Thank you for sharing your story with me @Former-Member.
No detail is required, you were so very young and that's why your dissociation is so severe. My heart breaks for you. I completely understand being stuck in a head that is locked into a trauma response. I bet you have lost years to that. Not only lost years but intimacy, depth and potential with just about every facet of life. You're just encased in a fog, waiting for the next threat. Your brain connections were established on trauma. It is just devastating.
Dissociation is very mis-misunderstood and extremely hard to cope with. We all numb out and can be a little automatic pilot at times, and go numb when we receive bad news etc. But chronic dissociation is almost like a zombie-fied psychosis if that makes any sense. It's very different to psychosis, it feels different inside, but psychiatrists without any experience with deeply traumatised and neglected people from a very young often mis-diagnose clients.
It must be so hard for you. I have never experienced alters, but the most terrifying dissociative state I have ever experienced took me to an emergency department. I'd forgotten some of it, but my sister told me recently when they took my pulse it was like 30 something. It's a very, very dangerous state to be in, in terms of SH and suicide risk because you're right in the centre of the terror memories and I think that our brains are re-playing the event/s and it's almost like we want to complete the act on ourselves before our attacker does, in some last desperate attemtpt to go with some dignity to our spirit. That's how it felt to me anyway.
I really hope that you have good support and an understanding health professional.
My heart bleeds for you that you don't have a present, interested, loving Mum. The pain of that alone is enough for anyone.
I understand the daily shame, fear and loneliness that you expereince @Former-Member.
I can't take it away, or make it better......but I get it.
Big hugs to you
Corny xxx