“I floated out of my body” and “It was like watching myself in a movie” are common ways of describing the feelings of disconnection and unreality that diminish the threat of death by allowing the person facing it to view the scene as a detached observer. Survivors of life-threatening trauma convey these phenomena in images that are familiar to anyone who has looked death in the eye. If you’re that person, until the root cause of your problem is detected and treated appropriately, full and long-lasting recovery simply won’t happen. Without being tested for dissociative symptoms, the person whose problem has an undetected dissociative basis can be in therapy for a long time without making any real progress. People go to a therapists office describing symptoms they can recognize as such: “I have wild mood swings,” or “I feel sad,” or “I have panic attacks,” or “I’m easily distracted,” or “I keep washing my hands over and over again.” If the therapist doesn’t ask any questions about dissociative symptoms, the presenting problem-manic-depression, depression, panic attacks, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder-becomes the diagnosis. Besides all the people who have an undetected dissociative illness, there are countless others who’ve been diagnosed with the wrong illness. The public’s unfamiliarity with dissociative symptoms and inability to identify them has caused dissociation to become the silent epidemic of our time.
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