 Good afternoon, Asperger's Legion. Welcome back to the Asperger's Grove channel with your cool edgy little boy over here, Mr Thomas Henley. Alright, I got you. I can see you. Looking at me. Today I'm going to be talking about something different to autism. Yes. Finally, an intro to a video where I don't say initially that it's about autism. Because that happens a lot and I'm sure it's annoying me. You probably don't care, but I have to listen to it for hours when I'm editing. Due to the recent drop of my medication from 150 down to 100 down to 50 and eventually down to zero in the next week, I have been experiencing a lot of things, a lot of different things, mostly depression, as you would expect, but also the things that come along with depression. Today I'm going to be breaking down in little chunks each aspect of dissociation. You know what it is, what kind of things you expect from it, how it makes you feel. I'll try my best. Very hard to explain, but I will try my best. So if you are even mildly interested in watching this video and all that sounds very unself-confident of me, but it's up to you. You've always got the control and the controller is coming to me now and let's play. What dissociation means in a sense is that you feel disconnected from your body. That is the general term for what dissociation is. You can get it from taking various medications, you can get it from going through periods of depression as I have. You can also just get it from having traumatic events. Apart from the bog standard explanation of what it is, a deeper understanding of dissociation comes in when we start to think about the brain. A lot of people speculate that when dissociation occurs, the different parts of your brain don't really connect with each other. They don't fire off and relay to each other. So if you feel like your feelings are very disconnected, you can even feel like your senses can be dulled, you can feel numb. There are a whole host of different things that could be going on when you dissociated. I was diagnosed with forms of dissociation, so things like depersonalization where I didn't identify with my own body for a long time. I was particularly in teenagehood and particularly when I wasn't on medication and my depression was really bad. And also I had derealization, so I became so disconnected from the world, the reality that I was in that I didn't feel like anything was real. And obviously that causes a lot of problems. Depersonalization, sort of aspect, you can be very disconnected from relationships and family and friends. And then the derealization part, mixed in with the depression, can sort of screw you over. Because if you just feel in constant pain and constant suffering and you don't believe that anything's real, you can kind of see where the road takes you down there. It's not a great thing. I can say from experience. Your thoughts, your feelings, your memories, the surroundings that surround you every day, you can always, you can feel disconnected from all of them. In terms of memories, I quite often sort of try and find things from past experiences and keep those. Because in times like this where I feel incredibly disconnected, having something physical that I couldn't have got anywhere else and had to be from that exact place helps me to stay sane when I don't feel like my own memories are mine or something. It's not about not thinking they're yours, it's just about not feeling like they are. Not feeling like those memories were you. It's just part of feeling dissociated from reality. It's tough. You can also get a very intense distorted perception of time. Meaning that time can go really, really, really quickly for one part of the day. Whereas time can go extremely, extremely, extremely slow for other parts of the day. And it's not one of those things where you're doing something fun, sometimes flying by. It's more of just a flat line, sort of not a flat line. Like a peak and trough that goes on for a day that you can't attribute to any certain activities. It's just how you feel. It's very complicated but it just feels like the clock just exists on a different wavelength to you when you just see hours just pass by between your eyes. You know, you look at the clock one time and then you look at it again and you're like, What? Has it only been five minutes? What? Been two hours? No way. It's very much confusing and I think because of my experience of that in teenagehood I really learnt to despise time. I even had a proper phobia about time for a long time. It's a weird sentence. It really bothers me that time passes now and I think that is one of the reasons why. So I was just so dissociated and it just felt so quick to me and I felt like I was rushed all the time. Yeah, that can be one of the aspects of it and that did hit me hard, very hard in the old psyche. You know, you get me? Some people who have dissociation can get it to such an extent that they have some form of out-of-body experience. Now for me, I've never had one of those out-of-body experiences that you see on the movies where you sort of rise up and view yourself from different angles. It's more like in your head, it's more in your head, it's you thinking about it when you're that dissociated from something such as a conversation you could be talking to somebody and just feel like you're not a part of the conversation and obviously you continue talking but you don't even know how you're producing words or why you're doing it and sometimes you can just have long silences while you're dissociated because you don't see the need to reply. She feels so out of the situation that it doesn't seem personal anymore. It's very difficult to describe and it happens quite a lot when I get dissociated which can be an issue in some cases. One of the other things that was pretty rampant in my teenage years was my identity. Yes, of course, around that age you know you're trying to find out who you are, what you are, whether you're a... It's very hard to identify as something, as you, when you don't feel like you're you so you like to latch onto ideas and you can sort of follow that train down and create this whole of a person that is you and isn't you. I'm babbling a lot. Very much babbling a lot. It's very difficult to describe that but I've tried my best, okay? Just take it as it is. Another one of the things that is described on medical forums is that you can feel like your heart is pounding or that you are very light-headed and this is not something that I've experienced before. Maybe if it was to a very