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Feeling internally split up

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thoughtfully

New Here
Hello everyone!

This is my first time posting, so let me know if I'm doing anything wrong.

I'm seeing a psychologist and have been diagnosed with PTSD from a trauma that occurred over the course of several months when I was 17. During the time of the trauma, I started feeling like I was splitting up. All my emotions would go in one box, and trauma, social situations, daily life, and long-term planning would, roughly speaking, all have their separate boxes. The weird part came when I (the long-term planning bit) started talking to the other "boxes" and directing them to do different things. They all acted very differently and would be present depending on what was happening or what needed to be done. For example, the one that dealt with social situations was very bubbly and talkative, which I was completely unable to do.

After that trauma came to a close, it felt like everything "zipped up." The boxes seemed to slowly disappear until I couldn't feel any of them there anymore. I still have a ton of PTSD symptoms and dissociation, and when I get very triggered, I start to feel things splitting up, and I start to feel all those boxes there again. I can typically calm things down enough that everything comes back together, though.

What is this? Does this sound like anything you guys go through? I talked to a few of my friends, and they said it sounded kind of like DID/OSDD, but as far as I know, I didn't go through anything majorly traumatic in my early childhood. I dealt with some chronic emotional abuse but nothing physical. The only thing I can think of is I had a major personality change when I was five. According to family members, I went from an outgoing, happy-go-lucky kid to a socially anxious, constantly upset, and regressed one.

Thanks in advance! I hope I described this well enough.
 
Welcome to the forums, @thoughtfully :)

Have you spoken to your psychologist about these feelings? They're probably the best person to help you with a clinical definition, as such, of what you're experiencing :)

What you describe does sound a lot like my situation; my trauma wasn't in childhood, but through it I experienced a structural dissociation of sorts, and currently have a system of 8 (non-DID) parts.
They all acted very differently and would be present depending on what was happening or what needed to be done.
They each developed out of necessity during my trauma, becoming specialised to do the different things I needed to do, as you say.

When I first did parts work with my T, she used the analogy of a stage to help me understand them: everyone is always present on the stage, but sometimes one or more parts are up the front of the stage, hogging the mic.

Parts work has been one of the most helpful things in my therapy so far.
I now find it much easier to identify who is up the front, and if they're distressed, I know the particular soothing techniques best suited to them.
 
I can't relate to speaking to boxes, but I can relate to compartmentalizing, minimizing to get through, radical acceptance, presenting as required, and shelving wants, needs or desires as secondary to the situation or in response to others or my own thoughts.

Welcome to you.
 
Yeah, it's sort of a weird way to describe it. I'm not the best with words, haha. ?It does feel like compartmentalizing, but then the individual compartments feel so separate that they seem like totally different entities from yourself.

Thanks for the response and welcome! :D
 
I can relate to what you have described, but for me they always felt like "people" at different ages, or different skillsets--I never told anyone about this experience because people get weirded out by it. You described it pretty well. I think it was just a habitual way I dealt with really very stressful situations while having to maintain the appearance of everything being just fine.
 
Agreed, it definitely feels weird to describe it to people. I think I describe them as boxes because they started as places to put emotions and trauma and other aspects of my life. Gradually, they started feeling more like autonomous people with their own thoughts and opinions, rather than just places to put things.
 
Yeah that sounds like structural dissociation or ego states. Ego states can have very little feeling if autonomy all the way to feeling like a totally different person.

Everyone has ego states to an extent. Work personal, social outing persona, crisis persona. Some of us who go through trauma, especially if younger and/or caregiver is the perpetrator, learn to do this to function.

I have an emotional child part that kind of carries all my core pain, and when she is triggered I am rendered basically nonverbal, fetal position, totally overcome by the pain where nothing else exists and I can't really even move.

I also have a part that can switch on if I need to do grown up things even if I just had a horrifically stressful personal experience. I can't do the switch from the nonverbal stuck part to this one, but if I'm in any other ego state no matter how upset I can just boom be this different self if I need to be. It's a survival mechanism.
 
