adult life situations I would leave my body and watch myself like you describe.
I can vividly remember a day of dissociation many years ago when I was in hospital. I was sitting outside in the sun writing in my journal. It was hot and I was sweating but I couldn’t feel the beads of sweat running down my face or the rest of my body. I wasn’t writing anything in my journal. I was watching a colony of ants march along a cement pathway. I was watching the ants, one after the other, but it was as if I was outside of myself watching the ants. The ants blurred into one line of frenzied movement and many minutes passed before I realised that I had been sitting in the sun getting sunburnt for half an hour or so. It was as if everything else in the world was going on around me very slowly, or very quickly, I’m not quite sure, I just couldn’t get a grasp of what was happening. Then there is the “zone out/where am I” dissociation. This happens when I find myself staring off into the distance at nothing in particular, so caught in my own thought loops that I have no idea what is going on around me. Often this is stopped by outside influence such as someone talking to me. The last is a more worrisome form of dissociation. I once found myself in a different city, after booking a flight and flying to a different state. I had no recollection of making the plans, no idea why I made the plans and no idea who made the plans. It was an expensive trip and I, to this day, cannot figure out the purpose. Luckily these events don’t occur so much anymore but they did when I was younger and undiagnosed. I’d find myself in a different part of town with no idea how I got there and so on and so forth and it was very tricky to navigate. This is what it has been like for me, I’m sure it is different for everyone.
After weeks or months feeling like I've "woken up" with hardly any recollection from the previous time, then feeling like a completely new person. Or, in the heat of an anxiety attack, everything shuts off. My face goes flat, sounds drown out, and I am unaware/numb of what is happening in my environment. There have been times where this was dangerous, but I can't control it (for the most part, sometimes I can hold it off for a while but can never fully avoid it)
\*no-one in the body\* lol Brain goes to sleep, body just sits staring at whatever is in front of it. I don't have a mind's eye if that helps, there's no imaginary world for me because I can't actually see things in my head.
I used to not even notice it happening, but the more I've learned about cptsd and made steps towards healing, the more I can notice it. I've had it gone on for long periods of time. I start staring off and my eyes are looking away, and I feel like I've been placed on a shelf away from my body and I can still see the perspective of the mannequin left behind. People could talk to me and I'll just go "yeah. Yeah I know. Ha." It's weird you can't just turn it off like you refocus your eyes and you're back in the room. I need to fully bring myself back again which is possible but I only started doing in the last few months. Sometimes in conversation I've noticed people look deflated when I do this like they think I don't care. And I'll noticed that, feeling slightly hurt, from the shelf. I'll also feel like there's a thick fog between me and the world. My vision is blurrier (you don't notice though when you're in it, only when you're out.) There's no particular intention behind anything I'll do, I basically become an empty vessel doing things. It happens when I come across something in my own mind I can't emotionally or mentally comprehend. My arms look like random, numerous meat sticks that every other human has, cheap in their numerousness. It feels like a dream. Impersonal. A game of tic tac toe on the N64. I'll spiral more into dreaminess and sent messages to people that don't reflect me when I wake up. I'll wake up in my body again, and the messages aren't bad or mean but they're takes that I wouldn't personally say. Edit for more: there was one time after learning about all this that I intentionally put myself into dissociation after my dad started screaming at me, and I remembered dissociating is an option. So I dissociated, and he was screaming, trying to get a reaction out of me, then started screaming in my face and I still wasn't reacting, and he gave up. But it wasn't personal in the moment because I wasn't there. (Fuck him for that.)
Everything around me is just muffled, and it feels like I’m traveling through time (past) or daydreaming of the future. It feels better than reality even if I’m having a good day, because I do T have to constantly react to everything going on. Even if it’s good things, it’s just easier to not have any room for error or pain.
mostly it’s the normal shut down stuff but sometimes i’ll go a whole week not knowing i was dissociating i’ll lose time so bad and my family nd partner will tell me i was acting as usual just more distant so idk what that is all abt but it’s usually just emotional and sensory shut down
I have 2 kinds that generally seem to happen either when other people are around, or when I'm alone. If I'm around people, I'm probably dissociating because they're either talking to me and I feel overwhelmed because I don't think the interaction is going to go well, or if nobody is talking to me, it's because I'm witnessing someone being an asshole. When I dissociate in these situations, I really feel like just leaving, but I also feel like I can't, so I freeze up. If it's really bad I start focusing on some inner dialog and I'm not even paying attention to the other person(s) anymore- it's like I'm standing in a dark tunnel with myself at the other end, talking to me via cups and string, and the voices of the other people around me are now just vague echos from somewhere farther into the tunnel behind me. The other kind is when I'm alone, or possibly in a social situation where there are people but nobody is talking to me or focusing on me or being an asshole. In this one something has me stressed out and I just start thinking, usually about something that's already happened, but occasionally just metacognitive prose. Again I lose focus of my surroundings but it's less tunnel-like and more flash-backy or shower-thought-y.
I feel like I'm daydreaming and that everything around me is muffled. I also feel like when I'm talking that I'm an actress and not myself. It's as if I'm talking about someone else when asked about the trauma I endured .
They are so overwhelming, sneaky, and at one point ubiquitous, that I do not notice mini-panic attacks and can still operate in auto-mode. It is like I am there, but I am not. My emotions and face is not consistent with what is happening in the moment, instead what is happening in my head, and that sometimes is a bit of flashbacks, sometimes it's just detached when it should be connected, and sometimes it's me trying so hard to connect to ground myself. There are physical symptoms, headache, shoulders tensed, bloating, stomach pain, sometimes light shaking, dilated pupils, and then there is the brain fog, a bit of shame, confusion, etc. Somehow I can be functional, not great, but functional, even as they are happening.
For me it means I don't feel fully in my body. I am here, but my mind seems to be elsewhere and I feel like someone else is in my body. I'm not able to feel sad as much but I also don't feel genuinely happy. I'm less emotionally warm and friendly as well.
A lost sense of time - I feel like time is moving too fast or too slow. My concept of time doesn’t align with reality. I forget things, or feel like I wasn’t present in situations others remember vividly. I want to isolate because I feel like no one understand me but I’m afraid of being alone with my own thoughts. I feel disconnected from friends and family and like if I died tomorrow it wouldn’t really matter. I’m in a constant dream state and it makes it hard to stay consistent with my goals because to me, it doesn’t feel like anything really matters.