hsphaven

I am writing this post backwards. This short introduction is actually the last thing I’ve written, now that I know what the post looks like. It is a bit of a different post to my usual posts. There are three things I talk about in this post, and I have broken them down into different subheadings as my mind’s all over the place and I’m struggling to write a cohesive piece.    

Touch starvation-

Harlow and Zimmerman (1959) were some of the first researchers to show just how important touch is. When given the choice between a wire-mesh “mother” that held a bottle and a soft cloth “mother”, baby monkeys preferred the latter. Touch is the very first way we experience the world and is the foundation for our physical, social and psychological health. Loving, meaningful, consensual touch is important for the following:

• Pain regulation (touch releases endorphins)
• Emotion regulation
• Mood
• Relaxation
• Sleep
• Reading faces
• Recognising emotions in self
• Expressing emotion
• Physical growth (“failure to thrive” is the pediatric term for stunted growth/weight)
• Immunity and recovery from disease
• Prosocial behaviour
• Connection to others

Former inmate Brett Collins shares his experience of solitary confinement with ABC, which can be found on YouTube here. The deprivation of human connection and touch, also called “skin hunger”, is essentially a type of torture. It kills, just as physical abuse or starvation kills. And prisoners are not the only people who experience it. You don’t need prison bars to make a prison. Sadly many people in our society are having a remarkably similar experience to Brett Collins. One election some politicians in my country even suggested having a minister for loneliness is it so widespread. A lot of this boils down to the shift from a collective culture to an individualist one. With this shift, we have seen a movement against co-sleeping, where sleeping separately is said to “teach” infants how to manage on their own. Technology is another factor. A lot of people got a taste of touch starvation during lock down.

According to journalist Alexandra Benisek, “touch starvation is a condition that happens when you don’t get as much physical touch as you’re used to — or any at all. You crave contact but can’t interact with others for some reason. It’s also known as touch deprivation or skin hunger.” I like this definition of touch starvation. Some of the things contributing to touch starvation can be internal. Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre talk about this in “Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationships”. They talk about the “connection survival style” where early attachment trauma can turn us into adults who need contact, like most people, yet fear it and create all kinds of barriers to it. For me I found I managed to disconnect from my need for touch for over a decade. For over a decade not a single person touched me (except for some unwanted contact), and I didn’t even care. But now I’m finding, particularly at night, I have times where I wish I had a partner or someone who would just hold me and help regulate me. Yet the problem is it also stresses me out when people get close to me. I usually don’t like being touched and I feel nothing emotionally. I’ve never had a partner because I’m just in survival mode around people all the time which doesn’t let me feel anything more. It takes someone extra special to make me feel comfortable and safe. 

I had a night like this last night. Yesterday I woke up feeling like shit, as always. The previous night I was obviously grappling with something which led me to sit up on the laptop all night. I spent the majority of my fortnightly pension in one night on more clothes I do not need, I went over and over stuff I’d written that day, I blasted music all night to point it no longer elicited any emotion in me and just become meaningless noise, like an overstimulated clit (sorry for the crude analogy, but I really can’t think of anything better!). I didn’t fall asleep until sunrise, and I felt particularly shit and depressed yesterday when I woke up. I took some dexamphetamine which seemed to pick me up for an hour or two. It made me feel calm, motivated, happier and NORMAL for once in my life. My neighbourhood was quiet and I loved having the house to myself. I had more concentration and sat in the courtyard watching a good chunk of Polly Samuel’s hour long video about her autism and dissociative identity journey. I find dex tends to make me more social and I was able to reply to a few friends. I made some more badges and managed to get dressed and see my therapist. But it wasn’t long until I crashed. The kind of crash where all you can do is climb into bed fully clothed you’re so depressed and tired but you are also wired so you can’t sleep and just lie there agitated and wanting to cry. So I then took some sleeping pills. I desperately wanted to sleep, but I still couldn’t sleep. My touch starvation then started creeping in. I realised in that moment that it wasn’t medication I needed, it was something as basic as human touch. I related so much to Sia’s song “Breathe me”, and Lana del Rey’s “13 Beaches”. I love this music video someone made to Lana del Rey’s song which is from a series called Skins. The character Effy was mute like me. The song, to me, speaks about that tension Heller and Aline LaPierre talk about between wanting to be alone and loneliness. It was getting me really frustrated.

“I’m so fucking tired and sick of living in deprivation,” I wrote to my therapist in the middle of the night. “It’s killing me. I fucking hate this. It’s so frustrating. I can’t even cry when I want to. All my tears are stuck inside, drowning me from the inside out.”

I suffer from the exact same symptoms Brett Collins developed during the five years he spent in solitary confinement, including the hypersensitivity to sound and finding it incredibly frightening when you do finally interact with people again. But then there’s the relief when you do manage to make a connection with somebody, as he describes at the end.

