Dissociating With Paranoid Hypothetical Visions?

[Kintsugi]

I've done this since I was a kid. I can't seem to find much here or on the greater Web about this.

I know one of the first signs of my compulsive self-harm as a child was to think of something embarrassing or shameful and to dissociate, having a vision of stabbing myself to death. I would lose time. Once, when I was very young but old enough to be chopping vegetables with a very sharp knife (8? 9?), I had one of these episodes, and when I came to, I had the blade pressed against my stomach, like I was about to enact my vision. It scared the crap out of me.

This, what I'm posting about, is very similar but different. I see something that could be somehow perceived as dangerous of deadly, and I dissociate briefly, having a vision of a hypothetical situation where I or someone else dies or is horrifically injured by that possible danger.

Example: as a kid, I would walk on a cement retaining wall next to the sidewalk, have a vision of myself or a friend falling off and cracking their skulls open, and then my vision would sometimes play through further, people screaming and calling for help, etc., maybe even to the point where I see people mourning over the death or injury in the hospital or something, and then I would come back to myself and not know how long I'd been frozen for.

I still do this today. I work with a vulnerable, wheelchair-bound population, and I will imagine them falling in the bathroom and busting their heads open, and when I come to I can tell I was frozen for a bit because I'm like a wax sculpture, frozen in the midst of movement.

WTF is going on with this? Anyone else? These visions are completely vivid. It feels like what I'm thinking is happening. It's about as vivid as a flashback, really, and very graphic for something I'm just hypothetically thinking in my head.

 

[Changing4Best]

I have these too, but maybe not as horrific sometimes. My eyes stay open, I do know that, but I never noticed if I freeze or not. Sometimes, I think about the future too, about my ending up homeless or even dead. Usually I am just sitting around when this happens, but I don't pay attention to my body, I am totally in my mind.

I have actually been homeless before, so the homelessness one is not so strange, I suppose, but some of the others don't seem to have any basis in fact.

I try to read or do something to distract myself when I realize I am doing this. I guess one can do grounding techniques too, but I forget to do that! I just want to escape. So reading seems the best form of that for me.

 

[Hope4Now]

Something along these lines happens to me. I read somewhere that it is called Disaster Thinking (maybe in Pete Walker's book?). I hate when it happens because is raises my anxiety profoundly. I think it comes from trying to imagine the worst as a way to prepare for what's to come. Probably from childhood. Also perhaps a bit of control--as in, what might actually happen cannot possibly be as bad as what I am imagining, so therefore maybe everything will be okay. Twisted up PTSD thinking.

 

[anonymous]

I have the same thing happen every night when I first go to bed, it scares the crap out of me, it has happened to me since a was very young, I'm talking 5 or 6. I also find my mind doing it durning the day as well just sometimes come to and think wow that wasn't good. I also sometimes am a third party just watching me from a distance and just not being able to stop it just have to watch me dying from some terrible thing happening to me. I get really scared and it seems so real.

 

[Kintsugi]

I too feel I am watching it at a distance in the third person. I see scenarios play where I'm bleeding out, calling for help, but I'm watching from above.

Sometimes these visions turn into paranoid delusions. I'll imagine "What if... someone is right around that corner and they're going to attack me?" and then I dissociate, see it play out (think Phoebe from Charmed having a premonition), and then when I come back to myself I am like CERTAIN there really is someone there and panic and run away.

 

[Justmehere]

Example: as a kid, I would walk on a cement retaining wall next to the sidewalk, have a vision of myself or a friend falling off and cracking their skulls open, and then my vision would sometimes play through further, people screaming and calling for help, etc., maybe even to the point where I see people mourning over the death or injury in the hospital or something, and then I would come back to myself and not know how long I'd been frozen for.

I've been told that people with OCD will have thoughts that are similar to this. I don't know if visions are included. I did read one article about "intrusive thoughts" where mothers with postpartum depression have been known to visualize their babies being dead.

I will have moments of something similar, but maybe a little different. I will be walking down the street, see a bicyclist, and suddenly vividly picture them falling over and getting run over. Very graphically. I will picture really awful things happening.

It feels like a way my brain is trying to prepare for almost anything horrible that could happen at any minute. It's really freaky to endure. It happens a lot more when I'm more stressed. Usually other PTSD symptoms are worse when this is worse too. For me, it's a sign my stress cup is overflowing. It's also freaks me out even more to be picturing these things. It's not intentional, and it's so vivid... I don't have any dissociation that occurs with picturing the person getting run over.

