Am I dissociating or in denial?

[Bimsy]

Hi everyone!

I was thinking about the way I think about my problems and how severe they are.
Often when I am in a good place I feel like I don't need therapy and that all the bad times seem so far away and that was all in the past.

I feel that way now even though I had an event just a few days ago where I came out of surgery and escaped from the recovery room.
I did this because I didn't feel like the nurses noticed that I was really anxious, I felt very vulnerable and didn't want to be around people that ignored me when I was in such emotional pain.
So I sort of switched into a stone- faced survival mode and pulled the needle- thingy out of my arm and ran away.
I was dressed only in hospital clothes with a big, growing blood stain on my arm where the needle had been as if I was chased by evil killer doctors!
I actually managed to escape from everyone (there were a lot of doctors and nurses there all the time) and had to come back when I realized that I couldn't go outside without my own clothes.

It all worked out in the end though, I came back and convinced them that I was fine and could go back home and here I am.
But now when I think about the event it sounds kind of dramatic and a bit crazy but I find it hard to connect with the traumatic feelings I had back then.
All I do now is laugh at how crazy it was but at the same time I can remember how I felt but in a very distant way, as if it was a story I've heard about someone else.

Does anyone experience the same thing?
Is this common as a dissociative symptom you think?

[arpy1]

are you familiar with emotional flashbacks? cos it sounds a bit to me like that was what happened. if it's new to you, you might want to check the concept out - 

(i copied the link for you:  www.pete-walker.com/fAQsComplexPTSD i hope it works, i am not very good at this stuff!)

and yes, dissociating is something that can happen to me too, when i get triggered and can't deal with the intense emotional arousal.  there are other ways to deal but i am finding that they take a while to learn, and often we can't access the emotions that we are hiding from yet.  i think maybe it's a long haul process of excavation done very gently. like the anger thing you have mentioned elsewhere, to try and feel those things too fast or too soon can retraumatise you if you're not careful..

I can remember how I felt but in a very distant way, as if it was a story I've heard about someone else.

yes, that's pretty much how i feel about my childhood. know what you mean.

anyway, glad the evil-killer-doctors weren't really after you, blood stains notwithstanding...  !

[Bimsy]

Thanks arpy1! I'll check out the link.

I thought that maybe it could be EF but I thought that EF could be unrelated to events.. or did I?
Maybe I was focusing too much on figuring out feelings of shame I have had when everything seemed normal but I suppose some events could trigger old emotions just like with PTSD.

It wasn't a "big" surgery or anything but they had to sedate me (because I was too anxious to stay awake) and before that they tied me onto a chair and I can't stand being restrained by other people so before I fell asleep I was just paralysed with fear.

I am not really sure of how I could deal with such things, I thought that I never had to deal with that anyway since I couldn't imagine a scenario where it would be ok for people to restrain me and hurt me.
But obviously surgery and things like that are a necessary evil some times.

It just seems odd now that I've always had this emotional distance to horrible things, I almost fear that if I start to realise all the terrible things that have happened I might go into shock or something :S
But at the same time I don't want to be numb.

Well, well I guess these are the questions everyone else is battling with.
I just wanted to know if it counts as true dissociation since I've had a T who was very against me using that word for my emotional blockage.

[arpy1]

yeah, some T's get very twitchy about giving names to things becos of the danger of reinforcing them and turning us all into people with a 'sick person' mentality so that we don't want to get better...    rampant paternalism, in my view.


me, i prefer to know exactly what i am dealing with.  if it has a name, and there is a 'language' to express it in and discuss it realistically that works better for me than skirting round the subject pretending things aren't what they are.  but hey, that's me.

[Bimsy]

I totally agree!
I actually kept using that word anyway but explained to my T that I didn't know any other way of describing the "brain fog" that I was in and she was ok with that.
But I never really felt validated that this was "serious enough" to be called dissociation so in the conversation it was always: "dissociation or whatever, something that no one can explain".

I think that maybe she had read some criteria about dissociation that I didn't meet according to her.
Now I remember that often when I used to dissociate I would sort of drift away in my head but always hear the voices of people talking very clearly.
I often did this when my mum and teacher and I met up each year to talk about how bad I did in school, you can probably imagine what it was like.

I don't remember today if I remembered what was said afterwards but I remember that it made me go in to a sort of mental prison where their words held me captive and my only defence was to refuse to speak or look at them.

[Sienna]

Bimsy, i am realising that after feeling terrible feelings, after it has passed, (or i have disassociated it away), i cant remember how it felt.
I think...it mustent have been that bad.
I think its disassociation.
I feel numb and tired after things like this...but maybe I'm not numb..and i just think i am, because how i feel afterwards is such a contrast to the intense emotions i felt when i was *in it*.