Dissociation & Trauma - 1 - Sociopath Community

https://www.reddit.com/r/OSDD/comments/izvhnc/how_do_i_figure_out_the_truth_in_a_healthy_manner/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

“Are you struggling with anything chronic or reoccurring? Periods of high unpredictable anxiety or depression?

Chronic anxiety and chronic depression among other things (vulnerability to abuse) are what made me choose to face this.

Really think about the anxiety and depression questions. If the answer is yes, and some of your symptoms line up with DID/OSDD then this is worth taking seriously.

As you probably know, there are no drugs to 'cure' this, only the right knowledge and tools. This means that until recently, many people with this condition have been fighting in the dark. And they have been losing. Because any drug-based therapy won't work.

Personal experience :

Before figuring this stuff out, I had no control over my internal anxiety or depression. Externally, I was a pro. I would talk in groups without flinching (while simultaneously burning on the inside). I could get through work days where I was depressed, while wearing a soft smile where necessary (and feeling dead on the inside). At some point I lost hope in living a truely happy life on the inside. On the outside no one but my partner at any given time would ever be able to tell that I suffer.

Knowing about my condition has been the only thing to help. I'm having a more calm life now because I'm closer to my parts. Not to say things were outrageous before. I was a pretty easy going person in the first place. But now we're happy (settled) inside because we've worked on finding tools and practices that encourage good communication inside (about feelings and needs).

Alexithymia

Something easy to start with is to think about one symptom that seems to be common in DID/OSDD but isn't common knowledge : alexithymia (missing or mixed up emotion(s)) If you did research already, you might have run across this symptom. It is linked to other conditions like autism. There are two kinds of alexithymia. One can have it since birth or one can create the pattern based on their environment. Someone with autism may be born with some degree of alexithymia. In contrast, from what I know, when it comes to DID/OSDD its usually the environmental kind. And last, a person can experience both kinds.

If you have it, you might not realize it until you think about it. I didn't realize it for a long long time. For me, two emotions I was obviously missing inside were 'excitement' and 'deep anger'. But it turned out they weren't gone. They just felt like other negative emotions to me:

excitement >> anxiety

deep anger >> deep depression

I had somehow repatterned these emotions by dissociating when I was younger and forgot about it.

Alexithymia exercise:

If you have a dulled or missing emotion (one you feel like you have to fake all the time) you can start by pinpointing it. Looking at your pattern, you can try to think honestly about why you may have swapped or lost these emotions.

For me, I was curbing my excitement because it was being used to hurt me at home when I was growing up. I got rid of the positive feelings, but overlooked getting rid of the negative ones. Over time, this pattern was auto-reinforced until it grew unmanageable and unhealthy. Upcoming exciting events would send me into either a misdirected hypo-manic or panicked state. I would not relate the panic to the upcoming event very much at all. But it was all linked.

This might also look like

intimacy >> terror

pride >> depression

disgust or fear (toward abuser) >> admiration or pity (for abuser)

Some people have a deep fear of intimate feelings because these feelings were used against them when growing up - this person may self sabotage relationships and push people away.

Some families make their kids feel bad about their accomplishments - this person may mysteriously feel very sad after they achieve something.

If a kid cannot escape an abuser, they may move their negative emotions into a positive or dominating realm to cope - this later moves into adulthood where new abusers may be encountered and are not attributed proper amounts of disgust or repelling feelings - toxic relationship victims.

This stuff counts for any environment where responsible and loving caregivers should have been, school too, not just home.

Finding even one missing or mixed up emotion is something to look at.

What everyone should know

I wish everyone could know this DID or not. Alexithymia, dissociation, and false beliefs hidden behind alters (example: I'm not good enough) are the driving forces behind this disorder. And it is serious. Being multiple on its own is not bad. The dissociative identity part is not bad. It's the disorder that slowly brings people down and needs real attention.

Alexithymia & alters:

The exercise above does not necessarily require communication with an alter, just soft and honest observation of your past. In the future, if you continue this work, you might find out who locked away a specific emotion.

Sometimes even these alters are pushed back and locked away deep inside by accident - along with the emotion(s) they hold. Sadly, it's like throwing out the fish with the fishbowl. This makes initial communication hard. But what you can feel from them is the negative emotions when they spill out... and the positive effect of properly addressing the underlying need.

For me, after rediscovering why I locked away my excitement, I was able to 'reassure' my wildly anxious thoughts (the alter that had the feeling locked away) by focusing on the correct feeling and cause. It still happens but now I am able to feel more calm and adjust healthily and more quickly. This part now feels safe enough to release this emotion under the right circumstances. I still don't feel full blown excitement, but we're working on it.

