Despite having studied psychology formally for five years and informally for an additional seven (approximately), and knowing a lot of technical information about dissociation, I still don't understand what it is. What does dissociation feel like? Is it dissociation if a person is fully conscious of their surroundings and has full executive control of their behaviour (as much as any human can, of course), but has sensations of detachment, depersonalisation or derealisation? (Because I don't think it is, but some definitions I've read seem to include that.) If someone consciously, willingly chooses to stop paying attention to their surroundings (say, during a boring movie), and instead pursues an alternative train of thought, is that dissociation? (Because - again - I don't think it is, but some definitions I've read seem to include that.) What about the involuntarily equivalent of the above - being mentally distracted and pursuing an alternate train of thought rather than concentrating on your surroundings, as may happen in attention deficit disorders, or simply in normal situations where a person has a lot on their mind? Does dissociation refer exclusively to mental states where your conscious thoughts are dissociated from the brainparts making executive decisions about your body's actions? I probably have more questions, but these are the main ones that come to mind. For the record, I am not putting forward any kind of argument about dissociation; I genuinely do not understand, and have had a lot of difficulty finding clear answers. Please feel free to tell me your own understanding of this concept, your personal experiences with it, or your opinions on its clinical application! I want to understand.
i only have my own experiences to call on here, but the way I personally experience dissociation is like... like there's a thick, syrupy/cottony layer between my consciousness and reality, and it feels like my brain is. Hmmmm like it's floating in something? everything is slightly wrong, all the sensory input I receive is just slightly off. my hands get too large, words float around on the screen/page, noises sound like they're coming from somewhere far away. Looking in a mirror is trippy and disorienting. my depth perception gets shot to hell, and I can't focus or pay attention to anything. I'll stare into space for ten minutes and not really realize it. closing my eyes doesn't help because when I can't see, I immediately get a sensation like I'm spinning through space or falling indefinitely. It's... Not good. I don't get a lot of the typical feelings though! It's mostly just sensory, without so much the intense separation from the self. Shrug!!
When I'm having sensations of detachment/depersonalization/derealisation, I technically still have executive control, but it's... harder. It takes several tries, or my aim is off. Things like that.
Yeah. I dissociate like that - like, if I focus I can tell that my surroundings are there, and I can do things, although it can be much harder than usual because I'm wading through metaphorical treacle. But I still feel like I'm shut away from the world. Like I'm stuck behind a thick sheet of glass, and banging on the door and screaming to get out, and no one can hear me. if that's the manifestation I'm getting, I tend to be scared that nothing I type or say to anyone will ever be heard, and that if someone doesn't happen to be around when I'm talking to them, it's because nothing I say is actually real so of course they wouldn't reply because I don't really exist and I'm just an elaborate hallucination or something. The other type I commonly get is where I'm probably real but I feel like the rest of the world isn't. Like if my wife's here I can observe that she's sitting like two feet away from me, but I also feel like she's a thousand miles away and maybe a hallucination, and if she goes out of the room I am then convinced that she doesn't exist until she returns (to me mildly panicking as I try to remind myself that no, people do still exist when you can't see them :P). Or I will feel like the walls are shifting or melting or illusory, or be scared to try and touch the furniture because I am worried that my hand would go through it and confirm that it was a hallucination, and so on. I feel like these are both dissociation; I've had to learn how to deal with it and cope with it and still do things to the extent that that's necessary, but it doesn't stop it existing-as-dissociation and sucking, you know? I don't feel like pursuing alternate trains of thought is dissociation necessarily. The memory/attention thing that I tend to associate with dissociation (because it seems like the same sort of mechanism) is when I just sort of blank out and lose time. Sometimes this happens when I'm not really doing anything, so I only really notice if I've been keeping an eye on the time. Sometimes it happens when I'm walking places; I'll just suddenly appear at my destination or closer to it without any real memory of getting there. (That kind of thing feels like lag in video games: I feel like I'm pressing the walk button over and over without moving, and then suddenly I teleport a distance.)
adding: i would not consider this dissociation! dissociation, at least in my experience, is almost entirely involuntary. it's much more extreme than simply not paying attention. i have inattentive-type ADHD and i frequently lose myself to alternate trains of thought that have nothing to do with what i ought to be paying attention to, and it's nothing at all like when i dissociate.
