Perhaps I should stop, as well, but. . . Here I go again. . .

A recurring theme in my own recovery has been that a great many of my psych symptoms are strengths used badly and/or used to unbalanced extremes. Dissociation is one of those symptoms. Used gently and sparingly, dissociation can get me through a tedious, unpleasant or traumatic event. As a way of life, it leads to isolation and psychoses(pl).

Flashbacks are another. The same still unidentified mechanism which causes us to relive bygone trauma in vivid detail will also allow us to relive a joyous summer day in equally vivid detail. As my recovery has progressed, I have found I can even feel the breeze and sun on my face as I swing lazily in a hammock. It goes well with the gently used dissociation which gets me through a tedious board meeting. Equally, flashbacks can alert me to when herstory is repeating itself and I need to find another response to an unhealthy sequence of events in the here and now.

The list goes on and on. Vigilance vs. hyper-vigilance. Anxiety vs. constant worrying. Flight vs running away. Fight vs. standing my ground. Logic vs prejudice. Starting over vs self-sabotage. Etcetera, etceteri.

I share your concern about this being very dangerous ground to explore for someone such as myself whose natural instincts have been pushed to psychotic extremes. Old habits die hard. My own safeguard is leaning heavily on my therapy support network while I explore. Reality checks needed. My head is not a safe neighborhood to travel alone. I always take backup and listen carefully to what my supporters have to say.

For what it's worth
I no longer believe I actually disappear, but I still believe invisibility is my superpower. I can disappear into your assumptions and if you can't see me, you can't stop me. I'm getting away with quite allot of mischief here in my senior years. I's just a helpless, doddering old lady. Go ahead and look right past me with all due prejudice. I don't mind.

Yep , you are running away from your situation. Disassociation was my coping mechanism when I was overwhelmed. I still do it somewhat, The need to run away fades as I progress in recovery. I notice I haven’t been doing it nearly as much as I used to. I’m more in the moment now, aware of myself and my surroundings and able to be comfortable and let the anxiety happen instead of running from it. It’s quite liberating. Look, anxiety makes us feel physically horrible, disassociation is just a unconscious coping mechanism, trying to protect us from perceived “danger.” There is no shame in it. We gotta do what we gotta do. It is a reaction to stress. I’ve decided to leave it alone, not worry about it. I can now choose to stop running away, literally, and stay in the moment whether that moment is filled with obsessive thoughts, high anxiety or whatever my mind has drummed up. I don’t have to be afraid and run from it. I just leave it alone, not responding to it, but just noting it is there and allowing it to stay instead of fighting it off. Yes, it is quite liberating.

Ditto. It's escapism. Just.... let yourself go for a while into a place where the body at least can get some rest even if the stress is ongoing. My one cousin swears he spent whole tour in Iraq disassociated, and yet he got through the daily grind. HUGS

Mmmhmmm. I learned this skill as a child, but found when I got older it was almost like a default setting and I'm still working on learning to be present, not just in really bad situations but in the mildly threatening and sometimes even just boring ones as well. Also, when I was pregnant with my son and considering childbirth classes I started to think that Lamaze (sp?) techniques are basically just controlled partial dissociation. So, I think it's totally possible to dissociate on purpose. In fact I think I lived a lot of years in and out of it having needed it so often as a child that sometimes I didn't even realize there was anything other than numb and dazed... Use it for good........

Peace.

sil, you wrote "I may have learned this "skill" as a child." I get that you put "skill" in quotations marks from your own experience here. In my childhood it was a real survival skills during the 6 years of combat I survived in Uruguay's civil war. Being quiet and still and going off in your mind to a happy place was something you really had to do when one side of the civil war or the other was really prowling close by.

TRIGGER WARNING

For example, in the 4th year of the civil war the rebels carried out a wave of kidnappings of foreigners in my neighborhood. One was my Us citizen neighbor Dan Mitrione, wh0se son Matt was 12 years old like me. I'd been on sleepovers to his house and he'd been to sleep over at mine. We were in the same class at school, too.

As this Wikipedia link shows, the rebels kidnapped and killed Matt's dad. So when the rebels stole our van from in front of our house, we were very still inside hoping they weren't stealing it to kidnap us. We were all perfectly still, frozen, and quietly dissociating to survive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione

From then on that was what I was taught to do for the next 2 years of the civil war, the last battles of which were fought in my neighborhood. But then came a Dirty War wave of terror from Operation Condor by the victorious government troops of Chile, Argentina, and my Uruguay who tortured me the next year.

After that, every time you saw one of the military dictatorship's death squad trucks cruising the city, you froze and went in your mind to your happy place, hoping they didn't grab you and disappear you. They did disappear between 9,000 and30,000 people who have not been found to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War

I almost disappeared when I was tortured in December of1973 by Operation Condor troops, but the officer's gun jammed twice when he pulled the trigger. I dissociated to save my life staying frozen so as not to provoke him any further. I couldn't dissociate enough to avoid wetting my pants in fear, but after the second trigger pull on his jammed gun he got no response from me to he just got bored from trying to kill me and let me go.

My trick in recovery with my VA therapist, then, was how to be grateful that the real skill of dissociating saved my life many times over the years so I could live with how it got hard wired into my young brain forever. It's a real trick because, though I wish I didn't, I dissociate about 3 times a day now still.

Thank you so much for sharing,everyone.

The thing is,I feel like I have a lot to escape.

My OCD,my flashbacks,my anxiety,it is like i am using one aspect of my inner world to quiet another.

Does that make any sense at all??

Yes, sil. In fact, I credit my dissociative skills with helping me escape into a doctorate in literature. Like John Lennon I had to imagine a better world or die in this one, and I refused to let this one kill me. Imagination kept me alive. Still does.

It is a skill that we were forced to learn. My Therapist told me. She said it is sad because normal children aren't force but get to develop normally

It's so interesting that I came across this discussion because I have been dissociating myself! To the point where I'm actually loosing track of time and movements. I recently reached out to begin therapy because my dissociative habits are getting out of hand and its scaring me that im loosing track of time.

It can get scary,can't it,Lii?

I so hope that therapy helps you with this.