Can other people tell when a person is dissociating?
Depends on the person. It helps if they know you well and are aware of what dissociation is.
Some days during lab work at college I'd spend all of it dissociating. I remember one time my favourite classmate approached me while I was out of it and said something along the lines of "to the untrained eye, you look VERY focused. But to me, you look like you're in another universe". I'm glad she knew me well enough to tell lol
Hm, now I'm wondering. Adhd hyperfocus is what I thought I'm doing. Sometimes it can be that strong that I literally don't perceive people calling me until they repeat it enough times and usually wave around me / show and move in my vision field.
In regular hyperfocus, if you come from behind, and say something, I'll jump to the ceiling 😂
Basically I can register things that are moving and then make sounds, but anything with sound without being visually announced will startle me like crazy.
That startle I thought it was trauma response. And focus is jusy different variety of hyperfocus.
But now I'm wondering if it's disassociation. Because I literally AM in that other universe - of my own thoughts and environment is almost on mute.
How do you distinguish?
It's easy for me to distinguish dissociation from other things because it's not like anything else. I can't startle while I'm dissociating because everything is so out of focus that it can't even register. Someone could set off fireworks right behind me or physically grab me and I doubt I'd even notice. Kinda sounds like the opposite of what you describe hyperfocus to be like
No matter how I try to focus or register what's going on around me, I just can't. I can't even think while I dissociate. I've cut my hand open while doing lab work before and didn't realize until I went to hand in my results and saw it was full of blood. It's like I'm not even there
I see. Thanks for sharing. Your example helps me to try to imagine. It sounds scary and like it's really confusing.
Reading your description my thoughts were - it sounds 'like you're nowhere' unlike hyperfocus when I go 'somewhere other than here'?