@alchemicalheart Ooh yeah a lot of that resonates!! particularly this bit, this feeling is The Worst: Thats part of why the mirror thing is so trippy, cause you're suddenly having to reconcile your distant passenger-feeling with the reality of your meat-prison, right there, staring at you. And also re: snapping yourself out of it, i personally find that it's doable IF you catch it VERY early. for me, the rule of thumb is "if my hands have not yet become Too Large, i can still avoid going Full Dissociation" and the only way for me to actually DO it is to basically do as many physical/grounding things as i can as quickly as i can. face slaps, getting up and stomping around, drinking very cold water, picking up the cat, making loud noises.... Sometimes it can keep me from sinking into the molasses. Sometimes not! But it is usually worth a shot, even though it looks, sounds, and feels incredibly silly.
it really depends on the kind I am experiencing. I used to have this feeling of derealization frequently. I would watch my friends and feel like I'm watching a movie, or I'd walk down the street and feel like I'm the character in someone else's novel. It happens less frequently now, but I've never found that kind of detachment distressing. I spend a lot of my time reading, writing, playing games, etc. so it's a familiar sensation. what happens more frequently now and I find much more distressing is when I feel detached from myself. It started off with random body parts just don't feel like they are not mine for no particular reason. Like how alchemicalheart described it: Now when I talk about stuff sometimes, I feel completely detached from my own body. I'm not floating, I don't see myself in 3rd person or anything. If anything it feels like I'm shoved back to the back of my own head. My body doesn't feel like it's mine, my words don't feel like they are mine, it feels like I'm listening to my own words as I say them and everything is automated. That is distressing because I am like "oh god please don't say things I don't want to talk about" because I'm worried have no filter anymore and any random thought or feeling is gonna spill out of my own mouth. which hasn't happened yet, because I'm still piloting even if it feels like I'm not. as far as my brain is concerned, my reflection is basically like my forum avatar, except I can't customize it, and my body is like the 3D version of that. That is to say, there is a lot of detachment there and I don't see it as fundamentally "me" most of the time.
I don't dissociate often, but it'll show up as a stress symptom from my on again off again depressionish anxietyish thing The most clear example I can think of is one time I started dissociating at the end of one class and had to walk two blocks to the next class building. It was like I was a robot, just moving without any attachment to why or how I'm moving. Usually you have some thought or reaction to something like a light going red at an inconvenient time for you, but I felt nothing about anything around me. I remember feeling like if I decided to cross the road despite the light being red nothing would happen, like a car might go right through me or getting hit wouldn't hurt or matter. But it's also a huge effort to move when dissociating so I just stood there till the light turned. It really does for me feel like floating a bit outside yourself, feeling like nothing around you is truly real
The two types of disassociation that @Lib describes experiencing are something I went through for a few months when I was 17. That was bad times. Now for the most part when I disassociate it's like my head is a balloon on a string and only loosely connected to my body, and I can do things but it's all very mechanical and by rote - I may as well be a robot. There's another kind where I just... go away, everything fading out into white noise even when I try really, really hard to concentrate, and I mostly can't remember what happened afterward. Overload and some emotional upsets can give me the head-balloon feeling (or maybe, give it to me strongly enough I notice it - I've disassociated from physical sensations a lot because of gender dysphoria, so feeling present in my body and being able to make it do things has at times been the exception) but the fadeout only really happens when I get into particular kinds of face-to-face arguments or tense interactions that are similar to how my abusive ex would go after me. The latter I can't really seem to do anything about - my brain started doing that to protect me from the emotional abuse he was heaping on me, and now that switch seems to be hardwired.
