Dissociation

Caption: I’m wearing colored contacts. Can you tell?

One of the new things I’ve been doing lately is opening up more about my experiences of dissociation. Personally, I think dissociation is MUCH more prevalent than we believe AND I believe it’s a feature that even the average healthy person’s mind will employ throughout the day. What becomes dysfunctional (meaning, doesn’t help you function day-to-day) is when the dissociation sticks. I would say that I experienced some form of dissociation up until 2 years ago, but I wasn’t aware of it. I was in the muck of my mind, watching the only channel available: Anxiety. If all your awareness can do is fixate on the never ending anxious ruminations of the mind, you’re probably experiencing dissociation. I was talking to another friend this weekend and we found ourselves trying to tease out whether there was any difference between dissociation and ADHD, the latter I have begun referring to as “attention trauma”. But I digress.

In September 2020 when I did 2G of psilocybin, I experienced a type of awareness that was very alien yet vaguely familiar, reminding me of when I was very, very young and still cuddled up on my parents’ laps. I suppose that was one of those last times when I felt truly embodied. But as I went through the trauma of childhood, adolescence, and being a young adult in modern America on modern Earth, I started to leave my body day by day. I understand my eating disorder to have begun specifically because of this. Trying to soothe my nervous system that I was evacuating my mind from. And the following years have been a kind of hell. But not like the kind of hell of having done shrooms and realizing the hell I’d been living in only to live in the hell of realizing you are in hell.

The last 2+ years have been a dissociative hell. I had slowly begun to realize what dissociation is, what the mind is, what had happened to me, to my nervous system, to my organism. I felt like I was going crazy. Like I was truly stuck in this human body that was permanently set on hell/trauma setting. I felt like I woke up in a cage, living in a hellish movie of being trapped in a permanently distressed human body. But I didn’t really feel like I could talk about it. Because I could barely put it into words for myself. And nothing in my environment, my society, or my past lent me any insight into what the hell was going on with me. Surely, I was losing my mind. Which was really distressing because this whole time, I’ve been trying to FIND it. That’s why I reached levels of desperation that led me to shrooms. And now I was feeling worse.

But in this time, I can see how I have been slowly trying to admit to myself and others what I am truly experiencing in my mind, despite the fact that no one around me was talking about experiencing anything similar. Seemed like everyone else knew they existed, were comfortable with that, and took their mind/body experience for granted. I mean, that’s partially why I am attracted to my boyfriend, Adam. He has a really fluid relationship between his mind and his body. He allows himself to feel and express his emotions. He doesn’t throttle himself or question his reality.

It was in taking the risk to begin to talk about my experience of my reality with people in my life that I trusted the most that things have begun to get better. It started with Adam. That very first time I noticed an awareness of my own cognition. I called it a “slug” as shorthand because I didn’t know any other words for it. Then very slowly I began to talk to more people, building up the confidence that what I was experiencing wasn’t in fact insanity, but in fact unprocessed trauma from my past. WHO KNEW!!?

But even still, despite talking about some of the thoughts and fears I was noticing, there were deeper layers I was experiencing in my awareness that I was struggling to admit to myself and especially to admit to others. Deep fears of abandonment and judgment. Fears of not being enough, of being disgusting, of repulsing and annoying people. Of being completely transparent for the faker (masker) that I am. It’s only in the couple of weeks that I’ve begun to openly talk about my dissociation. Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

I recently arrived to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with me. I had to be willing to through out our entire mental health system in order to do that and that was no small task. But godammit, I have trusted their guidance to the extent of believing there was something wrong with me if their counsel wasn’t helping me. But as I’ve learned about CPTSD and dissociation, I have realized that, although those are unpleasant experiences, they aren’t WRONG. It doesn’t mean the person in that state did anything wrong or is broken as an organism. CPTSD is a holding container. Holding you in a protective state until you don’t need it anymore. And if all that is true,…. there is NOTHING wrong with me for experiencing dissociation, derealization, nor depersonalization. Those are the facts. Now let’s walk backwards and figure out how we got to this very functional (in a way) state.

