Dissociation

[motionless]

My private psychologist I have been seeing on and off over the past 4 years is convinced that I "dissociate" but I am unsure what she means. Does anybody have experiences of it that they can explain to me in more detail?

What I told her is that I get "blackouts" where I will self harm/smash things/OD etc and wont remember doing it and she thinks this is what they are? Can someone shed some light?

How does it affect you? How can you tell if somebody is Dissociated? How can you tell if you are?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm just confused.com

xxx

[Sooty]

There is only a handful of times I would have said I have dissociated and I would probably describe it as I knew I existed but I had no awareness of what I was doing or whether or not I was in a dream or not or if what was happening was real or not. To be honest I'm not sure how you tell if someone has dissociated or if what I experienced was dissociation or something else.

Hopefully someone else here can shed a better light on it for you.

Sophie.x

[Arienette]

sometimes you can't tell when you're dissociated, at other times you can feel it, or things change (objects change shape, feeling wavy, blurred vision etc) which I would say is like the halfway house between reality and full dissociative episodes.

I don't think you can tell if someone else has dissociated unless nyou know them really well. I've never seen someone else dissociate, but my therapist could tell when i would, and my partner can tell - and they knew me really well. x

[Pi.R^2]

What I told her is that I get "blackouts" where I will self harm/smash things/OD etc and wont remember doing it
My fiancée dissociates and this is essentially what happens for her. She may well come to this thread and describe in more detail how she experiences dissociation, but from an outside perspective, although she still identifies as the same person (one time she dissociated and I asked her name and she gave the same name as she usually goes by) it's a bit like I'm with a different person, or at least a more delusional and more frightened version of herself. I can tell she is dissociated normally because her eyes look slightly different (I can't really describe that bit!) and the way she acts makes it clear that she is 100% convinced by her delusions and would happily tell anyone that she needed to go and take an overdose, not because she wanted to be stopped, but because her dissociated self seems to believe that everyone else will agree that that is an excellent idea, whereas when not dissociated she is aware that others wouldn't be enthused by her plans to harm herself.

In terms of what being dissociated means, my understanding is that it's kind of like a fragmented part of someone's personality that sometimes completely takes over control of the person, whereas normally the views and wishes of that fragment are suppressed by the person. That's just how I see it with my fiancée and I'm aware there are other types of dissociation, like not feeling real, feeling detached from the world etc.

Sorry, I've rambled a lot there. I hope it makes some sort of sense?

[Arienette]

my understanding is that it's kind of like a fragmented part of someone's personality that sometimes completely takes over control of the person, whereas normally the views and wishes of that fragment are suppressed by the person.

This is true. Mostly for dissociative identity disorder though, which is the most severe and rare form of the disorder. It doesn't always have to be that bad though, sometimes other experiences that are less severe are dissociative. Like feeling spaced, forgetting things, being unable to talk, unable to think, thinking white noise, moving objects like a hallucination, having no feeling or sensations in body parts, time warp feelings, time confusion - theres an endless list of things that class as dissociation/derealisation/depersonalisation.

Blurred vision too. I'm having that a lot today and bought reading glasses - didn't help. so i'm obviously not visually impaired i just can't see straight at times.
They're all similar in nature. x

[Pi.R^2]

Yes, sorry Arienette, you're absolutely right I should have mentioned that; I only focussed on that particular aspect of it, as that was the type of dissociation the OP was talking about.

[Arienette]

edited