What is disassociating like?

[Deleted member 35429]

For me it's like everyone else seems to describe: a fog rolls in before I notice it coming. I don't notice until I have to walk or talk or look around the room.

I have felt like I can't hear well and my vision is blurry. Things don't seem real. It makes everything feel in a dream.

 

[IamJenna]

Hey This is a helpful post.
I'm just learning what my dissociation & flashbacks r as they've just felt like I was going slowly crazy until I started counselling last year & began learning about it there.
It feels like I'm on drugs.
I had one episode so badly yesterday that I couldn't think long enough to decide on what to do.
I just stood there paralysed because I felt so overwhelmed with emotion that I just became totally removed from myself.
I looked at my hands & felt like they weren't mine.
I couldn't feel in my body at all. & it scares me how dangerous it is.
The time seems to fly by & I can't get a grip on any reality at all.
Everything feels a bit tunnel vision & like I can't access the part of my brain that can use logic or communicate to anyone.
It's really weird & scary when it feels totally out of control like that.
At times I can't focus long enough to even make a cup of tea or get in the shower.
I get so irritated with myself that I can't just make it stop so I get really panicked & wound up.
It's really not great when it happens outside as I panic on how to keep safe getting home. As I struggle to talk with anyone & I struggle to make sense of what I'm doing & how to get home & keep forgetting what I'm doing in the process. So makes everything take ridiculously long to get done.
Ugh. X

 

[Gadgie]

I'm afraid it never goes away, nor do we ever "get used to it" which seems to a phrase that people who have never suffered from it, keep telling us?

 

[Deleted member 42433]

I lose time, feel like I'm underwater, the world happens around me, like a rock in a river. Not present, not in the moment, feeling no actual emotions.

 

[garden]

I am still trying to sort through this for myself. I experience feeling light as if I am a fluffy cloud. I am not emotional, just there kinda hidden. I feel like I am hidden yet I interact with my environment. I lose time mostly if I am alone. I used to do chores, for example, and wonder who did them because I wasn't 'awake/ aware' while I did them. Lots of forgetting and disorganization. I feel like I am not in my body at times, like I am floating above it or in my head only. I picture myself as an invisible cloud that follows my body around. It feels soft, fluffy, and I am cocooned in this, hidden under the blanket of dissociation, yet functioning through it all somehow. Sometimes it's heavier and sudden and that's when I feel like I have been sedated.

 

[ninja]

The proportions of things look off to me sometimes. Occasionally I will feel giant and everything else tiny when I am standing, but when I sit down I feel tiny and everything else looks ginormous. Lately, I've been feeling like the world doesn't feel real. In fact, thank you for bringing up this thread because I now realize that when feeling like this I also sort of feel like I am only able to observe, not participate or truly take "anything in". For example people talk to me and I hear them but I don't really understand what they are saying right away -- I have to make myself think about it. I am realizing this might be what has gone on with school in lectures for me over the last 1-2 weeks with increased symptoms. Part of me thought I was incapable and that is why I couldn't remember or apply the material. No, it's because I've not had the space inside of my mind or the calmness in my body to be present to the outer world. Thank you.

 

[garden]

There is something about my dissociation that I wanted to add. If I feel the hard and heavy dissociation I have a much harder time interacting with people. For example, my husband might come talk to me while I am watering my vegetable garden, I feel myself trying to listen to his words but I have trouble focusing enough to understand so I make the extra effort needed to 'decode' what he's saying and at the same time it becomes hard to breathe and I feel fear, and I have to go back inside my cloud to make the fear and breathing difficulty stop. This is kinda alarming later when I reflect on it because I had no reason to be afraid yet my body was reacting as if I was gonna die if I didn't return to the cocoon.

I have no control over any of the weird states of consciousness that I might encounter. I plan to address this stuff more deeply in therapy soon.

 

[garden]

The proportions of things look off to me sometimes.

Yes, the world takes on a different appearance too. For me, I tend to notice that it looked different afterwards, when I come out of it. Then I suddenly realize the color of things, and how much stuff there is around me, as if it all just materializes and I am in wonder of it all.

 

[garden]

I can be really absent minded, and sometimes (a lot lately) feel dizzy like my brain is darting around, especially when anxious. And sometimes am bothered by existing or perceiving, like it doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Sometimes I think I feel like I don't exist, or the world around me isn't real, but I have no idea if I really think that or just think I'm thinking that.

This strikes a chord with me. Especially feeling bothered by perceiving or existing. I have specific memories from childhood where I wondered if I was real and if the world around me was real. I stared at the appliances in our kitchen and thought they were useless and meaningless objects, and wondered what was the point in anything. Everything was absurd and meaningless and I was excruciatingly lonely. I would then cry myself numb. There are remnants of these experiences from back then with me still in what I experience now.

 

[IamJenna]

I am still trying to sort through this for myself. I experience feeling light as if I am a fluffy cloud....

Wow that's exactly how I feel!!!
Losing time, disorganisation, confusion, feeling like I'm hidden within.
I sometimes feel like I'm trapped inside my body somewhere deep within looking out without any control over what I'm doing.
Other times I feel like a big cloud has covered over my ears & partially my eyes into tunnel vision.
Other times like I'm floating above my body.
& like u said other times when it's very sudden & extreme feels like I'm on drugs!
Thanks for sharing honestly. Really helpful! Not alone with this :) xx

 

[garden]

@IamJenna, that's what I love about this site! It helps in so many ways, but feeling understood and less lonely is what I love most. I appreciate it so much that others are willing to be revealed, and that others are so willing to be supportive and kind.

Thanks to you for sharing as well.

 

[GwenDR]

This strikes a chord with me. Especially feeling bothered by perceiving or existing. I have specific mem...

I remember spending an awful lot of time as a child sitting there perplexed that time could pass, that I could be aware of seeing at all. I'd stare, trying to figure out if I could really think, could really see. Trying to feel time passing, and baffled that it could be now when a moment ago it was a different now. That stuff still bugs me, though I don't spend as much time staring off into space thinking about it.

That said, if I dissociate more than normal for someone neurotypical, and even if it's tied at all to my childhood trauma, it's pretty dang mild and innocuous. Though the not belonging feeling (like I shouldn't exist at all and it's absurd that I do) does interact with my depression, so maybe it's not completely innocuous. I'm still hesitant to call it dissociation in the sense of being a symptom resulting from trauma.