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Is this normal, wanting to stay in a dissociative state?

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Lilac5598

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Is it normal to not want to leave the altered state you're in? Especially while talking to my therapist, I don't want to leave it because it gets me away from her and her questions to somewhere safe.
 
It isn't that I don't want to talk with her. I've just started seeing her a little over 2 months ago and we are kind of, just figuring out what overwhelms me. When I hit that tipping point, I guess, and the world fades away, I think maybe more than anything I'm afraid that she might try to talk to me about what just happened.
 
It's not easy to talk about things that upset us and it's quite common what's happening to you. Can you talk to your therapist about it? That you feel like your dissociating.
Thankfully, she does know that I'm having this happen. We know a few things in particular that trigger me. She isn't ready to give me her opinion on what's happening. Mainly, she is sticking to trying to teach me healthy coping skills.

That’s the nature of defense mechanisms.
That's kind of what I figured. I know she has mentioned something along those lines also. I just haven't told her that there are times when I just don't want to leave the comfort of that state.
 
I think thats the way we are wired. Fight isn't fun, flight is a lot of work, freeze isn't what I want to do. But a facet of the nugget of fight/flight/freeze is DON'T STOP! No matter which of the options our panicked lizard brain has sent us, it comes with the instructions to repeat as necessary and stopping isn't natural.
I wish I could stop feeling fight, and I wish when it hits me I could say "thanks lizard brain. but I can handle this situation with my frontal lobes". I get stuck on repeat as necessary. get me?
 
Especially while talking to my therapist, I don't want to leave it because it gets me away from her and her questions to somewhere safe.
Do you experience this in other situations that aren't so directly connected to working on your trauma? (Like, if the checker at the grocery store is trying to chat with you and you don't want to, you let yourself dissociate? Or some similar situation.)
 
Do you experience this in other situations that aren't so directly connected to working on your trauma?
I've only noticed it with my therapist and when I'm around my dad/in my parents home. When I'm there, there are a lot of bad/triggering memories of loss that I find difficult to handle. (This seems to happen only in response to my trauma as far as I can tell)
(Like, if the checker at the grocery store is trying to chat with you and you don't want to, you let yourself dissociate? Or some similar situation.)
I've only really experienced this in relation to my trauma, at least at this point in my life. I've been thinking about things and I've realized that I'd been doing this for years, just not to this degree.
 
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