Dissociating And Therapy

[tiredsoul]

I hope I post this in the correct thread; because it is about dissociating and therapy. Yesterday I had a really difficult session with my therapist. He was talking and all of a sudden I dissociated, and it was very uncomfortable and felt so out of touch with myself. Does anyone else feel uncomfortable about having a "spacing out" episode during a therapy session?

 

[TLight]

I swear I wasn't there for therapy for the first year and a half or so............I think it's pretty common. I wasn't there for most of my life!

 

[kers]

I space out a LOT in therapy. I think I have spent at least half my sessions talking about how embarrassing it is for me! But I have learned a lot through those incidents--getting scared, checking out, and then learning to talk about it with my counselor. Now, I can tell him I'm dissociating when it happens, and afterward I can talk about why it happened. It is much less uncomfortable for me and the shame is decreasing.

I think it's pretty typical to be ashamed of this, but there's nothing shameful about it. Dissociation is just one of the post-traumatic responses. It's like a little internal alarm system that something is getting too close to trauma thoughts or feelings. Working through it in therapy will help you understand a lot more about what happened and how you have developed ways to cope with it.

 

[Jestadud]

No, I wasn't even aware of dissociating at that time. I just thought of it as drifting off or daydreaming.
My therapist used to bring me back to myself with no embaressment to either of us.