Feeling Great And Still Having Severe Dissociative Disorder?

[LoriBee]

Hi all, this is my first post. Nice to meet you! *wavies!* :D

My name's Lori, I'm 37 years old. Lessee, I'm a huge geeky nerd and love comic books, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, video games, and I live in a little yellow house and raise honeybees and chickens and ducks as well as vegetables. I'm not that great with growing veggies yet but I'm having a lot of fun learning!

Anyway, I'm gonna have to summarize a lot of my past here into some very general terms and skip details, but I have PTSD. I have had it since I was a kid. From the time I was small I lived with chronic sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. I was raped several times by several different ment. I also watched my mother commit suicide in 2008 and was unable to stop her from taking her life.

So...yes. PTSD from all of that. I've spent most of my life in and out of hospitals and clinics, on and off medications, and working through all the emotions and flashbacks and nightmares and memories. I developed disabling dissociative disorder with DA, DP, and DR after watching my mom die, and have lost 3 jobs and a career I loved because of it.

I've put in a lot of work to heal with medical help. Over 30 years worth. And honestly...it helped a LOT. I haven't had a flashback or a nightmare in over two years. I feel better emotionally now than I ever have in my whole life and I love every day! I'm a genuinely happy person now with warm, healthy relationships with my husband and friends and family, I have great doctors who are awesome and work with me, and I'm doing the things I like to do in life. I haven't needed a therapist in a couple of years either as I feel like I'm emotionally healthy. ^_^

I FEEL like a success story...but...nothing seems to have worked on my Dissociative Disorder. It's like my body and my brain are living two separate lives now. I can't work, drive, or do a whole lot because it's like I'm trying to drive a very glitchy robot most of the time. I can't make certain body parts do what I want them to, and have put myself in very dangerous situations before because I'm not "all there" and I don't realize it.

...like walking out into the street without looking both ways first. Forgetting my name, address, and phone number (I keep it for reference on my phone). I stumble and fall sometimes because my brain suddenly can't make my feet work the way I want them to and lose my balance even standing still.

I feel like my mind healed but my body didn't seem to get the memo? I've been feeling good for about 2 years now since 2013. The idea of getting a service dog has been bantered about to help keep me safe and mitigate my mobility issues, which I'm somewhat reluctantly thinking is probably a good idea.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for typing all this out. I sit here typing this out, looking at the date of 1/2/15 and feeling excited and looking forward to all the things I'm gonna do this bright and shiny new year...and I wonder...Is PTSD really a kind of brain damage? Did my brain physically suffer damage? Did it burn out past neurotypical function now?

Do any of you sufferers of Dissociative Disorders dissociate even when you're feeling happy and feeling good?

Am I the only one?

 

[Bucky]

Hi Lori!

Welcome to the site! I'm new here too!

I'm not really sure about the brain damage aspect of your post but I have certainly dissociated during happier or better times. As you'd expect, most of my 'episodes' as I call them, happen when I'm stressed or triggered or coming round from a bad flashback but more recently I've found myself having them when things have been alright too.

My most recent one would be on Christmas Eve this year. I was at my parents place with my boyfriend and two of my closest friends. We were eating and chatting and just generally having a nice relaxing time. I remember my Mum asking my friend about her baby son and the next thing I knew, my bf was gently patting my knee to bring me round. It's happened a couple of times since then too.

I don't know, I've been in therapy for two months now and my therapist is amazing. He's done so much for me. Maybe it's just part of the recovery process? I like to think of my PTSD as a cliff that is slowly being eroded away by the sea (recovery), maybe our brains are so used to having dissociation as part of the cliff that when it gets eroded enough it falls away but kind of stays on the beach instead of being washed away by the sea. Maybe it'll stay there and maybe eventually it'll get taken out to sea by the tide.

Oh god, I hope this made sense and wasn't just ramble! I'm quite tired at the moment!

 

[KwanYingirl]

I have lost weeks and years to dissociation. My balance is abysmal and I often find myself lost. However, I have my own business and am able to hyper focus. Everything I have to accomplish is written in my day minder. And I mean EVERYTHING even mailing a letter or paying a bill or quarterly taxes.

