What is your experience like with disassociation?

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Members can share what it's like for them here. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately and am trying to understand more in concrete ways. I'll probably put more of my own thoughts and experiences in posts.

People can talk about derealization and depersonalization too if they want to.

Depersonalization is a scary anxiety disorder. I’ve had it since after high school due to being bullied by people who I thought were my friends. Bullying is traumatizing for me. DP is like your soul is being ripped out of your body and just hovering there. If that makes sense? It’s like you’re watching yourself. It’s like an out of body experience.

I haven’t dealt with it for awhile due to taking antidepressants. However I remember when I did experience it feeling like I was moving through a sort of fog and watching everything as if it was a TV show. I used to also not feel like I was looking at myself in the mirror, it felt like looking at someone else so I’d avoid looking. I still feel a slight disconnect but nothing like before thank goodness.

At times it's like playing in third person with a lot of controller lag, instead of first person with responsive controls like usual.

Or possibly like being very high on DXM, only you're not.

I've either had it my whole life, or not at all.
It doesn't come and go.
Chances are it's my default.

For me, it's like when you are falling asleep but you're not asleep just yet. It's not quite fully conscious. Everything blurs. The sounds. The people. It's as if I'm existing in a moment that somehow exists outside of time. As if someone has taken me out of reality and I'm in a liminal state trying to find my way back.

I can't focus because nothing is defined. Everything feels slow. Floating.

Over the last few years, the main issues I've had with this have been related to emotions. More specifically, if I feel strong emotions or multiple emotions at once. I frequently go from feeling something, to feeling absolutely nothing. It's like a switch gets flipped in my head and poof, away they go. On one hand, it's nice because I suck at emotions, on the other, it's maladaptive and I have no idea how to learn feeling feelings in a healthy way if my brain shuts them down so quickly. I also struggle to connect with my external reality. It's like it's not real to me sometimes.

I used to lose time. A lot. I still have years of my life that I can't recall, and I doubt I ever will. I was dx'd with DID at one point. I no longer meet the criteria for that. It's been years since I've lost time and become a different version of myself. I think the way people experience road haze is a good enough analogy for that...you know how sometimes you space out a stretch of highway or something? I'd do that in all aspects of life. Only sometimes it would be days or weeks or even years. Then I'd have to figure out what was going on and act like I hadn't missed a beat. It was this weird impulse to fly under the radar, not let anyone know.

Sometimes I would be aware of what I was doing though and have memory of 'not quite me' times, but not have any control. It was like I was a passenger in a car, watching, unable to do anything about what was going on. Other times that stuff was like foggy, dreamlike, and I couldn't say for sure if I was dreaming, imagined it, or if it actually happened. I was essentially doing life on automatic.

I do have a pretty detached view of my of my life and don't connect to much of it on a personal level. I can talk about stuff that happened, and it's like I'm talking about a book I read or something. Very few things that happened to me hit me on a hard level these days...they really only did when I was doing the trauma work. I don't know how to connect to that stuff now. I mean, sometimes I do, and it hits me hard, but then the off switch gets flipped again and I go back to my normal state of not feeling anything. Numb is my default and I'm comfy here.

I used to get bouts of derealization to. Sometimes I'd go around touching things to make sure they were real and use that as a tether of sorts to the real world, a way to ground myself. Everything looked off, like that uncanny valley stuff. Close, but not it. I hated that. It was like I took some lsd but was sober. More common though was just feeling like none of this was really my life. I'd look at people I'd known for ages and it was like I was seeing them for the first time.

It's a profound detach for me. A detach from my feelings, my past, present, future, all of it. Like I'm not living my life, just hovering in existence somewhere.

I only experience this on a mild scale occasionally. I took a quiz for it and it said what I experience is about normal for people with depression and/or anxiety.

One time recently I kept getting this nagging feeling that nothing was real and I was watching myself sort of. I forgot what triggered that, but I was fairly shaken and upset by whatever triggered it.
Have experienced this feeling that "nothing is real" on occasion, usually when stuff that hits me in a deep way happens. When I had to have my dog put down, for instance.

edit:
Do shutdowns count as a form of dissociation????

family members used to make fun of me because I would go to sleep in places such as restaurants, bars, malls, etc. It was shutdown, due to overload of both emotional and sensory origin.

but I did not learn that until years later when I got my diagnosis and began to understand my disabilities with sensory processing.

I experienced an entire summer of dissassociation where I lived my life as an imaginary figure from my favorite book series. My sister and I spent months role playing as the 2 sibling characters. It was a huge relief not to be me. I hated me and I believe everybody else in the family did too.. hostilities were temporarily suspended with sister, who antagonized me constantly, when she willingly played along. It was a pretty good summer!! ! it all ended when we had to go back to school.

I experienced both derealisation and depersonalisation in my early twenties before I was on psychiatric medications for my mental health issues.

For me, it was similar to how others have described the 'disconnect' when looking in the mirror.

As if I wasn't entirely seated within my own body, at a time when I had these sensations. I felt a bit like a floating spirit looking at an strangers body when I looked at myself.

I think I’ve experienced different degrees of it. During traumatic events, I often tended to disassociate more than at other times. It’s strange. It can make memories fuzzy, too. Brains are so weird.

Well, I think I had disassociation when my high school was under lockdown because of someone with a gun. Like when I heard the announcement I don't even know what I felt but whatever it was it was too much, but after that it was kind of a blur till I got out of the school and home safe like yeah I just wasn't emoitionally there during it...after the fact things hit me harder but during the incident I didn't really feel anything(probaby a protective mechanism from my brain)

But yeah didn't feel anything during it or felt like I didn't, but after the fact it all hit me pretty hard but then no one believed me that I was super tramatized by that, like they assumed I wasn't a close friend of the girl who got killed, so what would I care...well I cared a lot apparently since I still have PTSD from that.

^ That must've been horrific.

I can relate to a lot of that. Some of the things I experienced didn't seem as bad as they were at the time because I wasn't really present in my body. In a way, the real horror came after although I suppose it depends on the incident. I'm not saying it's not all bad. It's just really odd the way people can react to traumatic events in order to survive them, subconsciously.