My Mental Illness: depression and dissociation and their relationship with my slave identity and kinky lifestyle

I have been following the site of Sex Bloggers for Mental Health for a while, intending to follow one of their writing prompts but forget to / am too busy to actually do it in the right week. However, I feel like I sometimes mention that my mental health is a bit meh in my ‘normal’ blog posts without ever having explained anything about my mental health to you. Therefore I thought it might be appropriate to take last week’s prompt “Mental Illness & You” to go into this for a little bit. And since I see Sunday as my bonus post day, why not?

I got depressed at a very young age (my second year of secondary school) although I didn’t know that it was depression for the first year or so. In fact, I knew that I was into BDSM before I knew what depression was, ha! And since I got depressed back then, I’ve been carrying that load around as it slowly started growing heavier over the years. When I found out that what I experienced was called depression (by reading a teen magazine), I immediately shut the magazine and hid it in my drawer. I didn’t want anyone to know about this and certainly not my parents.

Because of this, it took until I’d nearly finished secondary school before I told my dad and he took me to the doctor. The reason why I told him then was that my parents were divorcing and he thought it was strange I felt so apathetic towards the whole ordeal. Finally, I admitted that I needed help, letting go of my constant tenseness, which meant that I really needed help now.

I don’t know if this is familiar to any of you who have suffered from mental health problems, but I feel like I am capable of carrying on myself as long as I don’t admit that I need help. Once I admit that I need help I become vulnerable and unable to deal with it on my own. So then when the help you need isn’t provided, everything goes even more south. Which, surprise surprise, is exactly what happened because as you can probably imagine with the current NHS mental health services (probably not their fault and rather the lack of funding), there was barely any help.

Eventually, I decided that I’d have to do it on my own and convinced my dad that I was better now. I thought that perhaps, once I’d go to university, things would change because I’d start studying something I like and I’d no longer have to live with my mum. I followed this goal that I had in mind, with the aim of getting better.

By this point, I was aware that my symptoms lined up with depression disorder and social anxiety, which were also both diagnosed when I did see someone near the end of secondary school. The symptoms that I suffered from were loss of enjoyment of life. I was very, very numb and essentially a ghost or a zombie, whatever you want to call it. I had thoughts about dying and imagined how I might be able to die. I cried during most nights, feeling incapable of dealing with the pain I felt. I avoided a lot of social situations because I felt so anxious and was unable to hold any presentations.

I was living because I had to. Humans have to live right? But I wasn’t living for myself or for the joy that being a person is, lol.

During many nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d imagine some sort of scenario in which I would get tied up or dominated in some way. These images gave me a sense of peace and allowed me to sleep.

Over the years of dealing with my depression, I lost the ability to feel at peace. My body is always tense. It doesn’t matter whether I’m lying in a hot bath, in my bed, am sleeping, having a good time with a friend. I am always tense. I have tried mindfulness and amongst other things, for example, trying to tense everything in my body at once, so that it would release the tenseness or something. But so far no method has helped me.

When I finally went to university, I felt a lot lighter at once. Leaving Mum’s house somehow helped a lot, and the place where I studied was beautiful. However, my improved mood changed quickly when the students in my halls constantly started having parties till 3 AM, causing me to become sleep deprived as the porters didn’t give a fuck. I decided to go to the doctor and ask for help and he prescribed me antidepressants. Spoiler alert, they didn’t help.

Student services weren’t any more helpful, giving me two counselling sessions before sending me back to the doctor, and the doctor who immediately said he couldn’t do anything and that I should return to student support. So once more, I decided I had to do it on my own. I started cutting myself.

I moved to private accommodation in my second year and while there were still quite frequent nights in which I was kept up, it was nothing compared to when living in halls. But as a result of my sleep-deprived year, I had developed this strange thing where I would have to go to sleep as soon as my body told me to, which was often just before 10 PM. And if I ignored this call, I wouldn’t be able to sleep all night. This was obviously a problem if I was kept up again because that would mean I wouldn’t get to sleep at all.

Anyhow, near the end of my second year, I started talking to Miss Lois. It took a few months until I told her about my sensitive sleep and it probably took about as long for me to tell her about my depression. I don’t really remember, to be honest. But I do remember, especially once we started training about eight? months after we started talking, that she really wanted to learn about my mind, which included this depression.

Before the training started I did a lot of research on mental health, including depression, social anxiety and PTSD. I wasn’t looking into PTSD because I thought I suffered from it, but because I had a friend who did. Through my research (which I used for university), I stumbled upon a book about dissociation. Suddenly, everything that had happened in my life made so much more sense. I suspected that I might suffer from dissociation.

What is dissociation?

“Dissociation is a mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity.” – Better Health Channel

I started digging back into the time period when I had turned depressive and realised that what had actually happened is that I dissociated during a fight I had with a friend and that my dissociation was a defence mechanism that helped keep me alive, because I couldn’t cope with the feelings I had as a result of that fight.

I also realised that this defence mechanism hadn’t just originated from that moment. I had been using it for a long, long time, to deal with the fights that my parents were having at home.

Through reading the book on dissociation I learned that once a person adopts a certain defence mechanism or way of dealing with ‘traumatic’ situations, this becomes the set / go-to system for the body. This means that whenever this person encounters any situation similar to the ‘original trauma,’ it will automatically activate its old defence mechanism.

