A Small Breakthrough

I’m trying a new thing to see how it works. I’ve been “spacing out” aka dissociating when I try to write, so I went into a private room, recorded myself on https://resonaterecordings.com/voice-recorder/, saved my work on dropbox.com, paid a small fee to get an automated transcription of it on rev.com (well, technically it was free because it gave me a trial), and now I’m going to see if I can look at a transcription of my ramblings and somehow make it readable. I go to some extreme lengths to avoid staring off into space for ungodly amounts of time. The 2006 Adam Sandler movie “Click” is my actual life.

Yesterday afternoon, my doctor came into my room at 4pm and I slowly became conscious that about 48 hours had passed. I don’t remember going to sleep. I don’t remember what happened right before lying down. All I have are strange, disjointed memories of being really, really out of it. Today, my doctor and I recapped. I don’t remember what order the conversation went in because no matter how hard I try, things are foggy for me even on a good day. But I still need to process the conversation.

Doctor: “And what did I say yesterday?”

Me: “You said that it seemed that I had found a respite and I must have needed the break and we would talk about it tomorrow.”

Doctor: “Yes.”

Me: “And you meant that at face value?”

Doctor: “Yes.”

As I mentioned, yesterday, which was Wednesday, at like four o’clock in the afternoon, I woke up and apparently I had been “asleep” for like 48 hours. I was very upset about it because I grew up listening to talk radio that was very cruel to people who were dubbed as “lazy.” I felt like if I wasn’t working for days, then I was being “lazy. A compounding situation is that if I’m not a hundred percent honest, I feel absolutely awful about myself. I’m not sure if that’s actually a value or just a self-protection mechanism, but it is what it is. This is a challenge because when I’m having a dissociative episode, it’s hard for me to describe that in total honesty. Like most people, I learned to talk about the world from people who didn’t talk about dissociation much. So when my subjective experience is as weird as this dissociation is, I feel like I’m lying, even though I’m not trying to. In fact, I’m going to extreme lengths to be as honest as I possibly can. And I still feel like what I’m saying is not true because I don’t know how to describe it accurately. Besides, I’m convinced that if people really knew the truth they would obviously realize what a horrible person I am, and given that everyone here in the hospital has been extraordinarily kind, I feel like I must be subconsciously deceiving them or manipulating them somehow. So I told that to my doctor, that I was trying really hard to be honest and I felt like I wasn’t. And I told him, that I was upset about having apparently been “asleep” for two days. Worse, I was not asleep. Instead, I was in my head and couldn’t get out and access my body, which is dissociation in one of its ugly forms.

So anyway, I told this to the doctor said that I just desperately wanted to know if this was real. He listed all the reasons why he was confused about why this is happening. He said that, given all the things that should be making me not dissociate right now, my being dissociated was not something he would have predicted. I thought that what he meant by “I’m confused” was “I don’t believe you.”

I wanted to defend myself, but I tried to instead accept information that was hard to hear and didn’t feel exactly true, so I asked something along the lines of, “What would my motivation be to sleep for two days and try to appear sicker than I really was?” I meant it sincerely. He did not mention laziness as a possibility even though I had used the word more than just a few times, but he was able to think of a lot of other potential motivations right off the bat. He said that perhaps I was afraid that I would be discharged immediately as soon as I started to show any improvement (which I am afraid of because that always leads to another hospitalization as soon as I get out in the community and can’t cope there). He also listed things like loss of my support system and treaters, going off of social security and having to get and maintain a job. Those things are indeed scary to me because I have tried giving them up so many times, and it has always ended in disaster and humiliation. He wasn’t saying anything to accuse me; I had asked what my motivation would have been and he was just answering what seemed to be in his mind a hypothetical question. I listened and his ideas made sense. However, as afraid as I was of losing the things he had mentioned, as I recollected on the past week, I just didn’t remember making a choice to act sick in order to avoid things that scared me. It felt totally out of my hands.

