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I am going to try to take this a little lightly because I am struggling with what my T is naming as dissociation and struggling with accepting that I dissociate as regularly and extremely as she suggests. I can't figure out why. It's just a big roadblock and getting too close to the idea makes me nervous.

I found a photo of myself when I was a child the other night when I couldn't sleep and was going through some things (it was a bad night). I was looking for a notebook and I found it tucked in the pages of another one. The picture was taken when I was nine, and I'm in a group setting and we're all doing a craft together and next to me a cousin who is grinning like someone said "cheese" at the camera. And my face is just totally blank and my eyes are huge and scared and as soon as I saw it I connected it with dissociation. It's ... stark. I am a few years older than this cousin and in normal photos I would have looked it, but in this one I look much, much younger. It's also very eerie because it's a group photograph and everyone else is smiling. If it were a photo of a group of strangers I would see that child immediately and know that something very serious was going on with her.

The thing is, I know I took it out of the album--it's from an album that the same cousin gave me a few years after the photo was taken; she filled it with a few pictures of us. I keep it because I filled it with pictures of my childhood dog! It must have been one of her parents who took it, and she put it in and wrote "boo!" next to it because if you didn't know what was happening I guess it could be funny to a kid making a photo album. So I must have pulled it out and put it away, feeling disturbed by it but not knowing why ... I don't remember taking it out, or really noticing that it was gone when I looked at it since.

I don't really know what to do with the picture or the knowledge of it. Mostly it makes me sad. But also, like, do I look like that to others?? It can't possibly be as extreme as this, but it made me wonder. I don't have many pictures of myself. I got a camera when I was 12 (maybe even with that same photo album!) and made myself the photographer. And I don't have any others from that age. It is very sad to look at, but I am strangely glad I found it. It feels like evidence (not proof, though) for some of my memories of that year.

Not really sure why I posted this except it feels so strange. I am trying to decide if I am going to take it into therapy. I feel like it might be a way into talking about dissociating that makes more sense than her pointing it out when it's happening, but I also really do not want to get into details about that year. 

Does anyone have any similar experiences? Not necessarily from a childhood photo--just about running into something like a picture of yourself and seeing it clearly? What did you do with that object?

Candid, I phrased myself badly there. I think what I mean is something like:  My behaviors make more sense but some of the context--especially the social context--no longer does. Like you say, a lot of bad decisions and mistakes suddenly have reasons and that's kinda great! Other parts are more challenging--right now I am having a really hard time understanding disassociative behaviors and seeing them in myself. Also "triggers." Which, sadly, is a word that probably sets me off because of firearms. Why does it have to be such a violent word?? I need to think of something better before I can even try to identify them--but until I can it's like I am half-aware. Like having hearing but no vision. Before, when I thought I was just probably "crazy" it made sense--I had an explanation that was easy to not think too much about.

But when I said "things" I really meant people, specifically FOO and others closeby. It's like the understandings have swapped:  if I make sense, they don't. I don't really have any sort of toolkit or system of understanding to think about others right now and I can get myself tangled up very quickly.  At least I live far away from the FOO now so I can avoid not getting into it! It's really nice to hear several of you say to go gently and at my own pace.

Blueberry! I love blueberries! Thank you for the sweet and thoughtful reply. You make me feel so welcome. Some of the things you share ring so true, especially about the inevitability of collapse and how changed I feel. In some ways I don't want to go back. I can get angry now! Granted, I have a really hard time stopping being angry which is not great. But I stood up for a friend when she was telling me about someone mistreating her and it felt almost delicious to be angry at this person for behaving cruelly. But other things, not so great. My default is "raw and new" and it is not easy to get through a day.

I also really, really want to thank you for sharing what you did about the difficulty of seeing even into the evening on many days. When I try to express this to my friends (all three of them -- not sarcastic -- I don't have many, but I am very close to my few) or to my BF it has gone badly--they hear self-harm and nihilism. It doesn't feel that way at all. I know they are just worried, and I understand that I need to rebuild some trust. But I also need to figure out a way to express it that isn't terrifying. I don't want to keep scaring them but I would also like to be able to be honest when they ask me about Friday. Because Friday!  That's like asking what I'll be doing on May 10, 2025 or something. 

Thank you both for replying.

You don't ever have to divulge anything here that you don't want to. No explanation necessary - you don't want to is reason enough.

Thank you for this. I didn't realize how scared I was about that until you said this. I'm glad it's not an unspoken community standard.

