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I wrote a post about disassociation four years ago (which you can read here) while I was in a psychiatric hospital but I think it’s a little out of date and there’s been A LOT of new readers since then who probably won’t be going back through all of the 802 posts on I’m NOT Disordered! I also experienced an episode of disassociation recently when I ran away from hospital and it has been the inspiration for this post.
I had been taken to A&E (by Ambulance) after self-harming and was told I’d need stitches but before they had the chance to do them, I ran away. The Police found me on a road in a nearby town and I had no clue how I’d gotten there. The Police called an Ambulance to take me back to Hospital and I was sitting on a seat in the back of it with the Paramedic and she asked how I’d come to end up where I was found and I told her I had no clue. We laughed that it was probably safe to say I hadn’t been kidnapped and let go but I knew that it was actually serious. I explained that I used to disassociate a lot and she asked what had brought it on and I told her I had been abused. She said I didn’t have to talk about it, but I explained that I wanted her to understand – or at least have a better understanding – why these things were happening. And when I told her how scary it was, she said something wrong; she said, “it must be hard because you can control your self-harm, but you can’t control what you do when you disassociate.” It wasn’t her fault that she got it wrong; mental health is such a hard-to-understand topic that it tends to only happen when you, yourself, experience it. But rather than react the way I used to – by shouting at her and telling her she knew nothing. I corrected her “it’s not about control; it’s about not being conscious of it happening.” She understood and agreed but no matter how I tried to explain it in the back of that ambulance, how could she possibly understand something that even I struggle to get my head around?! But maybe a blog post would be enough of an opportunity to explain this and to explain it to as many people as possible?