Hi runningtomusic, good to meet you. When I dissociate it can be a few different things that I'm aware of so far. I can get the overwhelming urge to curl up and get under a blanket. I feel really cold and need warmth. I just feel fragile, no defenses and shake. At different times I'm more blank when this happens, other times I'm more aware of thoughts passing. I just breathe slowly out and in, try to relax my muscles and let myself unravel. I call it decompressing. It is a kind of numbness of not being there, hard to put into words. For me what brings it on is fear of facing something life is asking me to do there and then, which can be looking back at trauma if it is happening in therapy of even reading this site can do it to me.
Or I wander off into my imagination or play my piano or listen to one of my ego state's opinion on things whilst something a bit distressing is going on. I also analyze things, profile the person who is talking to me instead of listening. I start dissecting their motives and behavioural clues, analyzing their every thread of being to find out who they 'really are'. Sometimes (not that often though), I have an obsessive compulsive cleaning attack and get the toothbrush out to clean everything that gets neglected in fine detail.. lol. These are other ways I dissociate some would say these aren't true dissociation, I'm not really sure but they are an avoidance of feelings and I put them in the box with other dissociation for me. There may be more but these are the ones I am most aware of.
I've had a dissociative episode as I was naked about to get in the shower a couple of months ago. There was a five or so way conversation going on inside my head about having to go and do something I was very afraid to face, after the shower. I curled up naked in the empty bath with a towel around me for warmth, it took about an hour but it felt like half that time. I was crying in waves and taking part out loud, in the conversation going on between the different parts of me. I've never done this before either in therapy or by myself. I just decided to let go and it didn't matter what happened, I was going to allow it to happen, it was preferable to facing the situation anyway. I decided that even if I get carted off to hospital I'm tired of fighting myself. It wasn't as bad as I had feared all these years. In fact I realized some beliefs I had tucked away that I hadn't allowed myself to be conscious of. So I'm working on that now. Yeah I broke down and there is only one way to go from there which is up.
I have urges to self harm but I've only acted on them in a very small way twice. I have urges to scratch and hurt myself on the arms and the legs with my fingernails or on my face too. I've had urges to bang my head against a wall and to pull my hair. I gave myself a black eye by punching myself repeatedly in the head in 2010 about five times. This is the first time I've ever done something like that and it was a defining line in the sand for me that I needed to get help. My partner was being a jerk and I was sick of him sucking me back into the relationship and was mad at myself for letting it happen and having to go another round of trust and hope with him. I'm not going to do that ever again. I still get the urge to do it though occasionally.
The other time which was just before the episode above in the shower/bath I was curled up crying having a major flashback panic mode happening, I was under the blanket doing self talk to calm myself down and I just dug my nails into my shins really hard and wanted so much to take skin off but I stopped myself. I believe there is a difference between physical self harm and that which we do to our emotional and mental selves.
