In the immediate aftermath of a sexual assault or rape I think it’s firstly difficult to understand what has happened. But I then found it hard to understand my reactions to what happened too.
I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by a wave of ‘nothing-ness’. I knew something serious had happened, vivid flashbacks of the night reminded me of that, but I almost couldn’t feel anything about it. Or I was feeling too much so my brain was pushing it all away.
To me, and with the help of my therapist, I understood that this was ‘dissociation’. Dissociation is best described as a mental escape, a daydream on steroids, a complete separation from your thoughts and emotions. It’s a common automatic reaction to trauma when your brain is protecting you from something you can’t physically escape. Something too overwhelming to think about and feel. A way of displacing the experience from yourself - unable to accept that something so bad might have happened to you.
I quickly learned that this was my brains ‘go-to’ protective skill and I’m still learning about it now. Unbeknown to me, I spent a lot of my time in a big dissociative daydream. Mostly in response to vivid and overpowering flashbacks. I was distracting myself with work and socialising, whilst my body and brain were in what felt like ‘different time zones‘. It felt and can still feel disorientating and confusing. It can come out of nowhere and make everything else around you a bit harder.
I wrote this below excerpt ‘Different Tracks’ in an attempt to help myself understand dissociation.
Different Tracks
“I can’t put into words how I’m feeling. Or the words I do have feel too big or too scary or too serious to match with something that has happened to me. How could something like this have happened to me – is that a naïve thing to think?
Everyday throws a new challenge, but some patterns are the same.
I’m plunged into darkness, a rapid memory of the night. My brain feels like it pushes me under water and everything is muffled. Everything around me looks blurry apart from the memories; which are vivid and more real than the world I’m sat in. And everything is quieter apart from a run of loud thoughts; which are pushing me further away from the version of myself that I was before. The world that was once so familiar to me now feels like something I can’t be a part of.
My brain and body feel like they are on different tracks. I know that my body is feeling lots of emotions. I can feel them physically. It’s like my body is shouting at me. But my brain is protecting me. It can’t acknowledge or comprehend them.
Whilst its protecting me, it’s making me live in slow motion. Or everything around me is living in slow motion, I can’t quite tell. I try to think and do things like I did before. But I’m slower. I can see myself being slower, I feel like I’m shouting at myself to speed things up, but the message isn’t going through. I feel faulty.
Everything feels amplified, a sensory overload. The colours, the smells, the noises all feel insulting. All of the faces in the street feel unpredictable to me. I can’t hear myself think. The constant evaluating of whether I am safe or not feels tiring.
I know that my brain and my body are helping me, but it feels like they are against me. And I’m battling back against them to try and keep going. To try and keep functioning. I push away the memories and the thoughts. “I can handle this night with my friends” “I can take on this new piece of work”. And then suddenly it’s overwhelming. My body shouts louder at me. And my brain pushes me further and further under water.
I think I’m aiming too high. I’m aiming to go back to how I was before this happened, but I realise that that version of me has gone. There’s a new version I need to work towards that accepts this experience. And that’s the hardest bit.
I don’t want to accept that this has happened to me. I don’t want to use the words. I don’t want to feel labelled.
But I have to. I need to, otherwise I won’t move forward.”
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