 

[sun seeker]

I have something like this but without the dissociation. There are times though, when it is especially intense, when it feels as if I am in a trance. I was also going to mention OCD. Do you have any other symptoms? Do you have this more often when especially stressed? For me, I will fixate on something and my mind will go into overdrive, coming up with a hypothetical scenario where some disaster happens that is so unlikely it could be on Ripley's Believe it or Not. But it depends what state I am in, whether I feel the need to do anything to prevent the disaster. If I am pretty calm I can tell myself it's just my imagination and move on. If I am already anxious and stressed, I go into this trance-like state of frantically trying to prevent this highly unlikely disaster from occurring. This is somewhat different from what you are describing but I wondered whether stress has anything to do with the frequency of the episodes?

 

[Nam]

Many, many times. I don't think I dissociate though. My eyes are open. More like an intrusive thought. If it's mild (managing stress well for a while), then I can curb it or think about something else. I still go about my business. I had one when I was walking my youngest across a parking lot. A truck went by and I saw her being dragged under it and the guy didn't know and I was helpless to stop it. I heard it, saw it, and felt it. But I still walked with her hand in hand to the van without incident. I just remind myself that it's not happening, won't happen, and wow, creative imagination there, Nam. I've been doing this ever since my PTSD diagnosis. I don't think it happened before then. It's a part of me. When it's about me, for example, when I was cutting vegetables last week, I thought how the onion would look with my blood on it. What concerned me was that I didn't care and wasn't at all scary. Soooo, a precursor to self harm maybe?

When I'm not handling stress well, these intrusive thoughts cause physical symptoms: sweating, hyperventilating, rapid heartbeat, adrenal dump. Where I'm actually afraid it will happen. That I'm trapped in that happening. I'm pretty sure that my judgement on that is clouded. Everything seems dangerous when stress is high.

When stress is low and I'm living externally in life (engaged in the present and not in my head), then I don't have it as much. Even still, I have very good intuition of safety. I'm more aware of things happening and it's come in handy a few times. I think that's the only positive.

I'd be interested to hear how other people handle it. Or if it went away and how they did it?

 

[Kas_Can_Fly]

I do this all the time. Sometimes it's intrusive, sometimes it just happens, sometimes I do it to "punish" myself and more recently, sometimes I do it voluntarily to shut up the noise/panic in my head.

I have many different ones. I have one of stabbing myself in my right temple, one of slitting my neck, one of stabbing myself repeatedly in the stomach/womb area, one of stabbing my thigh and leaving the blade in, one of accidentally chopping my fingers of when cutting veg and then keep on cutting them, one of biting my fingers off by mistake when eating and again more recently picturing people beating me to a bloody pulp.

As part of self-harm I had these (and still do) even more - envisioning cutting myself very deep/hundreds of times, even if I have no desire or urge to do so. Scarily, I have dissociated and hurt myself a number of times in the past and ended up in hospital (a&e for treatment and psychiatric inpatient).

I don't how to stop it or control it, I don't even know what it's called though I call it an intrusive thought and I know it to be based in obsessional thinking. Either way, I wanted to say you're not alone in this.

 

[Kintsugi]

@Justmehere and @sun seeker , I do not have OCD. Just PTSD and DID.

 

[RussH]

Simon I would not say that I disassociate, but I do have fantasies about things like this as well.

 

[Kintsugi]

I wanted to reply more thoroughly, as I was on quite a time budget earlier.

@Nam I also sometimes have a bizarre feeling of peace and indifference come over me when I have these things, although now that you mention it, only (but not always) in regard to myself. One time I did this on the road. I have a habit of seeing off-ramps across the highway from opposing traffic, and I think how terrible it would be to cross the highway and go up it, and in this one instance, I actually started steering the car in that direction (lightly, drifting) and felt this nearly euphoric sense of calm.

Perhaps it is in relation to long-term stress. I'm in that place right now that historically results when I'm exposed to intense and prolonged stress. Everything gets increasingly surreal, and all of my problems I link to dissociation begin to become pronounced. I didn't really think of that headspace previously as being the outcome of that stress, but now that you've all brought up stress, there does seem to be a pattern involved with this particular phenomenon becoming more emphatic alongside other dissociative-related symptoms.