I didn't see it in the guidelines that I read so I'll just ask:  is there any standard on replying to old threads? I saw something that I was interested in but the last post was about a month ago.

I also appreciate you pointing me towards the direction of the dissociation forum. as well.

Candid, it's so interesting that you say you sometimes feel like not knowing was better. That really rings true to me. I mean, I know that the way I understood myself and my life was fundamentally self-destructive and unsustainable but at least things made sense. There are things (especially with the dissociation types) that I didn't even realize weren't just normal parts of everyone's experience--or, with some aspects, abnormal but in a way that I thought was my fault or decision or something. It's crazy how disoriented I feel just from having names for things...

Hello! I just found this resource after googling desperately after a terrible weekend of yo-yoing uncontrollably between hypervigilant anxiety and derealization. Two words that are still so new to me to use that I'm not sure I've ever said them out loud. I just spent some time reading through the things you all have written here and I think I feel less alone. Thank you.

I ... should probably introduce myself, but I am not really ready to detail my story. Especially since I am a little overwhelmed by all of the subforums and uncertain where I fit:  I don't remember anything before CSA* but when I look back it feels like my adulthood has also been trauma and wreckage.  That isn't accurate:  I'm 30, my boyfriend and I have been together for five years and he's wonderful, we have an excellent cat together, and I am in grad school and mysteriously am pretty good at it even now.

But the last year and a half has also been one of the hardest of my life on a minute-to-minute basis. After getting half the DMV-IV thrown at me in my teenage years I avoided mental healthcare for most of my adulthood. Which--I was not, by any one's standards, a functioning adult human--but my life was objectively the best it had ever been for the first couple of years after I met my BF:  he is so kind and stabilizing, and it's because of his support that I went back to college, got a BA, and applied to grad school. But then in the span of two years a bunch of things happened, the sorts of single events that can cause regular PTSD for anyone. And my head and sense of self and fragile system of kinda-coping all just shattered.

By the end of 2015 things were so bad that I got help. Or, more accurately, I reached a point where I couldn't see any options at all and my BF convinced me that I should let him walk me to the university counseling center. The mental health team I ended up with through that walk-in were the first in my life to suggest not only PTSD, but CPTSD. It's been a revelation--so many things make sense now, there are words for things I've had happen all of my life--but it also took me a good year to get to a point where I could even begin to accept the diagnosis. In part because getting treatment is very hard for me and I resist it at every turn:  I have known enough terrible mental health practitioners to recognize analytically that my therapists** and psychiatrist are all insightful and great at their jobs--but I also do not trust them, and a lot of the time I am abjectly frightened of them.  But a more profound hurdle is that accepting this diagnosis means having to acknowledge my life before age 20 instead of treating it like something I read about in a really sad novel once years ago.

I feel like this is where I should go into detail about symptoms--if only to convince myself, again, that registering and writing this was a good idea. But I can't right now. My BF is across the country with his mother, who has cancer, and I am alone with my head, which is basically a haunted house.***

I don't know if I will ever get better. The more I learn about CPTSD the more I feel like it affects--and always has--every single part of my existence. I don't know what "better" looks like, can't imagine it. Even on my very best days I can still only think maybe a week into the future. I don't mean that as a self-destructive euphemism (I read the rules and they're great rules):  it just feels like getting through every day and minute take all of my energy so I have none left over to think ahead. And also time is super broken for me lately which is probably a symptom with an official name that I might find in one of your subforums if I knew where to look for it...

So, um. Hi. I probably sound doubtful, and I am, but I am actually happy to have found this place. You all seem so smart and self-aware.

*(Yes, I studied the acronyms! Yes, it feels like an accomplishment, so I'm highlighting it.)

**(I have two Ts:  the first one I saw helped me transition to a female therapist with experience in trauma. She is my weekly or bi-weekly real therapist. But I really strangely trust T1 even though the fact that he's male makes it impossible for me to tell him, well, most things? I guess it's because he was one of the first people in my life to really see me, which he managed even though I hadn't disclosed anything about my life. I see him about once a month, usually right about when I am trying to find a way to justify quitting therapy altogether because I am apparently like clockwork in my cycle of distrust. I call him my meta-therapist:  we talk about trust and power and intersubjectivity and language in the broadest, most philosophical and historical terms possible until I remember that I trust him, at least, despite myself. And that makes me feel okay about continuing on with T proper. It's super unorthodox but it is the only reason I have been able to stick with therapy as long as I have.)

***(Probably like the one in Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House.)