Was I Dissociating At 5 Years Old?

[theotherside]

I just recently had a really weird experience where it was like i came out of a fog and everything looked and felt different. Kind of scary and strange. I felt so sad, like wow this is my life?im really here?just so weird and aware.

Now rewind to one day when i was 5 years old. I was sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal and i just remember looking at my arm, i guess fasinated and i moved it and said or thought "wow, im real."
"I can move my arm."

Kind of similar feelings/states. Im so new to all this. Recently diagnosed with ptsd. Never thought about dissociating, never really understood it..but now i see that i do zone out..especially under stress.

My trauma started before 5...

Just hoping to hear any input on what those two feelings/states were.

I also have some memories of trauma and some that are surfacing now.

I have had flashbacks that feel like im 5 years old and im getting smothered or killed and i just scream no no no! And im trying to get up but i cant and my heart beats so fast it feels like i can see my chest moving and it scares me so bad.

 

[Deleted member 20280]

At about the age of five I would drift off to sleep fitfully as I tried desperately to stay awake, I knew from a very young age that my eldest brother would be coming to bed soon and his beatings of me would start really soon thereafter. I suffer insomnia badly as a result now.

I would feel safe in a surreal kind of way, hard to describe in words, but as if I were not a real part of this world, as If I were heavier than I was in real life, my tongue bigger, my legs longer and my arms much more powerful. I sometimes even nowadays try and recreate that sense of out of this world surrealism. I can't as I am no longer a child but remember feeling like this, as if the whole world were weighting me down until I was at least in my teenage years.

So my answer is yes I guess, I would say I was dissociating at the age of 5 and I would say you were to.

Laurie

 

[Powder]

Children can dissociate more readily and fully than an adult who didn't learn back then. It is more challenging for an adult to learn to dissociate if they didn't learn as a child from trauma or chronic neglect.

Adults are now taught to dissociate if they suffer from chronic pain and drugs won't cover it as they grow too tolerant. It is hard for adults to be "taught." Children do it automatically to cope with emotional or other suffering.

@Santa_Laurie I feel so sad for that little boy. It broke my heart to read your post. My soul wants to travel back in time and pick that little one up and hold him safe and keep him safe and away from any harm. I'm so sorry that nobody mothered or fathered you that way when you needed it. It is so good to see you be able to write about this trauma so clearly. I'm proud of your ability to do that. Thank you for sharing this pain with us. You are a good soul.

Dissociation is difficult in the context of intimacy or bonding. It is the traumatized child who does NOT have a safe adult to go to for emotional recovery who learns to dissociate. Dissociation becomes the substitute safe place.

Dissociative states are an adaptation for survival in the absence of the alternative, a safe (real) person.

Dissociative barriers are placed to separate the ego from the trauma memories.
Dissociative containers are created to siphon off a forbidden emotion.
Dissociative identities occur when dissociative barriers become amnesic.

Dissociation occurs in levels, ranging from "highway hypnosis" to being totally passed out unconscious.

When a PTSD or DDNOS or DID suffer first learns about dissociation, it may be very helpful to research it and read up on structural dissociation.

 

[theotherside]

Thanks so much..so much new stuff to learn

 

[Chava]

I remember feeling very unreal when younger. And still sometimes it's like I don't know if I am dead or alive...definitely I entered some fuzzy territory at an age where I wasn't able to sort it out well. As an adult I've seen my arms shrink. As a kid I don't have a load of memories but a couple of just feeling not real, detached from the regular world and my family (like they were as good as strangers), and also sometimes like I was watching my life from outside. Now that shows up in nightmares sometimes (I am not within the nightmare or in harms way because I am watching, like through a window or from outside the scene somehow...I can even close my eyes when it gets really bad, though I know what's happening)

 

[theotherside]

I do remember lots of childhood but there are gaps like i remember before and after but the middle of a memory is gone and theres sometimes a faint thing i remember..and now those things are emerging. Its just all still hard to wrap my brain around