Same thing for anger. I've worked on allowing myself to feel and externally communicate anger with a focus on resolving the need at the source of my anger. No more long periods of depression. Better method of gaining security. No drugs.

Last words and insight

If this is your struggle too and you're just stepping into it, one thing I have to say is that you don't need to fear yourself. I realized that one common ground that every part of me has is that we are good and we want to feel good. None of us are bad. None of us want to live an unhappy or unsatisfying life. Even the most antagonizing self defeating voice turned out to be a part of me that was simply living a life where he was unheard and made to feel invisible. His messages were unfocused and negative before because he didn't know how to get through to me about what he needed.

Be kind to yourself. Be patient. Take things a step at a time. Feel free to ask any questions.”

“this was super helpful, i know i started to stop caring about my relattionships with people after a trauma situation that happened a few years ago, and always felt weird about it once the co-front/passive influence/switch ended.

But also, u/throwaway_alien, you dont have to go for a diagnosis! my therapist and i decided to just focus on trauma therapy and working on communication with alters and all that without worrying about diagnosis and it honestly took so much pressure off of "figuring out whats going on". I was terrified of ending up witha diagnosis that i wouldnt know how to handle, but we knew our communication, cofronting, passive influence,etc. was all real through journalling and thankfully my therapist is accepting of all of it.

just do what u need to do, dont put too much pressure on urself, and dont feel like you need to figure it all out right away! It took me a full year to accept that my dissociation and alter communication indicated osdd-1(I'd always make up random excuses for it that, looking back now, didnt make sense lol) but yea just take ur time and take note of all the things you experience! sending lots of love and support! <3“

The other day, I woke up from a nightmare, that there was an intruder in my house. I was laying in my bed in my room, but the bed was in a place it *used* to be in many years ago. Age 15/16, and also age 21. And everything in my room was the way it was during those times. I felt younger too, and, I was very scared. Helpless. I knew the intruder was possibly, coming. And I just laid in my bed like crunching up into a ball of terror, trying not to make a sound. Not knowing how I would get out of this situation, or what they were going to be doing to me. I feared the worst, which was that they were just going to shoot me. I could hear them getting closer and closer, slowly. It was dark, and I felt alone.

When I woke up, it was also dark in my bedroom, pitch black dark outside just like the dream, and perfectly quiet in the house. I still felt the urgency faintly, that the intruder was still coming like, I felt paranoid and sort of, I guess on high alert and fearful. That uh, that the dream was still happening. I couldn’t shake it off.

I got up though to walk around, just hoping to find signs of normalcy that would calm me down. To see everything was okay and I was safe. And I saw my dogs sleeping peacefully and I knew I was okay, because they would be up and alert and barking if someone was in the house.

And then I laid back down and, I was sitting up in my bed just staring forward and, I just, suddenly realized I was like heavily dissociated.

This is hard to explain... and every instance of dissociation is fairly unique like, there are so many different kinds and ways in which this can be experienced.

So in this instance, I felt a familiar feeling of blankness. I knew I had felt it before, and thought to myself, “oh this again.” Like, i knew, this already. As if I’d felt it in the past already but, I don’t know when I’ve felt this, like, I have no memory of it but. Yet the feeling was familiar like, de ja vu.

And, so yeah I felt blank and numb, like insolated, from the outside world and, detached from my own thoughts and emotions so much so that I couldn’t feel them and- they were not my own. Like, the state of being I was in, I could clearly recognize, inside myself- was not, me. That was present. It was like, something else filling that space. Like a zero. A place holder.

And this zero is, like, a void, and is unreactive and just, stares. And like, the zero, could look at my life, could see my memories, knew who “Mary” was, as a separate identity, a separate person, from what, this zero state of being was that was currently, taking the place of Mary.

It was scary to be detached from my emotions and my thoughts, and life. And it made me feel like, all of reality was, just as meaningless as a dream, and my entire life was like, just a movie that I had watched that wasn’t real. It wasn’t real enough to affect me. When I am in this zero state like.... it’s so hard to explain what it feels like.

But... it’s total nothingness like, push yourself to the bottom of a pool, and lay there, looking up. And, everything beyond that murky watery surface out there in the world- it’s, untouchable, it’s unreal. It doesn’t even exist, it was just, a passing painting that you looked at in a museum once. A dream you thought was real but, when you woke up you realized it wasn’t. It’s a terrifying notion to feel that this entire time you thought you were a person living their life, and then you come to feel that, this person wasn’t even real and neither was their life. It was just, nothing, it wasn’t real... it wasn’t, real.

