Dissociation + Moonknight

Dissociation + Moonknight

disclaimer: this is a long post, I triggered myself slightly when talking about this and ended up going off on a tangent. There is discussions of ab*se, not in detail apart from one brief mention of a we*pon at the end, and also a brief mention of s*lf h*rm but other than that it is a discussion about people wanting to be just like Moonknight.

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So, I’ve noticed some people on here and some others in marvel groups I’m in on Facebook recently commenting about wishing they had DID or another person in their mind to help them cope with the terrible things currently happening in their life.

I am not here to scold you, or aggressively condescend and talk down to you as someone who has trauma related disorders. I’m not here to make you feel ashamed for what can be seen as ‘normal’ thoughts when you see a show like this. However, please do be careful of what you say online in regards to mental illness, specifically trauma and dissociation. Those of us with these issues and disorders will see your posts, it is a very painful and invalidating for us to see what we perceive as people trying to romanticise and glorify our disorders. These disorders were born out of terrible, awful, scary things that have traumatised people for life, and should not be seen as anything but an unfortunate result of lifelong childhood trauma and not as a fun, “quirky” thing. It seems fun and stress free because you don’t actually have the said disorders and trauma so it is easy to play pretend when you can’t attach emotions and personal experience to it; when you actually do have these conditions it is not at all fun. It’s tiring both mentally and physically.

I do however understand the need and want to think this way at times because life is ultimately stressful for every single person on this planet; just existing is hard, but it is even harder for others who were forced to go through things as a kid that no child should ever have to go through. Life is even hard when you are a product of the brain dissociating from reality in order to protect itself.

Everyone at some point in their life has unknowingly activated their “auto-pilot” or “zoned out” brain function. For example; if you’ve ever been having a conversation with someone and completely spaced out part of what they’ve said to you, that is you subconsciously detaching from the current moment.

It’s a perfectly normal regular coping mechanism of the brain to be able to detach oneself from reality of the current situation in order to cling to something reassuring and avoid anxieties. Dissociation in general is normal, but when it starts to take over your entire life then it needs to be looked into by a professional.

In the case of DID, the traumatic event or events cause the self to fragment into a number of different selves, or alters. Some alters may be holding on to traumatic memories, while others are blocked from accessing these memories.

Dissociating often becomes the centre coping mechanism for traumatic experiences, anxiety, PTSD, or even depression. It can present unconsciously and will make you feel out of control of your own mind and body.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is not the only dissociative disorder, you can have DPDR - depersonalisation/derealisation disorder, and DDNOS (dissociative disorder not otherwise specified), amongst many others. The act of dissociation is also a symptom of many other mental illnesses, and sometimes in certain cases may not even be it’s own unique condition but rather a side effect of something else, for example BPD (borderline personality disorder).

It may seem really nice to be able to just “zone out” of stressful situations, but it really isn’t. You lose memories, you can’t trust your own mind, everything you remember is cloudy and foggy. I have very little recollection of my childhood, and what I do remember is mostly all negative. Mine started when I was roughly 11/12 years old. I came home one day crying from school when I experienced my first episode out of the blue with no warning ( I can not remember what triggered it, I can’t even remember how I got home, all I remember is the terrifying memory of laying on the floor at home) screaming that nothing was real and neither was I, I could see outside of my own body, I also couldn’t physically feel anything no matter how much I hurt myself, so in my mind this confirmed to me that my reality was not real and neither was I.

I spent the majority of my teen years fixating on this. Nobody ever explained to me what dissociation was or why it occurs. So, as an autistic person who struggled to identify what they were feeling and why to others, I couldn’t even explain it to myself, so I become obsessed with it. Because I was left untreated for so long, I kept telling myself none of this was real and neither was I, and because the dissociative episodes kept happening, in my mind it was solidifying it even further.

I genuinely believe, if someone had took the time to recognise what this was and talked to me, I wouldn’t have been as terrified, I would have learned to cope with it a lot younger and not fixated on something I couldn’t define so much, because a lot of the other trauma I have is from the episodes themselves, because they were utterly terrifying especially for an autistic child that doesn’t know how to say what’s going on.

