Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 2 (Dissociative Disorder)

Dissociative Disorder: Sorry, your connection was lost

Here is my flawed understanding of what these Dissociative Disorders are all about for me.

My more-or-less literal translation of the 4 Ds is that my Connection has been lost along with my mind’s sense of Order, whether the lost connection is with Myself or Everything Else.

Everything you think and feel is based on associations. That’s why some folks can love things you can’t stand: they have a different association with that thing. Or why you really love someone who your parents can’t stand. These associations are developed by experiencing the universe through your senses and making connections; thoughts and emotions are connected to experiences and people.

These connections – these associations – we usually take for granted; except when someone tells us they enjoy mayonnaise in their chili or having spiders crawl on their face, and then we look at them as if they’ve lost their minds for having such warped views.

Mindfulness in particular teaches us to stop hurrying from point A to point B all the time at the expense of feeling and experiencing the Here and Now of the many steps in the journey. It teaches us that we are all connected to the people and universe around us, and that it is very grounding to get consciously in touch with that connection.

Now imagine you’re talking to your best friend, and suddenly your words sound hollow in your ears. Sounds almost seem to drop from “normal” to “flat.” Or maybe I just suddenly become hyper-aware of how uniquely different I am from this friend. It’s disorienting to suddenly be so completely robbed of your connection even as the words leave your mouth, especially when the friend just converses on, oblivious that a huge shift has occurred.

Now imagine you’re in the middle of a conversation with your boss about why his new budget initiative will bankrupt the company within the hour, and BAM! Just like that you are ripped away from the Here and Now and plunged into another universe that looks and feels and sounds and tastes and smells just like the one you’re from, but you know in your bones that it isn’t the real world.

Sights and sounds seem flat, like you’re watching a closed circuit TV transmission of your interactions with the world, real-time but not really here. Now you’re in the ultimate interactive video game, one where the main character does everything you do, but it isn’t really you: it’s the character you’re controlling in the game you’re playing.

We’re talking about a sudden dissociation, the opposite of association; a loss of connection rather than the achievement or maintaining of connection. Connection to what, you ask? Oh man. Everything.

So this is a perception issue. I’m not really being yanked into a parallel earth, although that might actually make me feel better about the episode: it would at least make sense then. This sudden event makes no sense to me from the moment it happens.

My subconscious awareness of connection to the grand world around me is suddenly shaken, and all I’m left with is an overwhelming, undeniable, conscious sensation that I’ve just lost that connection.

From there, it varies based on what suddenly doesn’t seem right anymore.