Posted by littleone on December 17, 2006, at 23:30:58
In reply to dissociation, how to stop?, posted by muffled on December 17, 2006, at 15:03:41
Hi muffled, warning – this is going to be mega long.
I think this is really hard to answer because my experience of dissociation is different to yours. There are lots of ways you can dissociate – either from yourself or the world. You can dissociate memories, emotions, your identity and other things too that I forget right now. There are different reasons or gains for dissociating. Obviously there is an escape from pain or fear. It can allow you to maintain an attachment to an abuser. It can allow you to maintain conflicting thoughts/feelings. It keeps the unacceptable out of sight.
So all of this makes it very hard for me to guess what would help you. All I can give you is what helped me.
I think my work on this started with my foggy sessions. My T would talk about something that was scary or threatening for me and I would get lost in the fog. I couldn’t move and everything would look white and foggy and I just couldn’t think at all. My brain just kind of shut down. I literally couldn’t put a sentence together. It’s like I could think of one word at a time, but literally couldn’t put words together. I hadn’t realised until then that it actually takes quite a bit of work to put a thought together to make a sentence.
So at first I was flat out even remembering or recognising what had happened. Then I started to be able to recognise after the fact that it had happened. Then I started to be able to recognise it during the episode. Then I would start to recognise the warning signs just as I got foggy. And then finally I was able to recognise the signs before I got foggy. It was at this stage that I could finally start to do stuff about it. Like I would try to really focus on what my T was saying. I would try to move. Moving seemed to help me stay grounded. I would try to blink. I would try to let my T know that it was getting hard for me. I think a big help too was that after while my T could recognise when it happened, so he would move to a safe and soothing topic (he would talk about my walks or birds). He would ask real simple questions about safe things to try and bring me back.
It kind of because something to be real proud of – being able to stick around for my sessions. So it was something that I worked really hard at. It still hits me now at times, but I’m much more able to recognise it coming on and stopping it before it gets started. Or if I do get foggy, I can get out of it much quicker now. I think a lot of that change must have come from the fact that at the start I preferred getting foggy because of the safety in that. It was only later when I preferred to stay un-foggy that I was able to really work on it. And when I say I preferred to stay foggy, that wasn’t something I would admit to or even be aware of. It was an unconscious preference.
I think the next dissociative thing I worked on was my feelings and the nothingness. I used to rarely feel things. The only feelings I had were extreme ones from being triggered by something. I’ve always thought I was broken inside because I don’t feel caring for people like most people seem to. Very shameful for me. Also, I was really good at cutting things off. It’s like I would lock things up in boxes in a pitch black room. I was so good at it, I couldn’t even tell that some boxes were there.
A couple of years ago I was on antidepressants and I really noticed on them that all feelings went totally away then. Plus I had total nothingness. When I came off the pills, the nothingness stuck around. I think too that at first I preferred the nothingness. It’s safe. You can get lots of work done. People compliment you because you don’t get stressed out over work things like they do. Things are easier to bring up in T if you feel nothingness. Lots of other good reasons to like the nothingness.
I get a bit confused here, but I suspect that I started to feel some things with my T and that started to make the nothingness a bad thing. I started to feel really unwell. I realised how pointless and meaningless life is. Lots of bad things here. But even then, I couldn’t see that the nothingness was making things bad.
Then I started learning to comfort and soothe myself. Did lots of work on this. I still found feelings very scary and would fall back into the nothingness. But after practicing this over and over it became a bit easier to not cut off inside.
It was only once I went through small patches of feeling things that I started to realise that I didn’t like the nothingness anymore. I liked feeling things. It got to the stage where even bad feelings were good. I liked being able to soothe myself. I didn’t like that I had no control over the nothingness. If I fell into it, I would become lost in it. I would get stuck in the nothingness for 3 or 4 months at a time. I would be desperate to get out of it, but not be able to do so.
Each of these times I’d be lost in the nothingness, my T and I would try to figure out what threw me in there, which was hard – often it was because multiple bad things would hit me at once. Then we would work on safety. Have done a lot of work on making things safer for me. I’m not sure, but I think that each time we increased the safety, I was able to gradually come back to feeling things.
It’s now at the stage where I am terrified of the nothingness. Just the thought of being lost there again distresses me a lot. I work very very hard at not falling in to it. I work very very hard at trying to connect with my feelings and express them. I’ve found it is a lot easier and better to work through a bad feeling, than to cut it off and have to fight my way out of the nothingness. I think it was only once I got to the stage where I preferred to stay away from the nothingness that I was able to really work on staying with the feelings.
So I think a real simplified answer to your question is that you need to create safety, you need to learn to self-soothe, you need to learn to express your feelings, you need to take lots of baby steps from recognising what’s happening, through to understanding it, through to breaking the pattern and creating a new way of coping.
But I would have said a year ago that I was doing all this and it still wasn’t working. The thing is, because I’d been so cut off, I didn’t really understand exactly what all this meant and exactly what it entailed and exactly what it felt like. So even though I thought I was doing it, I was really only scratching the surface and had a long long way to go.
Even now, I am light years ahead of where I was, but I still feel like I’m only half way there. Still have a lot of work to do around all this.
I think another thing that I’ve been trying to work on that has helped me is to accept all my parts. To respect them and build liking up for them. I try not to be annoyed or exasperated or angry or irritated or hateful towards them. I still fail badly at times, but I’m really trying and I think this helps a lot with being able to express your feelings. If a part thinks it’s going to be beaten up for feeling something, it’s not likely that it’s going to be open and sharing with you. I think I had to learn about acceptance from my T before I was able to even start to accept my parts.
This feels like a really long winded way of saying those basic point of safety, soothing, expressing, accepting and baby steps. But they really aren’t basic points. They are actually very involved and require a great deal of work. Plus it takes time to build safety and to build the soothing skills and to learn how to do these things. Plus it took a lot of time to come round to preferring the non-dissociative strategies.
If you’d find it helpful for me to expand on anything, just let me know. But I figured this book I’ve written is probably too much as it is.
Oh, and the other thing I was going to mention is that through all this I’ve learnt a lot more about my parts. I can recognise them a lot better now. And they come out in therapy a lot more now because the safety has been built up. But this has worsened my memory problems. I used to remember hardly nothing about things, but as I did some of the above work, I started to have better recall of my sessions. Except now that the parts are there more, I remember a lot less of my sessions again. I think I’m absorbing my T’s words, but I simply can’t recall them at all. It takes a lot of thought for me to even remember the general topics covered. I haven’t yet worked my way out of this problem.
But I think I will in time.
poster:littleone
thread:714598
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20061210/msgs/714698.html