Love and Homeopathics: Mental Health, Community Care, and the Political Imagination

Section: Articles Dissociation: Trapped in Your BodyImagine you are standing with your head poking out of a little tent, alone in an enormous open clearing, in the middle of a raging hurricane. There’s almost no space to hear yourself think over the wind. At the edge of the clearing, far away, the wind knocks down trees and power lines. The storm is so vast and loud you can’t hear your own voice over the pummeling noise, because the wind whips the words out of your mouth before you utter them.Someone you care about is standing outside the storm, and they are so far away they are hard to make out. You can barely see them through the debris, branches, leaves blowing past. You wave your arms above your head, saying ‘don’t you see me? I’m trapped in here…’ but the storm pummels you, and the person you are trying to reach doesn’t hear you over the wind. It blows debris at them while you watch horrified, trying to protect them, trying to protect yourself, hoping with this tiny bit of you trapped in here that they see you and that you can come up with a plan together.This is what a dissociative spell feels like. The person I care about is on the outside, and I’m very, very small, and there is a raging storm between me and them. The wind steals the words out of my mouth before they can form and there's so much noise that I can barely think.  If someone knows me well, they recognize I’m in here, and we try to talk to each other above the noise. If asked a dir...
Source: The Icarus Project - Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Source Type: blogs