Dissociation

I'm pretty open about the fact that I am a childhood sexual abuse survivor. The effects of that abuse have permeated every facet of my life in ways I'm still figuring out. One notable way is that I historically have dissociated quite a bit. I was aware that I did this during extreme duress becuase it would be very obvious then; I would be almost watching myself from a distance. But dissociation is a weird experience because it's hard to even know when you're doing it. And when you do it for your entire life, it's just how you are-- and it's very subtle. It also robs you of the self-awareness needed to see that you are doing it.

Last year, I started a lovingkindness meditation practice that has changed my life profoundly in deep and far-reaching ways. I started doing it because I didn't like my own internal, negative reactions to other people in many situations and I was looking for a practical way to change that. Meditation certainly did that, but it has also done so much more-- some things even more profound than what I want to share here about how I stopped dissociating because of doing it. It simply stopped happening. It grounded me in my body, my breath. 

I'm not sure when exactly I stopped dissociating, but I first noticed it when I sat down and watched a movie with my daughter a few months ago. It was the first movie I had watched in awhile, and for the first time in my life, it was effortless to follow the plot. People have always made fun of how much of movies I forget. I would have to exert an extreme amount of effort to follow a movie plot before. It was something I always struggled with, and my way of dealing with it would be to tell myself (inside my head) the story of what was happening in the movie as I was watching it-- like a little plot summary-- and I would simultaneously be watching the movie and missing parts of it while I was summarizing in my head what had happened thus far. But if I didn't do that, I would have no idea what had happened. It was really a taxing exercise. 

I never realized that the reason I couldn't follow a movie plot was because I was dissociating while I was watching it. I WASN'T really watching it; I couldn't sit in my body long enough to watch it. It’s kind of like being on a telephone call with a bad connection, only the telephone is your body and you’re interfacing with reality and it keeps cutting out; you have to fill in the gaps the best you can. TV shows were ok because they are shorter, but even some longer or more plot-dense shows gave me issues. For whatever reason, books are totally different. I think it may be because reading basically IS dissociating. Your body is doing one thing and your mind is sunk into the other world created by the author. 

It totally blew my mind when I watched a whole movie effortlessly, followed the plot, and enjoyed it. Life is going to be so much easier this way. I can't wait to watch ALL THE MOVIES!

It also dawned on me that I learned to dissociate when I felt the most abandoned, and that dissociation is learned self-abandonment. And in the same moment, I realized that I don't ever have to abandon myself again, and I won't. Not for anything or anyone.