last week in therapy, my therapist assigned me some "therapy homework" so to speak, namely a mussar video about struggle, which was insightful as mussar is a pretty insightful movement of judaism, and then a 20 minute video about mindfulness. now, i told her that i don't like mindfulness meditation videos because they make my dissociation worse, but she insisted i try it, so i did. well, i put it off for the entire week because i knew what it was going to do to me, so i just did it this morning, the morning of my therapy day, and shocker, i'm worse off for it. or at least i feel that way.
in the middle of it, i started crying for reasons i don't really understand. the feeling of wanting to cry keeps persisting, and i have what i call "the ghost of a headache", which is what happens when a headache is about to come on soon. it's like the sensation of a headache without having the headache, like the pressure is there but it hasn't hit yet. it typically happens when i'm experiencing some kind of emotional/dissociative/trauma thing, i think due to the tension that starts up in my head, neck, shoulders, face, jaw, etc, as a result.
i came out of the entire experiencing feeling like my head was full of cotton. i knew it was going to feel this way when my eyes were closed toward the end of it, and even though i wasn't looking at myself, the sensation of the rest of my body felt incredibly far away from me. the crying sensation is starting to leave, and now i just feel numb. i feel like i'm looking at my hands typing this post through a camera and not my own eyes. i'm observing myself not as myself, but as if i were playing a game in VR. i'm in first-person, but what i'm looking at when i look down is not my body, and it doesn't feel as if all the settings are correct, so as i walk, i feel disoriented, i get some dizziness or mild vertigo. whenever i move to do something, the movements feel off, as if they're too fast, too slow, too heavy, too light. they're uncoordinated and strange. when it gets like this, i start feeling so disoriented that it feels like i'm high, or like i've taken something when i haven't.
in my head, i take too long to process information. i stare at the fridge for much longer than i need to in order to find what i need to make the food i want. my memory feels scattered. i remember that i had a conversation with my mother earlier but i don't remember what it was about, it feels like it happened yesterday. i just remember that it happened, but not the memories themselves. the mussar video and the mindfulness meditation video both feel like they happened yesterday, too. i barely even remember what they were about now. i only remember that i found the mussar video insightful when i watched it.
i made food and i can't even taste it. i'm not sick, and i added plenty of salt, pepper, butter and cheese to the mashed potatoes and meat substitute i made. but i eat it, and it's just some kind of soft pile of vaguely nutritious junk.
i'm losing the thread of what i was talking about because my brain is so scattered, i keep having to look at the rest of what i'm typing to remember what i'm doing because my thoughts just keep hitting a wall. it's taking a while to type this and i think my food is getting cold because i keep pausing to stare off into space, thinking about nothing.
the internal self-conceptualization that i have does not match up with the way that my body appears to me, and i'm not talking about transgender dysphoria when i say that.
things as simple as the way i carry myself, or the way i think i carry myself, the way my hands move and look, the way i conceptualize myself and my body in my head, do not match the way that my body appears in the mirror.
as my internal sense of self becomes misaligned with my body, my perception of my body and how it feels to me begins to change itself to match that internal sense in some way, through dissociative self-distortions. the two opposing self-conceptualizations begin to reconcile in this way, but i know that if i look in a mirror, it will all begin to fall apart again.
now that the crying sensation has passed--and in the spirit of mindfulness, i really have done my best to let the sensation pass without judgement, just trying to observe it--i just feel very emotionally numb. i'm at a stronger version of my already dissociative baseline, that of complete neutrality. i wouldn't describe it as apathy at all, just complete and utter calm neutrality. in this state, i observe the things happening around me without judgement, but externally i respond the way that other people typically expect me to in order to mask it.
when something happens to upset my friend, i know that it's bad but i don't feel bad for them that it happened. however, i still respond the way that they expect me to because i don't want them to think i don't care about them, even if i don't feel like i care about them/their problems [in that moment], because that's just the objectively correct thing to do for someone i speak to on a daily or near-daily basis, and have invested much time in. additionally, i know that at some point, the feelings i have for the other person are likely to come back, meaning that allowing apathy to erode my relationship with someone else is not a good idea.
i forgot what i was talking about again. as i've typed this, it's been getting worse and worse, and i can't tell if focusing on the dissociative feelings to describe them is making them wore or if i'm just up for being in an episode for this morning. my vision is blurry and it's getting hard to read the letters on my screen.
i think i started writing this because i wanted to explain it to my therapist? idk i don't want her to feel bad, this is just part of the process i guess.
it's nice that there's a lot of talk about dissociation online, but when people who aren't experiencing chronic dissociation talk about it, that's not what i experience. that's not to devalue their experiences or their contributions to the discussion of dissociation, it's just something that causes me to feel isolated, because when i say 'dissociation', it feels like i am referring to something completely different, when i know i'm not because i have read plenty of literature that describes what i'm experiencing. it feels like one of the only places i've been able to find my own experiences is in the literature. i don't entirely remember why i brought this up.
the headache is now coming on harder, and it feels like i'm having to fight myself to even stay focused enough to make this into something coherent. it's been explained to me by people who are more knowledgeable on this subject than i am that this kind of thing happens to dissociatives because the dissociative brain doesn't want to become aware, so when methods like mindfulness or grounding come in and try to cause the brain to become aware, it gets upset and starts dissociating even further. this has been a problem for me ever since i started trying to figure out how to ground myself to stop the dissociation years ago, and i've never been able to find a way around it. i just float on until it goes away.
so i guess that's what i'm going to do this morning. maybe i will attempt to play the guitar or draw or something until it goes away.
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