I was told by my mother that it was normal to feel this way, that she use to be like that as a kid. Now as an adult I realise my mother was wrong, because my mother as I later learned during my own adulthood also had very severe childhood trauma, and what she was experiencing at my age, was not normal either and she should have gotten help at the time too.

For some reason, I would often have the worst catatonic episodes during school break. I would be unable to function for 2 and a half months and then entirety of summer. I wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t get up, I’d lay on the floor in the living room with a blanket and pillow and try to distract myself. It got to a point where I was so physically weak that I was underweight and I could not leave the home without weeks of planning and reassurance and an escort who had to let me hold on to them because I was so physically weak.

I am still not sure why at the time my worst dissociative moments occurred at summer time/break, I’m yet to discuss this weird set of foggy memories with my trauma therapist in a few weeks. Idk if something happened to me during summer one time that I don’t remember, or maybe it was just because the first episode roughly occurred around that time and was very traumatic so maybe that’s why that seasonal time was always a trigger for me thereafter. But it still doesn’t explain what triggered me the first time, because I still don’t remember.

I never got treatment for it, never got an explanation as to what it was and why, never had someone investigate and say “hold on, why is this 11 year old cutting themselves and dissociating surely somethings going on at home”, I got sent to neurology because I had a history of epilepsy as a child (also traumatic to go to sleep in your bed and then wake up connected to a monitor in hospital because you nearly died, which gave me enough trauma to give me a fear of sleeping to this day) so they believed it was a type of seizure or migraine, but they most certainly were not.

I started to understand at 18 by doing my own research as to what it was. But by this time, I dropped out of college twice because I couldn’t cope with dissociative episodes happening during class and feeling myself beginning to lose control of my body when I was trying to take notes. It’s only now at 25, after years of constantly being referred to CBT by lazy GP’s that I decided to speak to one of the CBT assessors on the phone. I mentioned to her that CBT doesn’t work for me, I’ve been doing it and counselling on and off since I was 13 years old and it would have worked by now. I plucked up the courage to say that it doesn’t get to the route of my problems, I admitted to her over the phone that I think I have unresolved childhood trauma from physical and mental abuse I suffered daily up until the age of 19 and that I need to speak to someone about that because that’s where all of my other problems are coming from.

And now, because I said that, I finally, after 2 years of waiting, have a trauma therapist who is doing EMDR with me.

I’ve only had 2 sessions with her and they’ve been introductions, dissociative tests, trauma tests, and some background into the neuroscience of it all, and even that has helped so much because I’m able to talk more about things even if we haven’t got to the actual trauma part in detail yet.

Having to cope with how terrifying it is to dissociate for some people, living with traumatic memories, avoiding triggers, still living with said abusers etc is not fucking worth being able to “zone out” when shits difficult. It’s not fun. At all. TV makes it seem fun and quirky because it’s TV land and you don’t have anything from your own life to identify with to understand, but my god I can not stress enough how “not fun” it is.

It is absolutely terrifying not recognising family members, “waking up” in a place you don’t even recall getting to, “waking up” mid sentence and not understand why words you’re not even saying are flowing out of your mouth, seeing yourself out of your body, not being able to feel anything physically, intense paranoia, night terrors, everything looking and feeling small and faraway, feeling like your floating and not actually tethered down, being beaten everyday, having someone run at you with a knife and press you against a wall. This is all shit I experience or have experienced - it’s different for everyone - but it is universally agreed that it is not fun.

Even when I think nothing has triggered me, my brain fucking dissociates anyway. I hate it. I hate it so goddamn fucking much. I’m always tired mentally and physically. I can’t do anything. I’m afraid and paranoid all the time, I avoid going outside in fear of it happening in public. I don’t want to let go or lose control around other people. I don’t like not having control.

Just please please be careful how you choose to cope with your current situation, maladaptive daydreaming can also be quite dangerous. Please try to think of others with these dissociative disorders before you say shit like this.

Do not even get me started on people on this site who literally pretend to have dissociative disorders.

It’s so goddamn hard and I’m so fucking tired.