Dissociation

Yesterday just as the session was about to close I made a comment of we had talked about a lot in that session and then it hit me. So zoned out, I could hear my T talking to me but it was like she was so far away, or even muffled. I verbally responded back to her with a "yes" a couple of times, I think. When she realized I was dissociating she asked me to find 5 Blue things in the room. It didn't make sense why she was asking that, there was still this push/pull going on in my head. I found the items and she counted, I don't think I could have done both. Anyways, I was still stuck "out" of myself. Got into the car and it all felt odd, a little bit of slow motion and being numb. My hands felt like that had big, light gloves on them, like balloons. Drove to Lowes, sat in the car for a while when I got there, trying to recall the drive and I couldn't. So I went inside and everything Blue caught my eye, but I continued to walk around the store until I got to the items I needed. I started coming out of it a little bit and drove home. When I got home(approx. 2 miles) I was so relieved to get there. I had something to eat and went to bed. Felt better, but exhausted mentally when I got up.
My question is how do you prevent something like this from happening when you have no warning it's happening? You don't even know you are "out" until you are well into it.
Are there different intensities to dissociation? This one seemed to have a stronger pull for some reason.

A lot depends on what you are discussing before you go into it. Perhaps what happens is if a door is opened where there is too much crammed in that place behind that door, it can be something that is so overwhelming that one simply doesn't even know where to begin to talk about it, so disassociation takes place. It can even be that a therapist is reminding you of someone that you have struggled with in your past where you just shut down because you are not comfortable, but might not be aware of it.

I disassociated and avoided talking about my older sister, and anytime anyone I interacted with was like her or reminded me of her I was triggered. Well, I have been talking about her with my therapist finally because of how she is challenging me and triggering me badly. With the behavior patterns I have explained that she presents to me, as well as others and her obcessive need for control, my therapist has told me I am descibing the behavior patterns of someone who has borderline personality disorder. It is no wonder I had such a hard time talking about her, how my mind gets very confused about her because she has a lot of toxic behavior patterns that confused me.

So, while it's hard, even just a little piece at a time can eventually get you to a point where you can slowly start talking more about whatever is behind a door that whenever opened becomes so very hard to talk about.

I don't think it is the T. I think I had my guard up through out the session and when it was over my guard got lax and it all hit me at once. The for some reason when she asked me to find Blue items, my anxiety surged through the roof, and I about took flight out of there. Also when she asked me to find the Blue Item I almost said "no". Why would I say "no" to that? I think that added more anxiety. I wonder if you can have a panic attack while dissociating.

You said you had talked about a lot with her before you disassociated. It sounds like whatever you talked about brought something up and it's still too hard to talk about.
I am wondering if your response to her asking you to pick out the colors that wanted to resist in anger was simply because whatever you zoned out about has anger attached to it that you buried and never sorted through. I have had that challenge myself, the challenge of anger that I could not articulate.

Yes, I think one can have an anxiety/panic attack if they are startled out of a dissociated state of mind.

Also, in trauma therapy work it's not unusual to feel flat or tired afterwards too.

Well there are some others things to. Usually I'm the only one at the office with her and afterwards she leaves, this is a remote office. So I've never had to deal with other people there before or after a session. She a client after me and I could hear the people talking in the waiting room, just outside the session room. When the dissociation hit I could hear those people on the other side of the door and I didn't want to walk through them feeling like this. Also.....could it be that I was about to say no because I wanted to stay in that dissociation state. It always feels like a push/pull of the mind to try to come out of them forcefully. Like my mind is fighting to stay there. Does that make sense? We did talk about a lot, I was reading off a list of things that had happened the past few weeks since I had not seen her in almost a month, that may have kept me grounded through that.

I have asked that my next appointment to be the last client, just to rule out that possibility. I'm trying to determine what made this one so much worse and maybe how to prevent it from happening again.

I can understand why it bothers you to have other clients after you. That can cause a sense of being rushed, which is not something PTSD likes. And being able to hear others talking while trying to focus can be very annoying and triggering too.

Our brains do a lot of things automatically and our executive functioning part of our brain doesn't do as much as we think it does. Trauma and "loss" really upsets that and that is why most if not all people resist change. This is especially true as we get older, and how "mid life crisis" became something that most people are actually challenged with.

I am wondering if when you are asked to come out of a disassociated state you react with anger because you actually have a lot of anger that you surpress and you just learned to disassociate because you did not have that anger validated and properly addressed or expressed where you were able to conquer whatever you needed to conquer effectively. It seems that you tapped onto that adreneline and figured out how to burn it off productively, however because you have experienced a trauma you can't seem to channel it that way anymore. That "could be" why you now disassociate because that at least provides a respit because you have not had a way to move forward. That would also explain why you can disassociate and then panic too, there is no direction once you come out of a disassociative state.

Keep in mind most people naturally disassociate so that is a normal thing that takes place in people from time to time. You are just at a point where you slip into it because you have not figured out how to move forward in your life right now because you have experienced something so traumatic and you don't really have the answer as to why either, you are not even sure how to move forward in spite of it because there is no sense of "safe" and "acceptance" you have come to "yet" with it.

By going over one's own history, it allows a person to actually see how their personal inner workings have been set up that they have opperated on. It's not about being judged either, it's about just learning about what is there and how you worked around it in your life so far. Each person is a unique house so to speak and within that house there is an arangement of things they got used to tapping into without much thought. It's much like how you just know where all the light switches are located in your house and you can move through your house without really having to stop and "think on a conscious level" where each one is located. Trauma can actually change that suddenly where a person's private house has suddenly changed and in that change they become very overwhelmed and the conscious mind is really working much harder then it is used to working.