 

[Numbalina]

In my early 20's, I was at work and all of a sudden I got super dizzy and collapsed as soon as I typed the first 3 letters of the license plate into the computer system (I worked at Jiffy Lube at the time). It was a Saturday and we were severely, crazily, backed up and busy as Hell, cars wrapped around the lot into the deli mart across the street. It was hectic and 100°. We even had a local high school club doing a charity carwash on the side of our building/parking lot. Have you ever heard the air bell you drive over at one of those places? Every JL employee has had the "non-stop, never-ending, exploding air bell" nightmare. That noise on a busy day is severely stressful, and we've unplugged it before for just that reason. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I had that feeling overcome me, and I told my Asst. Mgr that I needed to sit down because something weird was going on with me. I went into the office and put my head down onto my arm on the desk. About ten minutes into being in there, I started to have an asthma attack which induced an anxiety attack (or maybe it was the other way around) so I went out to my car to smoke a cigarette (it can help open up your bronchials if you don't have your inhaler on hand - I know, weird). My Mgr came out to my car with a pissy attitude, "You know what? Just clock out and go home." At this point I felt like I was standing outside of my body, watching myself. Which completely freaked me out to the point I was crying and shaking. I had never experienced a feeling like this, or even heard of it before. So I called 911. I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't drive the 50 mile drive back to my house. Not in this condition. I hobbled back into the open bays of the shop, and told my Mgr that I was having an ambulance come get me, but asked them not to show up with berries and cherries flashing, sirens screaming as to not make a huge deal and screw up the flow with rubber-neckers. Before 2010, I wasn't affected by my PTSD like I am now. I was able to work hard, long 12-14 hour shifts, coming in on days off, and was ALWAYS punctual.Not so much anymore or at all, but that's off topic. The doctors had no answers for me, after hours of laying there, and gallons of blood and urine. I left the hospital, the out of body subsided. For the next 3 years I continued that cycle. Nearly fainting, anxiety through the roof (my family has huge history of heart disease), unable to breathe, and being out of body. The anxiety and out of body feeling was the worst part of it.

Was that dissociation???

 

[shimmerz]

My dissociation started at 4 days old. I didn't have a time to really even 'be in my body', therefore my dissociation is not of seeing myself from outside of my body. I go wayyyyyy inside.

As a child I used to drink vinegar, I suppose to make myself 'more aware'. I didn't realize why until I learned that I dissociated, which almost 50 years later. It was quite a shock when I was told that I dissociate and worse still when I found that I dissociated from get go. *heavy sigh*. Yes, dissociation can happen from any age. As @Muse mentioned, it is actually much better if one has learned how to dissociate from a young age than to have to learn when older. Dissociation was your friend at one time. The trick now is to be able to recognize when you are dissociated.

 

[theotherside]

Thanks so much..it just feels so strange now that im aware i guess

 

[Anarchy]

The shite that got me here started in my first six months. It's only in the past 12 months (like shimmerz - half a century later) that I've realized that I spent a lot of my childhood in dissociative states.

the world outside me and what I am saying or doing can seem unreal.

I've also had the feeling of moving back further from my eyes, as though my viewpoint is from the back of my skull, time slows right down, and I become quite strongly dual conscious - I'm monitoring my normal conscious stream and actions from some other place inside my skull.

those are the sort that I remember, there are some situations that five minutes later, I couldn't tell you what had happened, only that it was bad. after those I want to lie in a dark and silent room.

 

[Ronin]

I keep coming back to this thread. Trying to figure how to make myself talk about it. Relating to a lot said (except the ages... how do you all do that stuff, I have to check my papers to figure how old I am almost on a daily basis. Doesn't correspond to most of my sense of time, just that time that concerns me in it. I'm better tracking time by other people & events if I was involved.).

 

[theotherside]

I just track my age by what house i lived in..im not always right but close enough

I guess all the moving in early childhood was good for tracking my age..