Thanks, Velcro. When I leave a session, I remember portions of it. Then, other pieces of the session come back to me the next day, or the day after. Some bits that felt fuzzy in her office will suddenly make sense. My mind will start working to put the events in chronological order. Eventually, I can form a pretty good summary of what happened at my session, which allows me to write it down, either in my journal, or here.

It's a "putting together" process. Like taking puzzle pieces and fitting them together until you can see the picture...or like being a reporter, and taking notes jotted down from an interview, and rearranging them until there is an understandable story. The more time that goes by following a therapy session, the more I understand what happened.

I seem to remember my session in stages. At first, I go over and over it in my mind until I can remember "the facts."...what my t said, what I said, what happened after that, how she reacted, etc.

After I have a pretty good idea of what happened in the therapy session, I will start getting feelings about it... why did my t say that?...why did it make me anxious when she did such and such?...why did I want to avoid that topic?

The last part of understanding my therapy session is getting a grip on what I learned in the session...what was the main point of it? What was my t trying to get me to think about? What did my t want me to work on this coming week? This is the most difficult part for me. I'd say it takes every bit of 1 week or more to get to this point.

On the other hand, if I am super busy after I leave my t's office and don't have time to sit quietly and think about my session, piece together the facts, or pay attention to how I feel, I'll forget a good majority of the session by the following week when I go back. I might only have a fuzzy general idea of what we discussed and a few blips of conversation I can recall.

The more I dissociate in the session itself, the less I will remember what happened. The more present I stay, the more I remember.

Even though I get confused by my dissociation, it is considered co-conscious. I never lose so much awareness that I have "woken up" somewhere I'm not familiar with.

If I dissociate at work, and it isn't very bad yet, I can usually know it enough to get to the bathroom stall so I can reground. If I am not able to recognize it and leave the office, and a coworker stops by, they may notice that I seem "not with it" or "upset," or that my eyes are red and teary. That is why it is so important for me to learn how to catch the dissociation right when it starts and get control of it.

If I dissociate at work, due to a trigger, and can't get myself calmed back down and regrounded, I have had to go home sick. Thankfully, this happens much less often than it used to.