I don't know if you'd be able to give any insight, but I was wondering if you could give some input on an event/thing that happens sometimes? (sorry if this is too long, and thank you so much for any answer you give).
It happens every few years, with the first time I distinctly remember it being when I was 6. It also happened when I was 9, 13, 16, and happened twice this year and a few times last year.
I enter a sort of mood/period where I feel really low and overwhelmed, this can last anywhere from a week to a few months, and it gets to a point where nothing feels real (it isn't dissociation though, I have that to various degrees regularly and can tell the difference) and after that there's a few days where I'm super out of it.
After that though the huge thing that's super overwhelming kinda fades? and then I hit a period where everything feels VERY new to me, as if I've never really seen the world before, and my attitude towards things shift and reactions, some personality traits, interests, etc change (but stay kinda similar, so it's not like ""I completely change personalities"" (putting that in quotation marks because the vibes of that saying is iffy) ).
The longer the time period between these events the worse my memory gets, so stuff that happened before doesn't feel like it applies to me? If I even remember it in the first place (I don't remember... a lot about my life.)
Would you have any idea what this is? Is it a sort of defense mechanism where my brain re-wires parts of itself when I hit something that's overwhelming? Is it part of the natural processing of traumatic events?
For additional context: my birth home (ages 0 to around 3 or 4) was super abusive. I was punished if I acted out of line, and out of line was practically just existing. I was beaten if I made noise, needed anything, or just because someone was having a bad day. They'd also beat me sometimes because they thought it was funny when I cried. I was kept in one room and wasn't given clothes or anything than the bare minimum they could get away with giving me, was only sometimes fed (if I was they would tie/strap me down to a chair and force feed me), and had many near-death events happen (strangulation, drowning, suffocating by smoke, etc). I also wasn't allowed to learn to speak, and the closest thing to a caring parent I had was a cat.
After nearly being killed and left to die (4 days until someone found me, I had nearly a full body cast after that) I was placed in a foster home with other people in the foster care (I was the youngest most of the time). Long story short 2 of my 6 siblings had raped me multiple times, 4 of the 6 had tried killing me multiple times, some of them had beat me (not so much the adults noticed), and whatnot.
After that phase I was adopted and turns out that my foster/adoptive mother struggled with mental health issues and ran a semi-organization that functions quite similarly to a cult. For some years I was raised so I could "take over the business" when I grew up, which included a lot of private lessons from her.
Eventually she figured out that what she was doing to "fix" me wasn't working so I turned into the inhuman creature posing as a human, and was raised with her bouncing between calling me "an alien creature who tried to escape by becoming a mimicry of a human (and wasn't doing a good job)," telling me that my choice to exist was wrong (and more along those lines), and that I was special from the rest of the humans because I had her who could teach me the "one true reality".
(there's a LOT of things that happened with my adoptive mother but that's the basics. fun fact! when I was adopted she changed my name to her name, and I wasn't allowed to learn my birth names. Also the amount of times she did hypnosis and other energy-work-healing-stuffs is crazy. All hail the Infinite Mind, may we all reprogram the inherent flaws of humanity to connected to it and become part of the Illumination /sarcasm)
(I managed to escape out of the household recently but I'm still stuck around people in the group and honestly living almost 3 years in nearly complete isolation with her (and the only other outside interaction was members of her group) was not good for me at ALL omg did you know it's not, apparently, special if someone has a back-and-forth conversation with you?? like what???)
Are you approximately 21 then? (25)
From what you’ve said it sounds like what occurs cycles.
It could be depression that builds, coincides with an event/date, or a belief system.
It's interesting that you mention the ‘Infinite Mind', there are some belief systems that identify this such as Christian Science, Leo Gura, Valarie Hunt, and the Psychic Mind to name a few.