Dissociative Episodes.

[Wonderland.]

So I suffer from severe dissociative episodes. When I experience them I don't know they've happen, don't remember doing anything.

My mum is really good with me about it as she know how it upsets me when people think I'm lying and I can remember. But the fact is I can't.

I hate finding out I've done stuff through friends, and finding evidence and such in my home after an episode.

My question is how do you cope with the missing time? with people not believing you?

It make me feel so fragile and vulnerable.

Thanks in advance for any responses.

[when.will.it.end]

Hey Hun,

I can really relate to this, I struggle with losing time too. I'm not sure what can be done in the short term but in the long term grounding techniques can make a huge difference. You can, over time, train your mind to remain more grounded and present. Try and take notice any changes or variations in the level of dissociation you are experiencing, notice any triggers and do more of the thing that makes it happen less if that makes sense. Do you have any professionals that can help you with this?

[Laura2.0]

I am losing time, myself (or better: we keep losing time). Probably a bit different than it is for you, because we are 11 in the system. What has helped us before we knew of the 'others' was, that Laura took a lot of notes.
We are still taking notes, but now it's not just Laura but Cassi and I, too. It helps a lot to keep things coordinated, like... when one of us said we would meet a friend but the others don't know. And it's not cool if Laura says to a friend that she would give something to her, but I don't know about it and then they ask me why I didn't give it to her.

And it also helped, that Laura became more conscious of the dissociation. She didn't know it was happening at first, and later she didn't know what to do about it. But now she learned how to dissociate on purpose and also how to UNdissociate if it happens when she doesn't want it to happen.

Hope this isn't too confusing.

Ginny

[Crazy Cat Lady]

I understand how distressing dissociation can be.

Ku experience dissociation during therapy and my Psych is great with me. She can notice the signs and tries to ground me.

Do you see a Psychologist? Can you talk to them?

I hope you get the support you deserve,

x

[Wonderland.]

Thank you for your responses lovelys.

I have been assessed by a psychologist - thats how I got the diagnosis.

No one has ever told me how to deal with them - bar grounding techniques.

Which most of the time for me are useless because I don't know I've dissociated.

More what I'm looking for is either something to stop me from dissociating?

Or some way of grounding myself even when I go so deep in myself that I don't know I'm dissociating and forget everything.

People have told me that the more stress the more likely I am to have episode, which does seem to be true.

I try and keep the stress to a minimum but thats hard.

I guess I feel like I'm missing pieces to a puzzle. And someone else has that piece and won't give it to me.

I am now having sessions with a psychotherapist so will try and bring it up with her this week.

[when.will.it.end]

I think the key is to catch it early. So recognising the signs of dissociating before it gets so severe that you completely forget everything. Other than that I'm not sure how to stop it altogether. Like Laura said I think you can learn to recognise it and undissociate if you don't want it to happen. But I'm guessing that would take a lot of time to learn.

[Angelina]

Quote:

People have told me that the more stress the more likely I am to have episode, which does seem to be true.

100% true.

I find myself avoiding situations that are overly stressful or triggering. I'm not sure if this is 100% healthy, but it is helpful for my own functioning.

Psychotherapy is the only thing that can really get to the root of it, and deal with the real cause of it, and process the difficulties that have caused you to fall into dissociating.

I used to dissociate really badly, but with psychotherapy I am more present in my daily life and less affected by it.

If that makes sense?

x

[Laura2.0]

Yeah, of course it gets worse at times you are more stressed.
People 'learn' to dissociate in situations where they are in great distress, a situation where something bad happens and they can't fight or run (which would be the natural responses). But if the situation is unbearable the brain dissociates so it doesn't have to feel what's going on. Once a person has learned to dissociate and if the dissociation has worked in the past to excape stress, then it happens easily when there is stress in general. Problem is, that this happens unconsciously and the only way to change the way you react to stress is to work on being more conscious of the dissociation.
And this is best done with psychotherapy. When I had therapy for the dissociation the first thing my therapist did was asking me if I could dissociate on purpose. Then he asked me to dissociate on purpose and I learned to dissociate in steps of 10%. Like dissociating for 50%, then 60%, 70% and so on. Eventually I learned to be aware of the 'point of no return' - for me that is about 65% and it's the point where I can't get myself back to the real world on my own.
My therapist knows a lot of exercises with dissociation which helped me a lot to be first more aware of the dissociation and then to undissociate myself.

[Wonderland.]

Thank you lovelys.

I'm glad to hear that psychotherapy can be helpful in coping with it.

I have just started psychotherapy once a week and have highlighted dissociation as a problem to her.

So hopefully at some point we will be able to work on getting it under more control.

[Laura2.0]

You can always ask her to work on dissociation in a session, if I do that my therapist always knows something useful to do about it.