Running away

So, why do I keep checking out?

Dissociative behaviour typically occurs due to events that you don't want to experience. Now, it's true that I've had a lot of bad experiences, I'm a rape survivor, and before that my family life wasn't exactly all roses. But I'm not living a terrible life at the moment - My life with Daddy is frankly one of the best periods of my life, and I don't say this lightly. Why am I still so keen to leave reality?

My first response is that I've had a lot of practice dissociating. I'm pretty sure I've been doing it since age 4 at least. That makes 23 years of dissociating whenever bad stuff happens, so it's clearly a pretty heavyset habit. But that doesn't fix the question of why I keep thinking bad stuff happens all the time.

My psych tells me that I have an extremely heightened sense of threat - a lot of things that are not really threatening at all press my danger buttons, and have me running for cover. This probably explains at least a little why I tend to hide so vigorously when watching awkward moments on television - just watching someone being embarrassed, even when I know that person is fictional, is enough to press my danger buttons.

So... I spend a lot of time feeling threatened by life in general. This probably means that even mostly neutral interactions with people tend to set off alarm bells in general. It's worse when it looks like I'm agitating people or making them upset, because that really sets me off.

Perhaps the constant dissociating is me trying to get rid of that sense of threat? Easy way not to feel threatened - don't feel anything at all. But that's not a viable way of living - people are not going to have happy feelings all the time. It also probably explains why I tend to need time alone after very small amounts of time with other people - all that constant vigilance wears you out. The trick, clearly, is that I need to reduce the threat perception in my head, and theoretically that's something that I'm supposed to be working on (indeed, that's the whole point of "dropping the coin", ie unclenching. But I've discovered that I'm not doing it right - needs to be done for longer periods, not when stuff happens. We'll have to see how me unclenching while meditating helps. Either way, really need to tone down my danger signals.