If you are interested in reading about dissociation and trauma I would recommend the following two books:

         

The Myth of Sanity is the book that helped me realise what had been going on with me all this time, and Trauma is Really Strange is a fairly short, illustrated book/comic that explains things in a very easy/straightforward way, which I honestly would recommend to anyone.

Okay, so I went over all of this with myself, my later very good counsellor and other people and sort of pinned down potential triggers for my defence mechanism. The most obvious ones were social situations. I can enter a group of people and suddenly my mind goes blank. My anxiety makes me dissociate and suddenly I am disconnected. No longer truly there.

Other instances in which it might happen are fights with other people, but also if I start feeling too depressed myself. This might seem really weird, but once I get to a stage where I’m breaking down as a result of my depression and / or anxiety, my defence mechanism says that I need to be protected and the only way to do that and take the pain away is by killing myself. So there is the first flaw in this defence mechanism, lol.

Now a second flaw… if we go back to the definition of dissociation: “Dissociation is a mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity,” and if we consider that I might be dissociating half of the time because I am amongst other people quite a lot, as most people tend to be, then I am often without a sense of identity.

Additionally, every time I dissociate, I lose all my memories from the week prior. There are entire time-periods in my life about which I cannot remember anything, apart from the things that people have told me about them, later in life. Dissociation also disconnects me from my feelings. I often have no idea what I’m feeling. I often don’t feel anything. And when you don’t feel anything, it also means you don’t feel any joy, which, as you can imagine, makes life quite, em… bland? Not very much worth it? And then suddenly we are back into the suicidal sphere that we link to depression.

Now, when I was talking to Miss Lois, she didn’t understand dissociation at all and it was very hard for me to explain to her what it was and how it affected me specifically because I was still figuring it out. But I also had no idea how it was affecting me as a slave or my training.

You might have noticed in my posts how Miss Lois would sometimes ask how wet I was. Honestly, she would ask this question anywhere between three to ten times for every session that we had, or whenever we were talking. This was because I couldn’t feel or identify whether I was aroused or not. My body would know that I was before I did because my body would be wet, while my mind was completely dissociated from what I was feeling.

Discovering this together was quite a ‘breakthrough’ because suddenly I had this very concrete example, proof almost, of what was happening to me. Miss Lois started experimenting with some things, while always asking new questions, trying to understand my mind and what was happening or how it could potentially be changed.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that in The Myth of Sanity, Stout explains that the original defence mechanism is now, in later life, essentially stuck and a bother, rather than a help. The body/mind needs to be re-educated to feel safe in moments where there is no longer danger. So while I might have needed to dissociate at home during a fight when I was a child to protect myself, there is not the same necessity for me to still do this if I witness a fight or am a part of one. Yet, the dissociation is still automatically triggered.

As I mentioned above, I am practically incapable of feeling peaceful, and my body is incapable of relaxing. But then, after a session (about which I’ve written a post that will be published on Saturday 26/10/19 (Part 3: Clit torture: Dragon’s blood XXX Ultra Hot Sauce…)), I felt completely peaceful and I never felt so happy since… forever?

I can remember one ‘recent’ moment when I felt peaceful like that for a minute, before this session took place, which was when I was in a club, sitting down on a couch with my friend (where semi-romantic feelings that led nowhere had been involved once). She was stroking my hair and for that one minute, I felt completely at ease and peaceful. It felt amazing. But it was over within a minute.

After the session with Miss Lois, the feeling lasted a bit longer and she said that she now knew how she could trigger this response in me and help me feel it for a longer period of time.

She was right, as I then felt it a few more times after our sessions and generally after we played I would sleep better, even if the full sense of peacefulness wasn’t reached.

Our theory was that by experiencing intense pain, for example, I was eventually forced back into my body. And at the same time, serving as a slave and being a slave is such an integral part of my identity. It gives me purpose and a sense of self, which if you remember, dissociation makes you lose that sense of self.

By incorporating more rules, more constant reminders of being a slave, I gradually started feeling a bit more connected to myself and this world. Even now that our dynamic has ended, I have the tools to stay close to my slave identity, which makes me feel more connected and happier.

When I’m down, sometimes I turn to masturbation and a little bit of self-torture, which often helps a little bit.

(I would also like to mention that my ability to dissociate can be a very helpful tool. In certain instances, I can control it. And for example, if I have to be in a lot of pain for a session, I can manage by dissociating a little bit, and even when I do, I will be more connected to myself at the end of a session.)

But overall, dissociation is bothering me a lot and still sabotaging my ability to be happy. I haven’t figured out how to solve this yet, but I found a really good counsellor at my current university and he has been very helpful.

I hope this post will help you understand a little better the past references I’ve made to my mental health and also the future references I’ll make to my mental health and how this relates to play, my servitude and all that.

If you have any questions that you’d like to ask me about this, feel free to leave a comment or message me through the Say Hi!‘ page, where you can email me privately. Or, if you’d like to share your own experiences with mental health on its own or in relation to BDSM and kink, please do! I am very interested to hear about it.

Xx MLSlavePuppet

Mental Illness & You – Week 39