large extent when I was fully anxious and very very depressed in a certain state yeah I would become extremely dissociated but I would never say that the dissociation caused me to be like that. It was always the other two that were impacting me, whether it was the anxiety or the depression. I did feel that, it's just I don't think it's from dissociation so I don't agree with that for me. It might happen to other people and if it has let me know because I am always willing to learn. Now let's get into the meaty part of it. The real soldier's crying stuff. Feeling emotionally numb and not feeling pain. This is part of dissociation. When you feel so disconnected from your body and your emotions and your thoughts and your memories it would be very difficult to recognize that you're feeling an emotion. And as I've said before with the aspergers, aspergers has a tendency of making emotions hard to detect and hard to categorize and mixing in that with dissociation for me. I can feel the most emotionally disconnected ever. Like it's fully flat lined off, feel nothing at all. It may appear on the outside that my emotions change, but for me I don't experience any emotional change in myself because of this dissociation and because of, you know, aspergers sort of interplaying with it. It's very difficult to comprehend, not feeling your own emotions, but it happens and it isn't very nice. You don't feel sad, you don't feel all the negative emotions maybe, unless you're really really really bad on the mental half side. But you also don't feel any happy emotions, you don't feel, it's not even just happy and elated and excited. It's more about like relaxation, like just comfort. Mild small things throughout the day that help people get by in this horrific world. You don't feel them, you don't get much pleasure from it. It may relax you physiological, it may calm down your anxiety if you're having that at that point. But it doesn't, you don't want to, you don't want to do it. Usually when I'm the most dissociated, I am the most productive because if everything feels numb, I may as well do something that's productive and numb. It's a very very weird way of living and I'm hoping that I don't have this for much time longer until I get back on the old meds. New medication, that'll solve it. Pharmaceutical drugs. In terms of the pain, the physical pain, I can definitely attest to the lack of pain that I feel when I'm dissociated. A bit gruesome, so a bit of gruesome imagery, not imagery but what's the word for it. I'm gonna tell you something that's not particularly nice to hear. When I was a teenager and when my dissociation was at its peak, primarily I used to self harm so that I could throw myself back into my body. So I could experience something, I could experience pain. In order for me to feel something, I had to inflict that much pain on myself just to sort of pull myself back into my body. And it is very horrible. I've still got massive amounts of scars on my left arm which won't go away. But that was one of the ways that I coped to it. I also made myself very ill and very sick exercising constantly. Every morning, night, afternoon, I go to the gym, I do weekly rotors and on the weekends I do more. That was all to suck myself back into my body because in the exercise is good but we all know it's a bit painful and it's a bit of a push. It's not something that you'd want to do unless you're really into it. That's this borderline sort of masochistic isn't it? This conversation has taken a deep turn, a very weird turn, I should say. I don't know how to bring it back. How about I just keep talking. This dissociation, this pain reduction is also pretty cool. It means that you can walk outside in very cold weather with just a t-shirt and shorts as I used to did. Just to feel something, you know, in the cold rain, beating down on you with a bit of a wind chill factor. All very nice. That sort of woke me up. That definitely pulled me back into my body. But I didn't feel it as much. I would get into hot baths knowing that my body's feeling pain and not really associating myself with that pain. Doing that, you know, me being hypersensitive and especially hypersensitive to heat. Going into a really, really hot bath that stings and burns like I've just been plunged into a vat of oil. And yeah, I just, I did it. Here's a fun one. Have you ever gone on a car journey that you've done over and over and over and over and over for a couple of years? And one time got in your car and then just haven't realized how you've got back? Well, you have just experienced dissociation. That is a form of dissociation. But that experience is something that happens on a regular basis to somebody who has a dissociative disorder. That is a very strange experience for most people. Imagine having that all the time. Scary ghost noise to apply for exaggerative purposes. Yeah, I'll stop now. You can have very much tunnel vision, meaning that you don't really see much in your periphery. So usually, you know, I'd sort of, you know, you can see, you pay a lot of a 10, a mild amount of attention to the things in your periphery. Whereas when you are in a dissociative state, it's just forwards. You can see, you can see, obviously you can see the outside, but your brain doesn't have as much attention on it. If you have any attention in the first place, sometimes you'll just stare forwards and just stare off into space. You may also have intense flashbacks, flashbacks. Such a word that makes you think of movies, makes you think of how movies portray flashbacks. It is nothing like that. You are not sucked directly into the events and you can see everything. It's just that those, when you have a flashback, it's more like a repetition of a certain experience. It's more like, God, I'm doing a great job of explaining this. Give me a medal. I don't like to call them flashbacks because they're nothing like what you see in the movies. It's just that you tend to sort of dissociate so much so that you forget what's happening around you and then you start thinking in your head about things that have happened and then you feel very, you're very involved in the event that you're thinking about. It's very strange. People with dissociation to a severe extent can appear to be immobile, can appear to have no ability to talk, can appear to not be able to move themselves or do anything. Now, whether that's completely true, I don't think that dissociation makes you immobile. It just sucks you out of your body so much sometimes when it's really severe that you