So, I immediately felt extremely suicidal. I often feel that way when I feel trapped in my own “sin,” unable to make a choice to be holy and yet accountable for all my wrongdoing. But I actually know my doctor well enough at this point and trusted him enough that I could say that I was really unhappy because I felt like he didn’t believe me. I reflected by saying, “I am feeling shame and self-hatred right now.” It was a risk that paid off. He didn’t get mad at me for having suicidal ideation. Instead, we talked about what he was saying and what I was hearing. At some point, I managed to say something like:

“There’s the subjective experience and then there’s my intellectual analysis of it. My subjective experience is that I do not have control over this. I can not just stop spacing out and dissociating. I cannot just ‘wake up.’ I can’t do these things. My experience is that this is not a choice. But intellectually, I believe very deeply that it must be a choice. And so, I need to know how to make that choice.”

I thought that was a logical question. But he looked at me and said,

“You realize how ridiculous that question is, right?”

“Uh, no, but if you say it’s ridiculous, I believe you.”

“You’re asking me how to make a choice when you don’t actually have a choice. If it’s not a choice, then you can’t make the choice.”

I just looked at him. “Are you telling me that if I just tell you that it was not a choice, then, you’re just going to believe me?”

He replied in the affirmative. And he was very, very clear that if I say it’s not a choice, then even if he’s confused about why I’m dissociating, he’s going to believe me that it’s not a choice.

This completely blew my mind. I have spent my entire life desperately seeking someone who would just take me at face value. In recent years I’ve run into some people who have been doing just that, but I couldn’t take in that that’s what they were actually doing because I was so unused to it. This conversation was so direct that it actually broke through to me.

Once I felt safe, I just started explaining more and more weird things that had happened during this episode. I had been so absolutely focused on protecting myself by being apologetic that I never felt like I could speak freely about exactly what was actually happening. That’s when I remembered that there actually was a point when it might have been a choice. Today is Thursday and the episode went from sometime on Monday until yesterday at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. For most of that time, I had been in excruciating physical pain in my chest. It felt like someone was pushing down with a million pounds on my chest. I knew darn well that it was anxiety and would cause no long-term damage, but it was not fun. Then yesterday morning, I felt a strange sort of head rush for a few seconds and then I couldn’t feel any of that pain. Suddenly, my body felt at peace. I have no idea if I would have been able to will myself to come back at that point but I do know that in that moment I was very aware that if I had tried to ground myself and it had worked, I would have had to return to intense physical pain. This is because 10 out of 10 distress is when I’m dissociated so and I don’t feel anything unpleasant. When I have, in the past, grounded myself with an “ice dive” or other extreme grounding skill during times of dissociation, it lowers my distress from 10/10 to 9/10. Unfortunately, at 9/10 distress, I am no longer blissed out and I can actually feel the misery in my body. Going abruptly from feeling like I’m on cloud 9 back to the labored breathing and chest pain that are my normal state of being really sucks.

I wasn’t able to remember that this moment of decision-making had occurred until I could stop forcing myself to view the whole thing as a choice that I had made and was personally responsible for despite having no agency in it whatsoever. Once I could stop shaming and loathing myself, I could identify something that I actually did have agency in. Then, I was able to resolve to myself that I would make a different choice in the future. Years of religious indoctrination taught me to see no connection whatsoever between what I ought to do and what I can do. The fact that I can’t do something in no way makes me feel less personally responsible for doing it. Linking “ought” and “can” back together made for a good moment. I didn’t have to beat myself up for not being able to choose. All that it took was for someone to promise me very directly that I would be believed no matter what I said. Very few people have believed me in my life and it felt good. After that, I actually was able to describe the situation much more lucidly than before. I opened up about how one evening last week, my internal narrative switched from English to Spanish. Staff told me how great it was that I was practicing my language skills. I agreed, but I really didn’t want to be practicing them in the middle of the night. I was scared because it took so much effort to put sentences together in English and I kind of need the one and only language I learned before adolescence.

