Being Honest With Myself When I Dissociate Is Easier Said Than Done

Originally published on Medium 24/03/2021

I’ve learned a lot about myself since March 2020, but good grief, it’s been profoundly uncomfortable. The main lesson learned appears to be "never underestimate the depth of my own unconscious self-deception" and has led me on a quest for an identity that functions for me now. That’s definitely a work in progress.

Since I moved back to North East England in early 2004 in my early thirties, I was lucky to fall into an excellent job where I was able to qualify as a project manager. One of the emotional drivers for success was that I had earned a good opportunity and sought to emulate the maxim about “living well being the best revenge” as I’d quite literally run away from a bad marriage after being threatened with physical violence.

Looking back, I think I fell into the classic mistaken belief that once I’d escaped that rotten situation, everything would slot into place and that the experience had left me fundamentally unscathed. The last year of the marriage was particularly horrendous, as my ex was highly volatile. All of the photographs I have seen of myself from that time show the absence of light in my eyes from the strain of trying to appear normal — whatever that was.

So I moved home, fell in love and became heavily work-identified and driven. I poured my heart and soul into it. I grew personally pained and upset when things went wrong and ploughed on maniacally to put things right. This in itself should probably have been a red flag. I didn’t realise I had red flag filtering glasses on.

The problem is (I suppose) that life has a nasty habit of rearranging your priorities, I had a kid at 40, and that seismic event (accompanied by a frightening birth experience involving unconsciousness, infections and an emergency C-section) got added into the pile of other traumatic life events. The person that I’d built, this ego state, started to crack and develop fissures leading to an episode of burnout in 2014. I stayed with that company for another 3 years, then took voluntary redundancy, thinking I’d have the opportunity to re-evaluate my career choice as it had stopped working for me. It’s safe to say that didn’t go to plan.

What I do now is still related but in a different sector. The change has not been as good as a rest, as my brain has decided that remembering things is optional and switches me off like a lamp.

I’m nearly 50, and I’m scared witless.

To “cut to the chase” (says she, trying to shoe-horn in a labored running metaphor to fit in with the graphic) I’m now awaiting treatment for suspected C-PTSD. This situation arose due to a major bout of flashbacks, anxiety, panic, dissociation and insomnia last summer and autumn. In effect, the ego shell I’d built for myself developed a large hole that pushed a lot of my repressed feelings through. This led to me falling off my proverbial perch in late 2020 and needing a few months off work.

Getting an almost diagnosis is almost a relief — after all, I’d been struggling for a while (well, over a decade but that’s another story) and having a crisis meant I could no longer kid myself that I was “just” getting anxious from time to time. I also have a reasonable idea of what’s going on with my reactions, and that the resilient person I used to be isn’t lost. However, I say almost because I’d rather not have PTSD in the first place, but there’s not much I can do about that now.

The challenge for me is to work with my new reality of adapted brain function and limbic system over-excitement, and I’ve been able to start treating the physical aspects of the condition, as this is key to resolving the mental problems that come with it.

The Big Challenge

What I found initially difficult to work through and accept was that my brain was really screwing up my life and my sense of certainty in my own abilities. I’d felt quite hopeless at my skills apparently ebbing away. I’m happy to say they are still there, but my brain shoved them down the back of the sofa.

The big “elephant in the room” lies in the fact that I’d been trying and failing to fight dissociation for months because I couldn’t recognise or accept I was doing it. I literally lied to everyone, and the lies tripped off the tongue like Margot Fonteyn.

A quick definition of Dissociation from Wikipedia is as follows:

Dissociation...is any of a wide array of experiences, ranging from a mild emotional detachment from the immediate surroundings, to a more severe disconnection from physical and emotional experiences. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.

For me, the primary problem affected my memory. I undertook tasks and could not remember that I’d done them (requiring me to have to double-check which essentially doubled the amount of effort required to complete anything), as well as finding that I’d done weird things with the tasks I had completed and had no memory of why I’d done things a particular way.

This meant that I would have to fix them, again doubling the effort. While all the while my confidence and sense of my own identity were unravelling. My mind was, figuratively speaking, doing a runner every time I asked it to perform actions that I know I can do standing on my head.

I was pretending to be ok when in reality, I was a country mile away from fine. I couldn’t even admit to myself that I wasn’t ok, and I doubled down trying to convince myself and everyone else. I needed to do was embrace the incongruity of being honest with myself and others, while my brain, when placed under duress wants to hide things from me. Which it has done, to a startling degree.

The Impact

I knew I needed help when it became apparent that I was almost constantly dissociating while working, and my increasingly strained efforts to stay functional were blatantly obvious to others. I was fooling no-one. When that mask slipped, that’s when the other symptoms leapt out from behind the bushes.

I will say that going back to work after several months off has been something of an eye-opener. I keep coming across documents and plans I finished last summer that I can’t remember doing, and I have no idea what I was thinking when I did it. Certain of my previous actions make zero sense to me. My logical functions appear to have been missing in action.

Equally, I have been pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion, as there were times where I completed a piece of work to a high standard, and not gone off on some demented tangent. The problem is determining when I did it because it has been an exercise in detective work. I have no memory of completing them. Nada. Zip. Zilch. The good and the bad have indiscriminately fallen into a hole in my memory and I’m pretty sure I’m never going to see them again.

I have no recollection of the logic that determined some of the things I did. I have no access to those memories. I’d been able to keep a handle on it when I worked in an office, as the presence of others really helps to keep you grounded. The change to working from my current home during the pandemic was an exercise in futility and a brutal shove into the void.

To explain, we’re planning to move to somewhere that’s a more suitable size, but we’re dependent on certain things happening first. In other words, there’s a lot of stuff that we have no control over. Our neighbours are elderly, frail, sometimes insomniac, and incredibly deaf so there is bone-shakingly loud TV at inconvenient times. My husband works nights. My son receives additional help at school, so home-schooling while terrified and working was ghastly. (I gave in and sent him back to school as he’s eligible). The list goes on. One issue would be a nuisance on its own, but several issues going on at once became rapidly toxic and unbearable.

What I went through this summer and autumn was a whole new level of detachment. Along with the terrible memory, my critical faculties and executive function were shot into a million pieces. My training and years of professional practice were lost in space. My job means that focus and the ability to organize yourself are essential and woolliness is not an option. The framework of my life buckled.

All gone, like a wallflower at a party, sneaking out the side door and into the night.

How it turned out

There was a point a few months ago where I genuinely felt like none of it was going to come back. I asked feverish questions on PTSD message boards and mithered my family and friends. I spoke to various professionals and listened to guided meditations led by Americans and Canadians with soothing voices while lying on an acupressure mat (FYI — I strongly recommend this, it’s difficult to be tense when you’re being prodded 6000 times). It also hurts if you mindlessly move so it’s safe to say you’re better off remaining “in the moment”.

I’ve learned to regard my brain with a degree of suspicion, with an awareness that sometimes my automatic nervous system runs around like Kermit the Frog introducing a famous special guest on The Muppet Show. I question my responses and ask them if a particular reaction is proportionate and accurate. I’ve learned that if my forehead feels numb I’m probably heading towards dissociation (it’s not quite my forehead, but there’s definitely something off at the front of my head). Please note, this only works as an indicator if you don’t wear overly tight hats.

Rest assured, it does come back though I’ve needed to maintain a constant dialogue with myself to keep myself straight and in the room. It’s a little like I’m walking up to that person that’s me, standing alone at the party, offering them snacks and tasty beverages and helping them fight the urge to run off into the night.