eli5 what is disassociating? Tried looking online but I don’t understand.
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are you talking like dissosciative disorder or dissosciative drugs?
Ketamine/PCP are dissosciative drugs and the other is a mental state with somewhat similar symptoms as intoxication of said drugs. Hence the name afaik.
I pretty much dissociated my entire childhood it seems. There are good moments I remember, but looking back, I was struggling in school because I would dissociate during lessons. If we had been learning a lesson all week, on day 5 when the test would come it was like I was seeing the material for the first time. Taking actual tests? It was like an hour where I was living under water almost. It’s hard to explain. I still do it to this day when I’m in a learning setting and I’m 26. I have about 45 mins of focus in me while someone is teaching, after that I am gone. Even when I go to comedy shows (just saw Adam Sandler) and I get about an hour in and I get the under water feeling. When a super funny joke makes everyone laugh I snap back into my body. For a while I didn’t know if I was falling asleep but now when I put the pieces together it’s actually dissociation. I had a very chaotic childhood with constant night terrors so I was exhausted all the time and had a layer of fear/anxiety that never went away all day.
I would compare it to having a car accident. You know something just happened, but you can’t focus on it. Your mind is blank and everything looks “off.” It’s not really “you” sitting in a crumpled car. You’re looking at the world through a screen. You go through the motions of getting out of the car, but you don’t know why. You’re completely on autopilot. You’re functioning, but none of it makes sense.
You know when you’re daydreaming and there’s that little disorentation in the moment where you snap back to paying attention to what’s going on?
It’s a bit like that, except you can’t snap back and you’re aware that your thoughts aren’t engaging properly. It’s uncomfortable but really hard to focus on what’s wrong because you can’t control your thoughts enough to recognize the problem.
Kindof like daydreaming a panic attack.
Note: really subjective experience so probably lot’s of examoles and interperetations.
The correct term is dissociating, not disassociating.
Its like looking through your eyes as someone else. Sometimes your hearing may be muffled, vision blurry and a tingly feeling in your hands/arms and feet/legs.
It’s different for everyone but as someone who really struggles with involuntary disassociating for me it feels like a computer going to sleep. My eyes are open but it’s a blank 1000yrd stare with pretty much no conscious thought. It’s almost like a time machine, I zone out and then next thing I know X amount of time has passed. When I was younger I thought I was just really good at meditating (lol) but therapy has helped me understand it much better. I have much less control over it when I’m stressed or overwhelmed but therapy has been a big help. We taught my partner how to recognize it so he also snaps me out of it when he notices. It’s a tricky concept to nail down.
its essentially a coping mechanism your brain/body does when it feels overloaded with stress, it shuts down and stops taking so much information in from the world around it. It feels like zoning out, lucid dreaming, being in a trance, or being high. Usually described as feeling unreal, not fully present in your own body, or feeling disconnected from the world around them
Dissociation (in psychology) can be defined by one word: detachment.
There are two “kinds” of dissociation, but they are essentially the same–there is some detachment from reality (that is, what is happening around them) that leads to an unclear sense of self.
A very common kind of dissociation is daydreaming. I am sure most people can recall a time they’ve experienced this. A very severe kind of dissociation is dissociative identity disorder, where a person exhibits two or more distinct personalities. These I would call the first “kind” of dissociation, where there are no memories (or repressed memories) of what has happened around them.
The other “kind” is more like a fog, and some other comments have detailed this feeling. It’s described as a sort of detachment from one’s own thoughts and feelings, as if they aren’t really there or as if everything feels further away than it is, perhaps not unlike standing in the middle of a crowd but feeling very alone and isolated.
Ultimately, dissociation refers to a detachment from what we would call “the self.”
As some one who dissociates a lot I can only tell you from my perspective.
It’s like when you day dream but it feels further off and you have no memory of if you were even having thoughts.
If some one is calling to me it takes me a second to come back down to my body.
Feels like a almost come crashing down into my body and then I’m present again.
I’ve always felt like Radiohead’s “How To Disappear Completely” is basically the anthem for dissociating.
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