I didn’t realize how much I held back because I assumed people wouldn’t believe me. The fact that he was going to was a huge thing for me. I kept asking, “Are you really just going to believe me if I tell you this was not a choice?” Every time, he explained clearly that he would. I just felt really good about that. I was even able to extend some mercy to myself for not coming out of dissociation yesterday morning because I don’t really make the best choices when parts of my brain are inaccessible to me. I felt compassion for myself because for days I had been trapped in a dissociative state and I felt like I was falling. I was screaming and crying because I was falling, but people couldn’t hear me. I later learned that they were not audible screams, as I had thought they were in the moment. I was able to believe myself that I don’t actually want to have to be here in the hospital. I’m losing out on a lot. I want to be out, living somewhere decent, taking classes so I can go back to work. There are things that I want to do with my life and if I’m just collapsed and can’t move for days, I’m not going to be able to do them. I really do want to get better. Besides, being konked out and not able to move is traumatizing because my mother used to do the same thing. She’s got quite a bit of trauma of her own, but it’s never been identified by anyone except me. She used to “supervise” my siblings and me, who were homeschooled, and I would need her to help me with something but she would suddenly feel “sleepy” and just shut down on the couch. She honestly thought she was cute. She was not. She was a grown woman passed out on the couch drooling or whatever, and I was disgusted because I was a kid and I needed her to take care of me. When I’m trapped in a body paralyzed by dissociation, I felt like her. I felt like I was “sleepy” and fear filled me for if I ever have kids of my own one day. My doctor said that if I just said horrible things to myself for being lazy and disgusting and looking like my mother, then I’m not going to get better, but if I kind of chill out, then it’ll be better.

So he gave me homework, which is to read a chapter out of a book and write a blog entry. Taking up blogging was my idea and I really enjoy it, but I’ve been away for a while. He said to get back into it because it was very therapeutic. He also said to watch more videos on the “School of Life” YouTube channel as a bonus if I have time. He’s going to possibly give me some other tasks in the near future, but I don’t have to worry about those tonight.

I feel like today was a huge breakthrough. I never thought that someone would really, really believe me and tell me so with such sincere eyes. I can’t underscore what a big deal that is. My life has been marked by consistently having my subjective experience totally invalidated, especially by my parents. One day when my sister was in agonizing physical pain, my mom worried that she wasn’t really in pain and she just thought she was. Mom did a lot of things like that, and the end result was that we believed that whatever we were experiencing wasn’t real. It meant more than I can say that somebody would tell me that just because I told them something, they were just going to believe me. Even though it doesn’t make sense clinically, and even though there are reasons why he would have predicted that I would be less dissociated by now, he’s just going to believe me anyway. He’s going to take what I say about my subjective experience over what theoretically would make sense.

So, it’s been a good day. It feels good to be validated. It feels good to be believed when I’m trying so hard to be truthful. And it feels good that if I’m believed, then maybe in time I can learn to trust myself as well and self-validate. My subjective experience was that Monday night and all through Tuesday, I had no control. There are apparently things that I was present for that I don’t remember. Not things that I did, but that happened around me. I don’t remember, and that’s not my fault. In fact, a lot of this isn’t my fault. And I’m learning to tell what I actually do have control over instead of lumping everything into the category of things that I can do absolutely nothing else about except feel guilt. So I’m going to do homework and try really hard to stay grounded. Maybe soon I can even call some friends on the outside. They’ve probably felt snubbed that I’ve been neglecting them. It’s awkward because when I’m dissociation, I can’t really talk properly and what I do say doesn’t make much sense. It’s awkward to call your friends when your brain isn’t working properly.

Jeesh, I never realized how nonsensical my speech is. It took forever to make any sense of that. I think it was good to transfer speech to writing because I’m a lot more organized when I write. I would keep cleaning it up but unfortunately, I’ve got that head rush back and this is my cue to take a break before my brain checks out. I’ve been ignoring it for too long.