Posted by muffled on December 18, 2006, at 0:56:22
In reply to Re: dissociation, how to stop? mega long » muffled, posted by littleone on December 17, 2006, at 23:30:58
> I think this is really hard to answer because my experience of dissociation is different to yours. There are lots of ways you can dissociate – either from yourself or the world. You can dissociate memories, emotions, your identity and other things too that I forget right now. There are different reasons or gains for dissociating. Obviously there is an escape from pain or fear. It can allow you to maintain an attachment to an abuser. It can allow you to maintain conflicting thoughts/feelings. It keeps the unacceptable out of sight.
**Hmmm. A few of those makes sense to me....
I don't have a very good sense of myself or who I am...
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> So all of this makes it very hard for me to guess what would help you. All I can give you is what helped me.**Thank-you for sharing.
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> I think my work on this started with my foggy sessions. My T would talk about something that was scary or threatening for me and I would get lost in the fog. I couldn’t move and everything would look white and foggy and I just couldn’t think at all. My brain just kind of shut down. I literally couldn’t put a sentence together. It’s like I could think of one word at a time, but literally couldn’t put words together. I hadn’t realised until then that it actually takes quite a bit of work to put a thought together to make a sentence.**Ahhhh. Exactly. My first almost year of T seemed such a waste cuz I remembered next to NOTHING bout my sessions. In fact I just journalled today that I goto tell T, that we need more time of silence, so I can think. Cuz when AI even a bit dissociated, its very hard to form htots, and then even harder to form sentences and speak them...
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> So at first I was flat out even remembering or recognising what had happened. Then I started to be able to recognise after the fact that it had happened. Then I started to be able to recognise it during the episode. Then I would start to recognise the warning signs just as I got foggy. And then finally I was able to recognise the signs before I got foggy. It was at this stage that I could finally start to do stuff about it. Like I would try to really focus on what my T was saying. I would try to move. Moving seemed to help me stay grounded. I would try to blink. I would try to let my T know that it was getting hard for me. I think a big help too was that after while my T could recognise when it happened, so he would move to a safe and soothing topic (he would talk about my walks or birds). He would ask real simple questions about safe things to try and bring me back.**I knew pretty quick what was happening, didn't have a name for it, I called it blanking. Cuz i'd get home and not remember almost ANYthing at all bout T.
I can sometimes know when I going into a blank. Everything gets more muted, all things, color, sound. If it keeps going, then I find words very hard to understand. If I keep going then I can just barely see my T, and her lips are moving but I can't hear her. What I can hear doesn't make any sense. I open and close my mouth, but I can make sound come out.
I don't usu. go right out now. I recently figgered, when I find myself being very still, and working VERY hard at trying to listen and understand my T's words, that I am actually dissociating at that time.
So moving helps get out of blank? Like do you stand up? I jiggle alot all the time. I tend to get very still when I blank. I try to shift position in my chair early on, but that doesn't seem to help as far as I know....
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> It kind of because something to be real proud of – being able to stick around for my sessions. So it was something that I worked really hard at. It still hits me now at times, but I’m much more able to recognise it coming on and stopping it before it gets started. Or if I do get foggy, I can get out of it much quicker now. I think a lot of that change must have come from the fact that at the start I preferred getting foggy because of the safety in that. It was only later when I preferred to stay un-foggy that I was able to really work on it. And when I say I preferred to stay foggy, that wasn’t something I would admit to or even be aware of. It was an unconscious preference.**YES! It feels SO good to go home and actually remember most of sessions!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How do you stop it before it goes too far? I try and look around and focus hard, but I still seem to go part way out despite myself....
I think I am at the brink of that. I don't wanto be foggy, but I guess part of me does.
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> I think the next dissociative thing I worked on was my feelings and the nothingness. I used to rarely feel things. The only feelings I had were extreme ones from being triggered by something. I’ve always thought I was broken inside because I don’t feel caring for people like most people seem to. Very shameful for me. Also, I was really good at cutting things off. It’s like I would lock things up in boxes in a pitch black room. I was so good at it, I couldn’t even tell that some boxes were there.**What you call your nothingness, I call my sphere. Its like I go into a clear sphere. I thot I had no feelings. I didn't know that other feelings existed cept the intense ones. Now I do. Don't feel them much. Start to, but its cut off real quick. I can't stop it.
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> A couple of years ago I was on antidepressants and I really noticed on them that all feelings went totally away then. Plus I had total nothingness. When I came off the pills, the nothingness stuck around. I think too that at first I preferred the nothingness. It’s safe. You can get lots of work done. People compliment you because you don’t get stressed out over work things like they do. Things are easier to bring up in T if you feel nothingness. Lots of other good reasons to like the nothingness.**Ya, being in my sphere is OK at times, but when I realize I been in it awhile ( I often don't realize I been in it), then I realize I been only a bit alive, andf want to come out. I don't like AD's either. Make me nothing too. LOL, ya my hubby liked me on AD, cuz I was SO calm, never got mad..never got nothing at all I don't think. My sphere is safe, but I don't like it after awhile. If you could read my journal you would laugh and SO recognize some stuff yourself...!
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> I get a bit confused here, but I suspect that I started to feel some things with my T and that started to make the nothingness a bad thing. I started to feel really unwell. I realised how pointless and meaningless life is. Lots of bad things here. But even then, I couldn’t see that the nothingness was making things bad.**I just wanto live a better life, be a better mom, be more consistant. I kinda go up and down. If I could just be more aware of myself, then I would know so much more, but I just don't.