don't feel any connection with reality and what's going on around you and the people that are around you or even yourself so you don't see much need to do anything. This is particularly the stage at which people realise that you are completely out of your body dissociated. It's not that bad. It can make you feel a bit rubbish, especially if you're having existing mental health conditions thrust upon you from all angles. Usually, if you've got very severe depression, then dissociation sort of comes along with that to sort of get you out of the painful state that you're in. But yeah, sometimes you can become mobilised and you just won't do anything. The best thing to do in that case is just to wait it out for a little bit and then try and ease yourself back into it. But there's not really much else you can do because every time that you'll try something, you'll take about 10, 20 times longer to do something because you keep getting sucked out of your head and your body. Not literally, or visually, just mentally. Next comes the fantasy world. Now, if you've watched the 4080 podcast or listened to it rather than I've seen watched, if you've listened to the 4080 podcast, you will know that in my childhood, I used to live in a fantasy land. It was a way of just escaping my mental illnesses, the horrible times I was having at school, the difficulties in relationships and friendships because of Asperger's. And I retreated into a fantasy world where I made up things around me. I made myself into something that didn't exist in a way to cope with things. And that dissociation probably played a large part in that as well. Because obviously if you don't feel like you're yourself, you need to try and latch on to something. And for me, a fantasy land with a fantasy tom was the most attractive for me given my mental health condition. The causes of dissociation can be anything such as trauma, whether it's physical trauma or emotional trauma. Anything like any sort of traumatic event that you could describe it to yourself as mentally scarred. That can always have an effect on dissociation because when you have that experience, you want to get out of your body. So your mind does it. Your mind takes you out of your body. And that can lay foundations for future years when you're having a difficult time and cause you to dissociate again to cope with that stress or that mood or that event. You may get this effect from many different avenues. You could get it from hypnosis if you've ever been hypnotized and if you have applied yourself to the hypnotism. So you've gone along with things. You can sometimes be put into a very heavy dissociative state in hypnosis. The more common cases would probably be with, which is not nice to say this, but the more common cases probably be with drugs. So in particular, the most common, alcohol. Alcohol makes you dissociated. It really does. It takes you out of your body. It makes you feel like nothing is as real. It makes you feel like you're not yourself and you look down at yourself and it's like, whoa, what's happening? Other drugs can do that, of course, definitely. Some of the more heavy drugs, even medical drugs like nitrous oxide, can get you heavily dissociated out of your body. As I've said a lot throughout the video, mental health conditions can affect your susceptibility to being in a dissociative state. Anything from acute stress, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, depression, any sort of affective disorders, all of that stuff, a lot of good stuff, bad stuff, very bad stuff, what am I saying? That can cause you to be dissociated and it's dependent on the person. Some people don't, but it's usually when you're going for a hard time, whether it's from outside influence or inside influence. You can get dissociated. Just knowing about it and knowing what it feels like I think is very important because it's not that you're going crazy, it's just your body's disconnected, your mind is fragmented and it's having a hard time relaying messages to each other. So don't take it as a horrible sign of schizophrenia or anything, it could just be you're dissociated. There are a lot of other signs of dissociation but I feel like from the stuff that I've read on dissociation, the medical stuff, that it's very highly tied in with the effects of mental health conditions. So I don't feel like dissociation on its own causes all of these things other than just being a bit spaced out and not concentrating on school and all that. It's more about the mental health and dissociation usually does come with or after mental health conditions. So I've gone over the causes, what dissociation is, what the kind of symptoms that you can get from it for anyone who is viewing this for their own knowledge or their own treatment purposes. So hopefully anybody out there who is currently going through a large phase of dissociation or is just wondering, you know, what is this weird feeling that I'm getting about being disconnected from myself and reality. Am I schizophrenic? Maybe not, maybe you are dissociated. I hope this video has helped you and I hope that anybody else who is watching this video can be more empathetic towards people who have dissociation. It is sometimes hard on relationships, especially if the person doesn't know that they're dissociated and the other person doesn't really get it. So it can cause some difficulties, but I hope that this has given you a better insight into it and helped you. That's my goal. That's how I roll. Thank you very much for watching people. Social media is down there as huge. As huge. If you haven't already checked out the Forty Autie podcast, it is getting some steam and you can view it for free on Spotify. Just type in Forty Autie podcast or go to the link down in the description. Shout out to my Patreon supporter of the EliteSca... The EliteSca... Shout out to my new Patreon in the Elite Subscriber Squad, Cheryl. Thank you very much, Cheryl, for supporting me in making these videos. It's given me a lot more motivation to get through them. Also, thank you very much to Finding Your Serenity and for... Yes, for, with a big hammer. For supporting my videos, I appreciate it a lot and hopefully, we'll be able to get a bit more steam with this Patreon thing and we'll be able to get some more equipment and do some more cool things. So, I hope you guys are having a great day. And I'll see you in the next video. Uspes and uspianets go out in the world and do your best. So cheesy. Sweet out the move back Woo-la-oo Sweet out the move back Woo-la-oo