See, this is how I always feel, all the time - except without all the rest of the stuff you said. I was talking to some friends about this recently, and brought up how the first time I had a pleasant experience of drunkenness, I had a strong feeling that my consciousness had moved from the back of my skull and come forward to inhabit my actual face. I remember thinking "is this how other people feel all the time?" (obviously not wrt the other symptoms of drunkenness, just that particular one :P) I don't know if it is actually normal to feel like this, like I'm operating my body from the back of my head, but from the way that other people - especially allistic people - talk about their inner experiences, it doesn't sound like it. I think that if everyone felt this way they'd talk about it more. Sometimes I do get distressed by trying to remember that I am me, that my consciousness is part of this mind and lives in this body, but there are two causes for that, and I don't think either is dissociation. First is an autism thing: I can actively detach myself from my personal point of view to look at a situation from the outside, and I can run through this sort of mechanical mental process that generates possible thoughts/experiences/opinions that other people might have about the situation. When I do that it's a little disconcerting to go back to thinking "okay, yeah, but none of those are me, that one *points* is me". So it's more like... a side effect of having to actively, rather than instinctively, put myself in other people's shoes. The second is a simple depression/self esteem/self hatred thing: I've spent most of my life wishing I was someone else because I think I'm a bad person. I know this is quite a common emotion that contributes to dissociation, but if anything, I think that I'm less able to dissociate than the average person, because it takes a lot of active concentration to make myself feel like I'm not actually me. In the circumstance described above, it does happen accidentally, but it doesn't last, and the disconcerting feeling comes from it ending rather than it happening at all ("it" being not feeling like I'm me). Even when I feel detached from myself and my actions, I still feel 100% that I am the one initiating those actions, and there is no autopilot mode or alternate presence that can take executive control for me. I often wish there was, because operating my body is tiring and upsetting when it's not a body that I even want. (And I have to operate it to continue demonstrating my personhood as "this one" to other people, but I don't even want to be "this one", so it's a very unrewarding task as well as being difficult.) So, one of the reasons I started this thread is because I'm wondering whether this stuff does count as dissociation. Because apart from some superficial similarities in their summaries, I don't think that my experiences have much in common with dissociation, especially since there is so often a common vein of I never go away. I never fade out, or leave my body (though I often wish I could). Nothing is ever automated. My actions aren't impaired, and my senses stay the same. I never lose time or blank out or arrive somewhere with no memory of getting there. I always feel like my body is mine, I just really, really wish it wasn't. So to clarify: part of the reason I posted this thread was because I do just genuinely want to understand what dissociation is. The other reason is because I want to get more information to support or refute my hypothesis that I can't dissociate, or that I'm extremely resistant to dissocation. Existential-weirdness sort of stuff, like "hey, the whole universe exists, isn't that trippy", never comes along with the other "symptoms" of dissociation. As mentioned above, I've always spent a lot of time and energy trying to let my body run on autopilot, to blank out or to feel like my body isn't my own, because knowing that it is is very upsetting. I remember trying to explain to my first psychiatrist that I would spend long periods of time staying as still as I could, because if, for example, I gave my body the signal "move arm" and this arm, the ugly horrible fat arm, moved in response to that signal, it would just be even more confirmation that I was stuck in here. He didn't quite get it - his first thought was "magical thinking? Like if you don't move, you're not you?" and I shook my head and tried to explain that I know I'm me, I'm just trying not to rub it in.