And i felt very very numb, and very like, detached. Almost like i was still inside of a dream, a nostalgic, reoccurring dream of my past which I was inside of. Overwhelming euphoric nostalgia. And I’m just sitting there in my bed, like, not even feeling, the weight of my body sitting on my bed properly. I can’t feel it, I’m too numb. I don’t even feel the weight of my eyelids, as they blink. Too numb.

I don’t feel anything physically but numbness and internally I am so dislocated from myself, my emotions, my thoughts and memories. that I am in this other space, like a purgatory like place or a holding tank. Where you can be like, banished to. It’s, like prison because you feel trapped and can’t get out of it. You can’t get back “into” yourself. You can get back “into” reality and just feel like, your real life is, real. You desperately just want to feel normal again, and inside yourself, and get back to living normal life.

Not this, strange, other place. But yeah you can’t like, get back. So you just wait in this like holding space, waiting to get out.

After this, I started having a panic attack, I don’t remember why but, this just happens. A trickle of thoughts will start to occur that I recognize only, occur, when I’m abotu to go into one. And these thoughts get hard to ignore, they bother you deeply and unsettle you. It’s frightening and jarring, accompanied by pangs of anxiety in your chest. You can feel the panic boiling up to the surface as your mind starts to, want to race.

I tried to get back control, recognizing my symptoms and knowing okay time to meditate to get this down. Its sort of like trying to hold back vomit though, it’s very physiologically difficult to will yourself against the push toward the inevitable, physiological symptoms that take over. IT takes immense focus and control, over your internal self, your mind, your thoughts. It’s just very difficult.

So yeah I’m like doing my mediations and breathing, and other exercises for grounding and calming etc. I eventually felt better *enough* that I could watch videos on my phone and sort of just, try my best not to think about anything for a minute (or i could go back into it). You’re tired so like, you don’t really want to do anything else but you can’t lay there passively or it will start again, you have to remain sort of distracted from it. Hence the videos.

It feels like trying to hold onto your sanity. The physiological symptoms of dissociation still linger, but I try to ignore them. It feels like, drunken-ness, slurred speech. Slowness or heaviness, and your fingers might be kind of stiff like, a loss of dexterity, muscle weakness. And just a general feeling of haziness, slurry-head feeeling? And uh, you just feel like you just jumped out of a plane and did like 800 rapid spirals or something. Like you stuck your head in a washing machine. And you’re still recovering from that, dizziness, in your head. You just kind of look around like, looking kind of lost and confused, and distant behind the eyes. And you blink slowly. It’s just, a slurry mess.

But you’ll be running fine-tuned in a moment, for now you are loosy goosy but it’ll eventually get back to speed slowly with time.

And then, i went into a *second* panic attack (yay for me) and this time the feeling took on a little more strongly,t eh feeling of panic in my chest. The stiffness in your body. My legs actually became so stiff that, afterwards, the my leg like, was hurting- from how tightly it had like, tensed itself up during that panic attack. I couldn’t loosen the grip. You know. And, i was sweating this time. And feeling like, really overwhelmed with just panick. I got up and went to the medicine cabinet and took something, because it was just too much. And then i crouched down in front of my sink in the kitchen, and just stayed like that for a while. In that uncomfortable crouching position. Until my legs fell asleep.

And it was just probably an hour of that, in various places in my room or in my bathroom. Changing positions and like laying or sitting in very awkward positions, just like staring, spacing out with my face like face down into the floor or the bed, or in the palm of my hands. Nuzzled between pillows or like, into my elbows. Waiting for the symptoms to pass. Nausea. Stomach pain. Etc.

eventually I was able to lay down normally and relax, like i felt more relaxed. The lingering slurry dissociation feeling was still there though, but at least I was more myself- despite feeling still sort of a numbing and slowness of the body like. It was only partial... and yeah my body was less stiff now so i could relax. And take a deep breath. Which felt nice and... i was rubbing my leg where it had been stiffened up it felt good to massage it. Now that it was finally like, relaxed- but um... it was hurting from being so tensed up.

My legs typically get quite stiff during panic attacks, and sometimes will turn so stiff like a rock that I can’t even bend them, or they will just shake uncontrollably. That’s one of the ways i know a panic attack is coming on is i will check in with how my legs are feeling and if I notice them stiffening up i know like, I’m on edge.

Anyway, after that i decided to just chill and watch a tv show and sit with my dogs because they make me feel grounded and calm, and are just lovely to be around when you’ve had sort of a lot going on. I can be a little sad after that, and then i got really sleepy and fell asleep. Per usual, after PA’s and dissociation i pass out.