SOOOO wonderful to see a thread with your handle on it!!
It IS a good thing that you can write about that traumatic event from August...telling and retelling can actually dissipate the power of such a traumatic memory.
I'm very curious about your dissociative experiences, Jeannine. But of course you will share what is comfortable to you.
I was just today working on my lecture about dissociation. From my understanding it is a mechanism of escape from traumatic memories, events, emotions. It's a "switching" of tracks in our levels of consciousness.
It CAN be a great comfort...which is why for some individuals it becomes the norm...at an extreme you can see forms of amnesia, or if the process starts in childhood, Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder).
My closest brush with this was with a friend who is anorexic. Sometimes when we'd get too "close" to certain topics, or what I said contradicted "the skinny bitch" (our name for the negative track in her head telling her stuff like I was lying, we all wanted to make her fat, that she was not worth saving, no one could help her) she would "slip away"...
I'd see her eyes become unfocussed, rapid blinking, and she was gone...sometimes for over an hour. Nothing I did or said made any difference.
She described it like this: That she could still make out what I was saying, but could NOT respond...she'd try...but couldn't...the tape in her head took over...When she "came to" she'd have no idea how much time had passed.
Now THIS is an example of dissociation that was NOT very comforting! But other times it's a form of comforting escape.
Just wanted you to know that we're ALL capable of such states, some of us more than others...creative people with the ability to focus, get lost in a good book, fantasize etc. are more prone.
I'm glad your C is helping you with this, and SOOO happy to see you back and hear that your H may be waking from his MLC/Depression? coma.
