“WHO ARE YOU GOING TO PRETEND TO BE?” | REALITY & MENTAL HEALTH | HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Taking your breath, stealing your mind

And all that was real is left behind

-        The Greatest show

With a key component of Halloween being that people don costumes and become someone else, I thought I’d play on that notion of an absence of reality and use it as inspiration for this year’s Halloween blog post…

IT STARTED WITH DISASSOCIATION…

The first difficulty I experienced in regards to reality, was when the abuse started in 2006 and I found myself constantly, desperately, trying to pretend it wasn’t actually happening and I think that a huge reason for this was that I’d known my abuser for two years before he started hurting me. It meant that everything I thought he was – all the things everyone else thought of him – was completely untrue. It was a lie. A cruel, deception that meant when he became the exact opposite, I was so shocked and surprised, that I questioned the entire reality of it! Partly as though he surely couldn’t be the same person, and partly because how could anyone do what he was doing to me?!

Out of panic and fear, whenever he called me or took me to his office, it was as though my eyes detached from my body and all of a sudden I was watching him hurt someone else. Some poor girl who couldn’t fight back. I just had to sit back and watch it happening from my new position on the ceiling – something which rendered my view ineffective when it finally came to reporting the abuse and the details of it, to the Police. It was kind of ironic that me detaching in that way, was very obviously a coping mechanism that my body had seemed to just naturally fall into, yet doing that, was actually hindering of me getting justice for the reason I disassociated.

WHAT DISASSOCIATION REALLY FEELS LIKE

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disassociation four years ago (which you can read here) while I was in a psychiatric hospital but I think it’s a little out of date and there’s been A LOT of new readers since then who probably won’t be going back through all of the 802 posts on I’m NOT Disordered!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?