After I had first experienced my first episode of dissociation, I felt like an alien in my own body. It feels like there's a glass wall between me and everything else, or like I'm in a dream, or like I'm watching my life in a movie. Dissociation happens on some level with all folks.
It rises to the level of a disorder when you have impairment. It's pretty much a coping mechanism for... living with trauma.
Dissociation influences my style as a photographer. You feel separate from everything. You feel really isolated.
You feel alone and not a part of what's happening around you. That can really cause someone to spiral. My name is Jen, and I've been living with a dissociative disorder, depersonalization, derealization.
These are the meds I take. I take a couple for depression and anxiety, and another, it's technically a blood pressure medication, but it also helps with anxiety and getting into your body because it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which makes you calmer. Depersonalization, derealization, which I can just call DPDR. The depersonalization is more about detaching you from your body, and derealization is more about detaching you from the world around you. I kind of like describe feeling dissociated as being like way too high.
I just remember this like extreme sense of unreality. I was like, oh my god, nothing is real. I just feel removed. Even though I'm in life, I feel removed from it and from everyone around me and from my own self.
Dissociation influences my style as a photographer. It can often feel like a really fragmented experience. So that's also something I try to get at a little bit in my work. All these photos are from my project called At Once. The project ultimately became about dissociation.
I took a lot of creative liberties in trying to impart the sensations, like the emotional experience of it. Entering into this sort of state of mind where everything felt really vast and sometimes pointless and I felt really small. I think that photography is sort of a controlled setting for me to work with my dissociation and like kind of work through it because I am looking through a lens and that's sort of the epitome of my frustration with The sensation of dissociation, I feel like I'm looking at everything through glass. But with photography, I get to sort of make something beautiful out of what is typically a scary experience or can be a scary experience. So I really love this apartment because of all the color everywhere.
That's pretty much the number one reason why I chose it. Saturated color is really grounding to me. Feels like it really pulls me into the present. I remember the first night it kind of came over me in an anxiety attack.
I just remember feeling like it was just like a whoosh. Like all of a sudden I was up here and everything's down here. And it was just like a really wild feeling and sent me into a huge panic.
And I ran into my mom's room and I was like, oh my God, are we real? Like, is anything real? I was like so panicked.
I like threw up. From that point on, for a lot of months, I was pretty much in that state of dissociation consistently. I was feeling extremely far removed from everyone around me and just desperately wanting to puncture the veil that seemed to exist between me and everyone else.
I just remember staring at my pet rabbit in his little crate, and I loved him so much. He was just my little buddy. And I just remember looking at him and being like, I just want to feel like he's real. I just want to feel connected to him. I just want to feel like I'm here.
And I just couldn't. When I first experienced dissociation as a teenager, I didn't feel like anyone understood. So this is the picture where I was saying I kind of feel like I could see the seriousness in my eyes.
I was having a hard time. I have had traumatic experiences in my life, like various situations that have contributed to my dissociation. Some of those experiences aren't fully my story to tell.
So I'd rather not get into detail with that. I was like really desperately seeking answers. Unfortunately, my therapist then wasn't really able to like relate to me empathically in a way that made me feel understood.
Hearing that advice of just like breathe and like ground yourself in the present, whatever, was not landing on my ears. It is 4.15 and I'm on my way to my therapist's office to do my weekly EMDR session. EMDR is a practice of therapy that involves eye movement or tapping.
It does help you access your unconscious and work through painful memories in a controlled way. Guided by a therapist, I go once a week. In life, I've been in therapy since I was about 14, but I've been seeing this therapist not for too long.
But I really like him. We do a lot of like breathing and like centering in my body like... He always notices when I am dissociating, which most people don't usually. Hi, Justin.
Hello, Jen. How are you? I'm okay.
How are you doing? I'm good. So I'm going to check in with you periodically and make sure that you feel like you're still present. But what I want you to do, if you can, is stay with the anger, just notice, and just follow the ball. The important thing to know about dissociation is that its origins are in a stress response, and then that stress response can become basically a subconscious process that happens throughout the lifespan and then causes impairment when you have an adult still having those experiences.
At different times in my life, this affects me more than others. When I'm feeling dissociated, it makes it really hard for me to have stamina in keeping up a conversation with somebody. Like, I can put up a front and, like, be listening and, like... giving like verbal affirmations I guess but I don't feel connected with the conversation and and I feel physical stress doing it like I feel like it's straining my like vocal cords in my chest.
I've been feeling more dissociated lately just because life has been pretty crazy. True. I mean like and also the whole world is like on fire so yeah yeah I tend to tend to dissociate with that. How are you feeling about your project?
I'm feeling really good about it. Like I had this one guy email me with a really long email about like his daughter who was struggling with it and asking for advice. And so I thought it was cool that I got to give him my two cents since this.
Dissociation is so hard to describe. I'm like really hoping that people who do see it are able to be like, oh, that's what I'm feeling Someone else has felt this and I'm not crazy for feeling it Absolutely, that makes sense helping people like find their voice around a similar experience I've been dealing with the dissociative disorder for 14 years now I think the life lesson I can take away from this is figuring out how to be comfortable with the uncomfortable Learning how to be able to sit with the discomfort rather than react to it. I think that a lot of our problems in the world are due to us being disconnected from ourselves and from each other. A dissociated society, I believe, makes for dissociated people.
And I hope that it can inspire more questions, A, to be asked about dissociation. So that maybe we can stop being so dissociated all the time and like connect. So that's like the ultimate reason for me.