Huh, that's really interesting and seems more like a purposeful distance than disassociation. I haven't disassociated often, but when I do it is like... Ok, part of is definitely the blanketing/muffling of my perceptions, like being wrapped in a fog where my surroundings are hazy even though my eyes are seeing perfectly clear outlines and shapes. In those cases I feel like both the world and I are kind of unreal... But mostly that I am becoming a bit unreal. It's like interference in a signal, or an unfocused lens. Oh I'm I had an idea on how to make a comparison. Imagine there is your Body, and your Soul (spirit, mind, etc). Normally, a Soul occupies it's body fully. Imagine like those cartoons where someone can project their consciousness away from their body, or there is body swapping and you can see the mind of a person as a see through reflection of the body that gets pulled out of the body. Disassociation is like when the arrangements between Soul and Body are loose and the Soul floats out and away from the body, but not out because the connection isn't broke or undone, it's just loose.. Visually it would be like the physical body there, and overlapping with it but not fully, more to the right and back and up, is the exact same visually except that in a light blue colour and kind of see through. That's a bit like how I feel when I am away from my body. The distance basically unfocuses the mind and so while the body is working perfectly, the messages it sends to the Soul and received from it are delayed and a bit blurry. The way your experience sounds like to me, it's like you purposefully tried to move the Soul a bit away and out, so it's in that state... But because it was gradual and purposeful, the connection also evolved to send messages just as fast as when fully occupying. So you can feel the distance (back of head) but don't suffer the lag in the connection. I hope this makes sense!
i've had what i do described as dissociating to me, but i actually don't know if i do either. the definition can be sort of vague. in my case i don't feel like i'm floating behind myself or watching myself but it does feel like my Body is one thing and I am another thing that happens to be in it. and it goes through the motions of what it needs to do for the most part. it sits quietly in others company, it follows the people we're out with, it walks the same path we always walk when we go for a walk. sounds become either very muffled and barely there -or- very much there. usually when i can hear things really well i am also nonverbal though, it becomes harder for me to respond when i actually am capable of.. paying attention, loosely, to what's going on. so the meat sack just nods and smiles or does grunts of agreement when necessary while my mind is still just doing it's own shit, thinking a mile a minute or daydreaming wildly. i occasionally black out in a way.. like i won't really remember going from point a to point b, i'll just suddenly be there. but i know my mind was active the whole time and thinking up a lot of things.
TFW you read a thread on disassociation and realize that the way you've occasionally felt when under extreme stress is apparently what disassociating is. I've had the above feeling before, combined with a strange inability to focus on anything, leading to feeling very much like a deer trapped in the headlights of an impending car. There is usually an awareness that I'm a deer trapped in the headlights of an impending car, and a little voice in the back of my head telling me to do something, goddammit, like anything, like not clicking back and forth mindlessly between pages on the internet without reading them or anything, but it's extremely hard to force myself back into reality in such a situation. That's my experience, anyway.
I always feel like this to a degree, but I also dissociate, and they aren't the same for me. Doesn't sound like dissociation to me. To add to the growing testimonial pile, when I dissociate, my perceptions of sensations change. When it's severe, I can't move, and usually I stop being able to talk properly before I lose movement capabilities. Before that, things feel sludgy or full of weird vibrations, possibly depending on whether I'm more depressed or anxious. I also tend to get this feeling/conviction that my torso or neck is twisted all the way around, or turned sideways from the position it's actually in, and other distortions in proprioception. Many people never dissociate to any identifiable degree. Probably most people. It wouldn't be surprising if you don't (which doesn't = you "can't", since we have no way to prove that, but the two are functionally irrelevant if you haven't ever dissociated).
I have no idea if what I experience is dissociation, but I've been assuming it is for want of a better explanation. Unlike most people in this thread, I'm able to talk, I just ... don't feel like I'm able to filter/plan/analyze what I'm saying. It's like I'm watching myself from a step back. Acting-me is still doing things, but may well be clumsy, or forget how to have conversations. There's a lot of weird sensory stuff, like contrasts between light and dark feeling more intense, and everything that doesn't contrast strongly in some way feels wrong/painful? I have sometimes been very sound or light-sensitive. My memories during the time when I'm dissociating (if that's what's happening) are also a lot less distinct than usual, but not non-existent. Has happened in response to anxiety-inducing situations, in situations where I was overstimulated, and in situations where something weird is happening with lighting (like, during the solar eclipse a few years ago, I had a pretty intense reaction).
