Skip to main content

Hello From the Other Side: dissociation and its perils




 Currently, I am drowning. In dissociation. Those two sentences should have been combined and that will bother me for the next few hours, until my brain is back to its original factory settings.

Writing about dissociation whilst dissociated is harder than it might seem, but I thought it was important to record what's happening while it's happening. Future Louise might pop in (hi! I'm back!) and interrupt my ramblings with some degree of sense, hopefully, anyway.

Dissociation is a disconnect. (Google describes dissociation as a 'state of disconnection') Suddenly once there, you are not there anymore. Nothing makes sense, everyone, including me, talks gobbledegook and I struggle to understand what's going on.

I know I'm still me, I couldn't be anyone else, but the deep numbness and the staring and the thoughts-on-repeat persuade that I am to the contrary: I am not me, the logic and my mind at odds.

Bringing myself back from an episode is neigh-on impossible. I just have to wait and hope and pray that this isn't forever. And it never is. I always get back to how I was before, even if that seems impossible right now. The drowning is always reversed, the water seeps from my lungs and I'm able to breathe again.


Grounding techniques are unhelpful for me. It's true that I could hold ice cubes for longer now than during normal scheduling, but they don't bring me back, they simply demonstrate how far I am gone.

I don't think dissociation is talked about enough. A psychiatrist once told me that everyone dissociates to a degree. Arriving home after driving there and having no memory of said drive: that's dissociation. Picking up a pen and putting it down again somewhere: that's dissociation. But no one really talks about these things, not until they have to because they're drowning themselves or know someone else who is drowning.

Having a dissociative disorder is not exactly a party, it's actually pretty damn rubbish, but maybe, just maybe, talking about it like this, while I'm in it, will shed some light on what it actually is and how it feels. (Though I am only able to describe my experience, everyone has a different experience.)

I hope my brain (Brian) comes back soon.


Well, Brian's back and I'm feeling completely different. My dissociative episodes last around five hours, but they feel like days, as time goes excruciatingly slowly when I'm in an episode. Everyone's episodes are different and mine are affect me in such a physical way that my psychiatrist questioned whether it was epilepsy (which, thankfully, it's not).

I know this post has been, once again, about me. But! Dissociative disorders affect a whole bunch of people (I attempted to find a statistic about just how many, but I couldn't quite manage to find one... Okay, okay, I only checked Wikipedia!), and they need more press time. Dissociation is often caused by trauma, whether that is remembered or not, but can also be caused by psychoactive substances, or have no known trigger. Mine is probably more down the trauma route, but the exact traumatic event remains unknown. 


Ultimately, dissociation can't be cured, and that is vaguely crushing, but it can be managed. I'm learning to manage mine, which is a heck of lot harder than I anticipated. 

Do you guys experience dissociation or does someone you know? Or are you here out of pure curiosity? Let me know on instagram (you can message me!) @jumper.dweller or comment down below. Thank you for reading my incoherent rambles above. I hope this post was somewhat informative. 

Much love, the 'future Louise'! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not-Dinner-Party-Appropriate: anecdotes from the mental hospital

 I feel like a time traveller. I've awoken in 2021, sleeping through a pandemic and my teenage years, now in my mid-twenties. I have no dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes. Only mental ill-health with bouts of questionable wellness. I have been in four different mental hospitals, which I predict could be four more than most people. No one talks about it, including me. Like, at all.  Whenever someone talks about mental illness, there is this most impenetrable silence, followed by: 'I knew someone who was depressed once.' Or a casual, almost nonchalant change of subject. I mean, we talk about mental health a lot - how to keep it afloat, how to do 'self-care' in a commercially-assisted sense. It's all body butters and face masks.  I don't like it when people reduce preventing mental illness down to looking after yourself or not. That is a large part of it, a whole team of people looked after me at my worst. Most things cannot be made better with a face mask.  It
3 comments
Read more

Imposters: a story about a Capgras delusion

  It's cold. I'm always so cold. My hands quiver blue and wrists bloom purple, after days of bang, bang, banging my wrist on the arm of my chair. I don't think I'm okay, but I don't think I'm not okay either. I think, I think, I think I'm breaking. I am on the children's ward. I have not seen my real parents for months. Some strange people visit sometimes. I hide from them. They are not my parents. They are often nice and I begin to trust them, then they'll do something off-kilter and I shy away again, like a beaten dog.  I had climbed out of a window, bawled through the lane outside the house and taken solace at a friend's home up the road. Gently I was led back to my childhood home and bundled into the car, driven to the hospital and admitted in hopes of finding a way to avoid another inpatient admission. We couldn't find one.  I arrive at the unit, brittle. Last time I was in this position, I had a home, but now I'm adrift. My parents
2 comments
Read more

Building Bridges: breaking down the stigma that surrounds schizophrenia

Hi folks, another more serious post here (I promise there'll be a fun one very soon), as it's just come to my attention that it's mental health awareness week and that's a topic that deserves to be covered. This post might a little off-the-cuff as I've not planned or really thought it out, but here we go. Are you ready?  Schizophrenia. Most people hear that word and shudder. They might think of serial killers (admittedly, some do have the illness), violent outbursts, mental asylums, or just utterly unmanageable people. You might even be thinking (if you have no awareness of what schizophrenia is) that a person with the illness might have multiple personalities. This is not the case and I am living proof.  Without a doubt, the media's portrayal of schizophrenia, and indeed any psychotic illness, has highlighted the parts of the illness that the public most fear. Yes, sometimes unwell individuals might lash out, hurting medical specialists, family,
3 comments
Read more