To everyone who responded, THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH! I think I am in a better place today. I feel a little silly as I was such a mess. It's been both a relief and a new burden to have received this PTSD diagnosis. I have spent my entire life with this very odd sensation within myself that I have never had the first clue about how to communicate to anyone. It has taken so very many years of counseling to get me to the point that I finally understand the sensation I feel is "fight or flight"; I've spent my entire life feeling like a cornered bunny. All I could ever do was frequently lash out at other people whenever my stress level would quickly and uncontrollably raise from my normal level to uncontrollable releasing this raging monster. In order to "control" it, I know now that I learned to Dissociate. Except that I learned to dissociate so well that I don't think I'm ever NOT dissociating. I don't know how to stop dissociating; just as I don't know how to shut off being in fight or flight mode. As a result, I feel as if I'm interacting with the actual world only through a long dark tunnel. I can only see a little bit of the world while looking at the world from my side of the tunnel. I'm absolutely NOT religious in any way. I'm a Physical Determinist (I don't believe in free will) and an Agnostic Atheist (which means, I have not found sufficient evidence to convince me of supernatural claims; e.g. gods, fairies, souls, Santa Clause, etc.). However, I can only compare my feeling of the world through a tunnel as a metaphor for being dead or dying, and I find it easy to consider taking that last step and turning the dissociative feeling into reality.
