Dual Consciousness...anyone?

[Hope4Now]

I need help figuring this out. I know I dissociate a lot in lots of different ways, and one of the worst is my constant feeling that all this PTSD and complex trauma stuff is not real...that I am making it up...that it happened to somebody else and am somehow just acting out the symptoms for some reason that is unfathomable. I know derealization and depersonalization are part of dissociation and the stuff is all probably real but I can't handle it, but at the same time I feel like I'm acting in a really bad fiction of my own design. I torture myself with all this doubt.

I have the doubt because when I'm flailing around on the floor or in bed with these weird body flashbacks or body memories (or whatever to call them), or I suddenly find myself thinking in another voice that's a child's, or saying things out loud, or I have images or sensations of childhood abuse that kind of take me over for sometimes hours at a time, part of me is always aware that I am also here now in whatever place I'm in. Most of the time if somebody needs me to "come back" I can do it. And if I know I have to be "on" for something like a meeting or a social event, I can rally and make it through.

I'm pretty hyper-vigilant, and can manage a "good face" for the world much of the time. But when I have to do this too much, all the stuff I mentioned in the second paragraph just gets even more intense when I can finally be by myself. I know I am terrified to show anybody how horrendous all this stuff is and what it is doing to me. It's as if my system saves up all the chaos and it explodes out of me when I'm alone. If I have to be "on" for too long, I get really overwhelmed and start hurting myself unless I can isolate and curl up in a ball and retreat into fantasy-land or sleep.

Does anyone else go through this constant self-doubt? Don't "flashbacks" and "dissociative episodes" mean you completely lose yourself from the present? Do I really have PTSD if I can control when I melt down?

 

[Justmehere]

I can choose to some degree when I melt down. I think it means we have some ability to regulate... but are still symptomatic from the trauma. So often, as soon as I am "safe" (usually means alone) to fall apart, I do. My therapist says this is common.

Melting down in very understandable ways when alone doesn't invalidate a PTSD diagnosis - it actually backs up having one. If you didn't have PTSD, then you wouldn't be having the symptoms you are having at all.

I have dissociative symptoms that I remember and I am conscious for as well. For me, dissociation is a way to cope with the present that reminds me of the past. It isn't a complete disconnect from the present.

 

[Springer80]

Having co-consciousness of traumatised parts basically is secondary dissociation. Tertiary level is D.I.D. i.e. not co-conscious). Your not fraud. When I would switch into one of my e.p.s I always knew they where me.

 

[iwillbeme]

Most of the time when i am asked to talk about what happened i tell the story like it happened to someone else. My body just doesn't want to go through it again. When i am present for the story i try to change it. I try to find where i went wrong and where what i had done could have changed the out come.

What i have done is when people ask me about what happened i am as vague as a can and tell them right away how hard i am working with my therapist. That way they dont need to talk to me about it because they know i am getting help. Most people dont like to hear we are not doing well.

When i am alone and i can break down i do. We all do. However, i am doing a therapy that helps. I pick an event. Not the whole event. Picture it in my mind put that picture right above my head and a little off to the side. I walk for 30 min. I look up at it when i can. It helps me so much. Start small. And not the trauma at first. Try something else that made you feel bad. Work your way up. Worked great for me.

Hang in there. I hope you feel better:)

 

[Go Hungry]

I don't think you're a fraud at all. I feel like this all the time. I rarely ever 'black out' when I dissociate. I just.. I take on a very different way of thinking and perspective on the world. I usually have certain thoughts that dominate my mind, but I'm aware what's going on. Pulling out of it can be very difficult, taking hours sometimes. I've had a lot more success recently than I used to. I'm afraid too, that I'm making some of it up. Like it isn't really happening and I'm just acting or lying or something. But I'm not. I'm not doing it on purpose, because nobody would ever go through -that- on purpose. Not at the level I experience it at least. It's like you said, it's happening to a different "you", but through your body. I always have some vague idea what I was doing during that time..

And I don't think that being able to regulate when you flashback makes you any less sincere. I do it all the time. I mean, sometimes I go to work and pretend all day like nothings wrong, when in fact I'm a shuddering wreck inside. It's really exhausting. I don't think you're making up anything. It's just manifesting in certain ways. Which apparently are very common. Until I read this, I thought I was faking too.

It takes a great deal of trust in yourself to admit that you aren't in your own control all the time, even if you know that it's true. It's one thing to experience something and another thing to accept it. I couldn't accept it for the longest time. My family still can't accept it. But it's happening. It's as real as we are.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

I find it very difficult at times to be on with the real world. It is not as bad as it used to be so I offer you this hope that with continued perserverence you will make it to a better place within yourself.

 

[amy4k]

Having co-consciousness of traumatised parts basically is secondary dissociation. Tertiary level is D.I.D. i.e. not co-conscious). Your not fraud. When I would switch into one of my e.p.s I always knew they where me.

