I have not tried it yet but have been told that changing temperature helps. Cold water on the face for example.

Ice water on my face or hands. Essential oils with strong but happy smells (lemon, for me, or mint). Startling the sense of smell or touch seems to help me "anchor" at least enough to say, "HELP". Or to get enough "here and now" to find a safe place to ride out whatever derailed me....

First of all, it may seem odd to you, Mommawithptsd22, but I'm really grateful for my ability to dissociate. I learned how to do it growing up in 6 years of combat in a war zone as a missionary kid abroad. The war literally engulfed our house. It wasn't "out there" somewhere. It was a civil war. The rebel army's headquarters was located 4 blocks from my house in a residential lower middle class neighborhood.

After the rebels executed the father of the only other family from the USA in my neighborhood just 8 blocks from my house, a gun battle in my neighborhood meant soldiers stuck their rifles out my own bedroom window. I was 11 years old.

My missionary parents lost their minds to PTSD but feared their headquarters back in the States would consider them cowards if they asked for the evacuation they deserved. So they became hurt people who hurt people and erupted in domestic violence weekly.

They never recovered, and were eventually caught going over the line to criminal activity that got them deported instead of evacuated. The domestic violence in my home was so bad that my dad put my mom in the hospital with a beating. After it she beat him in front of the doctors and nurses when he took us kids to visit our mom in the hospital.

It was an ugly upbringing and they never changed, since they refused to get help. When I went to a therapist about it they considered it betrayal for me to discuss our ugly family secrets with a doctor, so they disowned me and never spoke to me again.

There was no safe place, not in the house nor outside of the house, so I learned to dissociate to a safe place in my mind. It worked, and I turned that into a love of reading books as my escape. Eventually, I got a doctorate in literature from that skill, and I have made a living teaching it now for 40 years. Dissociating has had its upside for me.

That's not to say dissociating isn't a problem. It's gotten me two divorces, so I've paid the price of having my young mind hard wired with dissociating forever. I use the grounding techniques others here mention so as to bring myself back to this world. For some reason, the physical work of playing guitar is something that works especially well for me.

It depend on where I am at when disassociation starts to happen. I use the methods described by others but if I am out I start looking around and describe what I see.......the sky is overcast with grey clouds, there is a store with tan painting, and so on. However sometimes the disassociation comes on suddenly when I don’t recognize the trigger that I can’t stop it, so to the extent that you can identifying triggers is important so you can avoid them as much as possible.

I know, Secouya, dissociating when you're at home in your safe space is one thing, but it's more difficult when you're out in the world when it happens. It's hardest for me when I'm teaching one of my nursing classes at my community college where I work. That's why for every class I literally script the whole lesson out so that when I dissociate while teaching, (not when but if, it happens every day) I can pick up where I left off.

I break from reality when anniversaries happen and I forget things. It's scary.

As I've mentioned, breaking from reality for me can actually a blessing and not just a curse, Mommawithptsd22, given the past realities the anniversaries I have remind me of. The thing is whether dissociating interferes with my functioning, and it does--I forget things. I teach community college, so dissociating can really make me into quite the absent minded professor.

So I write everything down, either electronically or on sticky notes I post at work or around my house. I make lists of things to do at work or at home every day and cross them off as I do them.

I run my classes that way, too. When I start class, I project on an overhead screen the things for us to get through that hour and cross them off one by one as we get them done.

So that's how I live with constant dissociating PTSD symptoms all day every day. Having PTSD from combat I lived through as a kid, anniversaries of that 6 year civil war abroad are inevitable. Some are now literally national holidays back in the country I grew up in, like veteran's day and other holidays are here in the US.

The domestic violence I survived in the home then from both abusive parents, too, has inescapable anniversaries. Like a lot of abusive families, gathering on holidays was an invitation to violence. Christmases memories are hard for me every year since.

The repeated molestation by the pedophile I and 4 other elementary school kids all survived is less marked with anniversary milestones. That interferes less according to a calendar and is triggered more by intimacy in the present that brings up the past as intimacy arises. To that there's no anniversary schedule.

So given the triple trauma sources for PTSD symptoms for me, I've had to turn to this idea that some dissociating is merciful. That is so long as it's not in the way of functioning in the present, and a lot of my work with my psychiatrist is on strategies for that rather than for fighting dissociating. Since PTSD is chronic and not curable, my psychiatrist and I work on chronic coping tools so I can get through symptoms as efficiently as possible as they come.

Tactile stuff helps ground me again. For instance, sugar free popsicles and their cold helps ground me like a cigarette smoke break used to do, just now in a more healthy way.

You have gotten a lot of helpful tools. Yes, we may have spaces of relief, and then a trigger sets things back in motion. The trick is to find which tools work for you. I had to order the hospital records after disassociating my first 5 days in the hospital due to an injury. I was awake and interacting with staff, just no memory. PTSD just is what it is, Comforting hugs.