I discovered the practice of Reiki last year. I also started yoga. My therapist said PTSD splits the mind and body and he recommends activities that reconnect them. I'm not kidding when I tell you I am better than any drug or therapy has ever made me. Especially Reiki. As a result, i became interested in Buddhism and in my own way ( as there are no temples around here) I try to live mindfully, with compassion and tolerance of all things. I've never been this functional. And my brain and body still have a long way to go. My hope is that my body will alert my unconscious mind that I am becoming dissociative and I will get a chance to nip it in the bud. Using grounding techniques I learn in yoga, I keep a small journal for jotting down Buddhist affirmations. It's all about being aware of where you are at-mentally and physically.

My a Reiki master uses crystals and rocks in her practice. She has smudged my home to rid it of bad energy. Once my body started to wake up, I experience body memories. No fun, but at least I can work on them with my healers. Give it a try (be brave and tell her you are dissociative). I had one session with a sound healer who uses tones to open up chakras but it was way too jarring. I had a wicked bad headache. Reiki is gentle.

There are credible sources that support the use of Reiki for PTSD.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

Hi LoriBee and welcome to the forum!

I don't have a dissociative disorder, but I would like to comment on the brain damage bit. I do think that PTSD can indeed damage us physically. I say "can" as some people can recover and not have any symptoms yet others end up with lifetime PTSD. I definitely feel that there is some sort of damage done to us physically. I know my system is quite out of whack in terms of those fight or flight chemicals that get released and I don't have a lot of hope for it fully healing at this point. I mean its not something that therapy is going to fix, so in that sense, its got to be a physical impairment. I say all of this as someone who has suffered from mental anxiety all my life, with the physical anxiety skyrocketing about six years ago.....yes, there is a definite difference, so that's why I feel that I am physically damaged from PTSD. Sorry for rambling on....

 

[greenleaf]

I have been seeing a few articles and such on the benefits of "trauma-sensitive yoga" for various body issues; getting more connected etc. It's a bit different from the yogas where the goal seems to be the most gorgeous pretzel in spandex... Googling seems to get various results, such as:

[DLMURL]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/trauma-sensitive-yoga/[/DLMURL]

It could be that your dissociated "parts" are somewhat integrated but could still use more work? Generally, the brain has some plasticity, and practice of the sorts of things you want to be able to do better, helps your brain develop pathways and strengthen them, in my non-professional understanding.

I heard a description of what Gabby Giffords has had to do in order to speak again after the bullet destroyed much of her brain's verbal area... The brain can be plastic, but you might be trying to get secondary roads to carry interstate-level traffic sometimes, in terms of repurposing pathways as an adult. It's possible that you can keep improving your whole life, while also not being as good at something as you could have been with a better early environment. I vote for continuing to work at improvement, personally! It's also possibly that with the right treatment you could completely recover, so please don't take what I'm writing as any kind of professional assessment, it's not.

Have you ever read the Van der Kolk books like "The Body Keeps the Score"? Has your therapy been mostly "talk"? If so, maybe the yoga, or somatic therapy, or another similar more physical approach would really help these problems a lot more than the talk approach (which does help some things very much.)

I'm having some weird connection issues but nothing as severe as what you are describing; it's more the sensation in parts of my left side that is spotty and was completely numbed out before. It has been getting a little more normal feeling over the last few months, but can feel more like itching at times than normal sensation. It also doesn't feel quite like the limbs spatially are in the right places compared with the other side, like the feeling you get when you can't get your two eyes to focus on something correctly at an optometrist's office.

For me, massage has been wonderfully helpful in staying present in those strange areas, incl. neck esp. on left side and such; it was what made me aware they were numb, to start with -- pressure on the same spot on different sides felt totally different.

 

[Ronin]

Hello, welcome to the forums, hope being around benefits you.

I relate - quite different life story, some similar effects. I compartmentalized - extremely. Lot of it was natural, lot of it was deliberately induced & then accepted as simply unchangeable state it wasn't, thankfully.

They're 'just' disorders. They don't have to rule over something as mood - and they don't have to control one's life, even if it can be difficult to balance together. It's bit of juggling at times. I don't find it that impossible to dissociate when, or *because*, of feeling of happiness. Personally, other emotions I'm used to, happiness kind of takes me by surprise every so often. Take it slow, it's a learning curve with emotions & trauma - all *sorts* of emotions, not just the 'typical' PTSD set.