Question About Feeling Like Part Of Me Died, And Disassociation

[RussH]

Thank you for all of your answers:
As for a metaphor, perhaps with some, but not in my case.
It was a couple of weeks before school ended, and the proverbial straw that broke the camels back fell. I shattered into pieces. I completely lost it with deep sobbing grief, and violent trimmers.
There was something, or someone in the that suffered a fatal injury, and that something, or someone died inside of me.
This happened in the spring of 1971. There were not many times that I talked about this to anyone, but the few times I did I would tell them that something inside of me broke, and a part of me died. I had never heard anyone talk like this, or discribe any experience like this, until this past October.
I read a book where the main character discribe some of the things I felt, and I realized I was not alone with this, so I started doing some research regarding the long term effect of bullying, and that lead me to this forum.
There are others that discribe their experience in the same manner, enought that it validates the feeling, in my opinion, and now I am trying to wrap my brain around how this can be, and the possibility of disassociation is one f the venues I am exploring.
Thank you all again for your answers, and thank you for your support this past year. It means the world to me.

 

[BlueOrange]

Dissociation takes many forms, and can be completely normal. If you quit your membership of a club, you are literally 'leaving an association'. If you say "I am no longer that person who wears sweaters, I will wear jackets only from now on," you are dissociating (somewhat) from your sweater-wearing self.

It's not a dissociative disorder unless it f*cks you up. If you say "I am not a violet person" and your way of dealing with the fact that you had a violent tantrum is to forget and to deny, then it becomes useful to talk about dissociative amnesia.

If you've made a statement to yourself and to the world that "I only eat healthy food," and then you get up at 2am every morning to eat massive amounts of icecream, then perhaps denial is the wrong strategy for managing your icecream-eating.

So, yes, it seems entirely credible to me that some part of you is being denied expression; that you have dissociated from it. For me, the diagnostic questions are:
- are you OK with that?
- do you find that sometimes that part of you takes over, that it forcefully refuses to be denied?
- what was of expressing this part occur naturally to you?

Your basic options (assuming you're unhappy) are:
- find a way to be OK with it not being expressed
- find a safe way to express it

Good answers to the questions should help to choose between options.