I can relate to you, it really points to did/osdd. I have no memory for my "big" child trauma and consider myself too strong to accept, that what i got trought could have affected me in such a way. Always in denial. And my splitting is insanely extreme and controversive. Very extreme, during my whole life i can remember. Got so much loss of years and moments and don't wanna look back. My boxes are present by the minds we all are and a virtual world very similar to Lucifer's in the series. We went trought life without much of a consent that something is different, but a very small thing triggered large crash of our system and finally after two years we now at least have some idea what might be happening.
 
it really points to did/osdd
Not so much, actually.

That kind of compartmentalization is exceptionally common in certain kinds of adult trauma. In certain trauma filled jobs, it’s even taught... going far beyond professional distancing, to lock down parts of yourself in order to be able to act as needed.

It’s a natural extension of what people do, normally... shifting gears between different rule-books for different situations. IE, not table dancing at church, nor treating everyone as your spouse, nor charging a crowd like it’s the opposing team at football practice. Not being able to think/act/react differently in different situations is a whole ‘nother brand of crazy (more typically following a head injury, but to varying extents can also exist in things like HFA, LFA, psychosis, etc.). Most People? act/think/feel differently in different situations/times/places. One of the great challenges of “normal” life is maintaining the balance between work life, home life, friends, hobbies, avocations, commitments, obligations, etc.

With many kinds of adult trauma? That natural level of compartmentalizing gets a bit f*cked. A person put the rape, the terror attack, the car accident, the house fire, etc. “in a box”. Anything and everything related to the trauma goes into that box... to allow them to function normally, or mostly-normally, in the rest of their lives. Because this was too big bad, it was too all consuming, it was too... everything. It would take over. So they lock it away. To the degree the OP is talking about is super common / very often a side effect of trauma. Because it’s IN that box, and not being processed? The other boxes life operates out of become more and more difficult to pull from. The mommy box, the work box, the girlfriends box... all start becoming a heavy kind of chore to pull out and use, a struggle, attempting to switch from one part of their lives to the other... instead of happening naturally/without even thinking about it.

Conceptually? Because the trauma-box is one too many bottles on the shelf. So every time someone wants to pull one bottle out, and put another back... half a dozen of them dive for the floor. So then you’re either leaping about attempting to catch the falling bottles, or ooooooooh so veeeeeeery caaaaaaarefully attempting to shift this one that way, and that one this way, and hold 2 more in your arms... so you can squeak out the one you need, and put the ones you don’t need back.

The “easy” solution is to take the trauma bottle off the shelf, so the rest of the bottles fit just fine. Easy in quotes, because dealing with trauma? Is anything BUT easy. So people often do just about everything else but that... removing other parts of their lives, BT the bottles still don’t fit on the shelf :facepalm: The trauma bottle is just too big. Then there are also times many people simply refuse to open the door entirely... isolating. And a whole host of other things.
 
That kind of compartmentalization is exceptionally common in certain kinds of adult trauma.
Or even adult day to day functioning. There was no room for the business owner me to bring those skills, behaviours, expectations and mechanisms home to my small children. I feel like that type of dissociation is adaptive and has very real value because there is flexibility and awareness there.

Therapeutic dissociation is another form that I am aware of which helps lead those of us who have maladaptive dissociation and want to learn how to integrate ourselves into a place of internal congruency. This is the Observer Self and can be used to step away from the processing of a trauma so as to look at the situation and possible solution critically rather than emotionally.
What are Self-Observation and the Inner Observer? - Cheryl B. McMillan

Maladaptive dissociation for me, has been a set of behaviours that are internally and unconsciously driven by dissociation. Generally they are noticed because the outcome of these behaviours becomes self defeating, or even dangerous to self and/or others in certain situations and there is an inability to assess them and recognize that adaptation to the new (non violent )environment would bring about a better outcome .
 
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