I’d actually become stuck in a boarding school where at the time I was receiving a lot of emotional pain, then emotional neglect from everyone around me (friends, family, classmates, etc.), and it happened 24/7 for 4 years until I got out (was also childhood emotional neglect that added on). Had no where to breathe, get some peace of mind.

Feel that to get myself through those years, to survive, forgetting everything that just happened helped prevented things from building up. Like a “natural built in defence” that kicked in to shield me from breaking down. But I feel that because I was like that for 4 years, my brains become stuck in this same mode, even though I’m out of boarding school. Everytime I go outside my room, it’s like this survival mechanism that kicks in and I start dissociating from the environment, from the person I am. Don’t process that my feet are walking on the road, that I’m looking at a car or a tree. Everything about me, that I’m a person with feelings, that’s lived for years , etc., all goes blank like there’s nothing there. Isn’t a memory loss, but very detached….

I’m very new to the mental health side. I’d been looking at dissociative disorders but hadn’t been able to find anything related to trauma and wasn’t sure. I guess my dissociative problems could be related more to PTSD. Hearing some insight has helped though, thank you