You can have co-consciousness with DID. Sometimes I am co-conscious and sometimes for one reason or another I am not. But, co-consciousness is also something we work towards in therapy. As it was explained to me there are many different types of amnesia. I can be co-conscious with one of the alters and watch her do something, but 30 minutes later have no memory of it being done. I remember being co-conscious but not that "x" was done.

The whole point of dissociation is denial and survival. It is normal for us to doubt ourselves, then and now. When you dissociate you have parts that take on certain roles and it can help one appear normal when everything else is falling apart. Yesterday was an absolutely horrible day for me. Yet, when it came time for me to drive my daughter to practice one of my alters pushed out and did the driving and chit-chat with the parents. For two hours only my daughter could tell it "wasn't me" and then when I got back home it was physically all I could do to make it back to my bedroom.

 

[Hope4Now]

Thank you all for responding. This really helps me understand better.

When you dissociate you have parts that take on certain roles and it can help one appear normal when everything else is falling apart.

This is what happens to me. That part of me is so powerful that it pretty much dominated for thirty years until, as my therapist says, "It just got tired." But it still revs up enough to make me doubt the reality of the other parts. Thank you for explaining this with your example. I completely understand the whole scenario...from horror day, to perfect mom, to wipeout. Happens to me pretty much every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Argh. Nobody but my therapist ever sees anything but the "normal" part, even though some people know about them.

 

[greenleaf]

Since the media seem to want to keep their watchers scared to boost ratings, I think the only examples of ptsd that many people hear about involve things like dissociation where the sufferer is totally immersed in the trauma and not connected with the present.

I was aware of operating on two levels way before I knew the term "dissociation"; I only started realizing that applied to these more functional states in the last year or so. Frustrating, but therapists differ in both the feedback they give and their understanding. Then there is the little problem that I have always done my best to hide that I'm doing this, often from myself too.

My sense is that I intentionally developed this as a survival skill; as a kid, I could be feeling very chaotic emotions, be numb, or have whatever violent event had just happened at home, running through my head... but still get out of the house and go to school with "normal" people. That required acting like them, which was complex. I have no idea how well I was really doing it! It was generally safer at school, and I'd seen that people with good educations seemed to have much better choices in life from a few examples in my family. However, I still had to live at home so I had to try to stay safe and develop skills for there too. (A side note on trust... I remember feeling that any other people would clearly be much worse, since one's family is supposed to be the people who love you most.) So, the motivation to have these two "worlds" operating at once mentally was quite strong and, I guess part of me felt, survival-related.

I bet people without childhood trauma also keep multiple "worlds" going in their heads all the time too, like their family stuff and their work stuff. However perhaps they don't have generally a "part" involving (sometimes not precisely conscious) brain sections that were activated from safety/death threats though, and perhaps their "worlds" are little more integrated too since those threats mess with memory, encode events differently or incompletely, who knows what else ... Just my best guesses.

 

[Hope4Now]

(A side note on trust... I remember feeling that any other people would clearly be much worse, since one's family is supposed to be the people who love you most.)

Your whole third paragraph completely resonates with my own experiece, especially the bit I quoted above. I remember my parents telling me how lucky I was to have such a loving family. That nobody would ever love me the way my mother did. That was wildly confusing and upsetting as a kid. (This one actually makes me laugh rather bitterly now...even then I remember thinking, "Well, if this is love, I don't want it." But, of course, I did. Desperately.) My mom even said to me recently, "You had a perfectly wonderful childhood!" I suppose it's no wonder that I struggle a lot to sort out what's real. Thanks for your response.

 

[kagamine]

our whole third paragraph completely resonates with my own experiece, especially the bit I quoted above. I remember my parents telling me how lucky I was to have such a loving family. That nobody would ever love me the way my mother did. That was wildly confusing and upsetting as a kid. (This one actually makes me laugh rather bitterly now...even then I remember thinking, "Well, if this is love, I don't want it." But, of course, I did. Desperately.) My mom even said to me recently, "You had a perfectly wonderful childhood!" I suppose it's no wonder that I struggle a lot to sort out what's real. Thanks for your response.

This, exactly this. My mom used to tell me we were lucky that we had her because "not all kids have parents that love them and take care of them" which is pretty damn messed up to look back at everything. It was largely to keep us afraid of family and children's services, that we'd be a lot worse in a foster home and afraid of the big bad world so we wouldn't question anything. We were interviewed more times than I even remember, and I'm not sure how you can be investigated that regularly and not have any intervention happen, even if we believed her and kept quiet.

But, on the original topic, yes I dissociate that way all the time. I started out not being aware of anything when I dissociated and losing huge chunks of time, but I learned how to function and dissociate when people at school started getting freaked out by me practically being in a coma 50% of the school day. I lose chunks of time sometimes, but I usually don't, I just see myself acting on autopilot. If I want to be present enough to not check out completely I usually engage in daydreaming, but it's always the same setting and cast, like a novel I open and close throughout the day. I've been collecting characters since the fourth grade.