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> Then I started learning to comfort and soothe myself. Did lots of work on this. I still found feelings very scary and would fall back into the nothingness. But after practicing this over and over it became a bit easier to not cut off inside.**My patient T is trying to teach me this stuff, but its hard. Some of my parts are not easily soothed...
I guess this is what I need to do. Mebbe I will tell my T that. Mebbe I should make an effort to express and actually feel some of these feelings. If I can..... Hmmm. I will tell my T this, this is good!
After a big blank, it does take me awhile to come back. sometimes months.
What things work for you to comfort and soothe?
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> It was only once I went through small patches of feeling things that I started to realise that I didn’t like the nothingness anymore. I liked feeling things. It got to the stage where even bad feelings were good. I liked being able to soothe myself. I didn’t like that I had no control over the nothingness. If I fell into it, I would become lost in it. I would get stuck in the nothingness for 3 or 4 months at a time. I would be desperate to get out of it, but not be able to do so.**I am TERRIFIED of feelings. My T says I have feeling phobia (with a smile, she smiles alot). I just gonna have to feel, thats all there is to it. And find out they OK.
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> Each of these times I’d be lost in the nothingness, my T and I would try to figure out what threw me in there, which was hard – often it was because multiple bad things would hit me at once. Then we would work on safety. Have done a lot of work on making things safer for me. I’m not sure, but I think that each time we increased the safety, I was able to gradually come back to feeling things.**This is where I struggle SO. Cuz I dunno how things come about. My mind is so mixed up alot of the time. I barely talk to my T. She mostly teaches me stuff. I think we fall into this, cuz everytime she tries to bring stuff up, I freaking dissociate.....
Its SO DAM FRUSTRATING. How did you get past this?
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> It’s now at the stage where I am terrified of the nothingness. Just the thought of being lost there again distresses me a lot. I work very very hard at not falling in to it. I work very very hard at trying to connect with my feelings and express them. I’ve found it is a lot easier and better to work through a bad feeling, than to cut it off and have to fight my way out of the nothingness. I think it was only once I got to the stage where I preferred to stay away from the nothingness that I was able to really work on staying with the feelings.
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**I not terrified of nothingness no more. Last time I was there, and I realized I was there, I knew I'd come back eventually, cuz I always seem to. Mostly I notice I in the nothingness now, by noticing my 'people' have gone away. Its dead in my head.> So I think a real simplified answer to your question is that you need to create safety, you need to learn to self-soothe, you need to learn to express your feelings, you need to take lots of baby steps from recognising what’s happening, through to understanding it, through to breaking the pattern and creating a new way of coping.
**Safety. Can you explain more about safety? I don't think I ever have felt safe. I was an 8 yr old kid who packed a knife....
How can I stop the 'cut off' when I start to feel feelings? Its automatic. I don't know how to self soothe my parts. Little ones don't trust me, and for good reason. Other ones are just trouble..
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> But I would have said a year ago that I was doing all this and it still wasn’t working. The thing is, because I’d been so cut off, I didn’t really understand exactly what all this meant and exactly what it entailed and exactly what it felt like. So even though I thought I was doing it, I was really only scratching the surface and had a long long way to go.**I think I still scratching.....but this has been hugely useful for me. Would it be OK if I show this to my T?
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> Even now, I am light years ahead of where I was, but I still feel like I’m only half way there. Still have a lot of work to do around all this.
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> I think another thing that I’ve been trying to work on that has helped me is to accept all my parts. To respect them and build liking up for them. I try not to be annoyed or exasperated or angry or irritated or hateful towards them. I still fail badly at times, but I’m really trying and I think this helps a lot with being able to express your feelings. If a part thinks it’s going to be beaten up for feeling something, it’s not likely that it’s going to be open and sharing with you. I think I had to learn about acceptance from my T before I was able to even start to accept my parts.**I'm OK with most of my parts, and they awful good about me. But there is alot of arguing and conflict that goes on, esp when I stressed. Ya........I been real bad to some parts.....its no wonder they hide :(
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> This feels like a really long winded way of saying those basic point of safety, soothing, expressing, accepting and baby steps. But they really aren’t basic points. They are actually very involved and require a great deal of work. Plus it takes time to build safety and to build the soothing skills and to learn how to do these things. Plus it took a lot of time to come round to preferring the non-dissociative strategies.**WOW. Littleone, you have done amazing work. And by sharing this, it will help me in my work :)
Thank you SO much.
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> If you’d find it helpful for me to expand on anything, just let me know. But I figured this book I’ve written is probably too much as it is.**Not even slightly too much!!!!Its WONDERFUL!!!!!!
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> Oh, and the other thing I was going to mention is that through all this I’ve learnt a lot more about my parts. I can recognise them a lot better now. And they come out in therapy a lot more now because the safety has been built up. But this has worsened my memory problems. I used to remember hardly nothing about things, but as I did some of the above work, I started to have better recall of my sessions. Except now that the parts are there more, I remember a lot less of my sessions again. I think I’m absorbing my T’s words, but I simply can’t recall them at all. It takes a lot of thought for me to even remember the general topics covered. I haven’t yet worked my way out of this problem.**Hmmmm.Damn. I like remembering my sessions. Dissociation sucks :(
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> But I think I will in time.**I think you will too! :)
And so will I.
Thank you, thank-you, thank you.
There's a few questions salted in there.....
I'll take any help you have, cuz I am finding all this stuff so hard and confusing....
I surely appreciate this.
Take care,
Muffled
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poster:muffled
thread:714598
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20061210/msgs/714716.html