That has catapulted me back into my childhood and caused me to reflect on the influences on my reality as I grew up. I was in a Christian evangelical bubble and lived in a household with a family that loved me but was emotionally dysfunctional which impacted how I saw myself and how much of myself I let myself express. I could get deeper into detailing the situations that naturally produced CPTSD, ADHD, and dissociation in my organism, … later.

What I want to focus on is the progress in the last two weeks of beginning to publicly talk about experiencing dissociation. The thought that I think all day long and that keeps me up all night is, “is there something wrong with my mind?” It’s a deep, secret thought that I’ve never really articulated as such until recently. When I decided there is nothing wrong with my mind and that its texture/contents are the natural outcome of living a life like mine in the situation I lived it, then I started to BELIEVE myself. Believe that there ISN’T anything wrong with my mind. That doesn’t CHANGE my thoughts or lived experience but it definitely got me to approach this from a different angle. If there’s nothing wrong with me AND I’m in mental pain, then it is appropriate to speak honestly about that pain. Because I am NOT crazy. I just have mental and somatic trauma. And how could I not, honestly?

So in going to meditation events and the like at Creators Space lately, it’s been interesting to see how I am changing. First of all, I NEVER would have gone to these things in the past. New Age stuff and meditation have been objects of my rage for a long time since they were prescribed to me by so many but when I dabbled, they only increased my experience of inner hell. But now I’m in a much more curious place, realizing that my aversions and anger come from my traumatized state that isn’t being addressed for what IT is. So I went to a psychedelic integration circle the other day and though I feel internal pressure to go along with the opinions, perspectives, and experiences of the others in the room, I let my skepticism, cynicism, and frustration be expressed as someone who has experienced life as I have experienced it. I think I learned very early on that no one likes the squeaky wheel. And so I haven’t squeaked in a long time. No wonder I’m in pain. I’m just retrofitting my personality so I don’t get rejected in the social circles I’m in.

Then yesterday I went to a sound healing reiki thingy which was a really interesting experience that I could get into in another post but suffice it to say that at the end when I had a chance to share, I was honest. Everyone else was talking about all their great visuals or energy movements or whatever, so I felt pressure to share that I was also directly impacted in a coherent way by the experience. But I wasn’t. My experience was really complicated. Why? Because I’m working on learning how to not dissociate. Or said better, I’m learning how to BE HERE. But it’s a practice. And so the entire sound healing, I was in and out of being here and not here. Judging the experience vs. experiencing. Judging myself for dissociating and then extending compassionate to my traumatized brain for a) dissociation and b) the judgment of itself.

I was also really “energetically” triggered in that I haven’t done that kind of communal “energetic work” since I was a Christian praying and praising with others in a room, crying, confessing, writing down our sins on paper. I felt a recurring familiar feeling in my body. A kind of thumping/pushing in my stomach… like a little seizure, followed by an intense call from my body to cry from the depths of my stomach. But I noticed how I repressed it. HARD. It was decided that it was NOT safe to let that out in this group. And so I didn’t. So when it came time to share our experience, that’s what I shared. I shared that sometimes I was here and sometimes I dissociated. That I desperately wanted to weep but I was terrified of all of you and terrified that I would direct all attention to myself, being dramatic, and traumatized. That’s what I shared. My true experience. And the folks in the room didn’t seem to judge me. In fact, based on the “hmms”, it seemed many of them related.

And that only serves to empower me more to keep speaking my truth. It tempts me to believe that I’m doing some really important work of escaping trauma/dissociation and that it’s better for ME and everyone ELSE that I speak openly and honestly about it because I’m not sure that there are narratives out there in the public about how to do this work. Maybe there are. I dunno. But I’m going to keep trying to dig deep into myself and encourage myself to be a bit more honest every day about what I’m feeling and what I’m experiencing. I think in that work, my mind will not need to use the dissociation feature nearly as much.