Talked to my therapist about my dissociative moments today.

I’ve tried to talk about them in this space before, but it’s a very difficult thing to put across. It’s like at any moment, I can lose contact with reality, and my brain sort of reboots. Often I have to deduce what is going on in order to re-connect with my short term memory of my situation.

Because my working memory is as empty as a politician’s promise.

My therapist said that often people with this very common problem can trace it back to abuse and that made so much sense to me. When I was being sexually assaulted as a three or four year old, I did what every abuse victim does and “took my mind away”. I told myself “this is not real, this is not happening, I’m not really here, I’m far far away”. I remember that clearly.

And that installed a very dangerous capacity in my mind, the ability to completely dissociate from what is going on, and apparently, sometimes my mind just does that spontaneously sometime, presumably as some kind of defense mechanism or internal regulatory measure.

It’s like my mind know how to short-circuit itself, and uses that as the ultimate form of escape.

That must be the source of the “gravity” that I have mentioned in this space before. The force that drags me downwards and inwards no matter what I have to say about it, and makes staying connected with reality a chore in the first place. I only have so much fuel for fighting this gravity, and when I run out, I fall back into myself.

And it wouldn’t be that big a deal to have these moments if they didn’t freak me out so bad. It’s really scary to lose contact when I am in a social situation (they are inherently realtime) and have to scramble to figure out what the hell is going on and finding it really hard to concentrate, and in that irrational state determined to hide this from everyone and try to “seem normal” as a way to keep a grip on something real.

I am pretty sure that if every time this happened, I externalized it (with words, a facial expression, some form of body language even), I would end up in an institution not long after.

Maybe that would do be a lot of good. I don’t know. But it’s definitely a problem.

Now I don’t relish the thought of trying to sort through the spaghetti wiring of my crazed cranium, so I am unlikely to be able to unhook that system directly. All I really want is to be in control of it.

Because that’s the real problem. It happens spontaneously. One moment I am fine, the next I am scrambling over thin ice and trying not to drown. It makes for a very stressful existence and explains why I have such a tendency to isolate myself.

When I am alone, the stakes are much lower.

I told my therapist that if consciousness is a house of cards, then I have a force that knocks it flat and makes me have to start all over again and it can strike at any moment.

It’s a wonder that I can keep it together at all, much less go to school and get good marks and have a social life with my friends. A lot of people with this problem would be either batshit crazy or drooling vegetables or both.

But I learned to deal with it. I had no choice. In a sense, it was lucky that it happened when I was so young, because my mind was plastic enough to learn to route around it most of the time.

On the other hand, because it happened when I was young, it’s set in stone in my mind, like hand-prints in wet cement. You would have to break the foundation of my mind to get at it.

So this is definitely a question of coping, not curing. Maybe if I was the sort of person to go on profound spiritual journeys involving walking through the desert and eating hallucinogens, I might be able to access the deep table of values within me and set things right.

But no, I am all cerebral and rational up in the head, so I have to do it the hard way : through the conscious mind. And it is terribly labour intensive and slow.

It’s a hard thing for us rational types to truly accept that under the brightly lit realm of our rationality, there is a vast dark ocean of subconscious thought. The rational realm is so much more appealing to a rationalist because in it, things make sense and are knowable, and that allows the rational type to feel like they are in control.

It even, on a good day, makes us feel powerful. Very powerful. After all, a sufficiently creative rationalist is capable of astounding things. Even the more straight-ahead kind of rationalist can often do impressive things with their minds, like remembering large numbers of facts by putting them in an intelligent framework, or make very intelligent planning decisions because of their grasp of the facts.

So a powerful rational mind can make someone feel like a wizard in the right milieu. This sense of power can be so overwhelming that it tempts the rationalist to believe that they are in command of the universe and (this is the really bad part) that there is nothing beyond their domain.

But there is. In fact, your rationalism is but one lonely island in a vast sea of emotions, instincts, and memories that stubbornly refuse to go away no matter how many times you remind them they don’t make sense.

They don’t have to make sense. And trying to make sense of them can lead one down a very twisty and treacherous path of justifications, rationalizations, and internalizations.

Your mind becomes a maze and the only way out is to stop trying to make sense of everything, accept that you are human and irrational and complicated, and open the door to finding out who you really are.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to lay down and…. I want to say think, but…. that’s not right.

Time for me to lay down, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.