We cannot change a trauma, what we can to is slowly learn how to grieve whatever it is and then find our way towards moving forward in spite of it. When PTSD is complex, that can mean that there are deeply injured parts of an individual that were disturbed with a traumatic event and it can take extra time for that individual to slowly address those issues and work them out to where they are no longer hampering what is taking place in the "now" where one may be stuck with some hurts that one needs to finally sort through. That is what takes patience and time to slowly unravel and sort through on an individual basis.

Again...you are too wise in all this I think CPTSD is trying to unravel a pot of spaghetti . You find one end and that brings with it two more strands, and you can't remove the strand you want until you manipulate the other strands. Which strand is the beginning? How do you know which one to get first? They all look the same at first glance, but then you notice some are longer than the others, there are differences.
While at the storage building I noticed a pot holder kit in the trash. I picked it up and remembered having one as a child but never finishing one because no one would shoe me how to connect the finished ends. So I brought it home and was going to donate somewhere, it still had the frame and some of the material used to make the pot holder.
So last night, this seems funny now, I saw the box and opened it up. I started weaving the pot holder and got to that point where the ends needed to be tied together some how. There were no instructions on the box. So I got some para cord and laced it through the loops, snuggly and finished my first pot holder. I was actually excited about it. I told a friend about it and she said I connected those ends wrong but if it worked it was cool. She said she would show me how to do it correctly some time. Funny how something so simple can have such an impact.

Since my last "big" dissociative event I've been dissecting it and trying to find out more about it. It seems that when dissociating , for me, a lot of push a pull going on in my head, that there's seems to be an imbalance that keeps me there. So maybe finding that balance will keep me from going there. Having these events around the T has brought up different issues than having them alone. Having them alone they just ran their course, I was usually at home in a safe environment without interruption. So when the T tries to guide me back, sometimes my head fights that, but why? When she was trying a grounding exercise before I left the office, we went through the motions though it didn't help, other than make me a little angry, again....why? Any thoughts on this?

I have things that make me angry too, in fact, there is a lot of anger that is present with PTSD. I find I get angry when "something" gets in the way of whatever I am doing, "obstacles" and have realized that I have had a lot of obstacles in my life path and the last big one was over the top and there were way too many after that too, so I am very sensitive now.

It could be that you have dissasociated for a long time and not realized it, maybe that is why you like things that got your adreneline going. I am just hypothosizing with you, maybe something I say can ring a bell, maybe not.

I liked your discription of the spagetti too. I have found that I can be triggered by something, get involved in a conversation and have this odd spagetti come up in the mix and if I have it in writing I can step back and study it "after". It's so hard to explain it to others though because most people just can't understand how someone can suddenly get caught up in responding to something that triggered them and not see it right away, or be consciously aware when whatever it is just comes out. If I am in a situation where I can see someone else doing it, I make sure I acknowledge them even if what they are saying doesn't quite fit into the overall topic. Sadly, I have seen some trigger themselves when it happens and they decide they are not fit to converse and trigger out of PC altogether. I have felt that way many times myself, and made myself keep trying, I kept saying to myself that no one really knows me and I have to see when this happens so I can work on it. I do not know "why" that happens, however, I have realized that when it does happen and I acknowledge it, it eases it so it doesn't happen "as bad" the next time that trigger happens.

I was talking to my therapist one time about something and so many other things that connected to that one thing came up, it must have been very hard for him to follow me when that happened. He stopped and said, "you see what you are doing right now?" and I said yes, are you able to follow?, and then he said, that is the PTSD and what untrained therapists/psychiatrists tend to misdiagnose as bipolar because of how your thoughts are racing like that. He could tell that I was connecting/adding in many different traumatic scenarios as if I was saying "and I can't believe this, and this and let me tell you about this and that". That is alot like the spagetti you are discribing where it's all together in a big mess.

It could be that you disassociate right now because there is such a mess you don't even have any idea where to begin. I have experienced that myself.

It's a lot of work that a lot of people don't understand, it's nice to have someone that does, it's a life saver really.

My T was curious as to why I want to know these answers, ask so many questions, and it doesn't stop. That's just my nature and helped me out as a very successful investigator. We are all investigators to an extent though. My main reason for wanting to know is to find out how to deal with it myself. You can't fight or help something you can't identify. Also, I want to know that what she is telling me is correct, I didn't tell her that though Maybe in time I will trust what she says. In some of the reading I think I have found that mental grounding doesn't work for me because I can't focus that long on something. That a physical grounding object would work better most likely, like a rock or something. I like and collect rocks, that's why I said a rock. I want to help myself between sessions and the T and I seem to be on the same page on subjects we talk about. CPTSD is a total, hot mess no doubt, thank you for understanding.

Trace 14,

There is nothing wrong or bad about wanting to learn the way you "can" learn. You know yourself well, and that is more important than what someone "thinks" you should learn or do or achieve something by their standards.

You like to pull things apart and investigate, nothing wrong with that, many individuals that contributed incredible things to humanity were like that. If material things ground you better there is nothing wrong with that either, many people are grounded by "hands on" and touching/feeling objects. My cousin is like that and has done some ground breaking amazing things being a surgeon. He did it so well he is highly respected and has been setting up entire huge departments in major Hospitals for the education of up coming surgeons to learn how to do what he has done. He has given burn patients and cancer patients their faces back, he has spent time on reconstructive surgery for women who lose their breasts to breast cancer, he has learned how to create an esophogus where there was none to name only a few of his achievements.

So, believe me, there is nothing wrong with doing well with touching and exploring with your hands and having that desire to "investigate".

((Hugs))
OE