• Started doing it when very young – maybe 8.  Definitely dissociating regularly from age 10

• I have no control over when it begins or ends

• Can last minutes or hours

• It happens when I feel physically threatened or significant emotional pain (esp. fear)

• Once I’ve dissociated the sight of any patterned material will make me dissociate more

• I’m not sure how I present to anyone when I’ve dissociated – no idea if/how my behaviour changes.  It’s probably unlikely that anyone realises that I’ve dissociated

• Dissociation has meant that I feel a bit removed from a lot of my memories so I can just state a lot of them factually with little emotion (dissociation coupled with the fact that I had to smile and laugh a lot growing up and hated that so my emotional reactions and facial expressions are often not congruent with what I actually feel)

Things most likely (but not guaranteed) to cause me to dissociate: 

•  Anyone touching:

  • any sexual part of me

  • my wrist(s)

  • my neck

• Feeling that my life is threatened – that I might die

• Being physically held down

• The threat of physical harm

• Actual physical harm

• Feeling physically trapped in a room/building/space

• Sudden, loud noises

• People crowded around me – esp. if I’m lying down

• Someone moving quickly toward me

• Significant physical pain esp. if it happens suddenly

• Emotional shock:  Someone saying something to me which is distressing and/or causes me significant fear

What it feels like:

• Rarely, when it begins, I’ll get really cold and start shaking

• Feels like some part of me drifts up out of the top of my head in a stream that moves up like steam (it’s a physical feeling)

• Everything feels fuzzy and far away

• Everything is in slow motion

• I feel removed from everything

• Physical pain often recedes

• Emotions become numbed

• Feel like I’m floating, spaced out

• Noise starts blurring together – I occasionally miss parts of conversations because everything is in slow motion and I can’t keep up with what people are saying

• I feel that I don’t care at all about what happens to me and I don’t care if I die

• I am so spaced out that I can’t process the environment around me – I bump into people, forget to look for cars, lose things, forget my address

• I feel things at a distance – I can barely feel touch

• I feel passive.  No fight left in me (if I fight it happens before I dissociate)

• Sometimes when things are too distressing it feels like I travel to some place inside my head where I can hide – that creates black holes in my memory

• I feel like a robot

• It’s an effort to speak or move

• As soon as I can I wander away – I start walking and keep going in any direction

What may help:

• Someone talking to me - quiet, slow, calm voice.  Move slowly.  Stay with me but at a physical distance (esp. if there are multiple people around) unless I ask for closeness.  Ask me to describe what I’m experiencing.  Warmth.  Count aloud in random patterns.  Let me get out of the area if I need to.  Explain either what has happened and/or what is going to happen next.  Debriefing.

• The worst thing anyone can do is try to hold me down

What it’s like after the dissociation ends: 

• I feel tired

• Sometimes (not always) there are black holes in my memory – patches of time I can’t remember.  Or in those holes I’ll remember noise or physical touch but nothing visual & vice versa

• I’ll get flash-backs of what happened to cause the dissociation

• I often feel tremendous emotional pain – that’s when I used to self-harm – for comfort

Originally written Feb, 2019