Mania-

I have spent all day on the laptop writing again and jumping between projects. One minute I’m working on a poetry book, the next minute I’m blogging and the next I’m bombing my poor therapist’s inbox and phone with messages. 

“Fuck I think I’m like manic, the amount of writing I’m churning out, the rage when anything gets in your way and doesn’t match the speed your mind is racing at, like a slow internet,” I wrote to my therapist. “I took another ADD stimulant today and I feel like I’m off like a fucking rocket. God help you. I’m trying to stick it all on my blog instead of bomb your inbox. I had a psychiatrist once who said I’m actually manic when I sit on the laptop.”

I don’t know if it’s good writing or just pages of crap that people can’t even follow. I’m all over the shop emotionally and I’m finding it hard to organise my thoughts at times. My internet has been crashing. I feel like I’m burning my internet out like I burnt my disability worker out.

I don’t know if my ADD meds are helping me or making me worse. I seem to have really sporadic and strange reactions to meds. Yesterday my Dex made me calm for an hour or two, as it’s meant to do for someone with ADD. But today feels like an endless word vomit. I am totally overwhelmed, everything is heightened and my dad’s mere presence in the house elicits pure rage in me. I need to be careful with ADD stimulants. I find if I start taking Dex every day I can get a bit weird in the head, and the Vyvanse just tips me over the edge straight away. They often seem to make my bipolar and anxiety worse. In fact it was the ADD stimulants that made the doctors realise I have bipolar tendencies.

Below is another email I just wrote to my therapist:

“Flights of ideas is actually not as fun as it sounds. It’s incredibly frustrating for you and probably for other people as well. You can’t humanly keep up with it all. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I would shut all the doors to our wooden hallway and then empty my box of rubber bouncing balls, those ones you’d get in those machines in plazas and supermarkets. They’re just chaotically bouncing everywhere and you can’t gather them all. At least eventually they would stop, and you would pick them up and put them back in the box. But this never stops. It never fucking stops. 

Pretty much my only connection with the world is through writing now, or maybe music. No body ever touches me, I’m face blind/vision impaired. I feel like a wild animal lost in suburbia. I feel like a person in a foreign country or like a child who’s just entered the world for the first time. I feel like this woman in this video who speaks about returning to the world after having a “spiritual emergency”. She couldn’t function in society anymore. She couldn’t cross a road. Everything was so loud and cranked up. Words were complete nonsense, nothing connected. I don’t have friends who will hold me like she did but even if I did I think I would struggle to feel anything emotionally anyway and just want to squirm away. Maybe I need to try the other things she suggested like comedy and watching Disney to get a fucking break. Or take valium, though that is a bit hit and miss for me. Lately nothing will calm me. Even in the hospital they gave me so much meds one night yet I still couldn’t get any rest and would be up again. I was impossible to sedate. 

I’ve been doing a lot of research on mutism. I’ve seen research papers which link it to stuff like schizophrenia. But I don’t know what comes first, the mutism or losing your mind. I don’t know if not speaking will eventually drive a person mad. Because you can’t talk things through and have a normal conversation anymore. Your communication and interaction with people is limited and it can become pretty isolating being locked inside the confines of your own mind. Then again I didn’t really feel like I was much of a talker anyway. I’ve always been pretty quiet. I’d be much more devastated if I lost the ability to write. At least I can still write.

I’ve got like really disorganised and confused, like walking into rooms all the time and not knowing why, and having a zillion tabs open [in fact I can’t even find the tab to the video which is playing right now and I’m so overwhelmed I can’t handle the chatter so I have just turned my volume off]. 

I’m just sick of everything. I get no relief. I’m tortured by overstimulation. My own body overstimulates me, my buzzing head and everything. And how do you get away from your own body?”

My chronic physical ailments are what actually distress me the most these days, though I know the physical and the mental are all interconnected. It’s torture being in my body. My nervous system feels like it’s on steroids. I still have chronic pain from a massage I got to try and fix the buzzing sensation on my head. My doctor suggested a massage as he thought the buzzing might be a mini spasm caused by muscle tension, but I still believe it was from the antidepressant Effexor I was given years back. It’s devastating when something that’s meant to help you ends up doing more harm. I have been on a downward spiral ever since I sought help for my mental health. Counselling left me depressed and suicidal. Then I was given medication for my depression which left me with even more problems such as the buzzing sensation on my head. I feel like taking drugs such as THC that I know induce out of body experiences in me. As terrifying as those experiences are, I just want to crawl out of my fucking skin.

I was recently booted out of the private hospital I sought an admission from because they felt they couldn’t manage me there. I was sent to a public hospital. When I arrived they were thinking of giving me ketamine. Sometimes I wish I had of let them, instead of going missing and trying to deal with my distress all by myself, which led me to attempt suicide with a plastic bin bag. I don’t know a great deal about ketamine, but apparently it’s a dissociative anesthetic used to treat depression and pain. It might actually help me.

