Does anyone else ever feel disconnected from your body?

[hoeffelt]

Does anyone else ever feel disconnected from your body? Like your body is here and you can control it but your psyche/conscious/mind is separate and distant. I get this feeling sometimes. Especially when days feel the same and nothing changes from day to day.

 

[Southern Discomfort]

What like a depersonalisation? I can't say I have, I've sort of thought I have a identity confusion; sort of trouble defining yourself, that's also in line with dissociation. I've heard stories of other people on the spectrum feeling similar things, such as this video. I'm going to mention my sort of identity confusion to my psychiatrist the next time, I don't know how normal it is for us.

 

[Cosmophylla]

Yes, hoeffelt, I experience this. To me it feels as though I'm wearing a shell, or a mask, over my true self (my mind/conscious). My "true self" feels withdrawn inside, like it is looking out of the windows of a house. The windows of the house are my eyes. I'm not sure but I think this is a form of dissociation. My psychologist recently had me take a dissociation test and I'm sure there was a question on the test about it. I haven't seen him again (the test was holiday "homework" ) so I don't know the test results yet.

And I agree with you that I experience it most when my days are repetitive, and nothing special happens to break the monotony. I've been suffering ME/CFS for months and until recently my days have consisted of me lying in bed almost all the time, punctuated with my son's morning and afternoon school runs. It seems to be I feel the separation/dissociation most during those school runs, when I'm driving the car over the same short (but too long to walk) route every day. Some days I'll drive a slightly different way to try to jolt myself out of it, because it can be scary to feel this way when driving.

Is there a particular activity you find yourself doing when you become aware of your own feeling of separation/disconnect?

 

[Warmheart]

Ooh, ooh!! Me, me!! Yes, I'm kinda floating through space somehow. My body is pretty numb. This varies by how much sensory overload, emotional dysregulation, social drain, etc. I'm going through. Illness (migraines, hormonal swings, the flu) increases my depersonalization. Freaky!

Add to this a poor sense of interoception (ability to read my body's signals), so I don't always know when I am thirsty, hungry, in pain, or need to pee. You can imagine the drama this adds to life. It all makes one feel very disconnected from one's physical self.

What helps:
Try to identify, if possible, the source of stress in your life.
1. Is your home sensory-friendly?
2. How much social energy expenditure is required of you, at work, at home... can you minimize that somehow?
3. Any chance you might be somehow in pain? (Might have to be a detective on this one... being numb means we can't always sense pain such as dry eye, arthritis or crohn's flare-up, migraine, swollen knee we banged a few days ago, etc.)
Do your own OT! Add in some vestibular (rocking or swinging) or proprioceptive (flapping! jumping/bouncing!) input so your over-stimulated, under-aroused brain gets the sensory input it craves right now. Then you can become more alert. It works!

Hang in there!

 

[unsurewhattoname]

I get this whenever I drink.

 

[Beverly]

Detaching is sometimes a useful tool, like when I'm on stage, or have to undergo uncomfortable medical tests. I'd be overloaded in minutes if I couldn't detach myself form what my body has to do or endure. (Just try dancing, and jumping for two hours non stop when you have a bulging disk in your back and, arthritis in your hips - no amount of pain medication that will leave you still conscious can numb that pain.)

Day to day? No I don't do it just because one day seems the same as the next for a while. That's how life is when things are going well and, you live in a stable environment, not much is going to change from day to day and, that's how it's supposed to be, that's good.

 

[N64boy96]

This was an art I perfected living with my aunt. She was verbally abusive and I eventually perfected the Norman Bates, that's what I call it, complex. I still do it to this day if you yell at me bad enough. I'll shut down emotionally, I can still see you, am aware of what's going on and I'll nod when needed but I'm not actually there. I'll go off into one of the many worlds I've created in my head and I'll come back when she was done yelling. I'm trying to break the habit but you know, old habits don't die that easy and I did that from 13 to 16 when I left and went to job corps