Dissociation-

I have been doing more and more research about dissociation. A lot of people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) also seem to have a bipolar diagnosis, or are perhaps misdiagnosed with bipolar because the different personalities have drastically different energy levels, moods and associated behaviours and ways of speaking. There is a lot of overlap between the two conditions. Both often involve memory loss and changes to our sense of time. For instance it is common to forget the things we say and do when manic, like it is common to forget what another personality has said and done when in control of the body. It can be really hard to pull all the different diagnoses apart. In my experience they all feed into each other.

I have a bit of a secret life online where I am part of many niche groups, such as those for trauma and dissociation. I thought I’d share a conversation I found interesting:

I’ve watched quite a few of Polly Samuel’s videos now. She was a local artist who also had DID. She painted pictures of blurry figures without faces as she was face-blind as well. In this video she talks about her mutism and typing being a conduit for other parts of her to express their world. She might not make a lot of sense to most people but I can follow what she is saying. She also made another video about dissociation here. I’m losing track of which ones I’ve watched. 

There’s also such a thing as “switching headaches”, which I’ve heard people in the DID community talk about.

“I’ve got something very similar where I get a headache before I switch, as well as after (especially when it’s a long period of someone else fronting),” one person wrote. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good solution for it; I just keep a bottle of ibuprofen in my purse and take it if it gets to be too much. Could the headaches be caused by dehydration/hunger? Perhaps whatever part is out is simply forgetting to eat or drink. I know that at least one person in here does that on a regular basis 😛 “

“I think I mostly get them when fighting a switch,” another person wrote.

“Usually we get headaches before a switch or while someone is trying to take control,” yet another person wrote. “If we are fighting it then we get dizzy/lightheaded but it starts to go away quickly once the switch is over and the fighting has stopped for us.”

 “Yeah I get headaches after sudden switches, and when I’m trying my best NOT to switch,” another member repeated. “Also when there is inner tension.”

Dissociation can be incredibly scary, but it can also be incredibly helpful. I probably couldn’t have got this far in my life without it. There are many different forms of it. Some are listed on a page called “Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice”, a great resource. I like this author’s spiritual bent:

“Spiritual definition – the real healing for me has actually come not from the neurological understanding, but from approaching the cracks in my spirit and putting them back together, and learning how to be here, or stay here. I’m still doing that, with guidance from some people I’m working with who work at the spirit level. They talk about how you can sometimes not even come fully into your body at the moment of conception, if you don’t feel safe or if there is violence coming down one or both lines, or your parents are experiencing fear or violence. And they’re teaching me to recognize the difference between my nervous system and brain and body and my spirit or higher self, in order to heal the body by listening to the higher self. It’s hard for me to talk about because I had no way to understand these things until recently.

The truth is the best and fastest healing is happening by using all the tools at my disposal, including the biopsychosocial model and the spiritual models. Everyone will find their own path and their own understanding; I might move fluidly back and forth between these frameworks which have all been helpful to me.”

Other forms of dissociation, such as escaping into video games, are described by Pete Walker, author of “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” when he talks about “The Freeze Type and the Dissociative Defense”. Then on the extreme end of the dissociation spectrum is DID. There are some people out there who do not believe in DID and think people are making it all up for attention or something, but DID is absolutely a real thing which is backed by science. There are psychological and even physical differences between the different personalities. Below is a quote from traumadissociation.com, another great resource:

“Alters may have different ages, for instance much younger or older; a different gender to the physical body; different names, or no name; different roles or functions, either related to daily life or to trauma; different attitudes, and preferences, e.g, in food, or dress a different perception of their appearance, for e.g., different hair or skin color, body shape; different memories, e.g., some may remember trauma or events in daily life that others have amnesia for; psychobiological difference to others, e.g., different vision, medication responses, allergies, plasma glucose levels in diabetic patients, heart rate, blood pressure readings, galvanic skin response, muscle tension, laterality, immune function, EEG readings, etc. Different alters have shown different results in neuroimaging tests, including functional magnetic resonance imaging activation, and brain activation and regional blood flow and differences in PET scans. The variability between alters is measurably greater than variability between non-dissociative people who are attempting to simulate alters.”

I have summarised my current state in my final emails to my therapist: 

“Are you awake? Can you fucking feel this energy, or am I just losing my fucking mind? Did you say it was full moon? I feel like the world is gonna blow up or something.

I feel totally overwhelmed. I have a zillion tabs open. A video was playing and I couldn’t find which tab it was so I just had to turn my laptop volume off. My dad is up and I can’t stand it. His mere presence elicits pure rage in me. I need to just park myself on a deserted island or another planet for a while the hell away from technology, people, noise and everything. And I need some fucking proper sleep”